Society today puts pressure on people to look a certain way. As a woman, I feel this pressure as if I were swimming at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
The Hollywood Angelina's of the world only make these matters worse. These morbidly thin women create unrealistic expectations of what women should look like.
During my teen years I battled with demons named anorexia and bulimia. I was supposed to be cheerleader, honor student-perfect. At five feet tall, 98 pounds wasn't cutting it for me. The starving, skeletal images in my high school history unit created envy in my fractured mind.
On a visit home from college, my brother gasped as a spectre of my former-self stepped off the plane.
I looked like bones, he said.
I continued to struggle with the person I saw in the mirror well into my twenties. Not settling into myself until well after meeting my husband. He made me feel comfortable with me. With him I not only found a new love of my self but also of cooking. Food became life-sustaining and enjoyable. Not the enemy I once thought it to be.
While pregnant with my first child I faced these negative voices again. I was battling between enjoying being part of creating the miracle of life inside me and the struggle of watching my weight climb. Despite the rational knowledge that this number did not matter, it was difficult to watch the scale.
Also difficult was hearing others comments. It's amazing what can spout from the mouth without use of the brain. How it can cut like a knife, to the core of insecurities.
Are you sure you're only having one?
Wow, youre so big!
I didn't know you could get any bigger, but you are!
I kept reassuring myself
they didn't mean what they said.
Reminding myself I was growing a life, creating a soul. Weight gain for the greater good.
My second pregnancy brought the same insecurities. Same negative voice telling me I wasn't good enough.
Honestly, I still struggle with drowning these nasty voices out. After giving birth to my second child and the weight doesn't just melt off.
I am aware of these demons and their existence around me. I see women and young girls everyday who are also battling these same demons. The media with its images of perfection tends to only feed these body image issues.
But I know there is a big difference between trying to losing weight and being healthy. A wise man shares these seeds of wisdom with me. There is a fine line between healthy and unhealthy weight loss.
Yet, so easily women cross this line.
Grown women resembling pre-adolescents, remind me of a younger, more troubled me.
Dying to be thin.
I still try to ignore the voices, the jealousy...
they are thinner than me
Then I hear a larger voice, God's voice...
but at what cost?
We are designed in His image.
Why would we want to destroy that?
He sacrificed and died giving His body for us.
Don't sacrifice that attaining a body to DIE for.
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NIV
