What the mirror tells me....

One of my favorite classes in college was a psychology class that I took my second year. There were several lessons that stuck with me, but one in particular that captured my attention was a discussion about body image. The professor asked for a student who didn't like the shape of their nose to volunteer for an experiment. He then proceeded to ask them to draw a life size picture of the profile of their face. At the same time the professor drew a picture of the profile of the student's face. He then hung up the two drawings, and asked the student to turn to the side so we could view his actual profile against the two drawings. The drawing by the professor was a fairly accurate rendering of the student's profile. The picture provided by the student, however, was much less accurate displaying a much larger nose than he really had. The professor went on to explain that we all have some degree of disconnect between how we perceive our bodies and how it actually appears.

So this past week, I was trying to find an outfit to wear to a business luncheon, and was having a hard time finding a pair of pants that fit. In general my business clothes are less form fitting, so when I lost weight after my surgery most of them were too big. Over the last few months, though, I have gained back about half of the weight I lost post surgery and have reached the weight I have maintained for most of my adult life. It seemed to me the task should not be a challenge any longer. I had a few pants I had purchased at my curvier post menopause frame (about seven pounds heavier) that would probably still be too big, but the majority of my dressier pants should fit again. As I changed from one pair to the other without success, I realized that something about my body had to have changed since I last weighed this much.

I looked at myself in the mirror and stared at my reflection. I could not see a big change. I still had a belly roll. My hips and thighs seemed wigglier to me since I had added some weight back on. As I tried to reconcile the image I saw in the mirror with the person's whose pants were too big, I thought back to the lesson from my psychology class. Clearly my clothes were telling a different story than the one the mirror was telling me. The truth was the mirror was only reflecting what my head was projecting, and what the mirror projected were my insecurities. If I wanted to see beyond my flaws, I would have to learn to project a few successes too.