Entries from September 2009 ↓

Alpha Mummy has a hysterically practical list of 10 ways to teach kids about sexism by Carol Midgley.

Some suggestions are to have a Bratz burning while chanting, Burn the Freaks!, buy a stack of women’s and girls’ mags and compare headlines with men’s mags, and if she ever talks about plastic surgery give her a large photo of Jocelyn Wildenstein.

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Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?: The Essential Guide to Loving Your Body Before and After Baby, written by my friend and colleague Claire Mysko and model Magali Amadei takes a walk through the psyche of pregnant women and address their feelings about their bodies.

Both Claire and Magali have personal experience with body image issues and eating disorders. In this book, they examine how women perceive their bodies as they become larger and watch the scale goes upward.

They also look at the unrealistic perfection of celebrity pregnancy features and actresses’ ubber-quick recovery and weight-loss might affect a normal new mom’s self esteem.

It also examines the odd phenomenon in which a mother’s body and her parenting choices involving her body become somewhat public space. Meaning, people who would never have intimately touched you before, strangers, bosses or neighbors, suddenly feel comfortable reaching out and stroking a pregnant stomach, criticizing a woman’s breast-feeding decision and exerting influence on medical issues such as epidurals. How does a woman adjust to her body being more public domain?

The book is full of fun and insightful anecdotes from real women talking about their changing feelings and very helpful steps women can take to make their pregnancy experience a positive one.

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Perfect, perfect, perfect! Why are we trying to be so perfect and demanding this odd-sort of perfection from our daughters? The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence by Rachel Simmons asks.

This book draws connects the dots between Good Mother and Good Girl roles. I agree, there is a direct connection.

Essentially, a mother holds herself to a standard of perfection and then inflicts the same harsh standard on her daughter.

Last year, I might have thought this had nothing to do with me.

This year, I can see this sort of girl culture and feminine generational inheritance with more clarity. To be honest, while reading this book I felt conflicted.

There are some very insightful passages like this one siting Deborah Tannen’s  You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, “It is as if mothers are emotional lightening rods, absorbing and grounding the emotions — both negative and positive — that are swirling around the family.” My children do not share their emotions with their father. They rarely tantrum, they save it for me. All for me. At times it’s more bonding, at times its just emotionally exhausting.

Still, reading much of the book and the premises’ around angry emotions and girls’ lashing out, I kept thinking, does this woman even have children?” I find it difficult to take parenting advice from those who have no personal, first-hand experience.

The book is written primarily, from the point of view of the child. Which, while a valid perspective doesn’t always make great parenting advice.

“Before I began interviewing mothers, I assumed they would use the unconditional bond with their daughters to resist the Good Girl limits on conflict in relationships. Certainly, plenty do. Yet many mothers said their need to repair conflict with their daughters was just as powerful as, if not more unbearable than, the urgency they felt with other intimates. An angry daughter evoked fear and isolation. Several located their anxiety in the fear that their daughters didn’t “like” them. The sense of disconnection and separation was overwhelming.”

I find the sentiments in the above paragraph very frustrating to read. Before she began talking to mothers, she believed they were emotionally super-human and never had upset or negative feelings about their daughters being angry at them?

“The girls were communicating a need to be angry and in conflict, and their mothers could not fulfill the request.”

The talking back disrespectfully and aggressively, tantrum throwing, name-calling and door slamming is right. in. your. face. and. directed. at. you.

I want my daughter to learn to be happy. Not learn to be angry. Angry is easy, at least for me. Happy, as a skill, is both a lot more fun and a lot harder.

What happens to real women who don’t play by Good Mother, Good Girl or Good Wife rules? Just look at how many women hate Kate Gosselin.

Maybe I want to be a Good Mother and this book made me defensive. I know that I need to find a way to make Ainsley’s anger less painful and traumatizing to me.  Yet, I still have to parent and make her do chores and homework and eat healthy foods. Asking her to do these things sometimes provokes her anger. Obviously, I want to respond properly to that emotion. I’m not quite convinced of what the proper way is after reading this book.

There are, to be fair, some very good exercises to use when daughters are overreacting in their “freak-out voice,” teaching your daughter how to accept criticism, good communication strategies that work in any relationship.

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This is my Toastmasters Speech #7 on research. I love my Toastmasters Club because I get positive feedback and I’m becoming less and less anxious and nervous about speaking in public. I have two more speeches to go for my Competent Communicator award. This speech won the blue ribbon. I love winning.

After I had my second child I logged on to RealAge.com and told it about my lifestyle. It calculated how much I exercised, what I ate, and how many friends I had. It told me that my health was that of a 38.5 year old. Which wouldn’t be bad, except I was only chronologically 33.

I wanted to be 10 years younger.

Now I want you to tell me – could I get completely across this room if I took only baby steps and no leaps or jogs? Could I climb an entire mountain, taking only baby steps?

Of course I could. Anybody could. Right? But, if I attempted to get to the top of the mountain in one leap I would fail. Right? So it is with lifestyle changes.

I want to suggest five baby steps that anyone, regardless of their current health can do. Five changes that will make you both younger and healthier.

Pass around an essential oil called peace and calming. . .
If everyone would put this on your wrists, close your eyes, turn off your brains and begin taking very slow deep breaths. Walk around with Peace and Calming to their wrists.

1. Meditate. It’s difficult to believe that doing nothing, that will maintain brain cells, preserve memory and prevent depression and anxiety, lowers blood pressure and drastically reduce stress. Taking 1 – 5 minutes in your day to meditate makes you years younger, according to YOU, The Owner’s Manual.
2. Change Your Mind. In The 4-day Win, Martha Beck says you must change the beliefs that are keeping you fat, unhealthy, out of shape or invested in a bad habit. She calls them The Lies We Live By. Some of mine were, “I look like my mother so I can’t be thin, I hate exercise and I can’t afford health foods or the gym.” I had to change my mind.
Please take a chocolate
3. Eat Healthy Chocolate. In The 4 Day Win Martha Beck states, Allowing yourself to become ravenous and denying yourself forbidden foods will make you fatter. She sites an Ancel Keys study they took normal people and put them on restrictive diets. The result was Famine Brain making them obsess about food, hunt it, hoard it and steal it and eat 10,000 calories at one sitting. So, allow yourself healthy, dark chocolate. Anything above 60% cocoa is an antioxidant and has many health benefits, which is why your body and soul crave it., Eat This, Not That breaks down the health difference in different brands of foods. The idea being that you can cut 100 calories a day by simply buying another brand of potato chip, granola bar, or box of cereal.
4. Move More. Whatever movement you’re doing now – do a tiny bit more. Go for a walk during your 2 15 minute breaks at work. I ride an elliptical machine during Oprah or The View. When your comfortable and getting a little bored, add another baby step. Never, ever, ever start a new year with a mountain climb or a 5k. Start with something you know you can do like a walk around the block.
5. Sleep. I can’t imagine why children don’t want to go to bed or why my husband stays up until 1 am. According to You The Owners Manual 40 million people have sleep problems. Lack of sleep increases risk for heart attack. You also release less serotonin, the pleasure hormone. Beck also sites studies proving that sleep has a connection to eating. If you want to eat less, get more sleep. Humans need 7 hours a day. It will make you years younger.

The key to becoming 10 years younger is to make permanent baby step changes. Nothing drastic and doing only things you can perceive as a kindness to yourself.

Using this method I have chronologically aged 3 years, having just turned 36, but my Real Age is now 33. That makes me 11.5 years younger than I would have been had I kept my original habits and 3 years younger than my current chronological age.

To find out how you can be 10 years younger visit realage.com and it will personalize baby steps for your own body and lifestyle.

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