How to accept yourself in Photographs!

  Have you ever had that feeling of sheer panic of having a Facebook notification pop up that someone has tagged you in a photo? It seems ridiculous to some, but for me and many other women that I have spoken to over the years that notification was enough to make your heart rate increase and your chest tighten.

But why do so many of us hate photos so much? Why do we hate the thought of the people we know seeing an unflattering snap of ourselves? After all most of the people on our social media know us, they already know what we look like? What are the reasons for us not accepting ourselves in photographs?

Firstly, other people may know what we look like but we don’t, the image we most often see of ourselves in a mirror is inverted, the same goes for selfies, it just isn’t the same as what we’d see in a photograph that someone else would take of us. We really aren’t used to seeing ourselves as we really appear, so the image of ourselves in a photo someone else has taken is going to look not quite right to ourselves.

Secondly, like me, you have probably participated in decades of negative
self-talk, where we have told ourselves that how we look isn’t good enough and therefore it never is.

So that covers what could make you hate pictures of yourself, but what can help you to start accepting yourself in photographs?

Just a heads up, it may take some time. If you have spent years being heavily critical of how you look in photos, chances are that this won’t be an overnight fix. But here are some things that can help you find acceptance.

1. Start following people who look like you on social media. Normalise your body!
   
2. Get someone you trust to start taking pictures of you, I am not talking a big glamorous photo shoot here, I mean just on days out etc. You don’t have to show them to anyone else or even look at them yourself. This is one of the main things I did to start becoming more comfortable with seeing myself in pictures. Initially I didn’t want to look at them at all, then gradually I’d get my husband to send the pictures to me, eventually I felt happy sharing pictures of myself that weren’t selfies.
   
3. Remind yourself that the people that know you, the ones whose opinions you actually care about, know how you look, they know if a picture is a bad picture of you anyway.
4. You may think that you will miraculously like pictures when you reach a certain weight but chances are you won’t. In fact you probably won’t allow yourself to like them unless you meet an ever changing target. So aim to accept yourself as you currently are.
   
5. See the best in others – when someone puts up a picture of you that you hate I promise 99 percent of the time they didn’t do it to show everyone that you ‘look horrible’. If it’s just you in the picture, chances are that they either think you look fab or that they love the memory that they associate with the picture. If it’s a group picture that they are in, it’s probably one where they think they look great. They don’t think you look awful and they aren’t trying to hurt you.