We all love dramatic Before and After pictures, don’t we? The beginning of a new year can be an especially enticing time to dream about a dramatic "after" for the "before" we're currently living. The Before shots show the person looking all plain, or overweight, or whatever, and they often seem depressed. Right next to that is the After shot, where they’re fully made up or thin and fit, and they’re all radiant and happy. Life is now awesome for them.
Here’s the thing; I have an issue with Before and After pictures – for several reasons. (Officially steps up onto the soapbox, haha.)
They’re seriously unrealistic.
The Before pictures show the person at their “worst,” so the difference between it and the After shot will be as dramatic as possible. For makeover Before and Afters, the model transforms from a plain Jane with blah hair who is wearing no make-up at all to a polished beauty with her hair cut, colored, and styled to perfection, and every feature of her face enhanced under the hand of a professional make-up artist. And make no mistake, those professionals truly are Artists, with a capital A.
Of course, the difference is stunning! Let’s be real, though. Not many women cruise through their daily lives with no make-up and zero effort put into their hair. Then on the opposite end, who walks around having started every day under the hands of a professional beauty team? So yeah, BOTH the Before and the After images are unrealistic.
The weight loss ones aren’t much better. Maybe you’ve seen some of the pictures floating around the internet where people have shown how a person can look like they’ve lost or gained several pounds just by their posture and the camera angle used in the shot. These pics are taken moments apart, and yet they look 10-15 pounds heavier or lighter. Not to mention how much a glum expression makes a person seem “heavier,” and a bright look in the eyes combined with a radiant smile adds to their “lightness.”
Try it. Take a slouching, glum selfie then take a shot of you smiling and sitting or standing up straight. See how dramatic you can make the difference. Even without Photoshop, pictures are easily manipulated. So again, unrealistic.
They play with our minds.
We see these plain, sorry-looking Before shots, and we relate. Each of us at times views ourselves and our life, or at least parts of ourselves and our life, as aptly represented by the bland or overweight people in those pictures. Even if we’re not overweight, in our culture, we often equate being overweight with being out-of-control (which isn’t accurate, but that’s another blog post), and who among us doesn’t feel out-of-control at least some of the time? So these “negative” Before pictures can hit us in a very vulnerable place. “That’s me. I’m that bland, out-of-control person.”
Then right next to that sorry excuse of a person is placed a bright, shining model of a joyful individual who undoubtedly has every aspect of their purposeful life under complete control – and IT’S THE SAME PERSON!
Oh, hallelujah, we’ve found the promised land! If that person can go from that Before to that After, there’s hope for me, too. Even though I may feel somewhat (or totally) pathetic now, I can be that perfect person with the perfect life. I can have that After! Then I will have earned the right to live in the neighborhood of eternal sunshine and bliss with all the others who have achieved their Afters! Oh, I’ll be so happy then and there!
(Notice how they're forming an "A" for After? Okay, so that may be a bit over the top, but you get what I’m saying.)
What is Before and what is After, anyway?
This is my biggest issue with the whole Before and After idea. It doesn’t really exist. Because we live in a world that measures time, we like to fit things into timelines. And there’s certainly a place for that. But when does Before start? Or end? When does After start? Does it end? If it does, does it then become another Before? But wait, I already had my Before, so if I have another one, I must be regressing. If I’m regressing, then I’m failing, Right? Maybe I never deserved my After after all.
You see what’s happening here, right?
For most of my life, doctors and the scale said I was at a healthy weight. Until my sister got cancer and died. She was 38 and left behind a husband and a three-year-old daughter. Obviously, it was heartbreaking, devastating, and soul-stretching. I gained about 20 pounds. Two to three years later, I decided it was time to let go of the extra weight. I had just started to drop it when my dad had a severe stroke that paralyzed him, robbing him of his ability to speak. Since he lived half a continent away and could no longer travel, talk on the phone, or write letters, emails, or texts, in many ways, it was as if I had lost him, too. I gained another 20 pounds. Three years later, after a valiant, inspiring fight, he died. After I had processed my grief, I returned to a healthy weight, where I stayed until Life gave me my next chance to further prove and improve my mental and emotional fortitude.
My husband and I have four children and, for most of our married life, owned a small residential construction company. Our faith, our family, and our business were our life. When the recession struck in America, construction was one of the hardest-hit industries. We drained all our savings and then used all our available credit to survive. The low point came when the foreclosure notice showed up on the front door of our home. (We barely avoided the foreclosure.)
During this time, our nineteen-year-old son’s best friend died in a car accident, which triggered the descent of one of our younger children into the world of addictions as he struggled to make sense of the death of someone he loved and looked up to so much.
Needless to say, the next several years of dealing with near financial ruin and picking our way through the land mine-riddled territory of substance abuse with our child were the most challenging years of my life. I gained over 70 pounds.
Now, here I am, with our financial world in better shape than ever, our son addiction-free and living a happy life, and I’m still 70+ pounds overweight according to standard beliefs about weight.
But why am I telling you all this?
It’s the Before and After thing.
Can you find the Befores and Afters in my story? Was my Before when I was at a healthy weight? Or was it when I gained the weight after my sister and then my dad died? That would mean my After was when I lost the weight. But then I regained all that and a lot more during the trauma that followed. So was that my Before? Or my After? And where does that leave me now?
I’m living the After right now if we measure by making it through all that. But I’m in the Before again if we’re measuring by pounds I’m carrying on my body. This is what I mean when I say Before and After don’t really exist.
It’s just all DURING.
Can we appreciate that? All of this - all the highs, all the lows, all the healthys, all the unhealthys, all the plain and glums, all the bright and shinings – they’re ALL. OUR. LIFE.
It’s all DURING!
Can we recognize the dangers of Before and After thinking and instead use those lovely images simply as markers along the beautiful, complicated, twisting, sometimes dull, sometimes exciting path that is our life? Can we love and celebrate our During? It’s really the only place we have power and, because of that, the only place we can have joy.
Let’s choose joy.
Let’s make our relationship with “Befores” and “Afters” a healthy one that serves us well. Most importantly, let’s appreciate, even cherish our During.
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