Personal Glimpses

We live in a world where you’re either paranoid about your body or frankly you couldn’t care less what the world thinks. I’m somewhere in-between although sometimes I can go to either extreme. (more…)

If there’s anything I would like to change about my body, that would definitely be my facial expression. All the time people who don’t know me well, comment that my facial expression when I don’t smile looks very fierce and offending. I don’t know why or the reason they are saying that but that’s what everybody feels the same and told me. It has affected my social life tremendously because people who do not know me well will say that with my facial expression, I’m currently in an angry mood thus looks unfriendly. This has prevented people from knowing me well or make friends with me. I do not realize that myself but after some day I decided to self examined my expression in the mirror. In fact, I was shocked as what they were saying is true. When I don’t smile with my original relax expression, my face looks very fierce and unfriendly. After that, I tried to smile more often hoping to cover up my awkward facial expression but that doesn’t help as well.

In fact a friend who actually knows me well told me that my smile looks like “a guy with a gun pointing at his head being forced to smile”. Well so much for that wonderful comment. I was lucky though and in fact my first girlfriend who is also now my wife understands that and accepted me as it is. Don’t know why she liked me, but I guess that’s fate as well. That is something comforting, however this does not goes on well with my job. Often new colleagues who do not know me will always have the sense of security of striking a conversation. I have to pretend to use my words careful because any slight misinterpretation that coupled with my angry facial expression will make people think that I’m trying to be offensive. But alas, that’s not my intention at all and this has certainly not going to help on my career. At least this is not that bad considering I’m working in a factory and not in the service industry whereby I will definitely find a difficult path in my career.

Well that definitely sums it all as to what I want. Although friends and family who know me well often commented about my calm and thoughtful inner characteristics, but with my facial expression that would somehow be conflicting. Well if only I wish I could change that.

wkhaiaun, singapore, 31, a guy with a dream

Lots of girls always said they envied me because I had an over average bra size. Well, yes, this did make things easy for me at times. Always having perfect strangers at my beck and call and smiling at me for seemingly no reason. This unnecessary attention began getting on my nerves and it got to the point that I started hiding this asset of my body as best I could, because I didn’t want to be stared at or be approached by strange men just on the fact that I had a huge chest. I always felt like the only reason complete strangers were talking to me was because they wanted to see my breasts and they were just perverts. However, it would be nonsense for me to think all men were created equal, but the truth is that I had no way of filtering them out into stacks of goodness.

I began hiding my beauty by dressing down and not primping up so much. My family thought I was going through some sort of mental illness or depression. They even talked me into going to the doctor and getting prescriptions of Prozac to help me with my “feelings”. Actually I think I was just rebelling against my own blessing, but I guess the big boobs were driving me to the edge of anxiety.

I considered the options of surgery for breast reduction for nearly 12 months while I wore a chest type girdle. I couldn’t bring myself to have the surgery, but I did meet a very special man during that 12 month span. I didn’t catch this man’s attention by using my bouncing chest; instead he was taken by surprise by my fondness of animals during my selfless volunteering at the animal shelter.

We began dating and I started letting more of me hang out with him, so-to-speak.

I remember the look on his face the first time we went out for a nice dinner, he had picked me up at my door, driven us to the restaurant, and then he helped me take off my coat. The look on his face was a cross between embarrassment and delight.

Over dinner we had a long discussion about how he had never noticed my beautiful body and that my beauty inside was more than enough to keep him interested in the real me.

After getting a little older, I’ve learned to not worry so much about what people are after, or even if they are looking for anything with an ulterior motive at all. Instead, I am going to try and enjoy my life and my big breasts without fear.

Karen May W.Virginia 35 and still dating

Growing up as a child I never really worried too much about my weight. I was always active in sports and never had to give much thought to what I was eating.

I started having children and with the first few it never really changed my weight very much, but when I had my eighth child that is when I really started struggling with my weight. My eighth Child died and I went into a serious depression. I have been suffering from this problem for about eight years now.

If I could make a change to my body it would be to loose the 100 lbs I have carried around fore the last eight years. The extra weight I am packing around is virtually killing me, but for some reason I am unable to loose the weight.

I have degenerative disk disease in my lower lumbar, as well as, three ruptured disks and a pinched nerve. I suffer on a daily basis and am in constant pain due to the weight on my spine. Doctors tell me if I take of the weight my back pain would be tolerable.

My husband doesn’t act as if he minds the weight gain, but I know our sex life would be better if I could get back to the weight I was when he first met me. I know he cares what other people think about me regardless of what he tells me. You learn someone after ten years.

My knees are now beginning to suffer from the weight as well. I have had one knee surgery due to a fall I encountered. The recovery was much harder due to being over weight.

I want to look in the mirror and love the person I see. At this point in my life I can not stand to see my own reflection. I think I am still suffering from some sort of guilt over loosing my baby.

I want to be sexy again before I am too old to be desirable. I wish there was a magic pill that could get me on the path to recovery, but I have not found my answer yet.

My weight is now 250 lbs and I am five foot seven. I am always being told I have beautiful smile and a gorgeous face, but what I really want to hear is that I have a sexy body.

My in-laws are all hung up on weight. It seems as if they monitor every pound I gain or loose. I would first off like to loose the weight for myself so I could be out of pain and secondly I would like to loose the weight for my husband so he could have the sexy wife he married.

Elizabeth in Cincinnati Ohio age 40 amd still married

Over the last four years I realized that my body has suffered dramatic changes, and when I say dramatic I mean awful changes. I lost a lot of weight; my current weight is 58 kilos (127 pounds) with a height of 177 centimeters (5′ 9″). I am very thin for my weight as you can already imagine, I used to have around 70 kilos (154 pounds) 4 years ago. This massive loss of weight is caused by a depression that has totally changed my life. I can say it first started with some family problems and personal problems, and as time flew by I was loosing weight everyday. This has affected my life from every point of view.

Many of my friends consider me still a child because of the way I look, many unknowns say I am no more than 19 or 20 but I will soon turn 27. My life before I started loosing weight was totally different , I can feel it , I feel very complexed because of the way I look, and there is not much I can do about it, I tried everything possible but quitting smoking, this sure keeps me 5 kilos back or so.

My girlfriend left me 2 years ago with no reason whatsoever, this has affected me the most and made me isolate from women for nearly two years. I am quite ashamed to dress off in front of a girl now, just because of the way I look. I used to have a nice body with well built muscles and I consider myself a quite pretty guy. Most of the people complain about putting on weight, this is a common thing but loosing so much weight makes you feel miserable most of the time, anxious and never. You loose your self confidence, just like it happened to me. I lost all my self confidence day by day just because of the way I look.

Two years and half years ago in June, I pulled myself together and got a real job as a bartender. I worked hard around 14 hours everyday and this increased my appetite, so I put some weight back on, around 4 kilos. This felt great, day by day my self confidence was back again, I was so happy I even quit smoking for a while and gained some more weight, I was feeling pretty normal again and was very proud of the way I looked but this did not last long. When I finished with the job I started loosing weight again and tuned back to my actual weight of 58 kg, started feeling miserable again.

I consider that it is very important to have a nice body; in order to be liked by everyone else, actually in a most recent study scientist discovered that a person tends to give more attention to what people around them think of the way they look than their personal opinion about their own bodies.

Currently I am attending a psychologist, as this has to do more with the brain than with the body. There are people than do not look well at all, but do not have a problem with it, they feel perfect “in their own skin” as one saying goes.

What I would like to change about my body is just the weight, I have a perfect healthy body, used to be quite attractive as I mentioned before. I would like to gain at least 10 more kilos this will make me feel good about myself and I would not have any more problems regarding relationship with others , especially women.

Andrew Heap from Chicago – Age 26