Skip to main content

The end of my body image issues

It's the year I turn 35 and I can finally and definitely say that my body image issues - which have been with me since my early teens - are a thing of the past.

I wish it was only one thing, the magic wand I could offer to all those who are still struggling. I see the magazines at the checkout that are selling the very same stories of fat shaming celebrities, fad diet successes, and fourteen-day detoxes with new faces every month. Someone's buying them, so I know there are still those who are struggling.

But I'm afraid I haven't found a magic pill - what seems to have happened is the last jigsaw piece of many has clicked into place, and suddenly the jumble has come together and forms a coherent picture: the picture of the strong, healthy woman I see in the mirror these days. I can share what the puzzle pieces were for me, but what I can't do is connect them for you. A piece or two might be different in someone else's life. But most of them, I believe, are the same for all of us.

Here's a few of them.
  • I'm older and wiser. The insecurities of my teens, the awkwardness, the need to be accepted by everyone - good riddance!
    Of course, on the other hand, I well remember my mother's continuous yo-yoing of the same 20kgs, up and down and up and down for as long as I can remember. She was older than me the entire time I was alive. So age doesn't necessarily take those issues away.
  • I'm a Christian and I know I'm accepted as I am. Sins, of course, are forgiven; but there's also the truth that God made me the way he wanted me to be. I know and have known this for a decade, but there's a definite difference between head and heart knowledge; and this acceptance hadn't taken the journey from head to heart in the decade I've been following Christ. It has now.
  • I'm loved. My mother's feminist voice in the back of my mind shouting protests notwithstanding, the committed, stable love of my husband makes me feel secure. I don't have to question my attractiveness; his opinion on that is the only one that counts. He's not very verbal about it - at times I wish he told me what he sees in me, and sometimes I end up 'fishing' just to hear him say reassuring things. But words aren't everything. In his actions he shows me his love, appreciation and care every day.
  • Being a mother. Again, I'm hearing grumbles from my feminist mum. But the truth is, my body functioned perfectly in pregnancy, labour, birth, and it's now sustaining and growing my daughter who is thriving on the milk my body makes. She doesn't care what my body looks like, but about its function - and it's been flawless. Healthy. Strong.
  • I've stopped fighting. My concerns these days are about being healthy, not about being thin. I've beaten and abused my body, fighting against instead of with it. Despite all my best efforts - extreme low calorie diets, fad diets, extreme exercise - my body never was (and never will be) of model proportions. I'm short and muscular by nature, not lithe and long-limbed. Nothing I do will ever change that, and I've come to not only accept that fact but embrace it. Yay for strong!
The fact is, these days I look in the mirror and am often positively surprised! I often find my reflection to be thinner and more attractive than I expected. That perhaps says something about a lingering negativity - in that I look worse in my head than I actually do in the mirror - but that's not a fight, just a journey. 

It also doesn't mean I have stopped caring. I still need reassurance from my Mr. and I still need to choose not to look at certain magazines. I still need to choose not to compare myself to others. I still choose my foods carefully - although these days it's not to attain the unattainable figure, but to maintain and build on the health I've been given. And I'm grateful for it all.

Good riddance to the struggle.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...
1 comment
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...
2 comments
Read more

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...
Post a Comment
Read more