You. Yes you. You look great. Now please don't try and hold or pinch a piece of flab on your body and say if only you lost that much, you would look better. No. You look great the way you are. You were born to be an individual. You have been the best looking girl child for your parents. Then why prove them wrong? If every woman had to have a perfect body, flawless skin, tight assets, wrinkle free ageing, and all that the global standards of beauty have enlisted, wouldn't we all look the same? Cast out of the same mould? And how interesting would the world look. We would all look like clones or robots walking around just like a scene out of a sci-fi movie.
I too, was (and to a certain extent still am) a victim of wanting to be "perfect". I have spent years, working out, eating right, reading about weight loss, researching about what garments would make me look 'kind of' lean, etc. I gave up on many foods only to find myself cheating and binging on them at many occasions. And soon after, pacifying myself to believe, its allowed to cheat. The problem was not following a healthy lifestyle. The problem was being obsessed with it. So much so that the number on the weighing scale and the fit of a garment each day would determine how that particular day would be. Why so? What was going to change overnight? Not much. But obsession knows no limit. And having said that I am blessed with a structure which can never look skinny (sigh).
My stupidity struck me hard when a few times I was stalking my daughter around the house, who was three then to make sure she wasn't up to some mischief, and to my horror, she was looking into a full size mirror, jutting her bum out and saying, "my bum is so fat". I let that pass thinking maybe she was imitating me. But I soon realised that she was avoiding foods like cheese, French fries, cakes, ghee, butter, breads. And religiously wanting to eat my salads, fruits etc. A couple of times she stopped eating right in the middle and said, "mumma if I eat more my stomach will become fat". Her grandmom once took her to a supermarket and told her she could buy whatever she liked. Any ice-cream, crisps, cakes etc. Pat came the reply, "that is all junk food dadi". Well, nothing to complain about that, but it was my thinking, brushing off on her. She was already beginning to believe that she had to be perfect.
When I was a semi plump teenager at college, I really was happy-go-lucky. Dropping a size was never the main aim in life. But I knew many girls even then, who would smoke cigarettes to lose weight (a terrible myth), eat and rush to the washroom to throw up (commonly known as anorexia), and not eat for hours or days even and chew a gum to fool the mind.
If this was the case then, wonder what pressures todays teenage girls might be going through. Given the need to have the perfect profile pictures, enough followers and cope with all the social media norms of popularity. We tend to judge ourselves based on others judgement of us and we lose a lot in the bargain. We cannot change that, but we can change the way we think and look at ourselves. Each of us are blessed with a different charm and we must work at enhancing that. As a mother to a girl child, I will always strive to create and maintain this solid confidence in her which will give her the wisdom to think what is right for her and what is not. And as she grows, I will, through my actions, convey to her what my mother conveyed to me: "happiest girls are the prettiest".