About a month ago, a friend of mine shared a video clip from an interview by Jay Shetty of Meghan Trainor. In that clip, she talked about the importance of loving yourself and your body. She discusses how her therapist suggested she stand in the mirror every day for five minutes naked.
Something about what she was saying about her feelings about herself really resonated with me, and after watching the clip a few times, I hunted down the full video to see what else she had to say during the entire interview.
Her entire interview was funny and interesting. She had a lot of things to say about addiction, trauma, and low self-esteem that related to my own life and my own feelings about myself and the trauma of my past.
You can watch that video here:
Full Interview with Meghan Trainor and Jay Shetty
Or, if you're only interested in the clip to which this particular story pertains, you can fast forward to around the 48:00 mark in the interview.
I'm an older woman with some pretty serious life-long body issues. I've spent my adult life struggling with my weight and my appearance. Even as I'm sitting here writing this, I'm internally giving myself hell for having just eaten a snack when I'm trying to lose about 30 pounds.
Like anyone else, it sometimes makes me feel better about myself to know that I'm not the only one going through something - like struggling with my physical appearance. So to hear a celebrity talk about her own struggles can help.
Even more helpful was something she related that her therapist suggested she do to help retrain her brain in dealing with her personal feelings about her body.
Her therapist suggested standing, fully naked, in front of the mirror for five minutes each day.
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So I decided to give this a try, because of how deeply what she said had resonated with not only my own feelings, but also because of how much what she said about her mother reminded me of my own mother when I was younger. It wasn't easy and I was beyond self-conscious at the beginning.
I like and work best with goals that have a specific time frame and a date at the end to assess progress and decide on next steps, so I created a little 30 day challenge for myself with some time to assess my progress at the end of that test period. I stuck with it and really did it every single day, no matter how hard it was. Here are some of my notes:
DAY 1: I didn't make it the full five minutes. It was too hard to keep looking at a body I'm so unhappy with.
DAY 5: I want to make changes and improvements to my body, because I want to be healthy, not just because of how I look. Many women in my family are seriously overweight, and appearance isn't the most important thing. What matters is the health problems that come along with being obese.
DAY 7: I woke up feeling motivated to improve my body for health reasons - not vanity.
DAY 8: I've started finding nice things to say to myself about my body.
DAY 11: Of course I still want to lose weight quickly and see results fast. But I also want to be healthy, keep the weight off, and live a long life, so I'm willing to take my time and make real and permanent changes.
DAY 16: I put a LOT of what I think of myself on what others think of my appearance. Too much. What matters is my own feelings - no one else's. And I feel like my body has worked hard to get me to where I am today. I should be grateful for it and less hateful to it.
DAY 23: I'm feeling more confident and comfortable in my own skin. I can look at myself naked in the mirror for longer than five minutes now. Dressing for how my body looks right now instead of how I want it to look in the future is also making me feel good.
DAY 28: I still don't know how to love my body. But I've learned to be comfortable with it, and I know how important it is to my success and my future to take care of it.
DAY 30: I started out focused on the changes I want to make to myself and the things I don't like about my body. I still want to make changes to my health and appearance. But I'm no longer ashamed or embarrassed to look at myself in the mirror, and I don't feel anymore like starving myself or overdoing it exercising to achieve my goals. I don't feel like I had some major epiphany or shift mentally, but I can tell my thinking has definitively changed.
I'm adding this to my daily routine, and continuing to do this every day, because I've found it to be beneficial to my mental and emotional health. It's changed my way of thinking about and treating myself.
I encourage you to do the same. Give it a try for 30 days and see where you're at. I believe you'll be happy with the results.
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