Body confidence is a strange thing, some of us have lots of it… others, like myself, have none.
I’ve never had a lot of confidence in myself. I’ve never had a body that I felt proud of. That I could show off. Or that I could even dress in clothes I really liked.
But my body has never been the problem.
I am.
The problem isn’t the way that I look, the problem is how I feel about it. I feel as though I’m this huge ugly monster.
There is five stone between my largest weight and my smallest weight as an adult. I didn’t lose it all at once, it was a slow process 1 step forward and a whole tub of ice cream backwards. But I did it. I was officially set for my hot girl summer.
Then I saw those two lines.. hot girl summer went out the window and super sweaty, hot and bothered summer was in!
Now I have a beautiful baby and I’m three stone heavier than I was when I found out I was pregnant. For the first few months I told myself that it was fine-
My body did something so incredible… it brought be my baby.
But I still hate it, and I’m past the point of being able to convince myself to love it based on what it did. I’m back to hiding.
I don’t look like this anymore, I don’t stand in front of a mirror and take a selfie anymore…
Mirrors in my house are hidden away, they’re avoided. I do whatever I can to make sure I don’t see myself.
Every day I try to get dressed and I have a huge meltdown about what I’m going to wear. I put at least two different outfits- hate them.
I feel fat. I feel hideous.
But that’s not true though… is it? I try to tell myself that it isn’t.
I try to think to myself, what would you tell someone else who felt the same way?
I’d tell them that they are more than what they weigh.
I’d tell them that they’re beautiful.
So I try to tell myself the same thing. I try to tell myself that I am more than what I see when I look in those mirrors.
But believing it is much, much harder than it seems. Surely if you say it to yourself enough times, you’ll start to believe it right?
Fake it ’til you make it… isn’t that what they say?
I don’t know, I just know that existing with so much self hate is hard.
But I know I shouldn’t hate my body.
My body has served me well- it deserves my love.
I’ll continue to flip flop between hating my body for how it looks and loving it for what it has achieved.
For now I sit somewhere in between, but I’m working on loving my body more. For me.
