Avert Your Eyes
My manager at work just came by and we were chatting about weight loss (we’ve both been doing Weight Watchers). She mentioned that The Secret (that book you may have heard of that is both crazy popular and… crazy) tells you a (crazy) way to lose weight. The book is based on visualizing things you want, or something like that. Part of the whole visualization technique is that you have to look only at people who are your ideal weight. In other words, as she put it, “only look at skinny people.” Well of course, I had to go and look this up immediately:
I have fixed my “perfect weight” in my mind and visualize stepping on the scale and seeing that. I got out a photo of myself at that weight and look at it. (I am going to do a vision board also.) When I see someone at a good weight I think admiring thoughts rather than beating myself up or comparing myself. I am making believe as she says that my perfect weight is current reality. The interesting thing is that with no effort I’m simply not thinking much about food anymore.
I didn’t see anything about averting your eyes from fat people, but I would really love to know if that part of it is true. It would make me angry if it weren’t so ridiculous. Also something I would love to know: what the hell is a “vision board”? anyway, I believe in manifesting, so I told my boss I would try it.
Manager (indicating my co-worker): “Just look at Jess all day.”
Jess: “No, don’t look at me!”
Mo: “No, let me try. I will be skinny. I will be skinny.”
Jess: “You’ll also be short, if you don’t watch out.”
Mo: “And Asian. You’re going to be really surprised on Monday morning.”
Edited to add that Debra has come through with this page, which quotes from the relevant parts of The Secret at length:
Make it your intention to look for, admire, and inwardly praise people with your idea of perfect-weight bodies. Seek them out and as you admire them and feel the feelings of that–you are summoning it to you. If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.
Wow. I almost can’t believe it actually says that. I… have no words.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Books, Humor, Weight Loss
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I wrote about this last month based upon an article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17317691/site/newsweek/ which states the book saying, among other things: “If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.”
Jeez.
Thanks for posting that link, Debra — I have no adequate response to this.
Yes, thanks, Debra! I’m going to edit the entry. Do you have a link to your post on the subject?
I dunno. In theory, The Secret (the theory of life attraction), makes sense. The whole “do not observe them” thing, I think, is either grossly misinterpreted by most of us, or realllllllly bizarre. I don’t think it can possibly mean, “don’t even look at them! Avert your eyes!” I think it means… don’t observe their actions, don’t study them…
I hope?
Yuck yuck. I did some research into the whole Law of Attraction, aka The Secret, last year for a friend and found a huge subculture of people who really buy the entire package.
Including: your thoughts make the whole world, you are responsible (through bad energy or fixation–not physical actions) for giving yourself HIV/cancer/obesity, bad things (including, let’s say, and they do, child abuse and genocide) only happen because you believe they can, women are raped because they imagine being raped and draw it to themselves, and due to the fact that one entirely determines one’s own destiny, such things as charity and intervention and even sympathy are pointless. It’s better to focus entirely on yourself and not look at all that nasty stuff happening to those lazy people unwilling to change their destinies (in Darfur, for example).
I think there is merit in positive affirmations and visualization, but there is a line crossed when you start to believe in an entirely subjective world.
Forgot to add this: recent article from Salon about Oprah’s conversion to LOA that makes some good points about the system.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/03/05/the_secret/
I watched the beginning of the video about this…it mentioned something about Lincoln knowing “the secret.” But if that’s the case, how did his life end up as unhappily as it did?
It’s a wonderful way of not taking into account chance, “acts of god,” or sheer stupidity.
Seems to me the Secret being promoted is permission to be a selfish bastard. Like we need more of that in the world. The New Thought movement and its writers have long emphasized also the law of balance, that if you take and/or receive, you also must give back.
Wow. Woooooooow. That MSNBC excerpt? That is some crazy shit. And some atrocious writing.
The Secret (am I the only one who thinks of deoderant when I hear this??) brand of thinking has been around–under different names–for a long time. Years ago I happened to eavesdrop on a convo in a cafe where a group was talking about a friend recently diagnosed with cancer. One woman confidently intimated that she herself could never get cancer because she indulged in this kind of (Secret-ish) thinking and so had absolute control over the cells in her body.
And in the ’70’s, a friend’s mother was confident that she could control reality with her thoughts. She told us that she was going to get a new car this way.
Funnily enough, living in Japan, looking at Japanese women all the time didn’t make me 5’0 tall, size 1.
“In theory, The Secret (the theory of life attraction), makes sense.”
In what way can a theory which, taken to its logical conclusion, blames rape victims for being raped and abused children for being abused be said to make sense?
Secrethaterh, sounds more like a book on how to be the most depressing self-faulting person you can be. Maybe they should sell it with a coupon for either therapy, or anti-depressants. You’re gonna need one, or both.
I know visualization is frequently used by performance athletes and others to help attain goals. Sounds like “The Secret” has taken something pretty straightforward and put a spin on it to make money!
I think visualization on its own is not a complete bag of trash. But this harkens back to telling pregnant women that if they see something horrible while they are pregnant that their unborn child will resemble that horrible thing. It’s just recycling ridiculous notions we should have outgrown as a culture a long time ago. It’s really rather depressing.
That’s not really what I meant. I meant that the notion of “like attracts like” and “put out in the universe what you want to get back” and “be positive, live positively” makes sense.
Sorry, I think the whole thing is fairly… well, odd. I don’t know why there really has to be terminology called “The Secret” or “Laws of Attraction” to express how we just all should live.
So does this mean if I keep looking at pictures if Paris Hilton I will become an international party girl, who is famous for nothing but being a bitch and flashing lots crotch shots?
Hrm… This whole Secret thing sounds a bit like an extension of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, aka “justifications for behaving like a self-absorbed asshole.”
This whole thing is *so* not new. It just gets repackaged every few decades and “The Secret” is the slickest, most media savvy one to come along. A lot of it goes back to so-called “New Thought” churches (Religious Science, Unity et. al.) founded around the turn of the last century. My folks were involved in that kind of stuff when I was young. I don’t want to criticize it completely, because I think some aspects of it are useful, maybe that’s just how I was raised. But at the same time, when I was a burglary victim, it sure as hell wasn’t because I attracted crime. I prefer to think that the perp was more attracted to my stuff (and the crack it would buy him) than I was convinced of the inviolability of my home.
Although, I’ll also say that I’ve read more of the Abraham-Hicks books on it, and they are nowhere NEAR as offensive as the anti-fat bias quoted here from The Secret people. That’s actually pretty messed up. I would think that if you practiced what’s quoted above, you would attract a whole load of shallowness into your life.
OMG, if only there were *more* skinny people I could look at, like in magazines and on billboards and on TV, I could automatically get skinny!
Oh wait…
This is the kind of thinking that blames cancer patients for not surviving. I find The Secret offensive for its blame-the-victim mentality, the encouragement it gives the self-invovled and the false hope it gives the desperate.
I think visualization can help in sports–maybe it has something to do with kinetic memory. I also think optimistic people tend to be happier. BUT, there’s a limit to how much your thoughts impact your life. “Keeping your eye on the prize” might give you focus to achieve goals you’ve identified for yourself. But, it’s a gross oversimplification to assert that you can wish a bike into your possession. And, suggesting that you should shut out even the sight of something incompatible with your goal is ridiculous. If Abraham Lincoln was so into The Secret, did he have to look away from anything that contradicted a unified county and the abolition of slavery? Yeah, right. I think the other possibile outcomes of his presidency were in the forefront of his mind. Shutting your eyes and plugging your ears seems to be the tactic of another, less effective, president. Sorry to get political. I just think it’s unproductive to encourage denial or to blame the site of other people for your problems.
I saw the Oprah shows and I’ve kept thinking that the secret creators are going to be the only winners with this.
And the same thing happens with the best seller self help books
Visualize skinny people and you’ll become skinny? That’s not news to me. I did that when I was anorexic.
I just love how things that are considered disordered for thin people (visualizing skinny people, restricted calorie diets) are considered perfectly acceptable for the overweight.
> If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.
Sorry I got to this post too late for the debate. But I’d still like to say something. Not only is this statement offensive for actively encouraging bigoted practices, and for representing fat people as grotesque, obscene and contaminating (rather than examining a culture that attributes this status to fat), it bizarrely champions repression and denial. It seems to suggest that by turning a blind eye, and shutting out the world, a better world can be achieved. If this person is trying to talk about having “vision”, such as you might attribute to Gandhi or someone, then they have a very poor way of communicating.
The advice reminds me of the experiences that are related in some narratives of abused children. Some survivors of childhood abuse talk about experiencing something so bad that they shut it out and create another experience for themselves. Only years later can the traumatic memory be recovered, at great personal cost. From hearing accounts of people who have used this technique as a survival mechanism, it seems unadvisable to follow this procedure. To trivialize the experience of these survivors by adopting it as a strategy for “the perfect body” seems unfortunate. And regardless of what outcome is sought – the perfect body/relationship/house etc, it seems to foster ignorance to suggest that a successful strategy is one which rules out diversity or doubt.
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“….do not observe them” as if saying it in a “smart” way and using extravegant words such as “observe” is going to make me forget you’re basically telling me I should be ignored….