"I Will Not Be Afraid of My Mirror"

Making friends with your full-length looking glass isn't easy (especially under fluorescent lights in a swimsuit-store dressing room), but the more you look, the less you'll stress. "When I ask women which of their body parts they like best, they most frequently choose the face -- and that's not because they find their faces particularly fascinating," says Kearney-Cooke. "It's largely because they're so accustomed to staring at their faces when they're putting on makeup or brushing their teeth, whereas they can more easily hide the rest of themselves from full-length mirrors."

If running from your reflection is de rigueur for you too, it's time to face your fear -- literally. "Avoiding looking at your nude body in the mirror just leads to more emotional anxiety," says Thompson. "Think of it like falling off a bike: If you have a bad experience and refuse to try again, your mind will blow it up into something much more scary than it really was." To get the wheels turning, you need to desensitize yourself to strip-down anxiety. If you're particularly squeamish, Kearney-Cooke recommends staring at yourself with clothes on or using a pocket mirror, area by area, until you get to the point where you can disrobe and take a long look at yourself without obsessing about or dissing your dimensions. Your goal isn't to become the next nudist-camp member -- it's just to get comfortable with your bare body. "The point is to accept your imperfections," says Thompson. "You may not think differently than before about what you see, but slowly, your anxiety about trying on clothes and changing in front of others will fade." It may seem hard to go from feeling cool with your reflection to undressing in the company of others, but look at it this way: You're not scrutinizing their lumps, bumps or figure flaws, right? They're probably not staring at yours either.