Friday, December 12, 2008

Workshop DVD's

So I have been doing a lot of thinking & since it is taking me forever to get the rest of the speakers presentations up here, I am toying with the idea of offering the video presentation of each of the speakers or even an audio presentation. There would be just a small charge for cost of each & I haven't looked into that yet but if anyone is interested, please leave me a comment with your contact information & I will get back with you. These speakers did a great job & it is better if you get the presentation right from them. The video quality isn't the best, but you get the point. I will still be posting them on the site, just don't know when. Let me know if you have any questions! Thank you for checking out my site!

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

If any of you are looking for a little inspiration, check out Dr. Wayne W. Dyers "The Power of Intention." I was flipping through the stations the other night & came across this on KBYU. I normally don't watch a lot of public broadcasting but I was so glad I turned it on & DVR'd it. I missed the whole first half but what I did catch was awesome! He was talking about love & loving yourself & he said this "True nobility, is not about being better than anyone else, its about being better than you used to be." I loved that because isn't that ultimately what we are all striving to become? Not better than anyone else but better than we used to be? He gave a quote by Michealangelo about beauty "Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else, that Celestial source from which we all come." I know I haven't felt very "beautiful" lately but I am striving to be more like the source from which I came. If you haven't read this or seen it, it is awesome! I am definitely getting me a copy so that I can reference it often. I also recorded another presentation by him called "Inspiration". I haven't gotten through that one yet but plan to when I get a few extra minutes to myself.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Dove's Real Beauty Workshops

I woke up early this morning with this thought on my mind & felt like I needed to share it.

For the past couple of months, I have been presenting Dove's "Real Beauty" workshops for girls. Most of the workshops I do have been for Young Women groups. In our community, religion is a very big part of our lives & because these groups are church related I felt like it was very important to incorporate quotes from LDS church leaders. I take a lot from the book "Finding the Angel Within" by Pamela Hansen. If you have not read this book, I highly suggest getting it. It is so good. All of the quotes I use are very good but the one I want to share is one by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taken from a talk he gave specifically to young women. I didn't find this one in the book but rather off of www.lds.org. (see reference below.)

"You are literally a spirit daughter of heavenly parents with a divine nature and an eternal destiny. That surpassing truth should be fixed deep in your sould and be fundamental to every decision you make as you grow into mature womanhood. There could never be a greater authentication of your dignity, your worth, your privileges, and your promise. Your Father in Heaven knows your name and knows your circumstance. He hears your prayers. He knows your hopes and dreams, including your fears and frustrations. And He knows what you can become through faith in Him. Because of this divine heritage you, along with all of your spiritual sisters and brothers, have full equality in His sight and are empowered through obedience to become a rightful heir in His eternal kingdom, an "heir of God, and joint-heir with Chirst."(Rom. 8:17) Seek to comprehend the significance of these doctrines. Everything hrist taught He taught to women as well as men. Indeed, in the restored light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, a woman, including a young woman, occupies a majest all her own in the divine design of the Creator. You are, as Elder James E. Talmage once phrased it, " a sanctified investiture which none shall dare profane." (Jeffrey R. Holland, "To Young Women" Ensign Nov. 2005 www.lds.org)

I don't think I need to expound any more on what Elder Holland has said. I have been ending my workshops with a song that was written by LDS singer and songwriter, Jenny Phillips called "To Become Like Him". I wanted to post a link to the whole song but can't figure out how to do that so I will just post the chorus.

"Remember you are greatest, when you walk with God
When His light is in your eyes, you are truly strong.
You don't have to prove your beauty, in the eyes of men,
You are divine within, you were sent here to become like Him."
(Click on the link below for a very moving video clip that goes along with this song.)
I think that chorus says it all. We don't have to prove our beauty to anyone because we are all daughters of a Heavenly Father who loves us for who we are. I hope and pray that all young women of all faiths truly realize this & know they are beautiful!

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Steamy Magazines Make Men Feel as Bad as Women

My friend Tiffany referred this article to me & I thought it was an interesting twist on self esteem. Women are not the only ones that struggle to live up to what we see in the media. Read on...

Jeanna BrynerSenior WriterLiveScience.com jeanna Brynersenior Writerlivescience.com – Fri Nov 7, 12:42 pm ET

Guys who check out the sexy female models in so-called lad magazines such as Maxim have more body-image problems than their pals, a new study finds.
While it is fairly well-known that women feel worse about their bodies after viewing other females in Cosmopolitan or Glamour, guys apparently take the same knock after perusing the lingerie-clad women spread across the pages of Maxim, FHM and Stuff.
The researchers say that by looking at idealized, sexualized women, guys feel less-than because they start thinking they need to measure up on the attractiveness scale to snag such a mate.
"Men make the inference that in order to be sexual and romantic with women of the similar caliber they see in Maxim magazine, they also need to be attractive," said lead researcher Jennifer Aubrey of the Department of Communications at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
The jury is still out on whether good-looking people snag others of their same physical caliber, however. In fact some research suggests women go for relatively less-attractive guys.
Nevertheless, Aubrey said lad magazines send the message that guys should be having lots of sex.
"So you have that in your head while you're looking at these magazines. If you want to get as much sex as possible with these types of women, then what's left but the feeling you need to look a certain way in order to do that," Aubrey told LiveScience.
Scourge of sexy women
Aubrey and her colleagues first looked at how guys reacted to magazines such as Maxim, FHM and Stuff, the pages of which are laden with scantily dressed and stylish gals along with articles written from an uber-male perspective about fashion, sex, technology and pop culture.
The researchers had 77 male university students answer questions about body self-consciousness and anxiety about appearance at the beginning of the study and one year later. They found that reading such magazines was related to more body self-consciousness. Statistics ruled out the possibility that guys who have body-image problems specifically sought out lad magazines.
"This was surprising because if you look at the cover of these magazines, they are mainly images of women," Aubrey said. "We wondered why magazines that were dominated by sexual images of women were having an effect on men's feelings about their own bodies."
In another study, Aubrey and her colleagues asked a group of 100 male undergraduate students to view one of these three types of images: layouts from issues of FHM, Maxim and Stuff showing a woman dressed in either lingerie or a bikini, along with a description of their appearances; layouts about male fashion showing well-dressed, fit guys; or magazine layouts that were "appearance-neutral" and so featured topics such as technology and film trivia.
The men who looked at the photo spreads of women reported more body self-consciousness than the other two groups. "Even more surprising was that the male fashion group reported the least amount of body self-consciousness among the three groups," Aubrey said.
Average Joe
To try and figure out why men get such a body-image knock from viewing images of beautiful women, the researchers ran a similar study with 143 male undergraduates. This time, the guys were divided into two groups, one viewing magazine spreads of sexually idealized females and the other viewing the same layouts with an average-looking boyfriend added to the photos next to the sexy woman, along with captions about how the female models are attracted to the average-looking men.
Men who looked at sexualized women reported being less likely to ask a woman out on a date or to interact with her. These men who were less romantically confident also were more self-conscious about their bodies.
Men who saw the average Joe pictures did report less body self-consciousness than men who saw images of just the sexy woman, but the finding wasn't statistically significant.

The research is detailed in the current issue of the journal Human Communication Research

Thursday, November 13, 2008

7 Steps to Ending your Emotional Romance With Food- Sheri Green


Ok here is the second speaker from my workshop! Sorry it has taken me so long to get this up here but the third one is in the works. I am hoping to get these all posted before the end of the month. Wish me luck! This is the handout she gave to everyone so hopefully you will get an idea of what she was talking about.

Sheri Green-
7 Steps to Ending your Romance with Food.

You know I am so excited to be here & what I was really excited about was when I walked in and saw a lot of moms & daughters here, because you will see as I get into my presentation here that really a lot of my inspiration was my daughter & what she felt about her body. So I am so happy that you are here. It’s funny because I present a lot to women and as I ran through it, I ran through it with my daughter & I have implemented some of her tips so that it will be interesting to the girls too. So today I’m going to talk to you about 7 steps to ending your romance with food. When I was 13 we lived kind of out in the country. We moved into a rental home & it was only going to be for about 18 months. And we had this rickety old shed out in the back & you know we were excited because it was a new home, well new to us anyway. And so we ran out there & we looked inside & there was a pig inside. We learned that it was the owner’s pig that had left it there & had called his relative to come & pick up the pig. And so this relative came & picked up the pig. Now driving along I noticed there is a lot of farm land out here. Does anyone own a pig? Have you ever had an experience with a pig? She knows how cooperative pigs can be. So this relative of the owner came to get the pig & take care of it while the owners were away for 18 months. So he got out there opened the door & no pig. So dad noticed he was kind of struggling to get this pig out of the shed so he handed him a broom, so he sat there with the broom pushing on the pig & finally it was my dad & this man pushing on this pig trying to get him out of the shed & just about that time the neighbor from across the field came over and he started helping too. So there was three people pushing on this pig but it wasn’t going to go anywhere. But it was a noble battle though. Finally after a while they have mud all over, they smell like barn yard & my dad said you know we are only going to be here for 18 months it might be a really good thing for the kids to have a pig around so they will learn some responsibility. They can take out the feed and make sure the pig is taken care of. And so the pig actually stayed there & we went on taking care of that pig. Well flash forward to today, I ‘m sitting on the couch and I’m staring down on my coffee table at a bag of chips. Its totally empty & I’m looking around the room going, gosh where are all those people that helped me eat all these chips. I know they were here because I couldn’t have eaten them all myself. And then I glanced down on my chest & I have little flex of chips all over my chest and I start feeling bad for these little chiplets because their only purpose in life is to be eaten, I felt bad so I lick my finger and I start making sure I get every last chip. And then all of a sudden a big whack from the stick of reality hit me on the head, I had just eaten a whole bag of chips & downed a 300 calorie soda and I didn’t even know it. I was oblivious. I was sitting there watching TV just eating and drinking. How can I eat that much and not even realize I’m doing it. I’m overweight, tired all the time. I don’t want to feel that way or be that way and then it dawns on me that I have this big stubborn pig inside of me and I it want to leave. AND I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GET IT TO LEAVE. I’VE TRIED ALL SORTS OF BACK UP. Diet books, one time I think I had four different memberships, hired a trainer named Sven, I didn’t tell my husband about him and one time I even asked my brother on his trip to Brazil if he would bring me back a tapeworm. Pretty desperate. So I feel like there is this pig inside of me and it won’t move. It’s not gonna go anywhere. So what do I do about it? Well I’ve actually learned a lot about what to do with it & I’ve learned that this pig is moveable and that we can deal with this pig. I’m going to share with you 7 steps of what you can do about it. The first one is to Love your Body & I know you have an interest in this or you wouldn’t be here. But that is really easier said than done. I know this from personal experience. I know this through the experience of my friends, that loving your body is hard. Maybe not for some, some of you I think you should totally be loving your bodies, actually all of you should be. So step one, love your body. I want to share with you a little bit of my own personal journey on how I’ve learned to do this. This is me about 2 ½ to 3 years ago. And I never wanted my picture taken; I think you can tell by the look on my face how excited I was that someone is taking a picture of me. But I chose these two pictures because this is a time in my life when I hated, hated, hated my body, I loathed it. I didn’t even want to look in the mirror because I could not stand what I saw in the mirror. I remember at this time thinking, you know if I was thinner I would have that promotion at work, if I was thinner, maybe my husband would pay more attention to me, if I was thinner I might have got a better deal on that car I just bought yesterday. So I was blaming everything on the fact that I didn’t like my body. So this was about the time that my daughter was 13. She is 17 now, and she was just getting hips. Very beautiful girl, but she had friends who were still in their 13 year old bodies; very narrow, very small frames. And school was beginning to start so I took her school clothes shopping and we started trying on pants and we went to the girls section and we were up to the biggest size of the girls section and she couldn’t get these pants to do up because she had started getting hips so I suggested well you know lets go look in the junior misses or get a small pair of the adults & she just looked at me & tears started streaming down her face and she ran out to the car and I thought you know the teenage thing a little emotional but I ran out after her. I was a little disgusted because we tried things on & I had to drop them off & go get my daughter. So I sat out there in the car and she just cried and cried and said mom I hate my body, I hate my hips, why can’t I look like my friends? It’s hard for me to even think about that right now without getting emotional. And I proceeded to tell her I said, “Sydney, your body is a gift, your body is precious, you’re beautiful.” I wanted to tell her so much more about that but I had a really profound moment; I realized I don’t feel that way about my body, I don’t feel like this is a gift. How can I tell daughter to feel that way when I don’t even feel that way? It’s like standing there with a cigarette in your mouth telling them hey honey don’t smoke it’s bad for you. I mean you can’t do that with your kids. And so it was just a very rude awakening for me & so I realized that I definitely needed to change that situation. I chose a couple of pictures. This is me in the past year. The focus here isn’t necessarily on body, if you can see it, this is more the look on my face that I have now. This is the look on the face of somebody who has learned to be grateful for what she has and has learned to take care of it & honor that. I’ve since started teaching some classes, I’ve learned a lot in this whole transformation that I went through & I started teaching some classes to other women. And the first thing I said about loving your body is that you’ve got to be grateful for it, you’ve got to thank your creator everyday for giving you this gift. I remember saying that in one of my classes & I have one of my good friends who she’s just well at the time she was almost 300 pounds. So she was a pretty large person and she raised her hand and said Sherri I can’t do that. I cannot be grateful for this. She said, Do you know how much it hurts me to get out of bed in the morning, and even just walk to the car? It hurts me to move, I can’t be grateful for that, & I thought, uh what do I say to that? But luckily I didn’t have to say anything. She had a sister that she had brought to the class with her that had a son when he was 17 was in a really bad car accident and ended up losing the use of his arms and legs, paralyzed who is an absolute joy to be around. He just spreads cheer and happiness even now to anyone who meets him & her sister turned to her & said do you know what? Kyle would give anything to feel his legs, even if it were pain he would love to feel his legs again. So I didn’t have to say anything, I think at that moment she also accepted the fact that we’ve got to be grateful. That’s where it starts. So loving your body is the most important & I did put that in step one because if you can’t get there, you might try dieting you might try exercising, because this isn’t just about weight loss, this is about the way you feel about yourself. Because if you can’t get there, you will never make lasting change. So you need to do what it takes to get there & I am going to give you some tools that will help you do that.
Step 2 is getting in touch with your body. I taught a college class, they were technical classes so I always had a lot of men in my classes. Well I remember this one particular class I had a girl, her name was Amanda, she was a great student, she never missed a day and always turned her work in on time. She was like clockwork, wonderful girl. Well it started getting toward the end of the semester & she was getting an A in the class. Well one day she didn’t show up. And I thought oh I wonder, this must be serious because she never misses, so I didn’t worry too much that day I just noticed it. Then the second day I thought wow something must be really up because she never misses, this is strange. So by the third absence in a row I got very concerned about her. So I went and looked up her phone number and I gave her a call at home & I was shocked at what I heard. She said Sheri, a few nights ago I was sitting at home & I started getting really bad cramps, just this severe abdominal pain & it kept getting worse & worse so I drove myself to the hospital. Well three hours later, she gave birth to a baby boy. She didn’t even know she was pregnant & I know this is an extreme example but I was dumbfounded, I thought how could you give birth & not know that you were pregnant, I had heard of this happening before but it was interesting to have it happening to someone you knew. Well I shared this story in one of my other classes too & one of my other students raised her hand & she said, I know how she can do that. I was thinking oh really. You know those of us that have had kids know how obvious it is, the changes in our bodies when we are pregnant. And she said I know exactly how that is. Elaine is about, probably about 63 years old also very large and she said you know I spend a good hour, hour and a half every morning on my hair and my face & then I just throw something on my body and ignore from my neck down. Because it is too painful for her to acknowledge what’s from her neck down & sadly Elaine has had some health problems for that reason. But we have done some things to help Elaine get in touch with her body and help her understand and listen to it. I’ll share one of those with you but let’s move on to the next slide. I want to talk first , I put this slide up for my daughter, I did this presentation for my daughter and she said mom you’re going to give someone an eating disorder, you’ve got to make it clear that it is ok to eat. I thought, huh. Because what I have struggled with mostly is overeating, but I know there’s maybe even some in this room & a lot of women at sometimes struggle with under eating, which a lot of times is based on the same emotional responses. So I need to make this very clear, “It’s ok to eat and your body needs food.” You’ve got to feed your body. So with that being said I’d like to cover the differences between physical hunger & emotional hunger. Physical hunger comes on slowly & it builds gradually. Usually physical hunger will come a couple of hours after your previous meal while emotional hunger will usually come on suddenly, unless you’re pregnant, that might be physical. Physical hunger is satisfied by a variety of foods while emotional hunger is really a craving for a specific food. Usually there is just something you are craving; you just have to have it. Physical hunger can wait & be put off for a certain amount of time. You don’t want to put it off too long, but if necessary can be put off while emotional hunger feels very urgent, like you’ve got to have it now. Has anyone ever felt any of these? Yeah, I have. Physical hunger is not triggered by emotion, but by physical needs. If your stomach is going to start growling you’re gonna start feeding it. While emotional hunger is often paired with an upsetting emotion. With physical hunger you are generally aware of what you are eating. Emotional hunger is a lot of time unconscious eating & don’t really eat when you are unconscious you could choke. And this is my bag of chips story, when all of a sudden you’ve eaten a whole bag of chips & you don’t even know it. With physical hunger, you are aware of being full and satisfied usually after about 20 minutes & you don’t need to be stuffed. Emotional hunger keeps wanting more of the tastes & textures of the food even if you feel full. Physical hunger strikes below the neck & emotional hunger is above the neck. I want to kind of demonstrate what I mean by that & this is tool number one for emotional eating. First of all I want to go back to the story of Elaine. She is a diabetic, lots of different health problems. She had type 2 diabetes and she had had the habit of ignoring her body & continuing to eat things. But we went through this exercise with her & it really helped her to open her eyes & get back in touch. So if you’ll just be patient with me, if you’ll just close your eyes, I’d just like to kind of help us all get back in touch with what’s going on in our body and this can help with both under eating & over eating. So first of all I want you to close your eyes, I want you to focus right now on your body, take a few deep breaths. And pay attention to what your lungs are doing for you. How much air are you taking in? How does it feel to have full lungs? What are they doing for you? Think about your lungs, think about your heart. Is your heart beating fast or slow? Mine is beating very fast right now. Just feel your heartbeat, get back in touch with that. OK, now let’s go to your stomach and I want you to think about your stomach. Is it full? Is it empty? How does it feel right now? Could it use a little food? OK, think about your stomach right now & imagine that if you were to eat a candy bar how would your stomach feel after that. How would it feel after eating that candy bar? OK then, now in contrast, let’s say an apple. How would your stomach feel about taking in an apple? OK, so kind of get in touch with that. Now open your eyes. Did you kind of notice things that maybe you don’t normally notice? How were your stomachs; were they full, empty needing a little bit of food? So I wanted to kind of point out the difference between being hungry from here up versus from here down. My friend Elaine, what she started doing, she said the first time she used this, she went to the drive up to get a strawberry milkshake; it’s her favorite thing. And she started drinking it, this was after one of my classes, she started drinking it because she was really excited about having it so she took a couple of sips & she paused for a moment and put it down & she started paying attention to what her stomach was saying. Now being diabetic, when you’re eating a lot of extra sugar not only does your stomach get upset but your body gets a little upset because your blood sugar is too high. So she started paying attention to that. She said you know what Sheri, I felt sick to my stomach. My stomach felt sick, my stomach did not want that shake. So instead she got something that her stomach did feel good about having. So that is tool number 1 for you today. That is just being able to pay attention. So if you do feel like…you know I don’t know about you but I’ve gotten pretty good about knowing what I am eating because I need to physically & when I just want to for different emotional reasons. But if you stop and pause for just a moment and say how will my stomach feel about this and on the other side of that, if you are feeling hungry and are ignoring that. I had another lady in class who raised her hand and said, you know what; this emotional eating is not for me. When I’m upset, I don’t eat & I said why is that. She said when things start to get out of control that is one thing that I can control. I am in charge of my body. Now that is not healthy either, so my point here is you need to be in touch with your body & listen to it. And as soon as you kind of teach yourself & train yourself, you can overcome that. So step three is pay attention to your behavior. So we want to really take a look at what we are doing when we are eating and how we are eating. So here are some specific things. I got to thinking about it & I thought ok I am probably the poster child for emotional eating. I’ve done every single one of these types of emotional eating and I started kind of thinking & digging & doing some reading about what this might mean. So when I crave a specific thing. The way I got this is I was thinking about a month ago, I was home on a Saturday everybody wanted me to do all of these things for them & my husband came up to me & said so what is your plan today. And I said, my plan is not to have a plan. Nobody is telling me what to do today. You know there were so many demands on our time that day I didn’t want anybody to tell me what to do. So I decided I wanted a lemon cookie. Not just any lemon cookie, it had to be from the Smart Cookie Store. So that’s what I did and then as I started looking through that and picking it apart, I felt like there was no control in my life & the one thing I felt like I could control is a nice treat for me, a nice flavor for me & I was feeling deprived in some other areas so I wanted that one thing that could satisfy it. So then there is the eating whatever is in sight. A lot of times this is maybe that you are avoiding something or distracting yourself. It is a fact that when you eat a lot of carbohydrates that your body produces more serotonin which makes you happy so a lot of times your body is reaching out for that when really there’s other things that need to be addressed. And so avoiding something, distracting yourself. When you can’t get enough & continue to eat when you are physically full, this goes back to being out of touch with your body & the physical messages that its sending. And that visualization that we just did will help with that. When you can’t pass up food that you like when you see it even when you are full, a lot of times, now these are just samples there might be other reasons you do some of this, but there’s not enough. It’s interesting I read in a book, they talked about a study where they gave people three snacks and then they observed the order of the snacks they ate & then they had the person tell them which was their favorite. And it was interesting because they learned that half of the people who had participated in the study ate their favorite thing first while the other half ate their favorite thing last. And they thought now that is very interesting, why would that be, nobody ate it in the middle it was either first or last. So before I give that away tell me who eats their favorite food first, yea me too. Who eats their favorite food last? Wow there’s a lot of you. So what they ended up attaching this too was interestingly enough large families versus smaller families. So I don’t know if that was statistically true here. But they found that people with three or less people in their family ended up eating, they knew the food was going to be there so they would save it & eat it last. But the larger families, & I know because I came from a family of 8 kids & I had five brothers & I if I didn’t get to that food fast I wasn’t getting any so I learned to get to that food quickly. So I don’t know if that’s how that worked out here but it was very interesting to me & I was questioning myself, why is it that when I’m not hungry but at work when there are some cakes sitting on the table or something that I want, why can I not just pass it up & move on. It kind of goes back to there not being enough. And then there’s the even though you are full you can’t throw away good food that is on your plate. Were a lot of you raised with you clean up your plate, if you don’t eat that people are going to be starving in China. That is a big weight to be put on a child! “If I don’t eat this people are going to starve!” (Question from audience)“How do you deal with that because my husband’s family was worse with that than mine was? And so I’m seeing my husband put that on my kids and because I’ve been through Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers when they talk about the behavioral trends and I’m like I don’t want my kids to think they have to belong to the clean plate club but his argument is they need to at least try it so we are having a battle of wills of what is most appropriate for the kids.” That’s very interesting & there’s a lot of ways you can do that. One thing you can do is let them choose their own amounts. It’s interesting there was another study talked about in this book where they gave three year olds big plates of food & they would only eat until they were full & then they left things off their plate by the time the child was five years old they ate exactly what they were given. And so a lot of times, if you want them to try something say you need to try some beans take some & then maybe go on to the next thing but let them choose their own portions as well. But honestly I think this is a dangerous thing to do to kids, unless you are worried about their nutrition if you are worried about their nutrition, if they are not gaining weight there’s some problems of course you don’t want to take it to the extreme and just let them eat their candy or whatever but that’s kind of a dangerous thing to do & a lot of people that still do this they sometimes are battling guilt, if I don’t eat this people in china are going to starve & always trying to do the right thing. That’s just kind of one area & there is a balance with everything, I had that battle with my own mother in law when my daughter was little she would sit there & make her eat and drink everything & I had to have a talk with her, I said I don’t agree with that, put healthy things on her plate and she’ll eat but I’m not prone to force feeding people. There was another question… “I totally agree with that, I have struggled with that myself because I grew up with the same thing so with my children I have a very large family and I kind of changed it so that when I put the spread out I put it all out on the bar and then everybody makes their plate according to how hungry they are but they are required to take something of everything I’ve made and they never have to finish their plate. And then if they want more they go back to the bar. So kind of taking it off the table also kept us from overeating; as you continue to visit sometimes we keep eating so keeping it at the bar where if you really are still hungry you go back for more kind of kept us from doing it without thinking about it.” Excellent, that is a very good suggestion. The next four steps actually are tied into…It was really important to me today to send you home with a tool or something that you could use. So I am going to walk you through one way of doing it right now. So essentially, the way I see it or the way I visualized it is right next to that inner pig there are also a bunch of little bombs. And each one is some kind of emotion. It might be feeling out of control, it might be frustration, it might be helpless. There’s all sorts of little bombs sitting inside of me & at one point one of those bombs gets lit & that’s when I go off on my emotional eating. And the very first step is to identify the charge. Let’s see, what’s setting us off, what’s lighting up that bomb inside of me. And this is the I part, If I win I want it to be easy to remember so the I is identifying the charge. Some possible emotion charges, the first thing that tends to set us off are the people around us. There’s something very important about this though. In this process in this tool that I am going to give you is it’s not a blame game. What this is is us taking ownership to our reaction to people and situations. So this is us taking ownership. Nobody can make us feel a certain way; that’s up to us. And so, but it is important to identify when somebody is setting us off so that we can change that within ourselves. Then there are situations. Sometimes I find myself financially stressed, maybe overburdened at work, maybe feeling overwhelmed with all of the responsibility that I have. And this is one of these little triggers that might set off one of these bombs. When I first started teaching this I just put the first two and then I had this lady that said nope doesn’t apply to me, I don’t eat when I am stressed nope I don’t, I said well do you overeat & you know it was obvious she was a little overweight & I said so do you feel like you overeat & she said yes, & I said well when do you? She said, I eat to reward myself I eat when I go out with friends, I eat… so I though it kind of deserved its own category, so celebrations socializing & reward. I kind of thought a lot about this, can you think about when you had family gatherings, what did you do? You ate. When you did something good in school what did you get, a nice little treat. We celebrate with food and there is nothing wrong with that. When it becomes wrong or bad for you I should say it’s because we are doing it too much or we are choosing the wrong kinds of foods to celebrate with. But the other thing I was thinking about I was thinking of all the fun things that I ate when I was younger. My mom used to always make a big family dinner each Sunday and I thought was it really the food that I enjoyed & the truth was it wasn’t. It was all of us sitting around the table talking joking laughing. So that food represented closeness, it represented family, belonging. So there were a lot of things that I associated with food & when I don’t get that in my life sometimes I go to food to get that. So that’s a really important one. And then boredom just didn’t seem to fit anywhere, does anyone eat when they are bored? It’s ok to come out cause you know what, I’ll lay it all out here. So I definitely eat when I am bored. And I kind of got thinking about that because I’m not really stressed, I’m kind of bored & I got thinking about that, do I really never have anything to do? I thought about that I thought, no I have plenty to do & I shouldn’t be bored. So I narrowed it down to I’m avoiding something. The problem is I don’t want to be doing what I really need to be doing so I am avoiding it. So a lot of times attaching entertainment to food, it’s something to do. So I would like you to look at the I portion on your papers, I would like you to think of a time in the near past that you might have chosen to eat unhealthy for emotional reasons & I say unhealthy this could mean you chose to starve yourself or you chose to overeat or you chose to eat bad food. So I want you to pick one of these four, again we are not blaming; we are taking ownership of our response. So the I is identify, the w is a when statement, so I want you to think about that time when you made an unhealthy eating decision, and I just wrote a few things down in each category, if it’s a person you might say when my children take me for granted, if it is a situation, when I am financially stressed, when I overeat while celebrating with friends, when I avoid responsibility. Now I gave you a cheat sheet on the back so if you turn it over, you’ll see some categories. So here are some people if you have identified a person it’s good to be specific about who the person is because awareness is the first step. You can say when this person criticizes me, misunderstands me, accuses me, doesn’t trust me, competes with me and when I put this down it wasn’t someone that I hated it was someone I was very close to that I loved and admired. And that person was not intentionally doing anything to trigger anything within me but it just did. I felt competitive with this person. I don’t know why, they weren’t necessarily being competitive with me or maybe they were but that just sent a trigger off with me. So I would like you to write specifically when my children, or when my husband’s name is Shane, when Shane takes me for granted, when my children take me for granted. And if you have chosen a situation when I’m overloaded at home, when I’m not meeting deadlines, when I think someone is disappointed with me, when my house is dirty. All sorts of things and only choose one. So go ahead and write a when statement. Then next thing, so we’ve done I identify, when, and now we are doing an I statement. This is the switch from where you are saying this is happening to me, this person is doing this. This is when you take ownership of it. You need to do an I feel, I want, statement. Here are a few examples, when my children take me for granted I feel unvalued, when I am financially stressed I feel helpless, when I am avoiding responsibility I feel guilty. I want this to be a tool that you can whip out when you are thinking I want to eat this box of chocolate. Go ahead and go to the next step. This is the new me statement this is when we are discharging the bomb. We’ve identified the person situation whatever it is that is making us want to eat we’ve identified the emotion or the belief about our self that’s underneath it. So now what we need to do is get rid of that belief and replace it with something new. My husband is kind of a neat freak & he cleans out the garage, and for some reason he always cleans out all the shelves. So I go out there and all the shelves are cleared so I go out there two weeks later and there is a bunch of junk on the shelves. This is the switch right here. This is how you are discharging so rather than feeling helpless, feeling guilty , feeling all of the things you might have identified, we are going to let go of that & replace it with something more positive and actually more truthful. Because who really believes that they’re powerless or helpless. So one way to do that is this new me statement & there are some rules here and this is actually based on affirmations. Has anybody ever worked or done affirmations before? So there are a couple of rules on these, one it has to be in the present. It can’t be I will take charge of my finances. It has to be I am taking charge of my finances. It has to be something positive of course because we are clearing off the negative off the shelf & replacing that with something good and positive. It has to be meaningful to you. It really has to be something that resonates with you and is meaningful to you & you have to read it every day. So basically once you have gone through this process you take your statement & write it down & you put it on your mirror and you read it every day. Now I’m a very logical person, I have a masters degree in computer science if you can believe that. So when somebody first introduced this to me I thought, yeah right that’s gonna work, reading a couple of words. But I tried it & it makes sense to me now, basically what you are doing is you are reprogramming your thought process. And you’re taking away that charge that is setting off that bomb inside of you that makes you want to solve whatever it is that is bothering you by eating. So it has to be meaningful to you and you have to read it every day. On the back of your sheet there are examples of new me statements, these are some that you can look through & use if you like, but the things that will really go better for you are if you choose something that is very meaningful and if you choose something that if you feel like ok instead of feeling hopeless I am going to feel adequate capable and equal to any challenge. So you write that on your card & you read that everyday & you reprogram yourself & eventually these little bombs are not going to go off. So this is the tool that I’d like to send you home with.
Some of you might be asking, I’m sure you have been sitting here on the edge of your seat wondering what happened to the little pig we had when I was thirteen. It was very interesting we just learned so much from this pig, it actually got out once and my sister and I went out there with brooms and shovels & we were whacking on this pig fighting this pig trying to get it to go back into the shed just like the other people were fighting to get it out of the shed and into the truck and my parents weren’t there. I hope there aren’t any animal activists in here but you can hit a pig really hard. So we just fought with this pig & we went back into the house to try to get a hold of my mom & dad & I don’t know what we were so worried about. It was pretty slow & it really wasn’t running away or anything it was just in the backyard but that was kind of an emergency situation, so we tried to get a hold of our mom & dad and they weren’t there so we kind of stewed and thought what are we going to do with that pig and we kind of left it alone for a while & we walked back out there & because we had left the shed open the pig had walked back in on its own. And the thing that I learned about that is, it didn’t help to fight the pig, the more we fought it the more it resisted. And this is exactly how our bodies are, the more you fight with your body the more you are I am going to not eat anything this stupid it doesn’t deserve food or the more I’m working out going I’m going to get this fat off if it is the last thing I do. That’s fighting your body, that is fighting and working against it & you will get resistance. It isn’t going to be until you love your body and you are thankful for it. That is the first step is just being thankful for it. In my prayers every night I thank Heavenly Father for giving me what he has given me; it is not perfect, I am never going to be a 5’9” model but I am still thankful that I can do the things that I can do with my body & I always will be and that is the message I want to leave with you and I hope that some of this has made sense & that you can use some of these tools and help make sure your eating is for physical needs and is in a healthy way.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Work in progress!

I just wanted to update everyone on the speeches from the workshop. I appologize that it is taking me soooo long to get these up here but I have been working on it just very slowly. I have bad eyes so I have to work a little at a time & each of the speakers spoke for about 40 minutes. It is a longer process than I thought & in the future I will have a better way of getting this out to you. I am working on the second one right now, like I said, very slow process! So I am very sorry that I am taking forever on this & I will get these posted as soon as I possibly can. Thank you for your patience!

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Workshop Notes

I am happy to say that the workshop last weekend went great! We had a good turnout for my first workshop. I have finally gotten one of our speakers notes typed up & edited, thanks to my sister in law Eve for helping. It took me a lot longer than I thought it would but hopefully I can get the rest of them up here soon! Enjoy reading & check back often for the rest of the speakers!

Tiffany Berg
Defining Beauty

"I’m really excited to talk to you today, how many moms are there? I have five children does anybody have more than five children? Six, Ten?! It’s Friday night, what do most moms tend to buy on Friday nights? Pizza! I was at Papa Murphy’s last night & I saw this ticket for the Castle of Chaos & I thought somebody’s making money off of coming to my house!! You know, being a mom with five kids, it’s a little chaotic. So I thought it’s kind of scary at our house right now. We just moved & this last year has been really bad. Do you all know bad, like awful bad? How many have had a great year? How many of you have had a bad year? Ok great because I am going to be talking to you. We are like this. Ok this last year, let’s see in the last year and a half actually. I won the Mrs. Utah pageant which was so exciting! Lots of fun, great new friends. And then I was hit on the freeway & hurt my head very, very badly. So that kind of started things. Then six months later my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Then a little while after that we needed to move into some place smaller. So when I say the castle of chaos, I really mean more like the dungeon of doom! That’s really what I’m talking about. But you know, there’s so much about what we’ve been going through that is beautiful. That has really been amazing, that I would be amiss if I didn’t share that with you. That especially you young ladies as you’re looking at wow what am I going to be when I grow up. What is there to look forward to? I know passing forty, you know, the location of certain things in my body is a little lower now, that’s not something you necessarily want to look forward to. But being a mom is fabulous, its awesome. And even in tough times its awesome! I did spend some time growing up in France. How many of you here know a different language? A lot of people here know Spanish. I learned French and interestingly enough, in France you would have these little kids that would run up to you that would want to talk to you because they knew English. They would try and figure out the English slang. So they would ask, “Teach us something American, not just something English or British.” So we would teach them how to say yes as an American, UH-huh so that’s how we say yes. And they would say that’s so great, how do you say no, huh-uh. So yes is Uh huh & no is Huh-uh. So these poor little kids would be uh huh.. The nuances are slight but it is where you put the emphasis. So, today as we are talking about Defining Beauty I want to talk more about definition more so than beauty. How do you define beauty as opposed to beauty in how you look? Let me tell you why that is so important to me. Sometime back my mother in law told us she wanted us to get together & have family pictures. We like most Utah families, large Utah families decided that we were going to all dress alike. We all wore white shirts & khaki pants. She said, now that everyone has the same outfits on we want you to drive up into the mountains as a caravan with the children and their spouses & their children’s children. So our whole pioneer heritage is going to go up into the mountains in our white shirts and tan pants and take family pictures. So we are all standing there in clumps according to whose married to who and who birthed who, you know how that goes. So we are all there in our little clumps & this very professional photographer very nice woman is looking at my husband on the end & saying come on you on the end, show me some teeth, come on show me some teeth. And everyone’s waiting, my husband is getting embarrassing. And the photographer is going come on you on the end show me some teeth. Nothing. So a couple of weeks later this photographer is at my mother in laws house & she spread all these photographs along the counter and she says Betty I’m sorry, this one on the end he wouldn’t smile. And my mother in law she knew who that was & she said, what you don’t understand, that son right there, he couldn‘t smile. You see he has been battling cancer and he lost his smile. He lost half his mouth to cancer. So ladies when we talk about defining beauty, what defines beauty? What makes someone beautiful? Yeah, I won the Mrs. Utah pageant, great, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to have my husband on the very last night. That is important, that is significant. I’ll hold that to Britney Spears any day. My husband is beautiful; he looks so different from the man I married. And I’m so glad he’s here.
I want to talk a little bit about Barbie. We all know and love Barbie. There’s fitness Barbie, camping Barbie, rock star, ice skating Barbie. I always loved Barbie; she was my idol growing up because I had buck teeth, red hair and freckles. I did not look like her, but I wanted to look like her. Later in life I found out that there is a box at the grocery store that you can buy for ten bucks, you can bleach your hair. Barbie didn’t always exist. Some of you didn’t know that. She was actually created by a lady named Ruth. And before Barbie was created, the only dolls were baby dolls. Dolls that you can actually wrap up in a blanket and pretend you were feeding with a baby bottle. And Ruth, she and her husband and one of their friends got together and created a company called Mattel. They put all their names together and started Mattel. Mattel originally was making picture frames out of wood. Ruth’s husband started to take the pieces of wood & he was making doll houses. And Ruth thought you know what I think it would be so great to invent a doll that looked more like a woman because she knew that girls struggle with the changes in their bodies, they struggle from going from looking like a baby to looking like a woman. And as much criticism as there is for Barbie she thought it would be kind of cool to create a doll that had accessories and a career and life choices. And she wanted girls to get excited about growing up & being a mom and owning homes and pink corvettes. She wanted girls to dream big dreams. And so she created Barbie. Now Barbie was the first doll to actually be shaped with breasts and that became very controversial. Because people back then thought that was very provocative they almost came right out and said its an insult to women for there to be a doll with breasts, even though, how many moms are here, you all have breasts, not such a bad deal. She got a lot of flack for that but immediately this doll was launched into the international toy box & Barbie became a fortune five hundred company. No one thought it would work & yet in reality little girls love to play with these. They love to play with the accessories. You know why there is not a Mother Teresa Barbie? She has no accessories and no clothes. Don’t work for everybody, but the dreaming part was awesome. Girls loved to get creative about possible careers , possible adventures. So Barbie came along, well years passed and you know Barbie has a lot of different looks and names now we have the Brats dolls. Still very fun, very creative. Years later Ruth got sick, she got breast cancer, interestingly enough. And the woman who created the first doll with breasts was one of the first to create prosthetics for women who lose their breasts to breast cancer. So in all of the criticism about “how could you do that, how could you come up with a doll shaped like a woman” Ruth through the irony of life became very aware of the meaning of the shape and beauty of a woman. It is important it is exciting to be a woman it is exciting to be a mom & have all of those motherly features. Now my husband, when he was going through a class that was just a couple of weeks before he would start his chemo radiation. This class was for the friends and family that would be taking care of the patient as they went through this process. And with chemo therapy different drugs are used for different treatments, I didn’t know that. So we were in a classroom with a nurse & the nurse was telling each of the patients and their family specifically, “This is the drug that will be given this is the dose, these are the things you need to watch for”. And there in the class was a young couple, a beautiful young woman, beautiful blond hair. So she’s sitting there & here’s this young couple, turns out this young gal had cancer in her female organs & she wasn’t able to have children. She was having chemo and radiation to keep her alive. Her name was Sarah. And the nurse said, “I’m sorry to have to share this with you, but not only is the chemo therapy going to make you sick, but it will also almost immediately make all of your hair fall out.” And as we sat there listening to the nurse tell this beautiful young woman who already knows she is not going to have children of her own, Sarah you will lose all of your hair & this is how its going to happen, within two to three weeks it will start to thin & one morning you’ll wake up and sadly it will fall out almost immediately. And her husband was sitting next to her and on the other side was her sister, & it was almost as if immediately they looked at her and said just as if without words, Sarah you are not your hair. You’ve got to know that. Just like we as a family had rallied around my husband & said you are not your mouth, just as much as we love that smile, you are not your smile. In the same way Sarah’s husband & her sister sat there & with that love just held her, you are not your hair. So what is beauty? What is it? When we define beauty. You see actually people are defined by the beauty they choose. We joke around about Mother Teresa, but in all reality, she was amazingly beautiful. When I looked up the word defining, defining meant critically important. So what is it about you that is critically important. What gifts & talents are critically important to your being, your personality? If every part of you was gone, in fact, you’re not your hair, you’re not your smile, (as she is cutting Barbie’s hair) .What defines you? I want to tell you about my friend Hope. You see when Hope was born, she was born with two club feet by the time she was 17 she had had over 26 surgeries &she was still in pain every single day. And the doctors said, “Hope, you have a choice here. The only way you are going to get out of feeling excruciating pain everyday is to amputate. This one leg we have done so many surgeries & yet it is not getting better.” And Hope thought about it and she prayed about it & she knew the only solution was to give up her leg. (trying to remove Barbie’s leg but it won’t come off) So hope said, go ahead & take my leg. So the doctors did a surgery & they removed one of Hope’s legs. 17 years old. The pain went away, but there was a new kind of pain. She was different she had to be fitted with a prosthetic leg and as time passed she got used to the prosthesis. She grew a little bit & the doctors said, “Hope, its been a while, this leg is doing really well for you. But because your body is changing, you’re a little taller now & a little bit different adjustment on the leg. We need to give you a new one.” She said Ok that will give me three legs. He said no you don’t need that third leg any more you can just discard that & leave it here in the office. You’re getting a new leg, a better leg. You know, this morning I was in the shower & I was shaving and I thought I need a better leg, its looking a little bit scary. So Hope was getting a new leg. She thought about this for a long time & thought wait a minute, if I am not going to use that leg anymore there has got to be someone that is my height my weight that could really use a free leg! So she asked her doctor about that & he said that in the United States we are not allowed to reuse prosthetics. We can’t just take your leg & give it to the next patient even though the next patient might really need your leg. And she said well that doesn’t make sense, I mean supply and demand; certainly there is someone who can’t pay for a leg who could use my leg. And they said no we can’t do that, in the US there are regulations against that. So she said well what about outside of the United States. And they said well no one has ever done that before. So Hope went on her computer and she started researching. Are there people outside of the United States that needed legs? Certainly there are. You see there are countries that have had wars right on their soil & children playing out in the fields inadvertently step on land mines. We don’t have that problem in the US. But in some countries they do. So Hope started doing some research and she said I am going to amass all of the free legs and free arms that I can in the US & I am going to find a way to take them to those people and to date, Hope Bevilhymer of West Jordan Utah, has gifted over 500 limbs to individuals outside of the United States. That is beautiful. That is not only beautiful, that is critically important, that is defining beauty, that is choosing what will define you. Not the media, not a scale, not a dress size, but deciding I get to choose what I hope for, what I believe in, what I see in the future and the problems I can solve. Hope was also gifted the Volvo for life award, which means, every three years for the rest of her life because of the one decision she made, she will be given a brand new car. Pretty dang cool. Pretty cool. You know it is hard to know what voices to listen to. In today’s society, you have the media saying what’s beautiful, the advertisements saying what’s beautiful. There was a young couple and the husband came home to find the wife admiring herself in the mirror in a brand new red dress. He said, “Honey, we are trying to save money. Tell me you did not buy that dress.” She said, “The devil made me do it. I’m sorry” And he said, “You know when that devil tells you to do something you say Satan get behind me.” And she said, “I did & he said it looked dang good from back there too.” We’re pulled by what the advertisers say is beautiful, what the actors and actresses say is beautiful, what the music says is beautiful and in some ways our definition of beauty & what defines us changes a little bit. I want you to think for just a minute. What was one experience that made me better? A critically important moment, not always the moments that make you aesthetically beautiful on the outside. Ladies, I think about my husband and I think about the frustration that he feels because on the inside he is the same person. He doesn’t feel like he should be perceived any differently & yet sometimes he is. When we go places sometimes people don’t know what’s happened. He had to go in for a pretty major surgery a couple of months ago where they actually took the bone from his legs & replaced his jaw because his jaw was being taken over by cancer. So he was in the intensive care unit for a week. And in the unit they don’t allow small children. Our two youngest fall under that 12 years old age bracket. So they hadn’t seen their dad in a week. And because it was such an intense surgery they had some major static going on because they missed their dad. And my husband he couldn’t really talk very well yet, so it was hard for them to even visit with him on the phone. So one day they came up to the hospital anyway & we were in the intensive care & my children were outside the room outside this long corridor. They were in the waiting room waiting for the rest of us to have our visit. And right when we were visiting the nurse came in and said Paul this is great, I’m glad your family is here because we are going to take you on your first walk since your surgery based on all of the medications & the stitches that were in his leg. And there was a lot going on, in fact things were so precarious that he had tubes and wires everywhere including a catheter bag so he wouldn’t have to get up to go to the bathroom. So as scary as all those wires and cords and all of that were, they got him up and he was on his walker and they were helping him walk around and right as he came around the bend, now as I say that is sounds like he was going fast, he wasn’t, as he carefully came around the corner, the doors to the unit opened. And so down the hallway were two little kids that could see their dad for the first time in five days all the way down the hallway they could see him and he could see them and I’m thinking oh this is so great this is like a hallmark moment he’s going to blow them a kiss or he’s gonna say something amazing and its gonna swell their hearts and my husband reaches down and he shakes his urine bag & he says do you get what this is? So I’m thinking the definition he’s going to choose for the first interaction with the kids is going to be something deep meaningful memorable you put in your scrapbook and he’s making fun of his leg bag. But I realized the definition of he’s the same person, all this had changed and all this had changed & he had cords and buttons and bags and iv’s. And the definition he had chose was humor, was so beautiful because at the other end of the isle my children were jumping and squealing and laughing because they knew that their dad was the same person. Less hair, less weight, a different shaped face, a different mouth, he was the very same person. And ladies, girls, defining beauty is critically important. You are not your hair, you are not your breasts, you are not your weight, you are not your looks, you are not your teeth, you’re not your makeup, and you’re not your outfits. There is something critically important about your value and who you are and nobody else, nobody will test that. So with that I’ll leave you today & thank you for letting me share my stories with you. "

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month & although I don't do a lot with Breast Cancer, I do believe that those who have suffered from it or any type of cancer struggle with their body image. One of my projects for this month is collecting items that can be placed in "wellness" bags to be given to cancer patients. I will be gathering items such as, nail files, nail clippers, clear nail polish, travel size lotion & hand sanitizer, Kleenex, blushes, eye shadows, lip gloss as well as other pampering items just for fun. These items will be collected at the What a Woman Wants Show at the Eccles Center in Ogden on the 24-25 of this month. Please check out their website, www.whatawomanwants.com for more information about the show. I am hoping to gather enough items to fll 250 bags that we will then deliver to the Huntsman Cancer Institute in hopes of helping their female patients feel better about themselves despite the circumstances they are in.

I have really enjoyed the projects that I have overseen & know that they will benefit so many women! I have felt a higher power helping me through the organization & giving me great ideas to go off of. Without the help of my Heavenly Father & friends that truly care about what I am doing, I couldn't have done this. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your help! You don't know what it means to me!

Don't forget to check out The Beauty Within Events link for upcoming events.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Percival the Plain Little Caterpillar

I have this book that I love called "Percival the Plain Little Caterpillar". The story is about Percival noticing the different colors that are around him & on different creatures. He notices the green on a frog, the red on ladybugs, the blue on the dragonfly, the pink of the lizards tongue, the purple spots on the lizards back, the yellow on the bumblebee, and he realizes how plain he is & wishes he were those beautiful colors. Then he falls asleep in his cocoon & dreams about all of the different colors he sees. When he wakes up, he is a beautiful butterfly!!!
This story is so much like we are. Many times we find ourselves feeling plain compared to the model on TV or in the magazines, or even our best friend. But as we experience life & go through the growth process, we too begin to see the beauty that is within us all. It may take months or even years for us to fully grasp that beauty, but if we look hard enough & learn from the challenges that are given to us, we will find it.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Jamie Lee Curtis has Nothing To Hide

I heard about this story a while ago & thought it was interesting so I decide I would post it. This article was written August 27, 2002 in the San Fransisco Chronicle. Jamie Lee Curtis has written several children's books on self esteem & says that it boosts her own self esteem.


JAMIE LEE CURTIS called more magazine a few months ago. She had an idea for a story and photo shoot. The result is in the issue that hits newsstands today. The actress is photographed in her underwear as she looks in the privacy of her own bedroom, without benefit of stylists, makeup or flattering camera angles.
Curtis, famously fit in movies such as "Perfect" and "True Lies," looks like what she is: a 43-year-old mother of two. Squishy in the middle. Chunky in the thighs. Flabby in the back. Thick at the knees and ankles.
On the next page of the magazine is another photograph. It's Glam Jamie, as Curtis calls her gussied-up self. She's gorgeous in a sleek black dress -- carefully chosen to elongate and slim her torso -- and sling-back heels with ankle ties. The magazine reveals, at Curtis's request, that the transformation took 13 people and three hours.
Obviously, it is no great revelation that movie and television stars hide their physical flaws from the public, that the perfection we see on film is a fantasy created through lighting, makeup, clever camera angles and gauzy lenses.
Yet Curtis's true-life photograph has created the loudest press buzz since the magazine began publishing four years ago. The story has been picked up everywhere from Liz Smith's gossip column and the "Today" show to MSNBC's "Nachman," CNN Headline News, the London Daily Telegraph and USA Today.
Why?
Because in 2002, more than three decades into the women's movement, it is still a radical act for a woman to accept her body as it is.
"We knew the article was important," said Susan Crandall, editor-in-chief of the magazine, targeted to women in their 40s and 50s. "But we didn't know how huge it would be. Even a 23-year-old assistant at the 'Today' show, after we were on last week, said that the article made her feel so much better about her body."
'Today' interviewer Campbell Brown seemed aghast at Curtis' boldness, as if being photographed as she really looks is more shocking than being photographed topless (as Curtis was in "Trading Places").
"There is no way I would sit down for a magazine photo shoot with no makeup,
no control tops, no wonder bra," Brown said to the actress. "Were you scared at all?"
"What I'm scared of is that that's what women have become accustomed to needing to feel good about themselves," Curtis replied. "And show business and media and magazines don't help by promoting these images of women that are completely airbrushed, that are completely altered, to then give you, the unsuspecting buyer, this fake sense of that that's what people are supposed to look like."
Curtis has just written her fifth children's book, "I'm Gonna Like Me: Letting Off a Little Self-Esteem," which is what prompted the idea for the photo.
"I felt that if I'm going to try to promote something where I'm trying to explain self-esteem to children, I needed to live it," she said on the "Today'' show. "And for me to live it means I need to be the person I look at every morning when I wake up and stand in the mirror, you know, kind of as God intended me to look."
The impossible ideal of the perfect body -- what we ought to look like -- has been etched in our brains since our first Barbie. One photo won't change that. But it is a reminder of where the revolution fell short. As we were getting the world to accept us for who we are, we never figured out how to accept ourselves.
This article appeared on page A - 21 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

The Beauty Within Workshop

Just a heads up! I am organizing a workshop that will be held in October. I haven't gotten the date or place confirmed yet but it will be held in Kaysville somewhere. This is going to be such a fun workshop filled with everything from health & nutrition tips to hair & makeup tips. We will also be holding a "Real Beauty" workshop just for girls & their moms. We will be ending the workshop with a fashion show & a keynote speaker. I will be adding more information as soon as I can but keep checking back!

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Real You

I have been reading out of a book called, "Live, Love, & Learn". It is from the Time Out for Women conferences that Deseret Book sponsors. I came across a story by Hilary Weeks titled "The Real You" & wanted to share a thought from it.

She says: "There are a lot of things like smiling that I want to improve about myself. I imagine we all feel that way. I have a little philosophy about becoming and being the "real you" or in other words, the person you want and know you can be.
To some extent we know our strengths and weaknesses. Often we notice someone else's strength and wish we were more that way...My philosophy is the good quality we notice in someone else is a quality we actually already possess but have not yet developed. It is in us, we just need to watch and learn from another's example. The fact we notice the strength in someone else is our inner spirit's desire to develop that quality.
....Who is the real you? Do you want to smile more? Do you want to be organized? Do you want to have a home in which everyone knows they are welcome? Do you want to make the world's best cheese ball?
It is pretty easy to figure out. Just think of someone's example that you admire. Watch as they use that quality. You could even ask them how they do it--get a little one-on-one advice!!
It is a pattern with which we are already familiar. We know how to look to the Savior for our ultimate example. And along the road of life, His qualities can be found in those around us. Following those examples can help us become our very best. Our weaknesses truly can become our strengths and our strengths can be a blessing to others. It is part of the cycle of becoming the "real you".
...Today & everyday I want to be SOMEBODY."

It seems that everyday we encounter someone who we think does something better than we do & I loved what Hilary said about watching their example & learning from them. It is how our children learn the things they do, by example. In her story she used an example of a friend who smiled all the time. She smiles at the person giving the talk in sacrament meeting, she smiles at the family giving the musical number. Hilary wanted to be more like that so she started smiling while she was doing the dishes or even sweeping the floor. She said that at first it didn't feel very natural but the more she does it, the more natural it feels.

It is the same with us. When we try something new for the first time, it may not seem natural but the more we practice it, the better we get at it & the more comfortable it will be. I am trying to follow the example of the people I want to be like more & be more comfortable at what I want to do & become "the real me".

Friday, August 15, 2008

What does it mean to walk in Beauty?

I was going through a folder that I found & realized it was stuff from high school. In it I found this page titled "What does it mean to walk in Beauty?" I am going to share this with you & I am keeping it as it was written. So remember this was written when I was 16 or 17 so it isn't grammatically perfect.

"To walk in beauty means to be beautiful in your thoughts, words and actions. You don't have to be beautiful to walk in beauty. It just means that you have a beautiful spirit & personality. To really notice that someone is walking in beauty you have to really look inside that person and dig deep into their soul. To walk in beauty is to be self confident. To be clean in all you do. When I think of walking in beauty, I think of a green meadow with trees in full bloom waiting to be picked & given to someone. I think of a spring afternoon warm & bright & full of color. I also think of a cool summer dusk when the sun is beginning to set. To me, that is walking in beauty. When your heart is filled with the wonderful things of nature. It is also love for all thing great & small. Love is the most beautiful gift one could ever walk in."

Like I said, grammatically, it is not perfect & you can see how juvenile it is. But I wanted to share it anyway because this obviously is something I have thought about before in my life, even if it was fifteen plus years ago. I still believe that walking in beauty comes from your thoughts, words & actions. Its not just what is on the outside but more what is on the inside that really matters! Everything in this blog has to do with feeling beautiful from the inside, out. I hope that my thoughts & words can help inspire you to be confident in whatever it is you want to do. No matter your age or stage in life, you can accomplish your dreams if you just have the desire & willpower to do it.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

How To Be A Winner

I found this in a magazine once so I don't know who wrote it or what magazine it came out of. I think it was Better Homes & Gardens but don't remember. I have always kept a copy because I loved it.

A Winner: A Loser:
..Makes Time ..Wastes time
..says "Let's find out" ..says "Nobody knows"
..empowers ..controls
..says "If it is to be it is up to me" ..says "I can't help it"
..is not afraid of losing ..is afraid of winning
..wants to ..has to
..is part of the solution ..is part of the problem
..does it ..talks about it
..makes commitments ..makes promises
..works harder than a loser ..is always too busy
..learns from others ..resents others
..says "I'll plan to do that" ..says "I'll try to do that"
..says "I'm good but not as good as I could be" ..says "I'm not as bad as a lot of
other people
..listens ..waits 'til it's his turn to talk
..catches people doing things right ..catches people doing things wrong
..says "I was wrong" ..says "It's not my fault"
..says "There ought to be a better way" ..says "That's the way it's always been"
..see opportunities ..sees problems
..celebrates others ..complains about others
..feels responsible for mor that just her job ..says "I only work here"
..translates dreams into reality ..translates reality into dreams
..expects success ..expects failure

Even though some of the things on the "loser" side (like waiting until it's your turn to talk) does not necessarily make anyone a "loser" & I hate using that term because it is so negative. So let's change the wording to "positive attitude" versus "negative attitude". That's really what it all boils down to anyway. It's not about winning or losing, it's all about the attitude you take with you along the ride.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Ironic

I have found it a little ironic that since I have started researching about self esteem, I have found myself struggling with my own self esteem. I read my friends blogs & the things they are doing in their lives, the way they word stuff & the articles that are written, & I find myself wishing that I could do that better. Wondering what my strengths are & how I can do better. How I can be a better writer or better mom or better blogger. :) When we start using comparisons we tread on dangerous paths. Paths that could lead to self destruction. However, sometimes we need a check up. Sometimes we get so carried away in what we are doing for ourselves that we need those comparisons to humble ourselves & look for the beauty within ourselves. To review our weaknesses & try to turn those weaknesses into strengths. One of my favorite scriptures is Ether 12:27 "And if men come unto me, I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all mn that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them." I know that when I take the time to check up on my weaknesses, it helps. But I know that I have a long way to go before my weaknesses will become my strengths.

Friday, August 8, 2008

The Man in the Glass

When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day,
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
And see what that man has to say.
For it isn’t your father or mother or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass.
The fellow whose verdict counts most in you life
Is the one staring back from the glass.
You may be like Jack Horner and chisel a plum
And think you’re a wonderful guy.
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.
He’s the fellow to please-never mind all the rest,
For he’s with you clear to the end.
And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the man in the glass is your friend.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
And get pats on the back as you pass.
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.
Annonymous

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Audrey Hepburn

One of my favorite actresses was Audrey Hepburn. I think everyone can appreciate her classic style & beauty. She has this quote that I love. I think that one of the best ways to boost your own self esteem is to help boost someone else's & this is what she says about finding beauty within yourself:

"For attractive lips, speak words of kindness...
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people...
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry...
For beautiful hair, let a child run his/her fingers through it once a day...
For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone...People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms. As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself, and the other for helping others."

This is so true. I find that when I truly forget myself & serve others, not only do I feel better about myself, but I am helping others feel better about themselves as well. May we all learn to live this "motto".