Weighing your chocolate. Not a bad idea…

{image via pinterest}

It’s International No Diet Day, and that means that your need for your at-home scale just flew out the window, right along side your Weight Watchers magazine and your fat-free ice cream. I mean, really, fat-free ice cream? Would you buy pants-less pants? But I digress…

Since you don’t need your scale today (or, perchance, at all anymore?), I thought you might like some ideas for what to do with that less than necessary piece of machinery.

1. Play “Guess Whose Purse Weighs the Most” with your friends or co-workers. Whoever wins gets the other players to pitch in for a shoulder massage.

2. Step on it to reach high into your cabinets where you hid those chocolate chips you were storing away for a rainy day. Who needs a rainy day when it comes to chocolate?

3. Balance it on your head to practice your posture.

4. Write a sappy break-up letter, à la ”It’s not you, it’s me…”, and leave it on top of it. Tell it how you just need to go your separate ways so that you can truly find yourself.

5. Put your dog’s squeaky too underneath it, so when someone steps on it, they get a little surprise.

6. See who has more hair products by weight – you or your partner. Then make fun of the loser.

7. Unscrew it and take apart the pieces. Mix them up. Now see if you can put it back together. If you can, pat yourself and the back and and start referring to yourself as an amateur engineer.

8. If you couldn’t put the pieces back together, create an piece of modern art with them. Even better!

9. Tape a picture of your grandmother or someone else dear to you on it. If you get tempted to step on it, you’d have to step on her face. And that’s not cool.

10. Practice carrying it with one hand above your head in case you decide to be a pizza delivery person. You’ll be set.

What else could you do with your scale? Let’s get creative!

You’ve decided to start therapy and you’re feeling a little nervous. Who is this random person to whom you’re supposed to spill your guts? Between the closed doors, tight lips, and vows of confidentiality, therapists can sometimes seem quite mysterious. But really, we’re just human beings with relationships, feelings, and – yes – problems.

At the risk of losing my therapist club card, I’m here to let you in on a few things you might have wondered about the person across from the couch.

1. Yes, she thinks about you when she’s not working. 

I find that my patients wander in and out of my mind a lot, whether it’s hearing about a treatment approach that I think could be useful in our work together or hearing a song that they mentioned a boyfriend once sang to them. Some therapists talk about “turning it off” when they lock up at night, and to some degree we do. We really are not “analyzing” everything that stranger says over cocktail wieners at our neighbor’s retirement party. But to think that we could know another so intimately and not find ourselves thinking (and yes, worrying) about them when we’re off-duty would be naive.

2. Sometimes, she wants to tell you to stop being crazy.

I once knew a therapist who had a stamp that printed the word “CRAZY!” in bright red ink. He actually never used it with patients (thankfully!), but he kept it on his desk, sitting there as a reminder that at times we all do things that fall in that category. All therapists have at one point or another wanted to tell (or shout at) a patient that they were about to do something totally stupid or were completely overreacting. A good therapist considers why that might be the case and helps the person reflect on their own behavior or thought processes.

3. She has her own set of “issues.”

As much as some might make you want to believe that it’s to the contrary, therapists are just as flawed as the non-therapist world. In fact, the majority of therapists I know are or, at the very least, have been in therapy. And I don’t know about you, but I think it’s much better that way. It’s impossible to escape life without a few bumps and bruises. I’d rather my therapist be aware that she needs support like the rest of us and be working through her “stuff” in her own therapy rather than on me. (If your therapist starts unloading his problems on you, head for the door!)

4. She might want to be friends with you.

It’s not unusual to have the desire to want to hang out with your therapist outside of your sessions. I mean, you’ve decided this person is trustworthy and likable enough to share your deepest fears. Why wouldn’t you want to grab coffee and watch The Voice with her? The truth is, we feel the same way sometimes. However, a good therapist likes her patients enough to want to spend time with them, but also clearly respects the boundaries of the relationship. Remember, the relationship is about you and your needs, not hers.

5. She cares about you.

The therapeutic relationship is an interesting one. It’s incredibly intimate and it involves the exchange of money. Strange, right? My patients sometimes ask if I care about them - truly care about them – given that they pay for therapy.  The answer is unequivocally yes. I absolutely care about them. If I didn’t, I would not only become complacent about my work (and thus ineffective), but I would definitely have gone into the wrong field. Therapists aren’t automatons who listen to someone’s woes without being affected. A good therapist, in my opinion, feels your experiences deeply and is able to separate himself enough to help you work through them.

Are there things you’ve wondered about your therapist? 

{via flickr creative commons: toodlepip}

We ll know the obvious question to be asked following news of a friend’s recent break-up. No, not “How are you holding up?” or even, “Rocky Road or Peanut Butter Chip?”

It’s, “Did you de-friend him yet?”

While some of us are gluttons for punishment, many new members to the Lonely Hearts Club recognize that they just don’t want to be faced daily with updates about their lost lover’s latest escapades. Photos of him with his hot new girlfriend drinking pina coladas in Riviera Maya? Hardly a self-esteem booster.

So we de-friend him. But what about all our other happily coupled Facebook friends? Are we ready to be faced with over-exposed photos of newly placed diamond rings or our cousin gushing about the romantic anniversary dinner her partner cooked up last night?

For some, social media like Facebook and Instagram can become a minefield of social comparison traps.

For the record, social comparison is a 100% normal human process. The theory, established in the 1950s by a psychologist named Leon Festinger, says that it’s a natural drive to try to establish accurate self-evaluations. To do this, we compare ourselves to others, either in an upward or downwards pattern.

Facebook and the like create the perfect platform for such comparison. We sometimes use our newsfeeds to help boost our own sense of achievement (“Look at all these bums taking the weekend off. I’m such a hard worker!”), while at other times it becomes a source of embarrassment or even shame (“Everyone has plans for Valentine’s Day except for me. Even my grandma!”).

Facebook doesn’t cause the problem in and of itself, but some of us are particularly vulnerable to such comparisons. If our self-esteem is already rocky, being faced with daily “reminders” of our inadequacies can be too much for our fragile sense of self to bear.

Technology doesn’t have to be all bad. If we can learn how to take in the information thrown at us on social media sites, we can sometimes preserve our self-esteem while still getting to partake in all of the great qualities of these sites — like an increased sense of connection and an exposure to new and interesting information.

Here are three tips to doing just that:

1. Remember that people post their greatest hits, not their blooper reel. While some friends do share their trials and tribulations with their whole Facebook networks, most of us avoid posting things that are truly embarrassing or distressing. Instead, we share our vacation photos, our successes at work, and our kids’ “adorable” (to us…) antics. We choose the photo that makes us look best, not the one with the crappy lighting where we look like we need a brow wax and to see the colorist. Keep in mind that the friend posting that photo likely chose between 20 similar ones. She didn’t look that great in the other 19.

2. Go ahead and hide that status. If you’re not ready to commit to the de-friend, it may be useful to utilize the hide function for those certain friends’ statuses. You know who they are. The ones that seem to have an endless supply of money, time, and joy. If it’s too much to revel in their constant paradise, you don’t have to. Hide their statuses and rest assured that if you feel up to commenting on their latest trip to Maui, you can visit their page.

3. Limit your online time. Facebook is a time-suck, no doubt. It’s easy to find yourself scrolling through hours of status updates with a blank stare and drool running down your mouth while simultaneously muttering about how much you hate this site. That might be your cue that it’s time to re-enter this other, pretty amazing world. It’s called reality. As much as the virtual world tries to imitate it, it’s not the same as actually living life. If you feel addicted (no joke, “facebook addiction” googled more often than “cigarette addiction”), try setting a daily time limit for yourself.

How do you manage to keep your social comparison and self-esteem in check when it comes to social media?

These days, a few hours spent at a baby shower, a salon, or another female-dominated locale can start to sound like an episode of Real Housewives. From bemoaning the flab on one’s arms to debating the merits of Botox, groups of women often seem to have an endless supply of topics that share a similar theme — how darn flawed they are.

The fat-talk is almost a given, but what research is now revealing is that “old-talk” is sweeping in, and with similarly detrimental results.

Carolyn Black Becker, a psychologist at Trinity University, and her colleagues recently published an article in the Journal of Eating Disorders about the new wave of “old-talk.” They recognized that as the Baby Boomers have gotten older, the incidence of self-deprecication around age has increased. Not only that, but it’s correlated with body image disturbance and eating disorder pathology. A quick look at the magazine stand reflects this reality as well. Cover stories, ads, and products abound about how to look younger and hide the signs of aging.

While the large population of Baby Boomers might seem to be driving this phenomenon, old-talk is actually, well… old. Women – and men – have been lamenting aging for centuries. Perhaps it’s related to our fears of mortality, but chatting about the losses associated with getting older is one way that we connect.

And therein lies the problem.

My question is this: “Fat” or “old,” why is it that we have to criticize the realities of our physical selves in order to establish connection?

My guess is that these seem like safe topics in mixed company. With politics, religion, and sex usually on the taboo list, most women feel pretty safe talking about diets and their crow’s feet in just about any social situation. We figure that others can relate. Doesn’t everyone want to change themselves?

I suspect it also has to do with a key element in the way that women relate to one another. Ever cautious to come across as conceited or, heaven forbid, powerful, women use fat-talk, old-talk, and other self-deprecating talk in a delicate social dance. The dance says, “Don’t worry. I don’t like myself and I’m flawed. I’m not a threat, so you can trust and connect with me.”

Well, I personally think this dance is a little outdated. I’d like to see women establish connection in other ways, ones that don’t require negative self-evaluation. I don’t think it’s necessary to complain about my thighs or my sagging breasts in order to generate rapport with someone. I know this because I’ve focused on not doing it over the past several years (since learning more about fat-talk) and have managed to find plenty of things to talk about in groups of women.

So my challenge to readers is to do the same. See if you can’t go an entire day – or week – without fat, old, or negative self-talk. When you’re interacting with other women, share what you love about yourself or something that recently made you proud. Can you imagine the revolution that would transpire if we all committed to doing this? We’d feel better about ourselves and promote others in feeling better about themselves as well.

Now that’s the kind of talk I like to hear.