My bae's often laugh at me; they say mom, you are the only person that I know that works out as strenuous as you do, yet you never really lose any weight. They should lose some kind of priviledge or at least be on punishment for a day or so for saying this to their mother; yet their observations are quit true. (smile)
For the last 20 years, I have been roughly around the same weight, within the face of 6 pregnancies.
I do excercise alot and I love to excercise (at least 4 times a week).
What my babies fail to understand and what I do understand, is that without regular excercise and diet restrictions, I would be so much larger than I am. I am no size 8 now, but I could be alot larger.
I learned a large lesson about myself, and body image around 17 years ago, while looking through old high school pictures. In these pictures, I am around 50 lbs smaller than I am today. That is a rather large weight increase.
I looked at the pictures, and even though, I am very beautiful in them and fairly alomst perfect size; I could recollect my mindframe at the time of the picture. I noticed something that changed my outlook on body image forever...
I actually "felt" 'fat' during that time in the pictures. I was not fat, but very perfect. That caused me to realize that my body image, or the way that I saw myself was unhealthy.
People that struggle with anorexia have distortions in their body image. No matter how small they become, when they see themselves, they only 'see' fat. Some suffer from depression, and vascillate between extreme thin to obesity. It is a very unhealthy health condition.
I learned to be thankful.
When you are doing your best to eat healthy, stay active, and living a sober life, then you really are giving your body the best opportuntity to be as healthy as it can be.
Some get discouraged and because they may not be losing the weight that they wanted fast enough, they'll resort to unsafe rapid weight loss tactics, that ultimately have them on a destructive roller coaster of weight gain weight loss, and the outcome is an unhealthy product, and they are left unhappy.
The failure is the 'feeling', that they are 'going no where', and they lose patience.
Never lose patience in the process. That is the message that I learned from looking back at my highschool pictures.
Now when I look at photos from present day, My outlook has changed and it has allowed me to be as healthy as I am capable of presently.
I look at myself and say, 'You look good', and 'You're putting forth the effort', those thoughts and outlooks mean more to me than being the perfect size 8.
I do still strive to lose weight and lose inches, but if I maintain my health with a healthy outlook then that is okey with me as well.
I can appreciate the 'I am enough', trend.
Trying to force outcomes with great demands is not a healthy challenge but ultimately an open door to unhealthy patterns due to the stress to over achieve.
Achieve, yes. But when you are doing your best, never feel that you are 'going nowhere'. Blessings, Ameenah
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