Dear friend,I cannot tell you how many Mondays I have spent starting over. Monday always seemed to hold so much promise. It was going to be the day I finally got serious again. I would eat better, exercise consistently, drink more water, and stop doing all the things I had decided were keeping me from becoming the person I wanted to be. Sometimes I made it through Monday feeling hopeful and determined. Sometimes that determination lasted for weeks. And sometimes, if I am being truthful, the...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Dear friend,For a long time, I confused taking care of myself with correcting myself. If I was unhappy with my body, the answer always seemed to be more rules, more restriction, more exercise, more discipline. I would decide what I was going to stop eating, how much I was going to exercise, or what I needed to change about myself. And underneath all those plans was often a quiet message I did not recognize at the time: You have let yourself get here, and now you need to fix it.The strange...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Dear friend,I have been thinking lately about how easily we can become accustomed to speaking harshly to ourselves. We can do it so often that eventually we barely even notice it anymore. We look in the mirror and immediately find something wrong. We get dressed and criticize the way our clothes fit. We eat something we had promised ourselves we would not eat, and before we have even finished it, the words start. Why did you do that? Why can’t you just get it together? You know better than...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Dear friend, For a long time, I think I believed that if I was ever really going to change my body, I first had to become unhappy enough with it. I needed to look in the mirror and notice everything I wanted to change. I needed to remember how uncomfortable I felt in certain clothes, think about how much better I used to look, or compare myself to some version of myself I thought I should be. Somewhere along the way, I learned to believe that feeling bad about myself was useful. If I could...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
For much of my life, caring for my body has been complicated. I started thinking about my weight and my body when I was very young, and somewhere along the way I began to believe that caring for myself meant constantly trying to change myself. There was always something I needed to fix, a new plan I needed to start, weight I needed to lose, or a version of myself I thought I needed to become. I have started over more times than I can count. I have promised myself that Monday would be...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read