Looking Good
The purpose of this section of the website is to contain a collection of lifestyle type articles that loosely cover topics on looking good, beauty, fashion wear and generally what you can do to look good.
After all, the whole point of this site is to bring your attention to the benefits of wearing body contouring shapewear so that you will look good in the clothes you choose to wear.
That also means you want to do something about helping yourself to look better.
That's whether it means shrinking yourself a little so that you can get into a smaller size of outfit or wear tighter jeans, tops etc without looking like a sack of potatoes underneath them!
We all want to look good and when we don't, we pine for the days when we used to. Or we crave the slimmer figure of others which either depresses us or forces us to think long and hard about what we look like now and what we need to do in order to look better.
So what I have decided to do is to create a series of articles that cover these topics that will provide some interesting reading as well as hopefully motivate you to want to try some other ways to create a better looking you.
What Motivates You?
That's a pretty searching question, when you think about it. You could be sitting there reading this in your PJs hugging a cup of coffee and wondering how you are ever going to lose all the extra weight you gained over the last whatever period of time.
Or maybe you're not overweight but still not feeling your best, perhaps you fitness is not up to par or you are not feeling so great.
Well, I can tell you I've been there and didn't like it very much! At first, I did as probably countless millions do which is to just sit around and mope. I can also tell you that is not much of a solution to anything and if anything just compounds the situation by making you feel guilty for looking and feeling bad and doing nothing about it!
Double whammy! So I got up off my fatter than I would care to admit behind and made it my goal to get back in shape! So I suppose my own irritation with myself for lack of action motivated me to take action, finally!
What Did I Do to Change?
I know a lot of you will be thinking to yourself, "You can do it, but I can't."
That's pretty common and really stems from nothing more than a lack of self-belief. That's something no one else can really change for you. You have to decide to change yourself.
Once you have made that decision, the rest seems to come easier, whether it smacks you in the backside and launches you into a flurry of action, or if it creeps up on you gradually, the end result is you do start taking action. With me, it sort of hit me hard at first to wake me up and make me take notice of myself, then the doubts set in and I started wondering if I could do anything to help myself, then a kind of feeling came over me that I could do it if I really wanted to.
That's when I started to get working on myself from the inside out to begin with.
I'm not going to make this sound all fairy tale and wonderful, because my transformation was really only very slight compared to a lot of women I know. I hadn't "let myself go" to the extent that I was a lot overweight or seriously depressed.
I had several pounds to lose and some fitness issues that needing some work (for that, read I had become lazy and physically unfit!) so I knew that whatever I decided to do would really not take such hard work as I know others would have to undergo.
Nevertheless, I also knew that if I didn't take any action now, I was liable to slide further down the slippery slope to being fatter and lazier and I did not want to go there.
What Exactly is "Fat and Lazy?"
Just breaking off my train of thought for a moment, it's interesting that we often talk about being fat and lazy in the same breath.
Did you know that it is often the fact of getting fat that causes people to get lazy and not the other way around? We all too often thing that a person has become overweight because they were lazy and didn't do any exercise, but that's not the case.
I was watching a TV documentary program about exercise, fitness and diet and how these things affect the way we are (its focus was on the obesity problem) and the conclusions from more and more medical experts is that it is not lack of exercise that causes us to gain so much weight. It is almost entirely down to diet and the fact we are eating too many calories each day that makes us fat!
The fact that we don't do enough exercise only affects our fitness levels, because unless we are training like an athlete - several hours every day, we are never going to burn off enough calories in the gym to make much of a difference to our size. Plus the fact that we get lethargic (read lazy) when we become overweight and a lot of that lethargy is caused by us eating too many high GI carbs (for example, white bread and white flour products like cakes, biscuits, etc).
These foods along with an overindulgence in sugary snacks and fizzy drinks cause a rush of blood sugar and energy followed by a crash as insulin is released in large amounts to deal with the overload of sugars. We don't benefit from the energy boost because we're not exercising so we turn it into fat and feel lethargic as a result. Its the bad food we are eating that is making us lazy, which doesn't help us much when we're piling on the weight!
Back to the Plot - My Positive Action
So back to where I was... I needed to get my mind into the right state first, ie positive!
Forcing away the depressive cloud is never easy, but it can be done by just getting in a happy frame of mind. That meant no more watching the news on TV or reading newspapers - they are all so depressing because it's almost always bad news! Guess what? Bad news sells newspapers!
I spend less time sitting around and if I had spare time, I would get up and go out of the house. Its incredible how getting more fresh air and sunlight on my face changed my mood into a good one and made me feel more positive, motivated and alive! You should try it if you spend too many hours every day stuck indoors with nothing better to do than to watch TV!
Do you know that once my mood was up and positive, the rest became really easy? I made a mental decision to stop eating all sugary snacks, switched to brown bread and then only occasionally and made sure I was only cooking my own meals from fresh ingredients that I had to prepare and peel myself.
No pre-prepared packet or canned junk for me! That stuff is just full of additives and garbage! Just read the labels if you don't believe me.
It's what's helping you to get fat ladies!
Ditching the Junk!
So with a fresh food diet and nothing else particularly radical apart from cutting out most of the sweet stuff that we all like (I still allow myself the odd treat), my weight started to fall all by itself.
I didn't go to the gym (I hate those places) or do any special exercises, although I was walking outdoor a lot more - fast walking as opposed to dawdling along.
It took about a month to see almost all my excess weight gone and my figure looking slimmer but not really very toned. The next step involved improving my fitness and for that I had to start doing some exercises. Yuk!
But I wanted to look good, so there was no skipping this step. My diet was back on track to keeping me slim, so I just needed some better muscle tone.
I didn't want to look like a bodybuilder, just get toned. So I went for some light exercise classes and yoga which is much easier on the system!
I admit I cheated along the way by wearing shapewear under my smaller size clothes because I just wasn't happy with my tummy that seemed to bulge out still and my thighs were loose and flabby.
But I did start exercising lightly each morning after my daughter went off to school and it did start to help some, although not as much as I would have liked. But hey, I wasn't going to go crazy about it.
Looking Good Takes Work and Commitment
The conclusion of what I've been writing about is that anyone can look good if they really want to and are determined to do whatever it takes to get there.
I don't believe you are ever too overweight to turn things around and come back to looking good. You just have to want it enough.
Sure, I know there are plenty of women who will read that last statement and think "Ha, what does she know about me?" and I agree, I can't possibly know what everyone else is thinking, doing etc. All I know is what I think and what I do. And I'm not anything special in the discipline department.
There's plenty of things I can't do and you know, if I didn't really force myself to do anything about my weight while it was still relatively easy to do it, I would have easily sunk deeper and deeper into the depression-weight gain-depression-weight-gain cycle myself. I could feel how easy it would be to have done that.
So take heart and don't ever give up on yourself. You're too valuable to let yourself go completely and no matter what anyone else says you can or can't do... you can do whatever you believe you can do!
Looking Good Articles:
Below you will find a list of all the titles in this category: