Pretty Perfect

So I was thinking today that I am not totally honest with myself. I say I am a healthy person and I eat healthy food, but I still have a little bit of disordered thinking about my looks, particularly my weight. This is so weird, because I'm not usually a perfectionist AT ALL. I am perfectly happy to go with the flow, let things turn out how they turn out, and I am kind of famous among my friends and family for doing everything halfway. I'm one of those people who firmly believes that good enough is good enough. Actually that's where the name of my blog came from... I'm notoriously lazy, and so this blog is about me trying to be unlazy as far as health goes.

Except with my physical beauty. Aesthetics are very important to me in general. I love to be surrounded by beautiful things, and I don't just mean pretty people. I love art, but only art that is genuinely beautiful (I'm NOT into modern art at all). It's important to me to live in a beautiful place. Luckily, that isn't too hard for me because I find a lot of different climates beautiful in their own way. I think focus on physical beauty has led me to be a perfectionist as far as my body is concerned. I admit that I get on the scale several times per week, and the number I see there still greatly affects my mood for the rest of the day. This is sad, I don't want it to be this way. Similarly, I will feel horrible about myself all day long if I wake up with a zit. Why am I such a perfectionist in this one area of my life, when I could care less about being perfect at work, in school, in my relationships with other people?

I could blame the media, and that might be part of it. But I feel like it's also just something I was born with. As far back as I can remember, I always regarded the rest of the world as an audience and thought of myself as a performer. Is this a personality thing that I am destined to have the rest of my life?

In some ways, perfectionism can be good. It forces me to make better choices. If I want a perfect size 2 body (which I don't quite have), then I can't eat crappy food all the time. This is good for my overall health. Also, I took up running to lose weight, but I found a hobby that I truly love (OK maybe not the track workouts, but there is no denying they make you faster!)

So I guess I find myself wondering, how do you go from obsessing about being perfectly pretty, to being ok with just pretty perfect?