Don’t Touch Me
“I don’t like my clothes touching me.” I hear this one from time to time. This is woman speak for “I’m not comfortable with my body and I don’t want to be reminded of it.”
I am not a licensed therapist but I deal with women struggling with body issues every day. When Adam and Eve were in the garden God asked them, “Who told you that you were naked?” I tend to ask the same questions: Who told you that you … Have ugly knees? Have a saggy butt? Need to lose some weight? Have narrow shoulders? Have an ugly scar? Need to cover up this or that? If you respond, “the mirror”, comment below and I will give you the chemistry of why you can’t trust a mirror – not psychology, but chemistry.
Crazy styling secrets are everywhere. One of my favorites is: wear your clothes a size larger and it will make you look slimmer. Nope. It will make you look slouchy and sloppy which actually makes you look bigger. Here’s another: My clothes have to cover my butt to make it look smaller. Nope. Have you ever been to a Children’s Museum? They have all these cool optical illusions. There is a black and white swirl and when it starts to spin you see colors. When the spinning stops you can see that it’s still just black and white. Remember when your math teacher showed you this picture <–> and >–< and asked you which line was longer (they were the same length). The brain is a powerful organ and plays all kinds of really cool tricks until you play “Mirror Mirror on the wall” and then the trickery can be disheartening.
Jennifer Lopez looks nothing like Gwyneth Paltrow and visa versa yet both of these women are celebrated beauties. These ladies don’t share clothes, they don’t shop each other’s closets and designers don’t ask them to model the same designs. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes; beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. The Twiggy era is over (thankfully). You make decisions every day that determine the course of your nutritional health but that’s a conversation for another time. Right now, we’re talking about living your best style today. I have a family member that has postponed more than half of her life because she, “needs to get some weight off first.” That’s crazy! The people of our planet don’t care what you look like; they care if you are kind. This isn’t rocket science. People need someone to smile at them and notice them and listen to them, not be thin and have a thigh gap.
I see elderly women who wear a size zero because they’ve aged, shriveled and shrunk. Put that same size on a 20 year old and the narrative changes. What matters is loving who you are today and dressing the body you have today.
All those clothes you have in your closet that make you look sloppy and slouchy, get rid of them.
