My Wardrobe, Myself

Body Image Rehab: My Past Blog, Continued Challenges, and Advice from Friends

Debbie Roes

March 16, 2018

Two weeks ago, I accidentally re-published an old post I was editing as part of back-end enhancements I’ve been doing on Full Life Reflections. Some of you may have received this post – titled “How is Your Body Image?” – and wondered about it, especially if you noticed that it dated way back to August 18, 2010. A couple of comments were submitted following the erroneous re-post, which got me thinking that I should write a new post on the topic of body image. Today I’m going to tell you about one of my early blogs (this is actually my fifth blog!), comment on where I am with my body image now, and share insightful tips from friends for me and others who struggle with feeling bad about our bodies.

The Body Image Rehab Blog

Back in 2010, I wrote a blog titled Body Image Rehab, which focused on my journey to heal a very negative body image. As those who have been reading my writing for a long time might know, I suffered from eating disorders for a large portion of my life. I was dangerously underweight for many years as a result of anorexia nervosa, and I was also bulimic for a long time. Even though the bulk of my disordered behavior around food subsided during my thirties (I’m now 51), I continued to struggle with a very poor body image. I remained highly self-conscious about the way I looked and always believed that I was heavier than I actually was. This impinged upon my happiness in many ways, so I decided to start a blog about body image with the hope of healing myself and others through my insights.

Do you struggle with negative body image?

To Be More Productive, Aim for Efficacy over Efficiency

Debbie Roes

11 comments

March 9, 2018

I don’t know about you, but I always seem to have a to-do list that never ends, which leads me to feel like a “hamster on a wheel” much of the time. Even when I have what could be called a very productive day, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the many, many things I need to do. What makes the situation all the more challenging is that I have quite a few other days when I feel like I’m slogging through quicksand to get much of anything accomplished at all.

When I look around at those people who I consider “successful,” I think that they must be super productive every single day. They must accomplish considerably more to-do list items than I do, and that’s why they’re so successful. This makes sense on the surface, but I recently read an article that gave me a whole new perspective on the concept of time management. In today’s post, I share the key concepts from that article, how I’ve been putting them into practice this week, and the way it has positively impacted my life.

Focus on being productive instead of being busy

The Myth of “Successful” People

Tim Ferriss is the author of multiple best-selling books, including The Four-Hour Work Week and Tools of Titans. Despite the fact that he wrote about working only four hours a week, I always thought he got a lot more done than me with far fewer days of floundering or spinning his wheels. It’s no big surprise that I thought such things, as “successful” people like him are typically portrayed as superheroes by the media. We think they don’t experience the same types of challenges that we mere mortals do, but we’re wrong.

What is a Full Life? – Revisited

Debbie Roes

32 comments

March 2, 2018

When I launched this blog two months ago, I mentioned that it would pretty much pick up where my previous blog, Recovering Shopaholic, left off. The tagline for that blog was “Trade Your Full Closet for a Full Life,” but the majority of my focus during its four year tenure was on the full closet part of the equation: responsible and mindful shopping, wardrobe management, and personal style. I’m proud of the progress I made in all three of those areas, but I feel that I still have a long way to go in terms of cultivating a fuller and more fulfilling life, which was in large part why I started this new blog.

Many of us have the goal of leading a full life, but what does that really mean? I pondered that question first back in June 2013, but I’d like to delve a bit deeper today. I’ll revisit my original answer to the “What is a Full Life?” question and share new insights I gained from one of the articles I saved when paring down my overloaded “articles to read” folder a few weeks ago.

a full life revisited

My 2013 Thoughts on a Full Life

I recently re-read my initial post on the full life question for the first time and I still wholeheartedly agree with what I wrote almost five years ago. That essay included the following quote from Rita Mae Brown:

“Happiness is pretty simple: someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to.”

Essential Information Part Two: Digital Detox

Debbie Roes

12 comments

February 25, 2018

Earlier this month, I wrote about the subject of information overload and how it relates to my theme for the year, essential. Specifically, I shared about my difficulty in narrowing down the articles I want to read and my feeling overwhelmed by so much information. In today’s post, I delve deeper into my journey to get to a more peaceful place with technology and the Internet. I have taken further steps that may also be helpful to you if you struggle with similar issues.

An Update on the Articles

I will first give a bit of an update on how I’m doing with the articles. You may remember that my husband suggested that I create a new “articles to read” folder each month and only carry over ten articles to start off with. Doing this was difficult and took me over an hour, but I felt a good release after letting go of close to a hundred articles that I had been meaning to read “someday.” Over the course of this month, I have read some of the carried over articles and I’ve also saved additional articles to read. At the time of this writing, I have 23 articles in my February 2018 articles folder. I’ve decided that I’m not going to carry any of them forward into next month. Over the next three days, I will read the ones that most interest me and start with a clean slate in March.

The Power of Small Steps

Debbie Roes

9 comments

February 16, 2018

When we want to make changes in an area of our lives, we often think we need to take big, significant steps. At the beginning of every year, it’s common for people to make New Year’s resolutions. In fact, as many as 45% of Americans resolve to make at least one major change each year, with the most common resolutions being to lose weight, start exercising, or quit smoking. Sadly, however, over half of these people give up on their goals by the end of June, and many quit much sooner.

Although there are many reasons why people abandon their resolutions, I believe a common explanation is that they over-commit and attempt to take on more than they can handle. For example, a person who wants to start exercising joins a gym the first week in January and starts going to daily boot camp classes. Another individual who wants to lose weight shifts from eating carbs all day long to consuming an ultra-low-carb diet consisting of mostly meat and vegetables. It’s no big surprise that such people struggle to maintain such difficult regimens and ultimately end up abandoning them. Of course, some can and do keep up with their lofty plans, but it’s a recipe for failure for most of us.

“Baby Steps” Can Lead to Big Changes

power of small steps

As I mentioned several posts ago, I didn’t set any New Year’s resolutions for 2018. Instead, I just chose a single word – essential – as my guiding intention for the year. That doesn’t mean I don’t have specific changes I want to make in my life, however. There are actually quite a few shifts I’d like to see happen in various aspects of my existence, but I’ve learned that small steps are the best way for me to successfully make and maintain change in my life. What follows are two such examples of how taking “baby steps” has led to meaningful shifts in terms of my health.