What does healthy look like?

Let me begin this post with a little back story.

I have ALWAYS hated my body. I have absolutely no memory of ever loving or even liking my body. I remember being chunky in elementary school and wishing I looked like other girls. I remember comparing myself to my two best friends in middle school and joking about how “fat” we were. I remember crying in my room alone in high school because I wasn’t skinny like the popular girls. Here’s the kicker though, I was never actually overweight.

Now I am freshly out of college, working my first real job and guess what. I STILL hate my body. Only, now I actually am overweight.

The problem isn’t my weight though. It’s my mindset. It’s always been my mindset. Surrounded by magazine covers, and TV specials, and Instagram posts of impossible standards like Kylie Jenner and Gigi Hadid, I have always felt like I cannot possibly amount to beautiful. How can I, with my squishy tummy and stretch marks, be beautiful like these women? And that is where the problem lies. Beauty is not one size. It is not one color, it is not one gender, it is not one person over another. Beauty truly does not discriminate. It’s we who do that.

It takes a lot to retrain a brain that has been hellbent on hating its body for a whole lifetime, but I sure can try. It is realizing that MY healthy might not be a size 2 with lip injections and a fat ass. It is realizing that MY healthy will not look like my best friend’s. It is no longer comparing myself to and hating every beautiful woman that I pass. It is celebrating differences in body type, despite what society has trained me to do my entire life.

So, today I strive to be healthy. I will work harder to love the body I have, while putting good things into it. I will work hard to reach my goals and I will do what makes me happy. If that results in weight loss, great. If it results in me finally being happy, even better.