29th November 2016
A comfort zone is a
beautiful place, put nothing ever grows there.
I made my Facebook
live video debut yesterday! I'd agreed to do a cook-a-long with Bonnie and
anyone else who wanted to join in and I was asked on Saturday if I'd be recording
it live, that I hadn't considered. My
thoughts on live stream have always been do I really want my behaviour
recording and keeping, do I want to see what I look like when I'm doing what I
do in a meeting really, the answer was probably not, then I realised that this
is the version of me that hundreds of people see week in, week out and they
seem to be okay with me so why not. It
seemed to go down well, I cooked chicken jalfrezi from the new Weight Watchers One
Pot cook book (it tastes better when left to stand and the flavours come out
more, so maybe make it a day ahead) and once I'd got used to how it works, this
'live' thing, we had a giggle, I could read my members comments and we all got
to spend half hour or so with each other (albeit virtual) which we wouldn't normally
do, loved it. However today's blog isn't about me, I've
got me a guest blogger, one of my members actually, so I'll hand it over (I'm
not sure if I was supposed to name them or it's anonymous, so I'll leave the
name out for now)...
Guest Blogger
What do you see?
Do you see a haggard
old woman with a hook nose? Some of you
will see her straightaway but some of you won’t. Some of you might see a pretty
young woman looking into the distance with her cute button nose. But some of
you won’t.
For me this picture
sums up how we might feel about how others see us. What do you think other people see when they
look at you? If you asked them (and they told you honestly) what do you think
they would say? Are we ever brave enough to ask? Perhaps we should? We might be
pleasantly surprised.
Some of us are on
our Weight Watcher journey because we want to improve our health, our happiness
but many of us want to improve the way we look too. How many family photographs
do you have with you in it? Or like me are there a whole decade of pictures
with you behind the camera because you couldn’t bear the thought of looking a
picture of yourself?
Recently I found a
beautiful photograph of my family with me in it that I had hidden away behind
the sideboard for 13 years all because I could not bear to look at myself in
that picture. I feel so sad now because when we found it the other day my
husband said immediately ‘just look at you, how happy you looked then!’. That
is what he saw, my happiness in that moment; he didn’t see the double chins or
surplus pounds.
Weight Watchers is
all about ‘Eat, Smile’ Move’ and often Bev reminds us to focus on ‘our happy’
and tells us we are all ‘BeYOUtiful’.
Wise words. Sometimes people find it really hard to love themselves and
see their beauty, their sparkle, the radiance that others see in us. I guess
they call it ‘self-esteem’
I would love to look
like Elle McPhearson, Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston or whoever the current
definition of beautiful is. But I don’t. I look like me. People remember me by
how I treat them, not how I look. I have learned it doesn’t matter a jot if
when you look at me you see a haggard old woman or the pretty young girl. I am
me.
I am learning to
love what I see in the mirror and in those photographs. The weight loss is
helping but I have learned to see the happy in the picture and not the shape of
my body. I will always remember what happened in the picture; who I was with;
where I was, not what my weight was.
This last week has
been a painful reminder about how precious life is. Two friends diagnosed with
cancer at a young age, one of my old school friends died and a former colleague
had her life taken tragically last week. Life is so much more than what we look
like and what we weigh isn’t it? Weight Watchers tell us this all the time –
but how often do we forget the Smile of Eat, Smile, and Move? What have we got
to be grateful for? What can make us smile this week? If the answer is losing
10lbs, dream on and think again!
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