I have a secret....

I have a secret to share: I hated myself skinny.

I am a self destructive perfectionist.

I am constantly striving for flawlessness, setting high standards and then I am overly critical in my self evaluation. 

I am constantly concerned with other peoples opinion of me. 

I have been on some form of a diet since elementary school. The world tells us “You’re the reason a diet doesn’t work. You are flawed and not good enough or you’d be successful.” 

So during a diet you develop perfectionism to control/fix yourself. 

The problem is perfect doesn’t exist and we continue to beat ourselves up in the pursuit of it. The perfectionist mindset it falls into every aspect of our life -so that we don’t feel successful anywhere because...

PERFECT DOESN’T EXIST  

I attached my self worth to the success of my diet/exercise plan and I became hypercritical when I didn't achieve it! Instead of stepping back and saying “your perfectionist mindset is the issue”, I would push myself harder and insult myself along the way. 

“If you’d stop making excuses!”

“If you’d just stick to the restrictions!” 

What if I could just love myself and show myself compassion and grace FIRST and engage in healthy behaviors instead of constantly day in and day out chasing weight loss? 

Shame, guilt, and fear don’t bring positive action! 

I lost 140 pounds and I still wasn’t happy - I was still stressed and just recently realized the weight isn’t the problem my mind is the problem. 

The struggle didn’t end when I lost the weight because then I just put my negative thoughts towards something else - now it’s the sagging skin. I can’t lose the rolls, I’m still not firm enough, I’m still unattractive. The problem is losing weight doesn’t resolve our issues. I thought when I lost weight I would be happy, joyful, living the life of my dreams. So when I lost all the weight and those things didn’t happen, my subconscious brain said it was because I still wasn’t skinny enough and I had too much loose skin. 

Towards the end of 2018 and into the start of 2019 I was struggling emotionally to find joy. It started to cause me to have a lot of stress and anxiety in all areas of my life. My job and my relationships were suffering because I was suffering. I decided to speak out and ask for help and advice and the voice of reason was:

 CHANGE YOUR MINDSET 

Change your thoughts, how you feel, and your beliefs about yourself. Your beliefs and thoughts about your weight are causing the negative emotion. The only way to get out of that negative place is to change the way you see your body and find your worth outside of how you look.

It’s hard to go from a lifetime of making choices on food and exercise from a place of hate. I gotta eat this so I’m not fat and I need to workout so I’m not fat. These are hard voices to silence. I’m trying to make choices from a place of love and acceptance for myself rather than constantly focusing on what I want to change about how I look and doing it while I simultaneously insult myself. 

We have worth no matter what our body can do or what it looks like.

When I lost all the weight and ran a marathon people treated me like I was finally worthy and inside I told myself I had to go even bigger and better for people to continue to acknowledge my worth. If I don't run fast or as far people will think I am not good anymore. If I gain weight back people will think I am not good anymore. My constant need for outside validation is a problem.

The voices of judgment and criticism is usually the voice of someone else’s opinion that was handed to us. 

How can you trade out decades of self hate and find some self worth? Stop doing things you think you should be doing for things you actually want to do. Trade the "I should____" for things that actually align with you. I can't live my life in fear of what other people are going to think about me. I forced myself to do things I didn't really want to do because I wanted to prove myself to other people. 

What do you want? What are your goals? What are your expectations? What activities do you enjoy? 

Stop living under other people’s rules and expectations.

Switch the effort to get the number on the scale as low as possible with an effort to get as many adventures, smiles, and laughs out of the limited amount of days you have in this life! You are not alive to lose weight. Aim higher than thin and pretty. What do you want your life to feel like? What do you want to see and experience? You are missing out on so much of your life by only choosing to see your body as something to constantly make smaller. 

Tomorrow is not guaranteed to you! Stop trading living a beautiful full life for an endless obsession with weight loss. 

An anonymous woman upon her death: “It’s my own body I’ll miss the most. This body that danced, and ate, and swam, and had sex, and made babies. This body actually made my child! It carried me through this world and I’m going to have to leave it. I don’t have a choice. And to think... I spent all those years criticizing how it looked and never noticing how good it felt ...until now.”