For the love of God, can we stop hating our body?

We are officially into February and the sales on gym memberships, dietary supplements, and the like are still going hard. People are on diets and completing their final week of the gym membership they just started that they’ll pay for until July because they’ll go back one day.

Honest to God, I’m tired.

I used to care about size because in our society, nothing truly matters and you aren’t as successful as you could be unless you do it skinny. Or became skinny as your level up. There was a veerrryyyy long moment in my early 20’s that I didn’t want to pursue the things that I loved because I was overweight. At that time, I didn’t even know that I had PCOS yet and that was a large contributing factor to my size (no pun intended). Over time, this desire to be a certain weight morphed into this idea that in order to “have it all” I needed to be disciplined and I can’t be disciplined if I’m overweight.

Eventually, I did find out that I had PCOS and the goodie bag of symptoms that it came with–absent/irregular cycles, infertility, abnormal hair growth/loss, insulin resistance, insomnia/exhaustion, and weight challenges, to name a few. I was tired of feeling sick and tired so I drastically changed my diet to see if I could figure out which foods were problematic to me based upon how they made me feel. This whole process resulted in my losing 31 lbs in about 4-5 months. I started feeling better because I knew my body better and after including a workout regimen, I felt strong and I loved the way that felt.

Fast forward through 3 pregnancy losses and carrying my daughter to full term, having a c-section, and still having PCOS, my body looks and seemingly acts a lot different now. I’ve gained weight again and I don’t feel as strong as I used to. But I don’t hate myself.

I keep falling in love with myself and hopefully, after some encouragement, you’ll take the journey to falling in love with you too.

Whether I feel strong or not; whether I have extra weight or not, it is this same body that experienced both of these states and my body is still incredible. My body produced a whole person after 5 years of infertility. I can walk, see, hug, and experience life in this body. I participate in meaningful work in this body. I hug, squeeze, kiss, high-five, fist bump, explosion, hand shake, nosey-nose, three kiss, and see you in the morning (in that order) with my daughter in this body. I see my partner marvel and adore me in this body. I put on my favorite sweater and skirt suit, slip on my adidas and door knockers, go to the mirror and “damn, I look good” in this body.

This body has been very good to me. Because of this, my commitment to this body of mine is to nourish it, drink water, move it in ways that feel good to me, and say wonderful and lovely words to it.

Body positivity is not a conversation about health. It is a conversation of a person not being more or less valuable because of the amount of fat they may or may not have. And as some of us hopefully know, being skinny is not indicative of health. My hope is that we can all encourage each other to do good things to and with our bodies because we love and appreciate our ability to be embodied beings, rather than trying to make ourselves lose weight out of misplaced value and self-loathing.

Let’s be kinder to ourselves this year, mmkay?