Do These Thoughts Make Me Look Fat?
Passing up Pleasure to Pass Judgment
When did the bedroom turn into a place to put your body on trial? When did it turn into a kangaroo court with a stacked jury and a judge banging the gavel on your looks?
Making love is your chance to experience pleasure and connect to your partner in deeper ways, not an opportunity to enter a guilty plea on charges of imperfection.
Chances are there is one thing stopping you from returning physical intimacy to its rightful place: the conviction that you shouldn’t have sex until you’ve “improved” your body. Or, at the very least, improved your image of it.
Now it’s true that having a great body or a confident image of it helps you have better sex. But the reverse is also true—having great sex improves both. Those two facts sit side by side, and like Frida Kahlo’s eyebrows, they cannot be separated.
It isn’t the act of sex that gives you body confidence, by the way. It’s the wake it leaves behind—a deeper connection to your partner, an appreciation of what your body can do and feel, and a continued awakening of who you are, how you express yourself, and your capacity to give and receive. Those things will give you a sense of wonder, mastery, control, respect, and love that results in feeling better about your body.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This book is not about using sex to improve your body or your self-esteem. It’s about sexual insights and techniques that neutralize your self-consciousness. It’s about helping you relax and enjoy making love despite your body anxieties and reigniting the sexual bond with your partner.
This section is the first step toward that goal. It will challenge your beliefs about sex and its relationship to physical appearance by using respected but little-known studies to refute your assumptions. In later sections, I’m going to show you how it’s possible to override your obsessive thoughts through specific sexual behavior, but to make that happen, let’s spend a little time on those thoughts banging around your head.