Emotional Support Sisters

I have an uncle whose standard greeting is “Hello Beautiful!”. I love it. He genuinely means it because he understands thr idea that you are beautiful because you are you and it comes across whenever he greets me.

With that I have had a lot of thoughts about beauty, body image, and self worth lately that I’d like to share.

I recently finished a 4 month stint of a Keto Diet. It was prescribed to me to help with migraines and balance my blood sugar. A side effect of being in ketosis is that it is really easy to lose weight, which I have- roughly 30lbs. I get a lot of comments and congratulations on the weight loss, which is fine, but a part of me really struggles with it because I don’t want my girls, who sometimes have concerns about their body shape, to think that they have to lose weight and be skinny to be beautiful. They are beautiful just the way they are.

This has led me to a lot of thinking about body image and individual worth. The conclusion I have come to is that just being you is what makes you worthy. You do not have to look a certain way or do certain things. Just being a human, created by God, is enough. You are divine and worthy of infinite love.

Now I’ll take you on my thought journey to hopefully help you know that you are worthy.

Media, especially social media, touts the perfect body. What that body is has changed over the years.  When I was a teenager it was the super duper itty bitty thin that was achieved either through genetics or anerexia. I have noticed a shift in the last few years towards strong and fit and focusing on what your body can do vs what it looks like. I think this shift is a shift in the right direction, but doesn’t go far enough. I have a few examples in my life that illustrate this.

In order to have the strong fit look, consistent exercise is required. I like exercising. I like exercising consistently, but I have had to reframe  my perspective of what consistent looks like with chronic illness.

A few years ago I tried weight training with a personal trainer. I LOVED it.  I loved getting stronger, and tracking my progress.  I loved feeling the results. What I didn’t like was I had 4 workouts a week I was supposed to get in. I also hadn’t learned as much about hypermobility as I have now. I worked up to heavy lifting too fast. After about 6 months I started loving it less.  I started having joint and fatigue issues. I finally stopped altogether because it was causing more problems than it was fixing.

I have since learned a lot about exercising with chronic fatigue/chronic illness. The first being that my consistent doesn’t look very consistent. One week I might get 3 workouts in.  The next week might be none. I have to budget my energy and listen to my body’s needs. Some days I have to clean the house, which leaves no energy for the workout. Other days I might not have quite as much energy as I’d like to workout, but the only thing that makes the pain go away is moving, so I move. And sometimes I have a unicorn day where I have the energy to do everything. While other days laying in bed and reading a book is all I can do. All of those scenarios are me being my best.


Another aspect of this is weight and fat. This is also very nuanced. I look at weight loss/gain as a side effect or symptom of things your body is doing. A good example of this is fixing my blood sugar. I had severe undiagnosed hypoglycemia. So when my blood sugar dropped I would be frantically starving and eat 2,000 plus calories in an hour or 2 to feel better. That caused weight gain. But it wasn’t a self control  issue or an addiction or anything like that. It was quite literally my body trying to keep itself from going into a coma. Once we discovered the hypoglycemia, I was prescribed a keto diet. After a week on that my blood sugar started to stabalize and I felt so much better.  I also learned to  plan meals and eat 6-8 small meals everyday. The side effect.of fixing my blood sugar was weight loss. If you are overweight are you at risk for other issues? Yes, but that doesn’t mean you have those issues. People can also have issues associated with being overweight at healthy weights. Is there a huge stigma with being overweight? Most definitely. I was fortunate enough to grow up without social media and with a mom who was very body Image positive and didn’t talk about weight or being fat. We talked about listening to our bodies and feeding it good stuff to help it run efficiently. I had geat body image, even though by 7th grade I was 160 lbs and only 5ft tall. Since then my weight has yo-yoed from 135lbs to 196lbs (all of these are non pregnancy weights). I am currently hovering at 138, and still feel like me. Sometimes I look at pictures of my current self and am startled because I look so different. An irony actually is that my squishy jiggly mom tummy is even squishier and jigglier now than it was 6 months ago when I weighed 185 because there isn’t anything keeping the skin inflated. I still feel like me though. Are there things, like climbing trees, that are easier at a lower weight? Yes. Is it frustrating trying to keep a wardrobe stocked with that big of fluctuations? Also, yes. I am also hopeful now that I have figured out my crazy hunger cues are actually hypoglycemia, that my weight will stabilize a bit and I won’t have to have such a wide range of clothes on hand. Even with all of the weight fluctuations I’ve experienced I’ve always been me. Weight doesn’t change who you are.

Sometimes I hear that instead of focusing on the looks of a body, we should focus on what our body can do. That works when your body works, but what about when your body betrays you? What if you want to have kids, but can’t? What if you used to love hiking, but can’t? Focusing our self worth on being able to do really sucks when you can no longer do. So once again, just being you makes you worthy.


Just in case you didn’t get the message earlier. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL JUST THE WAY YOU ARE!

Missy