learning self-love.

For years I don't think that I really had the words self-love and self-hate in my vocabulary. But as I began to run, eat right and learn more about what makes happiness sustainable, these two words have carried a lot of weight. There are things that instantly make me hate myself--like weighing myself every week and seeing minimal results and then there are things that I can do to love myself--like stop weighing myself and go for a nice long run on a brisk morning. These actions influence my internal self-talk (and this is where battles are won and lost). We all have a voice inside ourselves that tell us how we feel about ourselves. I would say most people don't have one that says very nice things and sometimes mine doesn't still. Along the way I've learned that the voice that is negative can always be silenced and replaced by an empowering though.

I wish I could offer a simple advice on letting go of all the negative feelings we’ve learned to have about our bodies and ourselves. As we grow up it is quite literally marketed to us that our bodies in so many ways don’t measure up, and attaching this idea strategically to our worth we buy all kinds of products to “fix” all these things that make us unlovable.  So we spend years upon years repeating that message into our mirrors, running a tape in our heads, “if I could just change my appearance in this way” my life would be better/I would deserve love/I could accomplish more/ I would be worthy.

So when someone who still is above average for her height on a scale looks in a mirror and says I’m beautiful and worthy– it’s a little our of place.  It doesn’t match the running tape.  It doesn’t fit with all that we have learned about what it is to be a woman.  But somehow it feels familiar.  Because we didn’t always feel this way. We were taught with every beauty product and ever Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition this is what we're supposed to look like.

I feel like I can call myself an expert on the subject  of self-hatred as I started on this self-hatred path early.  I always had the perfect athletic family growing up around me and I was the chub of the family. I had already learned to position myself “appropriately” as less-than by the time I was in middle school because I couldn't play sports as well as the rest of my siblings and wasn't as slender as the other girls on the basketball team.  I can recount many stories throughout childhood where I felt like I jiggled too much or I had dressing room breakdowns because an outfit didn't look right. (My mothers singular response was always "you can change it so stop complaining".)  Also, being the type of person people who has a large circle of loved ones, I can tell you that while not all stories are the same, almost all the women I’ve ever known have felt these feelings.  There is no dress size attached to it.  Most of us have these scripts embedded into us.  

 All that to say, letting go of the story you’ve been telling yourself about your body for decades is not the kind of thing that happens overnight.  There are no easy steps or 30 day plans.  It’s a big pill we’ve swallowed and it takes time for the effects to wear off.

Here is how I did it:

I’ve had moments, and I think most of us do, where I've felt beautiful.  During an engagement shoot, getting ready for a night out, that kind of thing.  But they were fleeting and certainly not enough to shift my thought patterns. I remember the first time that I felt like maybe I had somehow broken down a barrier that would turn me into an extraordinary, beautiful person. It was when I ran my first half-marathon. I've never been a woman who attached beauty to make-up or hair styles. I wasn't raised that way but I did attach beauty to being slim and athletic. Maybe it wasn't even finding that I could push my body to it's very limit but more so that I could find something that was uniquely me. There is beauty in being unique and even at a horrible 13:00 mile pace there was something so freeing about getting sweaty and forgetting that there is such a thing as looking beautiful because this moment was beautiful. 

During that almost 3 hour run, I decided that I was beautiful. That the person I had become was worthy of so much more. Not because of any of the normal standards but because I could be inspired and motivated and to me that was beautiful. So I suppose if there was a step one it would be: Decide you aren’t going to hate yourself anymore.  More important than any weight routine followed, cardio completed, piece of kale eaten--this decision changed me.  But that doesn’t mean it changed the track in my head.

It was a conversation with my roommate, Mike that reframed how my mind thought about my body. Over a usual Sunday dinner, he asked me what my goals were with all this running and working out. With a wedding around the corner, the first thing that came out of my mouth was something about weight. He cut me off right there and told me that was first of all an awful goal and secondly, it will never work. From that moment on, as much as I can I decided that I would think differently about my goals. If I would begin rolling the tape that says things like, “You’ll never lose weight, your body is disgusting,” I would immediately change my thoughts to something like, “You are beautiful, you're getting healthy and any improvement on the scale is just a bonus.”

I have said negative things about my body to friends in the past 2 years.  I have said awful things to myself.  I have replayed that old tape time and time again.  But as I've gotten closer to accomplishing my goals, I’ve pushed back with positive loving thoughts, even when it was hard to really believe them (I always say fake it until you make it).  I made the commitment to be my own cheerleader until the bully I had always known began to disappear.

Along the way, I began to trust in my body and nourished my body with good, whole foods.  I've always loved to cook but I made sure that I was cooking the right things. I took baby steps, never allowing weight loss to be my primary goal.  I wanted to be inspiring. But I didn't want to be an example of “how not to be fat” but how to take care of yourself and to be the kind of woman that honors her needs as important and not just everyone else’s.  

I didn’t realize at the time, but the very act of exercising for the sake of feeling better instead of as a way to bully myself into looking better gave me power.  It forced me to pay attention to how I was feeling and act accordingly.  It made me proud when I accomplished something new.  Every time I could do something, I learned to love the power that my body held rather than seeing myself as weak. 

Next, I stopped making judgements about other women.  This is one of the more challenging ones, and it’s not because women are jerks.  I believe that women are so cruel in their judgements of one another because we’ve agreed to these impossible standards for ourselves.  We hold so close to the ideas that we don’t measure up, that the logical reaction is to throw stones at anyone who might or feel like we're better than those we feel like we're doing better than. If I didn’t have to judge other women then I no longer had to think about how i measured up.  I could see their unique beauty and thereby honor my own. Also, I think it is just as important to stop spending time with women who constantly bring down other people. We all know the type--they're the ones who can't sit in the bar without making fun of what a woman down the bar is wearing because it's not right for her frame. You'll never improve your own thinking space if you allow people who constantly bring others down pollute that space.

I see pictures of myself from the last two years and it is clear there is some sort of outward change. It takes sitting down and making a list of things that I have changed to achieve my goals that I realize that something much bigger has changed. I love myself and think that I am beautiful inside and out. That is not something that anyone can take away from me or that the number on a scale will change. I don't write this as an expert on self-love because really it wasn't easy to get this far and I still struggle. But it is the most freedom I have ever felt to be exactly who I am.  It is the accomplishment, while internal and non-medal earning, that I am most proud of.  It is the most empowering thing I’ve ever felt knowing that I can contribute to my body as it evolves and changes and know that it is was and always will be good.  I’m beautiful.  I’m good enough. And I know I have the power to walk around in this body at peace, however it is (and will be).

That is beautiful.