You are your own worst critic!

So today I am going to write about how I constantly have a conversation with myself about ME and my own self worth.

I really seem to have two people in my head.

There is the awesome one (Person A) who always tell me that nothing is impossible, I am bright, I am funny, I am sexy and anyone would be super lucky to be with me.

I like this person, she is very positive about everything and she gets shit done.

Then there is the annoying one (Person B), the one that calls me boring, that I have nothing to give, that I am lazy and fat. My hair is ugly no matter what I do to it, my boobs are always too big and my ass is too wide. This is like the relative who sees you once a year and always remember to point out that you have gained weight or that you should have a new hair cut…

Luckily the latter one only appears sometimes and in general I only need to tell it to “shut the F up” and it does – the awesome one (Person A) in general is in charge and that is a good thing!

The time when the Person B. appears however is the times when she really should stay away. Times when you have been rejected, times when you feel unsure about things that are happening around you etc.

For example I went to a job interview yesterday. I was bursting with confidence and while I was walking down the street to the office where my interview was I saw a reflection of myself from the window and I saw that my hair had gotten messed up in the wind. Immediately the Person B said “omg your hair looks so awful, you are awful, crawl back under the rock you came from”. Luckily I was able to brush this terrible remark away instantly because the rest of me looked pretty perfect and my hair got untangled with a brush in seconds, but I really wish I could get rid of this nagging Person B for good – no one should have “friends” like that.

I know I already wrote before about self-confidence but I want to go back to this subject because I know this is so important to so many people out there.

Everyone loves confident people. When someone is genuinely confident it doesn’t matter if they are short or tall, fat or slender, smooth or acne, bald or hairy… etc.

I know this from my own experience.

I am a bit overweight but I am also very curvy. When I dress up to a nice dress that fits me well (key words there FIT ME WELL, always get clothes YOUR SIZE!), do my hair and basically groom myself pretty I turn heads on the street – YES I DO you stupid person B (she was again saying that I don’t!). But it is not just the dress or my well done make up and hair. It is the way this all makes ME carry myself. When I look in the mirror and like what I see, I walk with a pounce, I smile at people and I throw my hair from one side to the other (Oooh yeah I do!). This makes people smile back at me and this increases my confidence which directly reflects to me feeling even more confident (and therefore more desirable).

You don’t have to be a size zero super model to be pretty, ANYONE can be pretty and sexy but in general these slender people are considered sexier and I could bet money on it that it is because overweight people in general have low self esteem and therefore don’t come across very confident.

It is a fact (yes it is!) that guys like a bit of curves on a girl. Yes, obviously there are those David Beckhams who love their Victorias tall and slender but I would bet all my money and fortune that the majority of the men actually prefer a bit of a curve over a bag of bones.

When I think about guys, I would not like to date a guy who was extremely skinny. However the media hasn’t portrayed skinny guys to be desirable anyway so my mind is not brainwashed to think this way. To me personally, even 10 years ago when I was a fit (and skinny) 20 something I wouldn’t have cared if the guy had a bit of fat around him. I was never really into the whole 6-pack thing. Usually guys who had the perfect body were so obsessed by it that it made me lose interest immediately.

What mattered (and still does) if the guy was healthy, confident and genuinely interested in me.

I mention healthy because I do think that it is important that you take care of yourself. You can be overweight (lets face it, today’s world really doesn’t help us with the whole weight issue, especially if you work long days sitting on your arse!) but you should try to eat healthy and add some exercise to your day, even if it only means walking 20 mins from train to home.  I don’t want to date a guy who is going to die next week of heart disease (basically!).

SO, now coming back to the whole issue of me battling with my own self worth and ultimately self image. When I take into account everything I just wrote about my own preferences, it really makes me wonder where did this nagging Person B appeared in my head.

I know my mother was always (I remember this since I was 5) telling my sister that she was too fat. I never had this issue because I was always very slender but I grew up with this image in my head that being fat was the worst thing in the world. When I turned 13 I started buying my own fashion magazines and got obsessed with super slim people. Everyone was always slimmer than me and I hated my body. Now I would like to also point out that I was actually underweight all through my teenage years, if I had lost any more weight I would have disappeared.

I sometimes look back at pictures of myself and always think how stupid I was to think I was fat.

SO unless you take up two seats in a train, you are not fat! If you take two seats in a train, go sign up to a fat clinic, they can actually help you lose weight (fact!).

But yeah, this was not about being fat or ugly, it was about me trying to quiet the negative person B in my head.  I realize this side of me is all my insecurities and fears of rejection piling up to try to protect me from being let down, but you can’t live your life in fear that things that you do won’t work out. You have to believe that they will and more often then they will because you have your own support to see things through.