The title of this month’s installment sounds like a summer blockbuster movie. You might think it’s a horror flick... maybe it’s a comedy... but it should be a fairy tale which leads to the predictable “and they lived happily ever after” ending. The challenge that lies before us is making that fairy tale ending a reality. How to take on that challenge is up to each of us. There are a few different ways to deal with the summer swimsuit season:
1. Avoid it completely.
2. Accept yourself with a positive body image and hit the beach.
3. Make frantic changes in your lifestyle that includes exercise to be ready for poolside in 3-4 weeks.
The answer probably lies somewhere between numbers 2 and 3.
Avoiding the summer fun of swimming pools, lakesides, and ocean beaches is one way to deal with the anxieties of swimsuit season. But who wants to avoid summer fun? The best way to attack the season back is to disregard what other people may think and make the changes you know you need to make and make them for life.
If you have second thoughts about going to the pool because of what other people might think, I’m going to let you in on a little secret……. those same people are probably worried about what you think about them. I am not claiming to be a psychology professor, but allowing your self-esteem to win out over your anxieties is a simple way to reduce stress in life. Worrying about what other people think, say, or do is only setting up roadblocks for yourself and allows people you don’t even know to control what you do. In this example you should go to the pool because you want to versus staying home because you’re afraid of what a stranger might think you look like in a swimsuit. Should you go the route of staying home and you’re being honest with yourself, it’s really what you think, not what a stranger thinks about you in your swimsuit. In other words, have the confidence to enjoy not only a trip to the swimming pool, but life in general.
One way to increase that self-esteem and confidence is to make strides to improve health and your own body image. The instant fix that many of us try to achieve is a disaster waiting to happen. The common scenario is as follows: Bob is an average guy. It’s 3 weeks until a vacation to the beach/best friend’s wedding/class reunion and Bob decides to start exercising to get in shape for the big day. He exercises every day for a week and is either so sore that he decides that exercise is overrated or continues for the next two weeks, doesn’t reach his goal and goes to the beach worried about what everybody thinks.
You may have experienced the above scenario with some minor tweaks, but the same result is inevitable. Your good intentions are vanquished. One of the most important benefits of an exercise program is to make you “feel” better. It’s not just being free from sickness and disease but being mentally fit with an increased confidence. Before reaping the self-confidence benefits of exercise, however, you must first begin and sustain a program. This is where something called self-efficacy comes into play. Self-efficacy is your confidence or belief in your ability to achieve goals or complete tasks. A high amount of self-efficacy must be in place for you to achieve goals, especially the lifelong goal of regular exercise.
In order to change your own body image and self-confidence, incorporating exercise into your lifestyle must be part of the story in that fairy tale. To make the fairy tale a reality you must increase your level of self-efficacy. In other words, you just have to believe in yourself.
