I can’t believe there was a Kickstarter campaign for “Anti-Thigh-Gap” jeans; all I can say is HALLELUJAH!!! http://youtu.be/DoFrpZ4QXwo
This video gives me confidence that the lunatics who still push the very unhealthy Kate Moss definition of beauty are FINALLY fading into obscurity!!!
Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate people who have a naturally small frame like Kate Moss or Keira Knightly. With that said, I’m fed up with that cookie-cutter stereotype still existing. Mindy Kaling is a great example!
Look at these Elle covers:
Granted, this happened in March, but it shouldn’t be happening at all!
I’m so excited to help women be mad scientists; I’ll give them as many tools to help them be successful in their life-long experiments with food, exercise routines, menus (I’m officially banning the word diet because it says “die” for crying out loud!!! — menu is intended to reveal your “New Me!”), makeup and fashion that will solidify their Aphrodite Attitudes!
In my last post, I discussed how Kim Kardashian is a fantastic ambassador for Aphrodite Attitude because:
1. She KNOWS that she is a beautiful woman and
2. She ALWAYS accentuates her her incredibly beautiful face.
However, if you think about Kim’s rise to fame, you’d see how the mainstream media wants us to feel about ourselves. When Kim first came onto the scene, as Paris Hilton’s friend, everyone buzzed about the curvy girl with a beautiful face and scrambled to find out who she was. They fawned incessantly over her striking, exotic facial features, as if she had won some genetic lottery.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. The mainstream media WANTS us to perpetuate their myth that woman has to win some sort of genetic lottery to be touted as one of the most beautiful women in the world. Think about the last time you saw a countdown for Maxim’s annual “Hot 100” list – as you get closer to the top of the list, the commentary becomes increasingly hyperbolic.
Need proof of this? Look at these two photos and tell me what you see.
Can you see what the common denominator is? If you nearly identical bone structures, you’re very smart and intuitive, which is a great quality to have if you want to embrace, develop and maintain your new Aphrodite Attitude.
The truth is that Mother Nature, however, determined that ALL WOMEN are equally beautiful; as evidenced by the women in the above photos. And since Mother Nature blessed us with intrinsic beauty, we should do everything we can to preserve it and the best way to do that is with makeup.
One of the biggest “burdens” most women complain about is the pressure to wear makeup because we have to look good for men (I believed this wholeheartedly!); however, contrary to popular belief, that is NOT the primary reason we should wear it.
One day I was watching QVC and Leslie Blodgett, the founder and CEO of Bare Escentuals explained that makeup, be it liquid, pressed powder, but especially mineral, serves as a shield from all of the nasty things in our environment. Every day when we walk outside the house, we expose ourselves to the sun, pollen, car exhaust, smog, etc. and when we wear makeup, we can walk around with confidence knowing that, not only are we accentuating our natural beauty, but that when we return home at night we will wash all of those awful irritants off of our faces and preserve our natural beauty.
I’ve been a huge fan of bareMinerals foundation for almost 10 years. Bare Escentuals is very different than the majority of cosmetics companies on the market; all of the products her company offers is all natural, from foundation to blushes to shadows, is made from all natural materials.
What I really love about Bare Escentuals, besides their dedication to bringing us high-quality mineral makeup, is their willingness to take as much time as is necessary to develop a breadth and depth of formulations. Here, I’ll give you a few videos about the foundations that they have made available to us.
This video sums up the key pieces of their breakthrough foundation:
In this video, you’re introduced to their READY Foundation. This is the pressed version of their incredible mineral powder formulation. I adore that they didn’t cave in to mounting pressure to just turn out a mediocre pressed powder — not only did they come up with the pressed form, they designed a unique brush to make applying it as easy and flawless as possible.
Earlier this month on QVC, bareMinerals finally revealed a liquid version of the mineral foundation. I’ve seen so many snarky comments about how it apparently so easy to make a high-quality liquid version of their foundation. I believe they will have the last laugh because they found a way to combine a moisturizing skin serum with the minerals to give the women who have wanted to switch a reason to finally try the bareMinerals difference. One last point is that Leslie and her team have made the point that they are not trying to get their existing customers to switch from their favorite formula. If they love the loose minerals or the pressed powder, they’re ENCOURAGED to stick with it.
This final video walks you through two things: 1. their revolutionary new brush that will give you the coverage you want with minimal product (sticking with their philosophy that makeup shouldn’t feel or be cakey and that less is more!), and 2. how to properly prepare, dispense and apply this new formulation.
I’d love to know what y’all think about Bare Escentuals/bareMinerals!! Are you interested in trying it? Are you a long-time fan, like me? Do you have any special tips and tricks you’d like to share?
In my next post, I want to give you another glimpse into my favorite makeup brand, Bare Escentuals with their absolutely fabulous Lash Domination mascara. I’ll also introduce you to Adonia Organics and their incredible lash and brow regrowth serums that are formulated to help us frame our best feature (our eyes!!) with beautifully full eyebrows and eyelashes.
Jessica’s confidence and beauty shines through regardless of what the scale says, and THAT is an Aphrodite Attitude!
I remember back in 2004, I saw Maxim’s countdown of the “Maxim Hot 100” on VH1 and I loved that Jessica Simpson took the number one spot. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that makes me so drawn to her. Scratch that… I know EXACTLY why I love her so much, but I’ll let you see why:
She epitomizes the Essence of an Aphrodite Attitude, not because she’s blonde bombshell, but because she UNABASHEDLY LOVES who she is NOW!! She admits that’s she’s not always following her “diet” perfectly because she’s only human and she wants to enjoy her life.
An Aphrodite Attitude can and will have many faces; Jessica’s just so happens to be more focused on healthy eating habits and being happy and in love with herself, despite what a scale might say.
I want every woman to have the same confidence that Jessica has.
“Yoga has really helped me feel more comfortable with the idea of being present, the simplest idea of spirituality, the power of now.” -Russell Simmons
In my last post, I explained that hypnotherapy, is one form of meditation, and when practiced regularly, it will markedly improve the amount of success you achieve in your personal and professional lives; Russell Simmons epitomizes this concept. I believe it was last Tuesday when I saw Larry King interview Russell on his show Larry King Now.
Larry and Russell were discussing Russell’s new book, Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple, and Russell explained how his discovery of meditation (specifically yoga) changed his life. I’m sure you’ve heard of Russell’s prepaid debit card called the Rush card – ironically, that card bears part of his nickname before he discovered meditation, Uncle Rush! In this clip, Russell tells Larry the story of how exactly he became addicted to the powerful peace of mind meditation gives him and how it’s impacted his career (watch from the beginning until about 7m30s):
What struck me the most is Russell’s cogent explanation of meditation being a practice; it may take a few minutes for our impatient minds to calm down, but once they do, stressful problems are easily solved. We must remember two key points:
The adage that “Rome was not built in a day,” and
the fable of the tortoise and the hare
Faster results and instant gratification is not always best.
Russell Simmons reaped such astounding benefits from the simple practice of meditation, and you can too!!
Now that you know that simple changes in your lifestyle can make a huge difference, I want to share with you the many ways we can transform our own lives by “exploiting” the expectations society places on us. We all have to eat, so why not use the foods we have (ideally, organic) to continue to build and reinforce our Aphrodite Attitudes? The same idea can be applied for makeup, skin care products and fashion.
Hypnotherapy audios help illuminate your strengths.
With my last post, I hope that I was able to elucidate that hypnotherapy is NOT the sorcery that some ultraconservatives would have you believe; rather, it serves as a means of self-empowerment. Hypnotherapy is just one method of meditation that you can use to begin your journey to building a solid and healthy Aphrodite Attitude.
I am a firm believer in the power of hypnotherapy because it has yielded consistent results since my first experience with it back in my junior year of high school. I can’t remember exactly why, but my social studies teacher said she wanted to reward us with a relaxing exercise. I think she saw the stress of the college application process was starting to wear on us (and to make matters worse, we had just experienced the unsettling events of September 11, 2001!). We began by closing our eyes and taking several deep breaths. Then, in a hushed tone, she told us to let the stress from our feet, shins and calves melt away – I’m assuming that the exercise itself only lasted for maybe five minutes because it was so effective that I actually fell asleep! When she was done, it felt as if I had been in a deep sleep for about an hour and I had this incredible sense of peace and determination that made every other responsibility I had seem easy.
I would love it if we all had the freedom to set aside about 20 to 30 minutes every morning (just after you wake up) and every night (right before you go to bed). Those are the ideal times because you are the most receptive to the messages of empowerment – remember that hypnotherapy is not meant to put you to sleep, but place you in a deep enough trance that its messages of empowerment sink in most effectively.
However, I know that life gets in the way (usually when we try to do anything to improve ourselves). I guess that is the universe’s way of testing your dedication to yourself and you can get around that test by starting small. If your life is unusually hectic right now, you can listen to an audio once a week and build up to making it a daily habit. Remember that Rome was not built in a day, so finding the perfect cornerstone for you is worth the time and effort.
Here are some free hypnotherapy audios that can help you see that no matter what your circumstances are, you CAN AND WILL break through them!
I found Ray Sullivan via Google search; I listened to his first audio when I was having a really stressful day with school and finding a new job and it was just what I needed to get through the rest of my day.
I’ve listened to a few of Joseph Clough’s audios over the last five years and I really love how extensive his collection is. Another great thing about him is that his audios are usually nine or ten minutes long, so they can fit in to any hectic lifestyle.
Another important thing to remember is that hypnotherapy is the most effective when you have a coach you trust and that will take some time. I must note that great hypnotherapists, you can truly connect with, can prove that they’ve been certified in the process (and when you’ve found someone you connect with, I highly suggest you see if you can make them your “mindset success coach”).
I’ve been listening to various hypnotherapy audios for about five years. At first it was very sporadic because I was trying to find the right coach for me; that changed in June 2013 when I found my mindset success coach, Jenn August. Her audios genuinely resonate with me because she asks me to visualize golden staircases, doors and suns – my class at Wellesley College renamed ourselves “The Golden Class of 2007” because we weren’t fond of our class color: Big Bird Yellow.
I listen to one of Jenn’s audios, in the morning and at night, at least three times as week. If life gets too hectic and I skip it for a week or two, I can absolutely notice a change in my outlook. It’s not that I lose faith in myself – It’s just that society’s proclivity to be so pessimistic can be overwhelming (especially since I’m known as the happy-go-lucky one in my social circles).
Once you’ve found your mindset success coach, you’re ready to move on to the last, and probably most important step in reinforcing your new meditation practice: doing at least one thing every day to remind yourself that you deserve to treat yourself as the goddess you ARE!
Again, you can start with the things we have to do every day and eventually, you’ll want to find other ways to pamper yourself. A good place to start is by improving the tasks we do on a daily basis anyway: eating, bathing, and sleeping. In my next few posts, I’ll share some of the small adjustments I made that completely changed my life for the better!
Meditation and hypnotherapy audios are two INCREDIBLE methods to erase the Negative Nellies in our lives and rebalance our focus.
If you are ready to join me in building a healthy Aphrodite Attitude, I’ll give you the cornerstone of the new mentality we’ll build together: daily meditation.
Remember the examples of the “acceptable” milestones we are bombarded with incessantly from a very young age? Well, to erase those you need to have a new recording ready to play at a moment’s notice (especially when the haters will do their damnedest to knock you down!).
The way I broke through those stupid boxes was twofold: I had a picture of a woman dressed as a queen taped to my wall (above my bed) and I found a daily hypnotherapy audio I could play in the morning and just before I went to bed. I know some of you might be a little wary about hypnotherapy because mainstream society views that as “hocus pocus,” but if you think about it, you’ve experienced hypnotherapy many times in your life (and if you’re a mom or older sibling, you’ve actually done it as well!).
Remember when you were a child and you had a bad dream? What would you do? I ran into my parents room and clung to my mother and sobbed uncontrollably. Without fail my mom would hug me and let me know I was going to be OK. After a few minutes, she’d take me back to my room and stay with me until I fell asleep again. She’d help me fall asleep by singing my favorite lullaby in a very hushed tone. It’d only take 10 or 15 minutes before my eyelids got heavier and heavier and I eventually fell back into a peaceful, deep sleep.
That is all hypnotherapy is; using hushed tones and positive messages to relieve stress and replace negative thoughts and messages from the world at large with messages of empowerment.
Don’t worry about whether what people would think of you if they knew you listened to these incredible audios because YOU are the focus. I know I felt a little weird when I first started to include audios in my daily routine, but after a couple weeks, I noticed a huge change! Before I started listening to the audios, I’d take every criticism to heart and I’d dwell on it for days. After the audios became an integral part of my routine, I noticed that it was so much easier to tune out the negative people in my life and the different tactics they’d use to bring me down.
Again, reprogramming your mentality will take some time, but every little bit helps.
As I’m sure you all know, I’ve loved Greek mythology for as long as I can remember, especially Aphrodite because of her unshakable confidence in her beauty and sex appeal. After I wrote my last post, I thought of another goddess I admired, Psyche; I loved her because of her steadfast determination to fight for what she wants. When she lost her love, Eros, she happily completed the labors Aphrodite assigned to her, regardless of how demeaning and in the end, she married Eros in a great celebration blessed by all of the other gods and goddesses.
In today’s society, Merriam-Webster gives two distinct definitions of the word “psyche.” The first relates to the English translation of the Greek word, psychē, which refers to a person’s soul, personality and mind. Definition #2 refers the way everyone (especially clinical psychologists) have a proclivity to “anticipate correctly the intentions or actions of [someone.]” On the surface, these definitions seem to be polar opposites, but in truth they are interconnected.
A well-respected journal of psychology, “Psychology Today” does an excellent job of melding the two definitions. In my last post, I detailed the three critical aspects of a HEALTHY Aphrodite Attitude, the most important being an understanding that we are inherently flawed, but our flaws are NOT fatal. In fact, they are just as, if not more important, to defining who we are as our strengths. When properly understood and harnessed, your flaws can and will become strengths.
Many women have a broken psyche as a result of the many pressures we face from society. Think about some of the boxes we’re bombarded with from infancy:
You have to be a certain dress size or you’re fat and ugly,
If you don’t get married and have a family by this age, you’ll be relegated to the life of an unwanted spinster,
Follow this career path and keep your opinions to yourself or you’ll be known as a bitch, and so forth.
Whenever I start to feel defeated by the pressures of society, I visualize two trees, one broken and a grand old oak tree. Every once in a while branches break off in a big storm, but that DOES NOT stop the tree from growing. Rather, the tree takes the time to get to know its wound and heals it the best way it knows how. When it is given enough time, the tree will replace that broken branch with two stronger, more beautiful branches. This is a tree after a massive storm:
Dove recently released a sad statistic: only 4% of women in the world consider themselves beautiful
If you’re willing to go on this journey with me and rebuild your Aphrodite Attitude, I want to make your psyche look like this:
An ancient oak studies its injuries and takes all the time it needs to grow stronger, more beautiful branches.
Our goal is simply this: do as an oak tree and absorb whatever criticisms are directed at us and use them to our advantage. It NEVER frets over a broken branch… it studies it’s faults and then takes the time to not only heal itself but grow two bigger and stronger branches in its place. And just like an ancient oak, this will not happen overnight; it will take dedication, but EVERY step you take is important.
Embracing your inner goddess means honestly contemplating whether all three parts of you (mind, body and spirit) are truly in harmony on a regular basis.
A few days ago I had a webinar from one of my business mentors playing while I was cooking my lunch and at the time I didn’t fully understand why. Then, just as I was starting to tune the audio out, she mentioned how she almost lost the rights to use one of her tag lines in a legal proceeding. The slogan she referred to reads as follows: “Remove your blocks so your business rocks!”
Unbeknownst to me, playing that webinar was the best thing I could have done for myself and for y’all. I’ve been pondering why the tag line resonated with me as much as it did, and I realized why: I’m ignoring a major block of my own!
While I absolutely LOVE helping y’all learn about the amazing healing properties of food, I understand now that that is not my only mission. To serve y’all to the best of my ability, I know that I have to stay true to myself and embrace EVERY aspect of a complete Aphrodite Attitude, especially the mental component! I could give you advice on infinite external tools you can use to improve your self-esteem, but if I continue to be negligent in acknowledging that we need to discuss the mental component as well, I am not fully honoring my mission.
From this point forward, I want to use this blog to help you embrace, develop and maintain your Aphrodite Attitude. In order to do that, you have to want to examine the following:
Your willingness to acknowledge that a HEALTHY state of mind allows you to admit you’re flawed (and that your flaws are just as beautiful as your strengths, just like Aphrodite),
Examples of strong, confident women who have the the courage to break down and eradicate the societal compulsion to force every aspect of your life into a perfect box, and
External tools that will reinforce our stronger senses of self-worth, including (but not limited to) balancing your psyche, proper nutrition (weight loss/gain is a bonus!!) & skin care/makeup.
Last Friday I tuned into Bethenny to see what she would discuss in terms of her “Diet Debate” segment, but what interested me more was her segment where she tested our beauty knowledge. Like me, Bethenny is a firm believer in using what you’ve got to improve your life, and it turns out that several common kitchen items can bring out your natural beauty and/or heal a specific health concern.
These three remedies impressed me the most:
Turmeric is traditionally used in Indian food, but it works wonders on acne. One of turmeric’s main ingredients is called curcumin and it works so well because of its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. You can either mix some turmeric in a glass of water or make a paste and let it sit on your skin for 10-15 minutes.
Strawberries make delicious preserves and jam, but did you know that they are also an effective sunburn treatment? The anthocyanins, the compound that gives the strawberries their gorgeous red color, have awesome anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. To get the most of this treatment, mash some fresh strawberries and spread it on your sunburn like a salve. Let it sit for 15-20 minutes.
Mint has been shown to be an excellent way to reduce the puffiness under our eyes. The flavonoids help increase the production of antioxidants in the skin under our eyes. Those antioxidants, in turn, help fight the free radicals that give us the dark circles and puffiness we hate. To use mint, crush some fresh mint leaves and make a paste and leave it under your eyes for 15-20 minutes.
I’d love to hear about how well these remedies have worked for you!
I couldn’t agree more with Ellie’s sentiment. I threw away my scale 2 years ago and made my focus how I feel and it’s an incredible feeling to get that anxiety about the scale out of my life!
Okay, you have been on your weight loss plan for five weeks now, how are you holding up? Still resolving to lose weight or are you a trifle discouraged? Ready to give up? Then I’d recommend you throw away that scale. A scale is not a great indicator as to how healthy one is and you have probably been checking it every day now, hopeful you have lost a pound or two.
Healthy living is the objective, not thinness. Weight means very little but bone structure means a lot. If you are large-boned, you will never comfortably be able to fit into a size 2. If you are small boned, even a weight gain of 5 lbs. will make you look a little pudgy. Good news – God created each of us uniquely but wants all to be healthy.
In regards to weight: a pint equals a pound. If you drink a couple of cups of water, coffee, tea or eat breakfast and then step…
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Aphrodite Attitude 