Gwen Stefani's Secret to Looking Good: Torture Yourself. [Gwen Stefani]

Gwen Stefani is on the cover of the September issue of Bazaar, and the 42-year-old mom is asked about how she keeps in shape. She explains:

There is no secret: You just have to eat healthy, work out, and torture yourself!

Torture. It's a joke, right? She's joking. But these are messages women can't escape: Beauty is pain. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Torture yourself.

It's possible that Gwen — who was a swimmer in high school — hasn't found a form of exercise she likes, but slogs through. She says working out is "more for my brain than it is for my body," and also admits: "I like to wear clothes too much, so I try to keep focused." Sure. Maybe she's being, as the Daily Mail calls it, "refreshingly honest" about her regimen. It just seems unfortunate that suffering has to be part of it. Both anorexics and athletes like the inspirational motto, "pain is weakness leaving the body." And maybe that's true. Perhaps a positive spin — it feels great to work up a sweat/running is fun/I love feeling strong/I do it for my heart — would be disingenuous. And certainly some celebs like to pretend that they just roll out of bed with flat abs and clear skin and shiny hair, glossing over the hard work and team of experts employed. It's just telling that from foot binding to corsets to weaves and waxing, women endure "torture" in order to meet some ever-changing standard of beauty, one that keeps moving, and is always just slightly out of reach.

[x17, Daily Mail]

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Going Out in the Sun? Be Sure to Rub Strawberries All Over Yourself [Food]

Aug 7, 2012 6:20 PM  

Strawberries are good for you — that one you've heard before. But according to a new study, strawberries help protect skin cells from UVA damage. As printed in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry, researchers have found that when you add strawberry extract to skin cell cultures — um, sure, why not? — and then expose those cultures to 90 minutes of blazing midday summer sunshine, the DNA damage is decreased. They haven't done any testing on actual live humans yet, but as the ozone layer gets thinner, smoothie ingredients may be our only hope.

[HuffPo, EurekAlert, NBCI]

Image by Stanislav V./Shutterstock.

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If You Want To Succeed, Start Lying to Yourself [Games People Play]

My first impressions are always right. I never regret my decisions. I don't care what people think. Humans lie to ourselves all day long. You know the old saying: fake it 'til you make it. And, as Sue Shellenbarger writes for The Wall Street Journal, self-deception has its benefits.

Researchers have found that children as young as three have a "positivity bias" — a subconscious tendency to see themselves in the best possible light and conveniently forget about some negative traits.

Shellenbarger reports:

When people are asked to choose the most accurate photo of themselves from an array of images that are either accurate, or altered to make them look up to 50% more or less attractive, most choose the photo that looks 20% better than reality, research shows.

And!

In an unpublished study earlier this year, young women were asked to stand in front of a sheet of brown paper and sketch outlines of their bodies. Some were then asked to read a story about dating to put them in a romantic mood. The others were asked to read about buildings and architecture, says Carrie Keating, a psychology professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., who led the research.

When the women were asked later to outline their bodies again, those who had read about dating sketched themselves as slimmer, with narrower waists, compared with their earlier drawings, reflecting an effort to "block out any negative information about their bodies" and succeed at the dating game, Dr. Keating says. The women who read about buildings didn't much change their sketches.

Harmlessly deceiving yourself to get ahead — believing that you are a great public speaker, telling yourself you have a real shot at the gold medal — can make you seem confident, assured, influential, powerful. Shellenbarger writes: "Benefits tend to come, research shows, when people simply block out negative thoughts, envision themselves enjoying future successes or take an optimistic view of their abilities — all of which tend to improve performance or persuasive ability." (Apparently it works in love, too.)

Since I do this all the time, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites:

I have good instincts.No one cares what I'm wearing.I know what I'm doing.

But letting it get out of hand is dangerous. There are limits. Confidence is great; losing track of the truth is not. As Dr. Michael Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School puts it, "a little bit of self-deception isn't an unhealthy thing, a lot is an extremely unhealthy thing."

The Case for Lying to Yourself [WSJ]

Image via Complot/Shutterstock.

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