The "Ideal Weight" Lie

I am very excited to say that I am only a handful of pounds away from my goal weight! It's not my pre-pregnancy weight but it's a number that I decided I was satisfied with and it puts me in the "healthy weight range".

One of the problems with having an "ideal weight" is if you can even achieve this number (which is usually unrealistic and too low), you spend countless amounts of energy trying to maintain it when your body is practically screaming "I'm not supposed to look this way!". The big lie the "ideal weight" tells is that once we get down to that magical number, that we'll be happy or at least satisfied. But once I got there once but it was no longer good enough so the number kept getting lower. I remember I was over 10 pounds underweight before Hezekiah was born and I decided to really look in the mirror. I undressed, stepped in front of the full length mirror, and stared at myself. I didn't recognize the person staring back at me and although I was skinny, I was disappointed to find out that I didn't like how I looked. My womanly curves? Gone. My sense of self-worth? Gone. Obviously losing weight wasn't the answer I was looking for. There was something deeper going on here. I had bought the lie. In my head, I convinced myself that I was losing weight to "be healthier". But healthy people don't constantly carry guilt around with them because they missed a day of exercise or they ate one too many brownies that day. My subscription to magazines like Shape and Fitness were my motivators. Not because of the articles on eating clean or the monthly exercise plan, but because I would stare at the skinny fit women on the pages and wished I looked like that. My husband hated those magazines because he knew it was poisoning my self worth so I would run to the post office before he did so I could hide them and read in private. Healthy? I don't think so.

Not only did being pregnant liberate me from guilty eating but after I gave birth, I grew to appreciate my body and what it can do. I knew I needed to drop some pregnancy pounds but there was a big difference. My body didn't look the same way it had before and it still doesn't. Everything is a bit softer and curvier. Weaning left my "two ladies" looking quite a bit smaller and sad. Stretch marks have made their way into what seems almost every part of my body. And a tiny bulge of fat sits across my stomach that keeps me looking like I'm constantly 3 months pregnant. But now when I look in the mirror, I'm okay with looking like me. It's like once I came to realize that my body will never look perfect, I can be free to accept the flaws. I've never felt more myself.

My belly 5 months postpartum

Not to say that I don't have my moments. Embracing my ever changing body in a world that says "you will never look good enough", is hard. One night while I was struggling to accept the changes my body took after having a baby, my wise husband said "You were never meant to look like your 25 years old forever!". That is so true. I could kill myself everyday to have a 6 pack but how long am I going to do that for? The next 50 years? There is a reason you don't see many older people in a nursing home lifting weights and doing the Insanity workout after craft time.  Our bodies are meant to get older and the sooner we can accept the changes that take place in every season of our lives, the happier we'll be. Wrinkles, fat rolls, blemishes, and all.

I browse Pinterest and I see images like these and I think "these are young women's motivators!?!?".

So now not only are we supposed to strive to be skinny and sexy but we also have to look like we're on steroids! It makes me really sad to be honest. I never want my boys to grow up thinking that that's what women should look like. And if I ever have a daughter I would not want to her to waste one minute thinking that she should strive to look like this or she won't be good enough. Who are we doing all this for anyway? If you were the only one who could see your 6 pack abs or your round tight butt, would you still do your 1,000 crunches everyday or your Brazilian Butt Lift video? I doubt it. I'm all for exercise and eating right but it's a lot easier for me to accept my imperfections than to kill myself to look like the ladies above.