What Makes You Beautiful?

This week has been one for reflecting on beauty.

On Sunday, I settled into the overstuffed chair in the living room to read from the book, Beauty: Rediscovering the True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope by John O’Donohue, that a beloved client had gifted me with. From it I quote – “When we say from our heart to someone: ‘You are beautiful’, it is more than a statement or platitude. It is recognition and invocation of the dignity, grandeur and grace of their spirit.”

At the gathering at my sister’s in the evening, I was in a touching conversation with a friend including a discussion about her beauty. This woman radiates the loveliness of a compassionate and kind spirit. And she is blessed with the genetics of a classic Italian beauty with high cheekbones and almond eyes. Yet still she cannot accept herself as beautiful and talked about wanting to get her nose fixed.

A study commissioned by Unilever, the company behind the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty reviewed the attitudes of 3200 women from 10 countries regarding beauty.

Only 2% identified themselves as beautiful.

How do we define beauty, culturally and individually? Is it measured by the ideas of perfection that are portrayed by inauthentic images portrayed in advertising, movies and television? To some degree, this seems to be the case. In this study, more than two-thirds (68%) of women strongly agree that “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever
achieve.” Women over 30 tend to believe this more strongly than women 18 to 29.

I love this Campaign for Real Beauty that Unilever has initiated. It is brilliant marketing but it is also using its power to wield an important message. Maybe it will be the beginning of a paradigm shift that needs to happen in the media.

Media aside, we all need to do what we can on an individual level to create beauty within and without. In the same study mentioned above, when asked what makes them feel beautiful, 92% of women stated ‘being loved’, 89% said “doing something that you really love to do” and 82% claimed that “taking good care of themselves” made them feel beautiful.
Fortunately, whatever we were given genetically, we have control over these aspects of our lives.

I invite you to ask yourself the same question: What makes you feel beautiful?

Whatever it is – do more of it. Our world needs more of the ‘grandeur and grace of your spirit’ and you need to feel more of your own beauty.

About the Campaign for Real Beauty

I found myself on the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty website www.campaignforrealbeauty.com where I was moved to tears by the newest TV commercial created for this campaign. The music and the images are emotionally powerful. But the larger part of my emotional response was from recognizing that a large company with enough dollars to reach a global market cared enough about their influence to want to deconstruct and reconstruct our ideas of beauty. In a world so heavily influenced by media and advertising, the bold move by Unilever (the company manufacturing Dove) might initiate a paradigm shift.

A number of people writing about the campaign have noted the incongruence between the message of women being beautiful as they are and then selling them firming and anti-aging products. I do agree with the incongruence. However, the campaign is a worthy one in itself for exposing the truth behind the media’s influence on the attitudes of real women, young and old. And I think we have to be realistic in the balance between a company’s reason for existing and how they wield their influence. From a perspective of corporate integrity, I think this is about as good as it gets. Despite the minor incongruence, I applaud them for the brilliance of the campaign as we are desperate for the message that they are offering: that beauty comes in all shapes, sizes and colours, and that beauty is founded on something more than physical appearance.

In the research study that Unilever commissioned that preceded the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, 3200 women in 10 different countries were surveyed to discover their perceptions of beauty and physical attractiveness, both their own and the larger concepts of it. I was so fascinated by the results of the study, that I brought my computer to the dinner table and shared the details with my partner Barry. You can review the study at http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/uploadedfiles/dove_white_paper_final.pdf

The top three measures of beauty were happiness (86% of the women surveyed listed this as important), kindness (84%), and confidence (82%). Although physical attributes were listed as important, the consensus was not as high. The appearance of the skin was listed as important to 67% of the women, overall physical appearance to 64%, facial appearance to 62%, and body weight and shape to 58%. From the study, they state “Importantly, women who are more satisfied with their own beauty are significantly more likely than those who are less satisfied to think that non-physical factors, including happiness, confidence, dignity, humor, intelligence and wisdom contribute to making a woman beautiful.”

Furthermore the most crucial affects on how beautiful a woman feels are attributed to ‘being loved’ (92%), “doing something you really love to do” (87%), and “taking good care of yourself” (82%).

It is apparent that us women are not blind to the wider dimensions of beauty. Being bombarded by media imagery that creates an unrealistic statement of ‘normal’ makes it challenging to consider ourselves beautiful. Only 2% of the women identified themselves as such. But it is also our responsibility to go beyond what is imposed on us externally and take control of our response to it.

I wonder though, what it would be like to be surrounded by images of women and men who are less than ‘perfect’ physically but exude grace, dignity, humour and vulnerability. I love considering the potential power of this possibility.

In conclusion, the research paper states:

“Just as women lay some of the blame for the perpetuation of inauthentic beauty on popular culture and the mass media, they also believe that that the latter can be a force for reconfiguring the former so that true beauty becomes the new standard – with unprecedented power to open minds and move emotions.

True beauty will not be driven by theory or ideology, but by its resonance in the hearts and minds of those who encounter it. This study has given women the opportunity to speak about what it can be. However, its articulation is the obligation of those who speak to women around the world about their beauty every hour of every day – in the visual images and words of the mass media. Their challenge is to know true beauty when they feel it and to faithfully represent it in the ways in which they speak about it.”

Stop Talkin’ Calories

This long held notion that you lose weight when you eat less calories than you expend is overly simplified.

I’ll use a metaphor to explain.
We could say that there is truth that if you were a moutain climber and you put one hand and one foot in front of the other, always going in an upward direction you would eventually make it to top. What do ya think? Some element of truth, but overly simplified? We wouldn’t be accounting for the extreme weather conditions, for the level of skill, for the support and training and tools that you have, for your mental capacities and motivation, or for that matter the unknown obstacles that every climber will inevitably run into.

The same is true for how any individual’s body uses the calories that they take in. Every organ system in the body makes use of the energy resources of the foods that provide the calories. The efficiency of a person’s systems, the food intolerances, medications, allergies, insulin resistance, thyroid function, emotional state, thought processes, etc, etc, etc will determine how the caloric resources get used.

There is also the quality of the food that the calories are coming from. 1800 kcal of nutrient rich food will mean weight loss for one person. 1800 kcal of refined food will mean weight gain for that same person.

All this to emphasize the importance of staying clear of oversimplified notions of how it is we lose weight. And more so, if you are a person who has not struggled with your weight, do not get caught in the judgment that someone who is overweight should just stop eating so much and start exercising more. More often than not, it is not that simple.

Emotionally Unintelligent Culture

I caught the tail end of an interview on CBC radio (Canada’s national radio) yesterday. Health Canada has come out with new statistics on obesity and the Canadian population. Possibly because of that, a science research writer was reviewing the research results of various factors on obesity. They talked about the effects of quitting smoking, of removing physical education from the schools, about calories in vs. calories expended and I am sure other issues that I had missed. At one point the interviewer says something like, “but really all of this comes down to what we have known for a long time – just don’t eat more calories than you expend”. How many thousands of times have we all heard that one. (See what I have to say about that simplified bullshit in my blog Stop Talking Calories). In the five minutes of the interview that I did hear, I was waiting for something insightful, some humane understanding beyond the ‘this is what the research says’ kind of jargon. I was waiting for something that spoke to the emotional, mental, spiritual and physiological issues that all people who have a longterm struggle with their weight have to deal with.

Finally, with me sitting on my seat in anticipation, the interviewer says “there must be some effect that the psychological plays in all of this” and the woman who is the oh so knowledgable science research writer, says “oh sure”. End of interview.

The culture of science and all those who ascribe exclusively to it keep missing the point. All the numbers do is confirm what we already know or intuit. How about we start talking about what really matters – people are stressed out, confused about their life, feel out of control, unhappy, and are judged. They feel emotionally, mentally and spiritually heavy and they don’t know where to turn next because there are so many experts telling them about the next best way to eat. What and how you eat is important to know but it is irrelevant if you can never stick to what you know.

Let’s get this clear. To lose weight and be healthy for the rest of your life is up to you. You need to take responsibility for your body, for your self and for your life. But it is not made easier by a culture that is scientifically focused and emotionally unintelligent to the realities that the weight loss struggle holds. As a culture we need a paradigm shift away from superficial attempts at weight loss, towards a more comprehensive understanding of what being heavy really means.