What is the key to having a body you can look good naked in all year round?
Who wouldn’t like to look good naked? Your health, happiness, self-confidence and effectiveness is strongly influenced by the reflection you see in the mirror, so how do we get better?
Despite what the popular media is telling you, looking good naked is less about your 6 pack and tight buns than you think. You probably know someone who has a great physical body but is unhappy with their image in the mirror. This tells us that there is something else going on here.
You wake up one day and have a ‘fat day’ and find you’re a little heavier on the scale than you were the last time you used that dreaded contraption. You resolve to eat better, drink more water and go to the gym. The next day, after sticking to your resolution for one while day and getting a decent night’s sleep, you look better in the mirror but the scale hasn’t budged. What gives?
The Internal Game
Your satisfaction with your body is an inside game. The difference between the two days I just spoke about has nothing to do with the physical appearance of your body. It’s about how you feel about the way you look, not the way you actually look.
Our perceptions of reality are all filtered through our emotions, thoughts, beliefs and values. We do not see what is really in front of us but rather a construct of what our brain is putting together. You don’t see your reflection in the mirror. What you experience as your reflection is the signals your eyes pick up and send to the brain which are processed with your mood for the day, your beliefs about the world and your beliefs about yourself amongst other things.
What you think is an accurate view of your body is more of an accurate view of your thoughts and feelings about your body. This means that looking good naked has as much to do with feeling good naked as it does with your butt or your waist line.
This is not to say that improving your appearance by shedding fat and rebuilding your body doesn’t make a difference. That can make a difference but it matters less than we think. How we learn to love and accept ourselves as we are is much more important and will also lead to better external results as we then adopt better habits more effortlessly.
The External Game
As a society we make ourselves vulnerable to slick marketing promising instant results that prey on our insecurities. Trying to conform to magazine cover ideals is a dead end full of pain, frustration and anxiety.
Research shows that adopting more upright postures makes people seem more attractive, desirable, confident and charismatic to others. In one study from New Zealand people with better posture had higher self-esteem, more arousal, better mood, and lower fear compared to their slouched counterparts. We know that good posture leads to good moods and less stress.
This tells us that improving posture is an often neglected key to looking good on the outside and feeling good on the inside. To those who have had an Advanced BioStructural Correction (ABC)™ adjustment that instantly improves posture, this is nothing new, you feel it every time but to those who’ve never experienced ABC™ it may sound odd.
The difference is that those in the know realise that posture is not about how you hold your body up. Posture is about how your body holds you up.
Would you like to look good naked?
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Peak Chiropractic Centre located in Claremont are family-friendly chiropractors focused on relieving aches, pains and posture correction. We offer in-house X-Ray facilities.
