Do you hate photos of yourself?

You wouldn’t be alone if you do! That candid photo that your friend shares on social media. They look great, but you look like you’ve got 20 chins and are twice the size you imagined. Do you really look like that from that angle? I wonder what the statistics are of women who hate photos of themselves so much that they simply refuse to be in them.

Only last week, I had a great night out with a friend and we laughed and drank cocktails and had a fantastic night but at the end of the night she forwarded me the photo that the waiter took of us mortified by how she looked in it and thinking she looked fat. The waiter was fantastic but David Bailey he isn’t! What a shame that a fantastic evening ended on a low point like that.

In the same week, a client was telling me about a great time she’d had at a family get together, only to discover that photo that someone took that showed her from an angle that she’s not used to seeing and with weird double-chins going on. It became the only thing she could think of now and took over from the great feelings of a wonderful time together.

The week before, I went for dinner with 3 friends, two of whom announced that they “had been good” that week and therefore were going to have starters as well as mains. I was the only person at that table that ate a pudding. I got to wondering whether we’ve found ourselves in a world where women are desperately trying to become a level of thin that’s unobtainable as well as a world were we feel so badly about the way we look in photos that we refuse to be in them?

If you died tomorrow, what photos would your loved ones have of you to remember you by?

Where does this come from?

Part of the issue is from the world we grew up in. Who can remember those terrible newspaper and magazine headlines pointing every flaw, bump and bit of cellulite a celebrity had. Endless comparisons with their old figures, constant speculation about whether they pregnant because of the imagined belly and heaven forbid you should look a bit rough on your beach holiday bending over in your bikini! The media would lynch you!

This kind of behaviour seeped into the conscious of the population and it’s not uncommon for some great aunt to “pinch an inch” or even your own mother to comment on your figure or worse – that of your teenage child!

Combine that with the social media explosion and being bombarded with images of perfection every time you scroll. Images incidentally that have been photoshopped and filtered within an inch of their life! Cindy Crawford is famous for saying she wishes she looked like Cindy Crawford!

Isn’t it time we broke the mould and stopped letting the media and massive (male lead) beauty companies dictate what our bodies should be like.

Make a new rule now that if you wouldn’t say that to your best friend, your daughter, your sister that It’s not okay to say it to yourself.

Let’s start that change today!

P.S. These photos are all stills from outtakes of social media posts I’ve made recently. I’m terrible at getting them right first time!