Fitness and Beauty
For A Healthy Self
Fitness and Beauty? Where does it really begin?
It is our great pleasure to introduce you to our friend Cari Corbet-Owen. Join us in our journey with Cari as she takes us to A New Healthy Self and find your Inner Beauty.
Tell us how you became an international author of Books and Workshops?
I started my first diet when I was 11. When I was a teenager, my bedroom wall-paper was pictures of all the Ms. World entrants – I so badly wanted to look like them. But alas – I was born rather short and stocky and rather ordinary looking. In my mind I was the ugly duckling who could never be a swan. When I looked in the mirror all I saw was FAT and UGLY. By the age of 15, I, was anorexic. I hated myself with such a passion that I used to cut myself out of every picture, or just tear my head off photographs. Then, when I finally started eating again, I gained 267% of my body weight.. When I look at photos of myself at the time, I can see that I couldn’t see then – The Miss anything beauty contest may not have been knocking my door down wanting me to enter, but in reality I really was beautiful in my own way.
We are all beautiful.
Then I spent 20 years trying every diet imaginable (at my last count I tried 69 different diets – this number goes up every now and again when I do a workshop in a different part of the world and ask people to share the diets they tried and I discover yet another one I also tried that I’d forgotten about). I also made up some pretty bizarre diets myself. I was ‘THE diet expert!’
In 1990 I had an ‘aha moment’ when I realized I was addicted to dieting because it gave me a sense of being in control. I was a diet-aholic. That started a fascinating journey of freeing myself from dieting by throwing out all my laxatives, appetite suppressants, fat burners and diuretics (yes I was hooked on them for 10 years) and starting to learn how to listen to my body and respond to its hunger instead of all my heart and head hungers.
I’ve founded The Mind over Fatter movement and written two books: The Mind over Fatter Programme and The Joy-Filled Body. I’ve also had my views expressed in many South African magazines such as Shape and the South African Journal for Natural Medicine (where I’m also on their Experts Panel in an advisory capacity), FitPregnancy, Readers Digest, Men’s Health, Glamour and many others. I’ve also had an extract of my book ‘The Joy-Filled Body’ (except that in South Africa it was published under the title: ‘ Mind over Fatter – learn to feel great without dieting again’), chosen for the December 2007 edition of the O magazine. I’ve been on TV and radio often and done workshops in various corners of the globe.
Tell us about your workshops?
My Mind over Fatter workshops are fun and interactive. We focus on learning how to trust and respond to our bodies as well as living more joyfully. Because these workshops are so safe and intimate – we discuss topics that people usually don’t feel comfortable to discuss. (But at the same time people only share at whatever level feels OK for them). People come as strangers and leave as friends that last for years after their workshops have ended. These workshops are life-changing and life-giving. And if you want to organize one where you live, please contact me via the ditch-diets-live-light website.
In your practice what do you find is the biggest issue with young girls and eating habits and perception of beauty is it friends, environment, family situations?
Young girls live in a world of: ‘what if’ and ‘if ‘only’. They so badly want to fit in and be accepted and sadly it’s so easy to believe all the hype the media sells us about our bodies and faces being THE passport to happiness. The media is full of diet and fitness success stories – they apparently all work and get us the body and life we want. And of course there are plenty of diet-product adverts that con us into thinking that when we become a Thinderella: Prince Charming will swoop down in his Lamborgini from his castle on the hill, desire us l and want to marry us( and only us) because we look beautiful which of course all adds up to “Happiness ever after.”
So young girls restrict and deprive themselves. They have lists of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ foods. They take pills, powders, potions and other desperate measures to look the way our culture dictates is beautiful. And yet sadly, even when they reach that supposedly ‘magical’ figure on the scale – they may feel temporarily elated but soon they start worrying about regaining that weight. Their goal weight has become their jail weight.
Many live quiet lives of desperation! They smile on the outside and feel isolated and self-loathing on the inside – and this goes for stunning models too. Outer beauty is no guarantee that you’ll fall in love or like with yourself. Being thin is no guarantee of happiness. Happiness and loving your life are inside jobs. It’s about realizing you’re a wonderful, fabulous being no matter your size or shape.
Tips :) we love tips! So how do you fall in like with yourself?
Remember that:
- It’s not so much how you look or what happen to you that determine your happiness – except for fleeting moments of elation when ‘you get that modelling contract’ or something else wonderful happens to you – it’s the story you tell yourself that really makes a difference. Let me give you an example: What triggered the diet that I became anorexic on was receiving a letter from a boyfriend who sent me a picture of myself in a bikini and said that he couldn’t wait to see me in my bikini again. The story I told myself was: “Yikes, if he thinks I look good in a bikini I’d better lose some weight so he isn’t disappointed!” Because I loathed myself so much I ‘couldn’t hear’ that he was saying I was already beautiful to him.
- your body has a ‘sell-by’ date. Unless you’re willing to spend plenty on nips and tucks as you get older, gravity will take its toll, your hair will grey and your face will wrinkle. Is that so bad? Well it will be if all your self-esteem revolves only around your appearance. What great qualities do you have to build on? Are you funny? Are you a good listener? Do you have a kind heart? Are you generous? When we focus on the attributes that make us beautiful from within we get MORE beautiful as we age.
- Remember that a guy may initially be drawn to another who is physically beautiful but if that person is constantly putting themselves down, or talking about dieting and what they can and cannot eat – the relationship has a poor chance of survival. I’ve found that when I’m self confident and being my quirky vivacious self, regardless of my body – that’s what people find sexy.
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