It’s January again, and I keep hearing about New Years Resolutions to lose X amount of weight and then do something fun. I talk to lots of women who’ve said for years that they’ll come in for that portrait / glamour / head shot / boudoir session once they lose a few pounds. And to them I say, you’ll lose at least 10 pounds in my camera. Just like that. No diet, no exercise, no waiting.
Part of the problem is that we women, cause I do this to… we don’t feel so slender, so we think we’re going to hide in a long, bulky sweater. It doesn’t work at all. It just makes us look bigger.
Other times it’s just our posture. You’ll lose 5 pounds instantly if you just stand up straight and push your shoulders back and down.
And then there are some women who are total bombshells and don’t know it. And that’s what kills me. How many of us see a bad photo of ourselves, and then walk around thinking that that’s what we look like? I worry that these women walk around with the Before self-image in their heads. And that affects how they talk to their clients and bosses, it affects how much they think they’re worth getting paid, and how they relate to their husbands and children. It has us always thinking that life with be amazing and different when we lose some weight. That’s when we’ll take the great vacation and buy the gorgeous clothes and get that portrait taken. That’s when we’ll ask for the raise, that’s when we’ll meet the guy, that’s when we’ll love ourselves. Do you think we might have a different world if these women start walking around with the After photos in their heads instead? If we all have amazing “after” photos in our heads?
(PS – no photoshop slimming was done to any of these photos. Skin smoothing, yes… and a fabric wrinkle had to go, but all the slimming was in posing.)
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