Guest blogger Nora Lahl is a beginning runner and self proclaimed foodie living in Bay View. She is also running her first 5K this weekend! Go ahead and check out her blog, Foodie Gets Fit.
This NY Times article reminded me of a recent post from Tracey about how to raise kids with a healthy body image. While it’s never a perfect science, it’s pretty clear that a parent, especially a mother, can have a huge impact on her daughter’s self-perception. So here we are, adult women, dealing with our flawed perceptions of ourselves while trying to suppress all that junk for our children (or the children around us, as the case may be). How can we be good models of healthy body image when we’re still working through the traumas of childhood?
I’d like to think I have a fairly healthy body image. Thanks, Mom! I don’t remember my mother once telling me to watch what I was eating. She never remarked on my weight or size. Likewise, she didn’t constantly compliment my body or make it seem that it was the extent of my assets. One of my favorite compliments from my mother? “You’ve got beautiful eyebrows.” I’ve carried that one around with me my whole life. It’s nice to know that you’ve got something special like that, that only people who really pay attention will notice. It made me feel good about the way I looked, and it’s kinda hard to become too vain about your eyebrows, you know? I think it’s the perfect kind of compliment to pay a child. I am truly lucky that I was raised in an environment like that.
But perhaps my childhood indifference contributed to becoming overweight as an adult. I was pretty scrawny as a child, but then when I hit puberty I, ahem, blossomed. That was the start of feeling bigger than other girls, even though I wasn’t. Plus, I was never one of the popular girls, and in high school, popular = attractive. I never limited what I ate, and by high school I was no longer involved in any athletic pursuits. That all added up to gaining weight as I got older and more sedentary. I learned to take pride in anything besides my body. To be honest, I was pretending to not care about what I looked like instead of working to improve myself. So while I cherish the fact that I don’t define myself by my body, maybe if I did I would have taken better care of it. It’s the only one I’ve got, after all.
Right now, I’m not trying to look like anybody but me. A healthier, happier version of me. I don’t want to be consumed by what I look like, nor do I want to continue to ignore the poor way I’ve treated my body these last 10 years. I’m running, the first real sustained exercise of my adult life. I’m eating better, which for me means major portion control. I don’t look at myself in the mirror and say, “Man, if only my ass were smaller.” Instead it’s, “Is that a muscle I see? Cool!” When I feel bad about my body, which inevitably happens to all of us, I remind myself that I’m beautiful in many ways, inside and out. Sometimes I have to have my husband say it a couple times to make it sink in. I think that’s what we all, women and girls, need: a voice, either external or internal, telling us we are beautiful and valued.
Popular posts