'Mirror fasting' trending among women to stop obsessing over looks

Women are giving up gazing at their reflection in the mirrors in an attempt to stop obsessing over the way they look in a new trend that has been dubbed as 'mirror fasting', it has been revealed.

The new movement, which was started in the US by a group of female bloggers, recommends people to abstain from staring at their reflection in the mirror.

It also includes avoiding looking at reflections in computer screens and shop windows.

"I'd become aware that I had a mirror face," the TELEGRAPH QUOTED Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, a 36-year-old freelance writer based in Queens, New York, as telling The Observer.

'Whenever I saw my reflection I'd 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," she said.

Whitefield-Madrano began her first 'mirror-fast' in May 2011 and continued it for a month, claiming she felt calmer after the experiment.

"I didn't 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," she said.

Blogger Kjerstin Gruys, 29, a sociology graduate in San Francisco, mirror-fasted for 12 months in the run-up to her wedding.

"I've managed to better separate my looks from my self-esteem," she wrote on her blog, Mirror Off the Wall.

"This is probably the most powerful secret to feeling beautiful," she wrote.

However Kate Fox, a social anthropologist at the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, said mirror-fasting is just another way of fixating on one's appearance.

"To me, it smacks of narcissism more than looking in the mirror like a normal person," she said.

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