As some of you may know, I have a very guilty pleasure. I’m ashamed of it really.
*sigh* For the last two years, I’ve been a loyal fan of Biggest Loser.
I’m not really sure what I find so addictive about the show, but lately something has started to bother me about the show, along with many other shows dedicated to losing weight. See, a lot of the people on these shows say things like, “Well, I just didn’t think I could do it because I was too fat.” But as they start to lose weight, they discover that they still are standing in their own way even as their shirt and pant sizes decrease. It wasn’t really their weight that was holding them back. It was their brains.
It all reminds me of a scene from one of my most favorite childhood movies, The Neverending Story. Atreyu, the main hero, needs to pass by a special gate that can determine your true value and worth. If they deem you worthy, you pass. If not, they zap you with their eyeballs and you are fried. Just like in the face of a mirror, even the bravest of warriors start to doubt themselves as they approach this gate, and not surprisingly, they get the wrong end of a laser beam.
Your brain controls what you see in the mirror
How many times do you see people go up to a mirror and say, “Aww yeah, I look GREAT!” Humans tend to pick at ourselves, don’t we? Women put on a little more lipstick or give out a sigh as we notice another gray hair or another wrinkle. We look at our pants which no longer zip so easily across our bellies, or we look at, well, every possible thing that we could find wrong with ourselves. But the mirror doesn’t REALLY magnify that stuff. The mirror doesn’t make us see that we are overweight or that one ear is higher than the other. We approach the mirror like those warriors approach that soul-piercing gate. We are expecting to see something wrong because we do not love ourselves enough.
What should you look for in a mirror?
The next time you go to look at yourself in a mirror, maybe before you go to work or before you go out to dinner, take a moment and ask yourself what you’re hoping to see. Don’t let that thought become negative, like, “Man, I hope my hair looks good.” What do you want to see? Do you want to see a person beaming with happiness? Do you want to see a person who looks like they’re in control and in charge? Do you want to see a person emanating confidence and security?
How can you make the mirror show you those things? Well, you need to look well beyond the stuff the regular mirror shows you. You need to look inside your head, inside your heart, and inside your soul. Your real essence needs to be grabbed from within so that it can show itself to you when you look at yourself. Once you have that core of yourself that you want, the mirror becomes inconsequential. You know what you will see. You know it will be beautiful. Your mind’s eye is what needs to be convinced.
A mirror, after all, is just a piece of glass encased in some hard material. Right?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/3786803863/sizes/m/in/photostream/ via Creative Commons