Mirror fasting: Women giving up seeing them in mirrors

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Mirror fasting: Women giving up seeing them in mirrors

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Women are giving up gazing into mirrors in an attempt to stop obsessing over the way they look.

19 August,2012 10:55 pm

The new trend is dubbed mirror fasting.The new movement, which was started in the US by a group of female bloggers, recommends people abstain from staring at their reflection.It includes avoiding looking at reflections in computer screens and shop windows and has been dubbed mirror-fasting.Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, a 36-year-old freelance writer based in Queens, New York, told The Observer : Id become aware that I had a mirror face.Whenever I saw my reflection Id open my eyes a little wider, suck in my cheeks a little and tip my chin down in an effort to make myself look more like I wanted to. It made me feel really vain.Whitefield-Madrano began her first mirror-fast in May 2011 and kept it up for a month, claiming she felt calmer after the experiment. I didnt want to do it because I felt bad about myself per se - I was just concerned about how often I was thinking about my appearance. I wanted to see how much my mood was affected by the way I perceived my looks.Blogger Kjerstin Gruys, 29, a sociology graduate in San Francisco, mirror-fasted for 12 months in the runup to her wedding.On her blog, Mirror Mirror ... Off the Wall, she wrote: Ive managed to better separate my looks from my self-esteem.This is probably the most powerful secret to feeling beautiful.A recent study, published in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy earlier this year, found that British women look in the mirror around 38 times every day and men 18 times a day.However Kate Fox, a social anthropologist at the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, said mirror-fasting is just another way of fixating on appearnce.To me, it smacks of narcissism more than looking in the mirror like a normal person, she said.Another study suggested a fifth of teenage girls in Britain admit they can barely bring themselves too look in mirror.The survey of 1,000 girls aged between 12 and 18, found that about two thirds want to lose weight and 63 per cent feel under pressure to change their appearance.