I’ve just seen the email you sent me and thanks for that, but personally I haven’t had any great experience or success with hypnotherapy so I’m not comfortable with recommending it on my website. I hope you understand,

Best regards,

Amy

I just wondered if you’ve had a chance to read the email I sent recently regarding this page on your website: http://amygodfrey.com/things-we-like-links/

Kind regards

Catriona Boyle
–
e: catriona@hypnotherapy-directory.org.uk
w: http://www.hypnotherapy-directory.org.uk

OH GOD this makes my brain hurt – but it’s good for me…

What I’m trying to say is that the clothes that make you feel good are the ones that make you conform to the beauty ideal (or get closer to it) and they are dictated to us by the social conditioning of fashion and the notion that we should be slimmer/taller/more tanned etc. Right? You feel more confident now you dress to flatter your figure because you look more gorgeous according to society, yes? And so you are more admired, more accepted and possibly conferred with more power and success… Possibly You wear fewer things that society tells you make you look ‘less attractive’ be that a bit fatter, or a bit paler a bit too tall or whatever and more that emphasise your good points and improve bits that need attention – showing your hourglass figure, lengthening your legs, smoothing out unsightly lumps and bumps as fashion tells us we should. In other words you’ve adapted the way you dress to make you appear closer to the beauty ideal that you think you did before. When you were dressing less flatteringly. Yes?

I mean, obviously, you are totally gorgeous, so you have a head start there

What I’m trying to say (in a really inarticulate way) is that at the moment, for me, feeling good in clothes means I think the clothes look ‘flattering’ which means I think they look good or as good as I can manage i.e. as close as I can manage to the beauty ideal we are routinely peddled. But feeling good in clothes shouldn’t just be about clothes being flattering. Clothes should make us feel good because we like the colour, the feel of the fabric, the associations we have but, at the moment, feeling good in clothes predominantly means feeling like they make us look beautiful in the conventional sense.

And there is the rub. People think you shouldn’t wear clothes that aren’t flattering and that means that fat people shouldn’t wear skinny jeans, people with bingo wings shouldn’t wear short sleeves and girls (like me) with hairy legs shouldn’t wear hotpants because it makes us look ‘ugly’ – they don’t flatter us. And people feel just fine about telling us that. I would like to feel good in the clothes I wear irrespective of whether they flatter me or not. I don’t want how good I feel in clothes to be based on how much slimmer they make me look, how much more like the beauty ideal. I want to feel good in clothes because they are fabulous, because they feel gorgeous on, because I like the way the sequins catch the light, not because they minimise my thunder thighs. I’m hoping to hit this spot every day.

Granted, for me, that includes a lot of days but not on all of them. However, I have to admit that sometimes, on a fat day, I feel glad to be so far away from the beauty ideal as the impossibility of attaining it frees me from trying to get there and I can just wear whatever the hell I want be it sofa cover, hot pants or that ever elusive lycra cat suit. I used to have one of those…

Hot damn, it’s good to have a fat talk sparring partner to make me think about what I really think – you awesome lady! Hope you are well and super dooper love love x

Amy – I wouldn’t say you always dress in ‘flattering’ clothes, but you always look stunning and striking, because of who you are and how you wear your clothes.

I really like this blog of hers too:

http://www.definatalie.com/2009/06/16/how-to-love-yourself-in-8-really-hard-steps/

If it were me (which it has been on more than one occasion), I would go for one of three options:

1) Mix in a cup or two of porridge, add water, boil for five mins, feed to hens.

2) Decant cups of soup into clear plastic bags (none o this supermarket-put-holes-into-bags-to-stop-children-suffocating-themselves-thereby-thwarting-recycling-freezing-efforts-nonsense) until you have a third left. Freeze bags of salty soup. Add more water and veg to remaining soup to reduce saltiness. Use frozen soup in similar way in the future to reduce number of potentially soupless days.

3) Wait for soup to cool to less than boiling. Have soup fight.

love

I’ve done that with stock – just left it cooking until oblivion. Most upsetting.

Last night, I was using up all the left over veg that haunts my kitchen since we started getting a weekly veg box. Anyway, I was making a massive vat of uber vegetable soup. After an hour or so of cooking, it was all tasty and lovely but really under salted. So I popped a little bit of salt in, then another bit, and then, before I knew it, I had a salty inedible vat of soup. Gutted. What the hell do it do with that!?