Perspective: How We Look and Feel About Our Body – Men vs. Women

This cartoon came across my Facebook stream last week, and while it’s good for a laugh, it also gets right to the point. This man and women quickly demonstrate the differences between the male and female perspective when it comes to what we think and feel about our bodies.  While this mind-body mindset to evaluate our features and flaws might not ring true for everybody.  I suspect that for the majority this cartoon does a good job of showing where we stand if we took a physical self-appreciation survey.

It’s not right or wrong to view yourself from either perspective, what I’d like for you to contemplate is: Are you aware of (a) which perspective do you view yourself from, Flaws or Features?  And (b) is this view of yourself serving your healthy-highest good as motivation to do what you need to do to take care of your body and maintain excellent whole-body health?

There needs to be some sort of balance between these two extremes.  There are some things we can change about our physical self, and some things that just make us unique and special.  If our view is warped, we can negatively affect our self-worth, and self-sabotage our health efforts because as hard as we try there’s always some BIG flaw that we focus on.  It can be difficult to see past the flaws and celebrate the features.

On the flip side, if what you see when you look at yourself  is not anywhere close to reality, and you don’t see anything that needs improvement there is zero incentive to make any changes in your lifestyle to bring your outer-self to the point that it actually matches the features you see.  By not acknowledging any of your flaws you place yourself at serious risk for health issues, injuries, and even an early death because you’re oblivious to things that really do need to be addressed.

It’s time to give our bodies a break, and embrace who we are, the good, bad and ugly.  Learning to love and accept both our features and our flaws can help us keep our health improvement goals in perspective truly focus on things that we CAN do something about, and learn to embrace the things that are beyond our control.  Sure you can pay someone to give you new features…but with every nip & tuck, there will be something else that stands out that you might think needs to be “fixed.”  What needs to be “fixed” first is how we feel about our self – our Mind-Body Mindset!

A slim and sexy body is great, but it’s not the only thing that defines health and beauty.  A beautiful person is someone who loves themselves regardless of their size, shape, or appearance.  THIS is a healthy attitude, and with the right mindset and appreciation of our physical form, we then are in the right place to begin exercising, and making health improvements and lifestyle changes to help us look and feel even better!

Your perspective matters!   Click here to take a short (7 question) survey on the Mind-Body Mindset: Flaws vs. Features.