How I Discovered the Secret to Attaining Real Beauty
Does the goal of attaining real beauty seem unreachable to you? It did for me, before I had an enlightened moment on one of my torturous thirty-minute walks, on a stifling hot mid-summer morning.
To fill you in on where my head was at the time, I had been struggling with my thoughts, well, actually venting about why I was walking in the intolerable heat. I still had a good ten minutes of walking and I was already drenched. It was about 7:30 in the morning and so humid that I was having trouble filling my lungs with air.
I had been walking four to five days a week since summer began, as part of a new weightloss plan. I realize that I am supposed to call it a lifestyle change, but it makes me chuckle at the thought that I will be able to maintain this "lifestyle" forever. The previous year, I had somehow gained ten pounds, even as I maintained workouts and ate healthy.
For a while after this happened, I was very depressed. At the age of 46, I thought that I still looked like I was 35, but a year later, the mirror told a different story. My new reflection revealed a saggy face and a plump apple-shaped silhouette. At 152 pounds, most people said I looked pretty good for my age. This was one of those times when I would rather not hear the word "pretty", when it really meant, "how do we agree with you in a politically correct way."
What was worse was comments from well-intended people like my poor husband, who tried to console me with statements like, "Just think of what you'd look like if you didn't work out!" Needless to say, my response wasn't pretty at all.
No matter what the scale said, I felt like I was 300 pounds and my spirit was in agony. My usual exercise routine of Pilates and yoga and an already healthy eating plan was not working. It was as if my metabolism died and I had slept through the funeral.
I confessed to a friend that I felt like everyone who saw the flab hanging over my waistline was judging me as someone who was lazy. I even found myself, on occasion, rating other women in the room by their appearance. "Four looking really good over there. Ah, there's one looking so good I could hate her. Phew, at least five more like me, we're not outnumbered." I know I'm the only one that has ever done this, it's embarrassing.
I realized my attitude was affecting everything around me. So, after watching a few dozen Oprah shows and reading a few hundred inspirational stories in my favorite health magazines, I finally got the crazy courage to take their advice and add more cardio to my "lifestyle".
So here I was, eight weeks later, speed walking around my favorite park, showing zero weightloss results for my efforts so far, cranky as you know what, and totally annoyed that my jiggly thighs appeared to look worse now, instead of better. One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, calls her thighs the aunties, as a way of endearing the unchangeable; but, since I am a writer, too, I keep feeling that using this endearment would be a form of plagiarism somehow. If I grow pessimistic enough in the future, I might name them after men, seeing we can't live with them and we can't live without them. For now, they are just jiggly thighs.
If jiggly thighs were not depressing enough, my stretchy exercise shorts were now a size too small and that is being kind to myself. I was so determined that I would be ten pounds thinner by the end of summer that I talked myself out of buying new clothes.
I looked like I tried to stuff myself through a paper towel tube and got stuck at the waist and everything up top was trying desperately to squeeze out below my ballooning waistline. Definitely not a pretty sight, but I must pat myself on the back for bravely walking on.
Actually, by this time, it was more like stomping, with a few hissy fits and some expletives. Does anybody know if hissy fits burn extra calories? On this unbearably hot day, my ranting went something like this. "Why can't I lose weight? How can I feel young and beautiful again?" And of course the mother of all questions, "Why is beauty so unattainable?"
Then, in a precious silent moment between rants, a divine and profound inspiration popped into my head. It left me dumbstruck, or maybe that feeling was from my circulation being cut off at the waist. Either way, it was three simple words that I almost dare not repeat, for it seems too insane to be the answer. Let me assure you that these words of wisdom came from somewhere outside of my head. For me, they were preposterous!
The trouble I was having with the revelation that came to me was that it seemed too simple. It didn't involve miracle cellulose creams or weightloss supplements. It didn't involve nipping or tucking or a scalpel in any way. It didn't involve juicing veggies or eating grapefruits or swallowing nasty teaspoons of vinegar to melt the fat away. Oh, and the most unbelievable, it didn't involve cardioÑat all.
The three words that transformed my struggle with attaining real beauty were, "Change Your Perception!" It was elementary and yet felt almost insurmountable to me at that moment.
"Change your perception," I mused as I walked on. "Is that all it takes?" I started to wonder. And then it dawned on me. Is it possible that my trouble with the idea of beauty is just the way I perceived it? Could society's ever-increasing focus on the material world have skewed my understanding of what real beauty is? Have I bought into the idea that beauty is skin deep?
My walking pace actually began to quicken as I delved further into my lightbulb moment. I am used to describing someone as having a beautiful face or body, but beautiful is just an adjective here. The definition of beauty can mean a quality or the essential nature of grace or charm. It is a state of being, of doing, which is not about the physical body. It is not just my body that makes me beautiful. It is who I am, what I do, and how I carry myself.
So, if I change my perception of beauty from what I look like, to what I am doing instead, beauty becomes attainable and I have full control of just how beautiful I become.
It is still a lot of work, but now it is the work of my soul. Instead of fretting over how my body looks, I can spend that time working on having a beautiful life. For me, this will add hours to my week, when I think about how many minutes of each day that I spend focusing on my flaws.
It is wonderful to be born with what society has deemed as good looks, but, I hear even the most beautiful models and stars have hang-ups about parts of their physique that I would kill for. This shows me that the common perception of beauty at today's standards has become unattainable for almost all of us.
I also realize that this does not mean that if I create a new perception of where beauty lies that I stop taking care of my body. The nature of real beauty involves even more that I nurture the precious gift of life that my body gives me. This involves maintaining optimum health and well being, but for reasons of experiencing balance in my life and not for the approval from passers-by.
As my walk finally came to an end, I felt a shift inside. I would walk again tomorrow and the next day. Not just because of the desire to look better, but because my body does feel better, even if I am not losing weight.
Attaining real beauty is an ongoing process. There aren't any magic pills or fountain of youth for me to look for anymore, because there never were any to be found. I still have days when I don't like what I see in the mirror. At the end of each day, I strive now to change the question from did I look beautiful today, to what beautiful act did I do today.
I know, also, that I will take on being a messenger for this new reasoning, because I have been gifted with a forgotten truth about beauty. I will continue to walk forward with this new perspective about real beautyÑjiggly thighs and all.
By Helen Heinmiller.
An author, speaker and the founder of Kids' Voices Count Project.
Contact her at NewPossibilities@verizon.net, www.helenheinmiller.com