The nuts and bolts of it

Do you have a hard time drinking enough water?

I do.

I was going to do a different topic for this first week in the Health and Beauty subject, but this is perhaps my greatest Health and Beauty challenge. I didn’t grow up drinking water (my mother always drank lots of it, but the habit never got passed down to us kids) and I’ve spent years and years now trying to rationalize consuming other beverages instead. I’ve also spent years fighting strange symptoms that I never connected with dehydration. I tend to get dizzy when I stand up too fast, I have no energy at all on hot days, and I get headaches. While these things can be caused by reasons other than dehydration, I’ve found that when I actually stick to drinking my required ounces each day, these symptoms vanish like magic. Not only that, but my body improves in ways I hadn’t even noticed as problems.

Believe it or not, my metabolism speeds up! In fact when I was a teenager and trying desperately (and in many stupid ways) to lose weight, I noticed that if I drank a glass of water, I got hungry very quickly. This really upset me because I was trying to fill my belly with of water to make myself feel full, but I always seemed to eat more when I’d been drinking plenty of water.

In one of those classic I-can’t-believe-I-was-that-stupid moments, I decided that drinking water was hurting the weight loss cause and tried to avoid drinking, as much as possible! It wasn’t until later that I finally realized that water is vitally important in the metabolic process and that my constant dehydration was slowing my metabolism down! Talk about shooting oneself in the foot!

So how much water do you need? Well conventional advice says a minimum of 64 ounces for an average adult (How many of us are the statistical “average adult”?) in conditions not overly dry, hot, or who isn’t engaging in much physical exertion.

Um, yeah. As if that describes my daily life.

I’ve noticed that bodybuilders (who are utterly obsessed with health and tend to be more reliable since they judge results based on physical performance and not on what most effectively sells something) recommend a lot more water than the government health recommendations.

Since you generally aught to work your water intake upwards rather than drowning your poor unsuspecting body, I’d say work towards 64 ounces and then experiment with higher levels and see if your body responds positively.

So how do you manage this impossibly large sounding number of ounces?

Start by picking out a drinking glass that you can comfortably finish in one sitting (I use a 14 ounce glass which is a good bit larger than the recommended 8 ounces, but that is comfortable for me). Then do the math to find out how many of these glasses you need to make up your ounces (when in doubt, round up a glass not down).

Now here comes the easier part.

Drink one glass when you first wake up in the morning (yes, before your coffee) and another last thing before you go to bed. Then all you have to do is make up the glasses in between. I find that I need to drink five glasses a day, so once my morning and nighttime glasses are out of the way, I only need to remember to drink three glasses over the course of the day.

Another useful technique is to have a little pad next to the place where you keep your glass (if you are at home, next to the kitchen sink is ideal). Write a tick mark for each glass you drink and then you can see at a glance how much you need to go. I promise that it’s easier than it sounds.

You should start noticing the benefits of increased hydration within 48 hours (I’m not sarcasticly referring to increased bathroom trips), but the benefits will continue to show up for weeks as it can take that long to become truly hydrated. Just think of taking an old dry sponge and immersing it. It takes a while before it can actually absorb that liquid.

Please don’t put this off until tomorrow, next week, or next month. Start now. Don’t wait until you can start this habit perfectly. Even a glass of two a day is better than nothing.

As Flylady would say: Even drinking water imperfectly still blesses your body.

The elixir of life

What if there were a magic elixir that could make your skin beautiful and glowing, could clean your body of all the poisons and toxins it has built up, could take pounds off your body, could increase your health and vigor, could infuse you with new levels of energy, could prevent many illnesses and many of your headaches, and on top of everything else, was completely free. All you have to do is to drink it.

Take a minute and go drink a glass of water. Start the process of flushing your body with this miracle liquid and I’ll tell you more tomorrow.

* * *

This week’s topic: Water, the elixir of life (Health and Beauty)

And don’t forget to continue working on last week’s topic: Living emotionally independent (Living Well)

Feeling beautiful

Everybody wants to feel attractive. In our culture we learn to measure ourselves against a model of “perfection”, and any place where we don’t measure up is a “flaw” that we should either correct or spend our lives wishing we could. We have lost sight of the simple fact that there is no ideal body. Every body is unique and individual. As long as you are healthy and your body can meet all the demands you place on it, then it is exactly as it aught to be.

I find it fascinating that some of the more alluring women in history have not been “perfect”. Even the French, fabled paragons of beauty and allurement, tend to have roman noses and frankly, they aren’t that naturally beautiful. To me it shouts out the fact that a woman’s beauty is not in the shapes of her features or the size of her hips or whether or not her legs touch in the right places. A woman’s beauty is in the aura she projects.

As long as you hate your body for this or that “flaw”, you will need somebody else to provide you constant shots to your self esteem. You will always be dependant on an emotional “fix” to keep you going.

My oldest child has a birthmark across her forehead. When she was very little I used to make sure her bangs were arranged to hide that birthmark. I planned her haircuts around family photos so that the mark wouldn’t show in the photo if her trim was a bit too short. This went on for a couple years before I suddenly realized what I was doing! When it hit me, I just wanted bury my face and cry! I was programming this beautiful little child from her earliest memories to see herself as flawed! Can you imagine a worse legacy to give a child? She can’t change her birthmark, she didn’t commit some crime that put it there, so how is it a flaw?

So what if you have some mark on your face! So does Cindy Crawford. So what if your breasts are “too small” or “too large”. That’s not even physically possible since they were custom made for your body. Every part of you was custom made and individually tailored to match every other part of you.

Take time to really get to know your body and learn to love it. It’s the only one you are ever going to get, so relish it. When you love your own beautiful unique body for all its quirks (rather than despite them) you won’t need the compliments. You will act beautiful because you feel than way. The funny thing is that the less you need to be told you are beautiful, the more you will hear it.

Find your own beauty and then everybody else will discover it too.

I know, it’s really easy to say that you need to become emotionally independent and to fulfill your own needs, but that doesn’t do much good if you don’t know how.

Some people can sit there and meditate with the mantra “I love…myself”, but that just makes me feel silly. If you can just tell yourself the things you want to hear, go for it. It doesn’t work for me though.

I read once that the act of taking care of something makes you love it. Do we love our children because we take care of them (as opposed to taking care of them because we love them)? I don’t know. But if you ever see somebody with a little tiny dog that they coddle as their baby, you can see what I mean. That person didn’t instinctively love that little fur-baby because they birthed it and they have all kinds of maternal hormones flowing through them, they love it because they take care of it’s every need and the more they pamper that yappy irritating little pooch, the more they care for it.

The best way I know to come to be your own best friend is to practice taking care of yourself.

Treat yourself with respect. Do not take care of everybody else’s needs and then if you have a time leftover, take care of yours. If you did that to somebody else it would be an insult. Do not make promises you can’t keep, even if the other person won’t be bothered. You must be able to respect yourself and your word. Use as much care and attention in buying your clothes or feeding your body as you would give to doing those things for your children or for your best friend. Do not ever compromise on the things you believe just to avoid conflict.

Treat yourself with respect and care and attention, and you will begin to feel cared for and respected.

Here are some other thoughts I had on this week’s subject of emotional independence:

If you need something outside of yourself to complete you, to fill in the gaps of who you are, you live with a constant nagging dependence. You can never truly give all your energy to living life to its fullest, if a little bit of that energy is always spent wondering if the person or situation that is providing you with your love, your respect, your security, or your encouragement, will be there to ensure your supply.

When you are a stable self-contained unit, then (and only then) can you be perfectly relaxed in a relationship. If you supply all your own emotional needs, you are free to love others for who they are and not for what they can provide you.

Being emotionally independent also means not getting your self-respect from whether you gain or lose 10 pounds, whether your house is as clean as your mother’s, whether you finished college, or the status of your job.

If you want people to respect you or like you, the first thing to do is get your mind off what others think and learn to quietly respect and like yourself. The world outside you will follow your cue and treat you accordingly.

The Foundation to Being Secure and Confident

Needy.

We’ve all described somebody that way, and none of us like to have it applied to us. Have you ever known somebody who craved praise or attention (we all like it of course, but I’m talking about those who hunger for it)? It’s pretty much impossible to be alluring when you are unsatisfied and, well, needy. A girl has to move from being needy, to being confident and secure. But how?

You must satisfy your own emotional needs. You have to be self-sufficient in a deep way. A person who needs others for their sense of validation, who can’t live without feeling loved by someone else, who is never happy alone, this person isn’t healthy or stable.

When you have emotional needs that you are not fulfilling within yourself, you are leaning on another person. Your balance is dependant on them and if they were to step away from you for a second, you would fall down. This is a very tiring and frustrating situation for the person being leaned on. It doesn’t make you very alluring in their eyes, just a burden. For you, the one doing the emotional leaning, you are completely out of control of whether or not you will fall. You have put that control in somebody else’s hands.

When you need the admiration of others to feel good about yourself, you are taking your self-worth and handing it to somebody else. If instead you have spent enough time with yourself to be able to see your own beauty and your own intelligence, then admiration from others still feels lovely, but the lack of it does not shake your balance.

Another reason why you must fulfill your own needs is that if you don’t, you will be useless in taking care of others. How many women do we know who give and give, but there is always an air of desperation and misery about them?

When we are starved for anything, whether it be food, love, respect, or security, that hunger is the most important things in our lives. We can try to ignore it and go about our normal activities, but it keeps clamoring for attention. Only by satisfying that hunger can we finally focus on other things. If you want to have a great relationship, raise happy children, or have a thriving career, you can not give what you need to give if you are starved for something. You have to truly understand your own mind and body, and understand what you need. You have to take a bit of time to yourself (not always easy if you live with other people or have little children hanging on you, but absolutely necessary none the less) on a regular basis and feed your own needs.

If you need physical admiration, then you need to get to know your body and learn to love it. You must become comfortable in your own skin. Be proud of your assets, and get over any guilt about your “flaws”. We are all different and every body is “flawed” so you might as well learn to love those things too, as they are just as much a part of you.

If you need to feel loved, you must learn to love yourself. If you are of a religious nature, you will find that God is a source of all the love you could possibly ever need. If you are atheist, then you must find that sense of love within yourself.

If you need to be respected, you must first respect yourself. Stop putting yourself down casually in conversation. Weed out the habitual self-effacement from your daily life. You do not need to be boastful or arrogant, in fact that is just sign of craving the admiration of others, but false-modesty is almost as bad. Simply know your own abilities, your own strengths, and quietly respect yourself. If others agree, wonderful, if they don’t then it doesn’t hurt you at all.

When you are fulfilled and secure in yourself, no matter what happens to you in life, you can handle it. Your insides are not dependent in any way on your outsides. Your life can go crazy, but nothing outside of you can shake your inner strength. No one can deny you any thing you need because you take care of your own needs.

Being complete and secure in yourself is the root of confidence.

The category for this week is:

Living Well

A note before we get started...

Hey there,

I've tried to divide the subjects/lessons (or whatever you want to call them) into three categories:

Living Well
Health and Beauty
People Skills

I know that in the pursuit of becoming an alluring woman, it seems like we always focus on the "beauty" aspect most of all, but I believe that living well, having wonderful people skills, and being healthy are as important or more so to being alluring.

I figured that we could rotate the three categories each week so we would always get three weeks to work on that item before something else from the same category came up. I thought it would also help us develop in a balanced fashion.

I say we, because I'm working to implement these things into my life right along with you!

There are little girls in this world who are taught at the knees of their mothers and grandmothers, how to be beautiful. There are little girls who hear the secrets of grace, elegance, and self-confidence taught to them alongside the reminders to brush their teeth and make their beds. There are little girls who learn how to seem mysterious and beautiful no matter what their faces look like, and these girls embody it so completely that their physical flaws are seen as exotic marks of beauty.

I was not one of these girls.

Growing up, my clothes came from hand-me-down bags and were chosen only for minimum expense and adequate modesty. I was lumpy and rumpled and stained and never knew why I was different, just that I was. My hair was cut short because that was easier than teaching me to brush it. I was a slob, and everything I owned was trashy because I did not know how to take care of my things. I was selfish and self-centered and had a hard time maintaining friendships because I did not understand how to behave.

I knew that I wanted to be beautiful, to be elegant and graceful, to be confident and capable, to be a rare creature that others admired, but I did not have the first clue as to how achieve that.

I started by assuming that all my problems stemmed from my extra ten or twenty pounds of baby fat. I don’t want to even talk about the lengths I went, to try to lose that weight. I did not understand about treating one’s body with respect and nurturing it. But even through all the mistakes that I made, I continued to search for the key to being truly beautiful. Not just the beauty that a plastic surgeon can create or that some people are born with, but that essence that permeates a woman’s every action. What the French call “je ne sai quoi”, the indescribable something.

For years and years I’ve searched, and bit by bit I’ve started putting the pieces together from here and there. I’ve also found that it is not enough to know the secrets. One must apply them or they are useless.

Have I become that woman that I’ve always wanted to be? Not yet, but I finally understand the basic teachings that those few lucky girls started out with. Now the task is simply implementing these things and creating that new life. That is the project that I am working on, week by week.

This blog exists because I realized that there must be other women out there who feel the same way, and who don’t know what to do about it. It seems a waste to spend years and years searching and learning, and then have only one person benefit from it.

Most of us don’t have the money to go to finishing school or hire an exotic European woman to follow us around and teach us the secrets to being one of those rare beauties. We have nothing more than desire and determination.

As long as we have the secrets in hand, that is all we need.