body image

alhambraantiques.com

I have just finished a book called Mirror, Mirror, Off the Wall by Kjerstin Gruys, about her personal experiment of not looking at herself in the mirror for a year in order to learn to love her body more. I am amazed at Kjerstin’s courage to not look at mirrors (even with her wedding coming up!), and inspired by how she explored the meaning of beauty and learned to feel more confident and comfortable with her body.

Through this experiment, she was able to give thought to what it meant to *feel* beautiful. She came up with - feeling surrounded by people who love her, feeling pride in her accomplishments, and feeling confident and at peace with herself, among other things. 

As this is a fashion and style blog, and seems to focus a lot on appearances, I thought that it is important to talk about body image. I was discussing this with my husband, as he thinks that by caring how I look, and blogging about it, I must be obsessing over my appearance. However, I explained that, to me, style is more about creativity and having fun, as opposed to feeling overly self conscious about my appearance or my body.

When I was younger, I was a typical self conscious teenage girl, and I didn’t always feel comfortable in my body. At 16, I started eating much healthier (not that I wasn’t healthier before) but I eliminated certain foods that I thought weren’t the best for me, and I have continued since. I felt that I was too often using food for emotional reasons, or to destress after a long day. (This is something that I feel has kept my body physically healthy, and I definitely think it helped me have a healthy pregnancy and baby, too.)

When I was around 20, however, I was “feeling fat”, partly because of family pressure, and partly because I did gain a little weight. I was probably eating more than usual because I felt a bit depressed from being single. I was not feeling satisfied with my body or how I looked.

 But I knew that this thinking needed a change. It really didn’t matter what I thought, because I was not overweight at all, and it really is important to be satisfied with how I look and feel pretty all the time. I wanted to feel pretty no matter what, because life will change my body over time and in different circumstances. I wanted to feel confident all the time, no matter what. So I wrote about it and prayed about it, and one day I woke up and I felt pretty! And the “fat” in the mirror disappeared! That summer, I didn’t wear makeup most of the time, even at special events, because I was so amazed by the revelatory feeling that I felt pretty without any embellishment. 

Since then, my body has changed in lots of different ways, but I really don’t let it bother me. I am happy with myself. I don’t worry when I gain or lose a little bit of weight. I try to eat healthy, and I am working on exercising more regularly. Another thing that I found really helped me not obsess or worry is that I don’t weigh myself; I haven’t for at least three years. I really don’t want to know a number. I think that seeing a number on a scale will just make me neurotic and worried about whether its too high or low. Now, I just wear what fits me and go with the flow of my body’s changes. (Even when I was pregnant, I told the midwife not to tell me how much I weigh each time, and I would close my eyes when I was on the scale. Because even though it is normal to gain weight during pregnancy, I knew the number would just make me feel panicky.)

I am very grateful that I feel good about my body. I hope that we can all be inspired to feel beautiful no matter what, because of our uniqueness and talents and the things our bodies can do, not only by conventional standards.

What does feeling beautiful mean to you?