Lauren @ Lot 48 {Guest Post}

hello never the same spice twice readers!! i am lauren and i blog over at lot 48!! i blog about really anything that pops into my head.  you won’t find diy posts, fashion or beauty posts and you will rarely find recipes.  i like to blog about my life, entertainment and really just anything that is fun! 

but today i want to talk about loving your body.  loving yourself.  this is something that i greatly struggle with and i know there are a lot of women out there that struggle with it too, which is why i want to talk about it.  i want to help, i want to show you that you are not alone and that you ARE in fact beautiful and worthwhile.

year before last, before i got engaged, i was at the heaviest i have ever been.  i was disgusted with myself.  i hated myself.  i felt worthless, disgusting and gross all the time.  i had rolls of fat over every pair of pants i wore and i hated getting dressed.  i was so fed up with how i looked that i joined weight watchers and lost 16 pounds and got back to my “normal” self again.  

the thing with losing weight is you get really tired of sticking to such a strict diet.  my self esteem was so low and i was so convinced i was an ugly cow that if i went to the gym to workout and it was closed, i had a huge fit.  i had to work out 6 days a week!! i had to! i had a wedding dress to fit into!! i was NOT going to allow myself to look fat in my wedding pictures.  i was completely obsessed with my weight and when you do weight watchers, you weigh yourself once a week.  that day of the week when i weighed myself determined my happiness.  if i hadn’t dropped, i was in a horrid mood and was nearly suicidal i was so obsessed with losing weight.  even if the scale was the same, i would get furious and feel worthless.  once i started to really move along with losing weight, people started complementing me on how thinner i looked and people told me they could particularly see it in my face.  which is true, my face and belly and thighs is where the fat was.  it felt so good to hear people compliment me and notice that i had lost weight and worked so hard.  my self worth was completely dependent on what the scale said.

i have been married for 11 months and now weigh my “goal weight” that i was never able to achieve when i was losing weight.  i am at my goal weight, and i still think i am fat.  during the time of losing those 16 pounds, i was seeing a therapist for my self esteem, given how low it was.  he told me something that i think about often and that you should think about too: “it doesn’t matter if you lose every single pound of body fat and become skin and bone.  you will still find something wrong with you.  even if you lose it all, you will still find something wrong with you.  the issue isn’t losing weight, the issue is losing who you are, believing that you are worthwhile, despite what the scale says and that you deserve good things and to be loved.  you can always find something wrong with yourself.  you need to change the way you look at yourself.”  

i think about that often, and particularly now, i think it is so true.  i am at my goal weight and i still find things wrong with me.  my pants don’t fit anymore.  it doesn’t make any sense because i am at my goal weight but they are too tight!! the only thing i can think of is that i put them in the dryer too many times and they shrunk.  because it doesn’t make sense that i am skinnier than when i bought the pants, but they don’t fit.  

i want to love myself, i want to be nice to myself, i don’t want the scale to determine my happiness and feelings of self worth.  so every morning i say to myself “you are beautiful, you are skinny, you are worthwhile, you deserve good things.”  i am so paranoid when i post pictures that i look fat, but is all in my head!! i am beautiful!! i am worthwhile!! i deserve good things!! i am not fat!! my pants shrunk, time to buy new ones, who cares, it’s fine! it’s okay! 

and so what if you are bigger?  so what if you are overweight?  so what?  why should that matter?  answer:  it shouldn’t.  instead of making new year’s resolutions to lose weight, make a resolution to love yourself regardless.  to believe that you are beautiful regardless.  work on it with me!! pop by the blog and say hi as we work on loving ourselves together!