Changing a Negative Self Image [Aplogies All Around]

It is not often I feel genuinely sorry for celebrities and yet - have you seen the video of Giuliana Rancic pestering women on the red carpet at the Golden Globes about their diet secrets?! Jezebel provides a helpful mash-up:

Click thru to see the vid - it doesn't allow for embedding. Sorry!

It's a veritable body-image gauntlet. How is it that the most important question a reporter can think of to ask an actress is what her diet and exercise routine really REALLY is? Especially when said reporter is so waifish herself. Just watching it was like being sandblasted with body snark, jealousy, insecurity and shallowness. I can't imagine what it must have felt like in person. Made me love Christina Hendricks though with her, "Maybe you should eat more food and lay off the booze" admonition!

Actually, watching this vid made me think of how things have been around here at GFE lately: a hail storm of body image woes. A sweet reader recently e-mailed me saying, "I wish you wouldn't be so hard on yourself. Because when you're hard on yourself, it makes me hard on myself." Unless it's from joy, I don't often cry reading your e-mails (usually I snort liquids and make embarrassing noises trying to stifle my laughter) but this time I did.

I forget sometimes that I walk a fine line here by sharing all my deep-seated crazy - and there's been a serious uptick in insanity since the Jelly Bean has been born, I'm not going to lie to you - and holding all of you hostage on the crazy train with me. You should know that for every weight-loss thought that I write, I think 100 (1,000?) in my head. It's an illness, this self hatred.

The scale, the calories, the inches, the percentages: for years these numbers ruled my life and I don't want to go back there. Truly, I don't. But you should also know that every recent resurgence of my disordered eating has been after the birth of one of my children. Hormones, sleep deprivation and baby weight combine into this trifecta of evil that makes me so very hard on myself. Plus this time around my therapist, whom I loved dearly, is now working for the prison system and alas I am not a criminal.

And so I blog about all this trying to keep it transparent, thinking that if I'm accountable to all of you then perhaps I can avoid repeating past mistakes. But I forget that some of you are fragile too. And some of you are just sick of hearing about this. In retrospect, I don't know that it is helping me much to indulge in the negative self talk. Making excuses for my bad behavior just allows me to wallow in it instead of making the necessary changes.

I asked my sister today if it is possible to change one's entire personality. To let go of my Type A insanity and embrace a more mellow me. She said she believed I could with a lot of work. I hope so. I'm going to try. I'm not exactly sure how to go about it yet but I hope to be gentle in the process.

My sincerest apologies to those of you I have made sad, mad, crazy or just otherwise irritated. I'm going to cut the negative self talk in the future. I won't be perfect but I'm going to try. I love you guys too much not to. Hopefully I'll learn to love myself that much as well.

Thanks for your patience with me. We're all in this together, right? Where do you draw the line between a healthy dialogue and pointless obsessing? Anyone else want to smack Guiliana??