Mirror, Mirror On the Wall

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail with a cartoon of a woman looking in the mirror.  The woman in the cartoon was older and quite overweight, but the reflection in the mirror was of a young, thin, beautiful woman.  The cartoon caption read "I need your help.  I need to find the shop that sells this mirror!"  The cartoon made me laugh and I thanked my friend for passing it on.

While the cartoon may have been humorous, it did get me thinking a bit about how we perceive what we see in the mirror.  Before I started on Take Shape for Life's 5&1 program, I never saw myself as big as I was.  Sure, I knew I was large (I never allowed myself to think or say "fat" or, horror or horrors, "obese" - I was "overweight" or "heavy.'), but candid photos of myself always made me wince.  What was captured in a picture didn't reflect the image I perceived in the mirror and I was convinced that the mirror was real and the picture was "a bad angle" . . .

Because my perception was skewed, I told myself that I wasn't THAT bad.  Sure I was overweight, but I'd look in the mirror and reassure myself that I carried my weight well.  Never mind that I was 260+ pounds packed on my 5'5" frame and bursting out of a 24W/3X, I certainly didn't look obese like some people I saw.  My perception of how I looked contributed to a lack of commitment to losing weight for a long time.  I wasn't happy about my size, but my mirror told me that I still looked "pretty good," and as long as I looked "pretty good" I found excuses to cheat on whatever diet I was on.

For me, it wasn't until my weight began to impact my health that I finally decided to do something.  Being diagnosed with diabetes, high cholesterol, gastric reflux and borderline high blood pressure scared me, and it also worried me that I was out of breath walking up a flight of stairs.  I may have been able to fool my perception of my body as reflected in the mirror, but I couldn't fool the inside of my body and it accurately reflected what was really going on.  As I began to lose weight, the inside of my body responded quickly - blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure all returned to normal, which was very exciting! 

What took longer was my perception of what was happening outside.  Looking at myself in the mirror every day, I didn't always see a difference.  My clothes were getting loose and then falling off, but the reflection in the mirror didn't seem to change.  I realized that my perception didn't reflect reality, so I began taking pictures to document my progress.  Sometimes when I absolutely didn't see it in the mirror, I'd pull out pictures of myself from before and compare them to pictures of myself after losing 30, 50, 80 pounds.  When I looked at the pictures, I began to see myself in a more accurate light.  Being able to really "see" my progress helped to keep me motivated and made me anxious for the day when I could finally take an "after" picture.

This program changes us, inside and out, physically, emotionally, mentally - perhaps even spiritually.  Not all of the changes are reflected in the mirror, and sometimes what we see in the mirror may not be an accurate reflection of the changes we're experiencing.  It takes time to adjust to all of the changes we experience as we get to a healthy weight - that's one of the reasons this is called a journey.  Even if you aren't feeling like there is a lot of change going on, even if you don't see change reflected in your mirror, the choices you're making will eventually be reflected inside and out.  Choose wisely :-)