Physically, I can’t pull it off. My self-assessment of the physical aspects is inaccurate always. I have no realistic idea of what I actually look like because, every time I look in the mirror I see someone much fatter or somewhat skinnier than I actually am. What does size 20 look like? What does XXX lbs look like? I honestly don’t know.
These days I see myself as fatter than I used to. I’m the same size and approximately the same weight (consistency is my thing), but my perception is different. It’s funny, too, because the timing is such that I have the people around me volunteering that I “wear it well”, which is an acceptable statement or that “You’re not fat”, which is not. I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know what it means that a person would wear their weight/size well, but I don’t know what that means for ME.
So I finally did something that I’ve been thinking about for years. I was in a room with some tens of people (I didn’t count) and there were several fat women there. I dismissed the body shapes that didn’t apply and narrowed it down to three women that I might resemble from the waist down. All three were different sizes, but they were all the same basic shape. I asked my mom to look around and let me know which body looked the most like mine.
Now, understand that I had already picked out which one I thought I was. Maybe a small part of it had to do with her outfit, but most of it was that when I look in the mirror, it was that woman’s body that I see.
So I asked my mom, and she was confused by the request. I guess that other people don’t analyze this sort of thing, or at least not the way I do. Maybe it’s just that “normal sized” women see what they really look like. Or think that they do. Warped body image, I hear, is a pretty common thing, so maybe I’m the smart one for asking for an objective opinion when I know that mine may not be accurate.
She pointed to the girl that I resembled the most, and I was wrong. She chose one that she said that I looked like proportionally (though I am built slightly larger than scale) and then pointed out a second who was a “maybe” because her style of dress tried to hide her body instead of flattering it. Neither of the two were the woman I guessed and I told mom that. She was shocked. “No. No way. Not at all. You’re not that big. Absolutely not.” She was pretty vehement about it.
But now that I really think about it, I wonder if that’s not something we all should do, regardless of size or weight or anything. We know that when anorexics look in the mirror they see themselves as larger than they are. We probably all know someone who not only thinks she’s smaller than she is, she wears too small clothes to “prove” it and thinks she looks good. Not even that she looks sexy, but honestly thinks she’s stylish in clothes that don’t fit.
I’ve not heard of this before, asking someone else to show you another person with your figure, but now that I’ve done it, I wonder why everyone doesn’t already! I feel freed. No longer do I need to question whether or not I’m seeing something accurate. In fact, this is something I’ll do again, when I find myself in a room with a lot of people, some of whom are in the same range as me. Whenever I start to question my perception, I can get an answer and stop worrying about it.
How cool is that?