The selfie.

I was recently reading a blog by a woman, Skinny Emmie, who has an awesome post about defining "skinny" as "being happy in your own skin."

I think this is really important because every girl grows up wanting to be "skinny," and every woman has some notion of what she will do when she is finally "skinny."  I think we should take a page out of Emmie's book, and instead of defining "skinny" as a certain weight or jean size, we define it as finally accepting our body and loving it the way we should.

If we started doing all of the things NOW that we used to reserve as things we could only do when we reached our goal weight, we could instantly be living happier and more fulfilling lives.  Think about it: who says you can't love the pictures others take of you unless you have a "perfect" body?  You look magnificent in that bikini, cellulite and all!

So, in that spirit, I have decided to do something I have always wanted to do, as soon as I got "skinny": post an awesome poolside vacation photo online!  Don't you always envy those beautiful, "skinny" girls with their super cool poolside vacation pictures on Facebook?

Well fear not, bloggers! I have now officially proven once and for all that you can indeed post a bikini picture online AND include some unedited cellulite and tummy pooch, and the world will not crumble and fall!

I went back and forth a lot with this decision because it's one of those that makes me feel very vulnerable, but I decided to practice what I preach and accept my slightly inebriated Mexican bikini body, in public and on the internet, once and for all.  And you know what?  It feels pretty great. #

Keep kicking.

"Radical self love is a daily fight."  There are some days you'll wake up and feel great, there are some days where you'll look in the mirror and wish you never started down this path.  We live in a society that constantly reinforces the perception that you're never good enough.  You will spend the rest of your life fighting this.  It's going to be a long, hard war, and I can't promise you we'll win every battle.  But I can promise you this:

It will be worth it.  Be brave.  Join the revolution. #

Mind and body, body and mind.

Who here has watched The Biggest Loser?  Basically everyone, right?

In my opinion, weight loss shows are the bane of the body positive movement, and here's why: the entire show, be it one episode or a whole season, leads up to a single moment- the moment of the big revealing.  Everything is leading up to the moment where you finally get the "money" shot: the before and after.  Whether it's jumping through a blown-up picture of your old body, or coming down a staircase to stop at a cardboard cutout of your former self, there is always a big moment in which you see the end result, the final goal, the ultimate transformation.

Here's where I get really aggravated: whenever you see interviews of people who have lost a significant amount of weight, they reveal their "new" body and then talk about their "old" body as if it wasn't really part of them at all, as if it was a body they were trapped in and that this "new" and supposedly better body is the "real" them.

One of the many things I think Western culture has lost touch with over the years is the perception of body, mind and spirit as one entity.  In our Western mode of thinking, we look down at our body from our mind as if it's somehow separate. In many cases, women refer to their body as an "it," as if our body is simply an object, not part of us but simply where we live, as if our body is some dilapidated house we have to reside in for now, until we can do some major home improvement projects and really make it our home.

Here's what those people have missed: your body is absolutely intrinsic to who you are.  You are not better than your body and you are not worse than it.  You are part of it and it is part of you, and possibly THE most important step in ending body hatred is realizing this.  Those "weight loss success stories" may have lost a lot of weight and changed how their body looks, but it's still the same body, plus or minus a few fat cells or some muscle tissue. 

You do not live in your body.  You ARE your body.  For better or for worse, every freckle, scar, wrinkle and stretch mark is a postcard along the road of that little adventure we call life.  Why would you not want to embrace every little thing that makes you the person you are today? I hope that by learning to embrace your body as your home, you will also learn to show it a little more kindness and realize all the incredible things it does for you, without asking anything in return. #

Making a decision to change.

A lot of the time, we don't give enough credit to the fact that you can simply decide to change.  Yes, old habits die hard.  But all it takes is one moment of strength to decide you want to change.  As long as you can keep coming back to that moment, you can make it real and you can make it last.

When I was 18, I decided I wanted to be confident in my body, no matter how much I weighed.  I lost my way a little while ago, but last week I decided I wanted to uphold that change for good, and here I am.

What would you do, if you had that one moment of courage it takes to make a change? #

Fat and fit!

One of the comments I often get from men and "skinny" women is that, by pushing a "love your body at any size" mantra, I'm encouraging women to reject reasonable health goals and instead embrace a destructive lifestyle.

This is not at all the case, and I wish to make that clear at the outset.

Here's the deal: You are beautiful at any size.  Tall, short, fat, skinny, curvy, straight, whatever you are, you deserve all the love and respect in the world.  You also deserve to live a long and happy life, and that means you need to be healthy.

That being said, can you be healthy and fat?

A burgeoning amount of research says yes, at least to an extent.  According to such significant sources as Time Magazine and the New York Times, more and more researchers are discovering that as long as you're eating well, exercising regularly, and all of your vital statistics (blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose levels, etc.) are considered within healthy limits, there is no reason you should be stressing about carrying a few extra pounds.

When I was in high school, I weighed over 200 pounds, a significant amount on my 5'4" frame.  I was so out of shape that even walking long distances was difficult.  My feet hurt all the time from carrying so much excess weight.  I fueled my body with junk food and I felt horrible.

Then in my senior year I lost 30 pounds.  I started eating an organic, vegetarian diet based in whole foods.  I made exercise a priority.  I even trained for and completed a triathlon to prove to myself what my body could now achieve.

Then in college I went through a dark period (fueled by being surrounded by body-obsessed girls and eating disorders galore) where I dropped another 10 pounds by starving myself.  I stopped exercising and started eating junk foods again.  I again felt horrible and eventually gained the weight back due to binge eating.

The moral of the story is this: I was not healthy at my heaviest weight and I was not healthy at my lightest.  The place I found serenity was somewhere in between, at a place where I was (and still am) happy with the way my body feels and the way it serves me.  It is my goal to keep my body in a place that I can do whatever I want to: triathlons, backpacking journeys, bike trips, anything and everything that catches my eye.

Here's my point:  I'm considered overweight for my height, but I'm in much better shape than the vast majority of my "skinny" friends.  The BMI chart is not the be-all and end-all of health concerns, but neither should you throw caution to the wind and decide that loving your body is enough to keep it running.

So yes, long story short, I believe that, regardless of what you weigh or what size you wear, you deserve to love your body and recognize all the incredible things it allows you to do.  But in the same spirit of living your life to the fullest, I also believe that living an unhealthy lifestyle is a waste of all the incredible opportunities you've been given.  So while you enjoy never needing to diet again, keep in mind that a little more exercise and a little less junk food never hurt anybody.  In fact, it will probably lead to a much longer and more fulfilling life in the body that you are now learning to love! #

Pierce Brosnan likes your curves.

To supplement my "No Fat Chicks?" post:

I give you the beautiful and curvaceous Keely Shaye Smith, an NBC correspondent, out for a stroll with her incredibly sexy husband... wait for it... Pierce Brosnan!!

To all those beautiful ladies out there who are under the impression that you won't find any man, much less a quality one, if you don't lose the weight, I'm here to tell you that's absolutely not true.  In my own experience, once I decided that I am beautiful, amazing, and deserving of a just-as-amazing partner, I found that there was no guy in the world who was "out of my league," extra pounds and all.

Your weight has nothing to do with the kind of partner you can find or the kind of partner you deserve, just as it has nothing to do with how beautiful you are or how much you can achieve in your life.

As Justin Timberlake attests,

No fat chicks?

Why do you want to be skinny?  Odds are, it's because society has taught you that all these amazing things will happen once you're skinny: you'll run down the beach in technicolor slow motion and nothing will jiggle, you'll finally pull a size 2 off the rack and slip into it easily, women will envy you and your amazing skinny body, men will faun over you so ardently that they will argue over who will buy you your next drink...

Let's pause on that last one for a moment: one of the major reasons women want to lose weight is to attract a mate.  We have this misconception that the skinnier you are, the more attractive men will find you.  And you know what?  That's true.  For some men.

But here's a reality check: for the vast majority of men, your confidence and the way you carry yourself is a much more significant factor than your jean size when it comes to whether or not they find you attractive.

Beyond that, it turns out that men like a lot more meat on our bones than many of us would suspect.  A flurry of recent sociological studies coming out of U.S. universities in the past year or so have revealed that our ideal size for ourselves is a size 6.  Pretty small, right?

In contrast, amazingly enough, researchers found that the average man's ideal size for a woman is somewhere between a 10 and a 12.  Further, researchers found that men tend to seek out women with bodies that look "natural", bodies with some curve and jiggle to them.  You don't need to be carrying an entire Christmas season's worth of extra weight with you, but once you get down to skin and bones, many men simply aren't interested anymore.

Imagine that!  Men don't mind if we look like real people!  The average guy doesn't want to be sleeping with a Vogue model, he wants to be sleeping with you!  With one caveat: the confident, self-accepting you.

So how about, instead of killing yourself to drop the weight to find a mate, as it goes, you focus instead on accepting your body the way it is, and realize that the person who is right for you will love your body just the way it is.  Apparently men like us with a little extra something to grab; if that isn't a great reason to stop dieting, I don't know what is! #

Vintage charm.

"Men wouldn't look at me when I was skinny, but since I gained 10 pounds this new, easy way I have all the dates I want."

Just let this sink in for a moment.

And then realize, please, once and for all, that society is a fickle, fickle friend.  Society's definition of what is "beautiful" is constantly changing, and it never has anything to do with reality.  You will never be tall enough, short enough, skinny enough, curvy enough, blond enough, brunette enough, have the right breasts, butt, thighs, abs, or legs for society.

And you know what?  That's okay.  Because unless you're a celebrity and it's your job to please society, you don't have to worry about it.

 As long as you're enough for you, you're enough.  Period.  And that is why this journey is so important for each and every one of us to take: once you realize that you are more than enough for yourself, you are enough for anybody else that matters. #

Learning to trust again.

I think one of the major reasons women refuse to stop dieting is that they don't trust themselves around food. When you've spent the majority of your life relying on dozens of rules and restrictions to regulate every aspect of every meal, simply eating "normally" often feels like stepping out into the great unknown.  Many of us can't even remember what simply eating for nourishment might consist of.

This is an interesting point to make in that, for all the time women will spend obsessing over calories, very little thought goes into actually listening to the body and using that as a gauge.  Diets have taught us to reject what our body is telling us, and instead focus on whatever diet plan we've chosen.  They have, in essence, drilled into us that whatever our body is telling us must be wrong.  You're still hungry?  Must mean the diet is working.  Feeling weak?  Your body is just adjusting to your new eating plan.  Lack of energy?  Think of how much you'll have when you've finally lost the weight!  No pain, no gain, right?

The problem with this approach is that your body is the product of thousands of years of evolution in which it learned exactly how to communicate to you what it needs and when.  That little voice telling you that you're hungry, or not, is the same voice our ancestors relied on, ancestors who had virtually none of the eating-related diseases that plague the current population.

It should go without saying, then, that one of the first and most important steps to quitting your diet is redeveloping a relationship with this voice.  As you become more acquainted with this voice and get better at distinguishing what it is trying to communicate to you, you will begin to trust yourself around food more and more. 

The key to reaching that point is restoring your trust in yourself and your body.  Dieting tells us that we cannot be trusted to be around food.  To overcome dieting, you must trust your body to tell you what it needs, and you must trust yourself to listen to your body and respond to it accordingly.  It is only through being conscious and honest about our eating behaviors that we can begin to reacquaint ourselves with our body and it's voice. #

Shed your weight problem here.

Are you too voluptuous for Vogue?  Too curvy for Cosmopolitan?  Too weighty for Women's Health?

Well guess what: the reason you THINK you're fat is because these pieces of trash have led you to believe it's true.

Want a real slice of reality?  50 years ago, the average model weighed only 8% less than the average American woman.  Now, it's almost 25%.  Let me play a numbers game with you to illustrate this: models weigh in around 110 pounds, and are airbrushed down to under 100.  We (normal women) weigh in much closer to 150.  Do you really want to spend the next 10 years trying to lose 50 pounds to look like a model?

Here's a new rule: magazines are no longer allowed to tell you whether or not you're beautiful.  You are the only person who can make that decision.  The fact that some horribly unhappy woman sitting in some far-off corporate office has decided that clothes hang better off of women who are paid to starve themselves is no excuse for you to hate your body.

So here's the deal.  Stop defining your beauty by models, stop trying to look like them, and get on with your life. #

But I'm still fat!

I think one of the major issues women have with this notion of consciously putting an end to dieting is the feeling that you haven't yet reached your goal weight, so you can't stop dieting.

I want to discuss this early on because I don't want anybody out there feeling like they can't participate in this journey with me right now, just as you are.

Here's the thing: learning to love and accept yourself is more important than any 5 pounds or 10 pounds or even 20 pounds could ever be.
 Let that sink in for a moment.

In fact, it's SO important that I'm going to say it again: taking the journey towards truly embracing yourself and your body at whatever weight you're at is absolutely THE most significant thing you could ever do for yourself.  You are going to benefit from this infinitely more than you ever would from any kind of weight loss.

I think this is really important to keep in mind because it's very difficult to let go of this daydream of how you will feel when you finally reach your goal weight.  Dieting has been drilled into us girls for so long that many of us believe we can't be truly happy, and we absolutely cannot give up, until we get to our goal weight.  But you know what?  Those aren't the rules. 

You deserve to be happy in your own skin, no matter how you think you look or what you weigh or what other people have told you. There is no right or wrong way to be beautiful, and it's time we start accepting the fact that we can be carrying a few extra pounds and also be beautiful and important and valuable at the same time.

So here's your challenge, bloggers: try to let go of your goal weight for a moment.  You don't even need to give it up completely, but you do need to put it aside for a bit and realize that embracing yourself, your body, and all your flaws TODAY is much more important than any number on a scale could ever be.  You are not defined by how much you weigh.

And you know what? If, in a month, you still feel the need to lose a few pounds, you can address it then.  Dieting isn't going anywhere, trust me!  But for now, give loving yourself a shot, and a fair shot at that.  I can almost guarantee that you won't regret it. #

Girls don't just simply decide to hate their bodies.

Ladies!  Please remember...

You are the product of generations' worth of women being devalued, depreciated, belittled and trivialized because they don't live up to the standards of beauty that are set out for them.

Just keep in mind, these standards of beauty have changed throughout every decade... fat, skinny, tall, short, straight, curvy: none of these define what you must be to be beautiful.  Who says you need to be any of these things to be beautiful and worthy of kindness and respect?

"Beautiful" should mean happy, and nothing else. #

Show me your emotions!

We all know the first day of a diet is significantly easier than the second day... or the third... or the fourth, etc.  That's why diets don't work in the first place!  Well I can now tell you with 100% certainty that it's exactly the same with this whole "love thyself" experiment, too.  With today came all the anxiety about not dieting, not counting calories in, not tracking calories burnt, but with none of the excitement about my new journey.  And let me tell you, it was not easy to keep that anxiety at bay.

However, I've made it through the day, sanity intact!  One of the things that came up for me today that I'd like to talk about for a moment is emotional eating.  One of the principles of the whole no-diet movement is to eat in response to your body, and nothing else.  Even your emotions.  That's a new one for me.  I'm used to using food as therapy, something I've been doing my entire life.  So when some pretty raw emotions boiled up to the surface today, my instinct was to grab some chocolate and send them back to the depths.  Instead of doing that, though, I just sat with that hunger for a moment and acknowledged consciously to myself that I was not in fact hungry but upset, and that there was a much more rational and healthy way to deal with my feelings than, well, swallowing them.

This was a really important moment for me, because one of the major reasons I've kept myself on diet after diet all of these years is that I know I have a tendency to binge eat whenever unpleasant emotions arise, and I also know that if I'm going to make this challenge successful, I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with my emotions in some other, more constructive way, and I know this is true for most of you guys too!  So whether it's petting your dog, taking a walk, or even simply tuning into your own breath for a moment, try to at least acknowledge to yourself that your desire to eat is motivated by something other than hunger.  If you keep coming back to this fact and trying to figure out what motivated the urge to snack/eat/binge, eventually you'll begin to address what you really need to deal with instead of masking it with food, or even worse, masking it with that body hatred you've been holding onto for so long.

I think an important point to make while addressing emotional eating, though, is that if you find yourself emotional eating, do NOT (and I really genuinely mean this) beat yourself up for it!  Accepting your body means accepting your bad habits, your coping methods, and everything else that comes along with them!  Berating yourself for emotional eating is JUST as bad as beating yourself up for not having stuck to your diet, or for not losing those 5 pounds you've been working on, or whatever your physical vice is!

With every war comes a bunch of smaller battles, and you know what?  You're not going to win all of them.  Sometimes you're going to make the choice to binge eat or emotional eat or just eat when you aren't really hungry because it looks delicious!  And here's the important part to keep in mind: there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!!  The relationship you've developed with your body and the food you put in it took years to develop, and learning how to restructure your relationship with food is going to take a little while too!  The most important thing here is that you just keep on trying to be conscious of what you're feeling and how that's influencing the choices you make, and you'll be on the road to success! #

The journey begins.

Every morning begins the same: you wake up and swear to yourself that today is, somehow, magically, going to be different.  You're going to be "good."  You're going to make the most of your workout.  You're going to pass up sweets and genuinely enjoy your 1200 calories of raw veggies.  And you're going to keep this up until you reach that magic number on the scale, the one at which life can really begin.  The one at which you're somehow, magically, going to be happy.

And then at some point during the day, inevitably, it begins to unravel.  Maybe your favorite jeans are still a bit too snug. Maybe you can't run as far as you want to at the gym.  Maybe someone brought your favorite doughnuts to work.  Whatever the reason, a few bites here and sip there turn into much more than the fruit salad you were planning on eating for lunch.

By the end of the day, you've completely given up: it's clear you've been "bad" that day, and, of course, no progress can follow from bad behavior, right?  Might as well throw in the towel and eat whatever you want (and can) tonight, because tomorrow, surely this time, your diet really begins.

It is this vicious cycle of dieting and binging, self-loathing and body hatred that I have been caught up in once again.  Every girl has been through it at some point in her life, but the fact of the matter is, we don't have to live like this.  This is a choice, not a necessity.  There is no rule saying that you can't be happy unless you're skinny.  People weighing much more than you are living their lives to the fullest because they've realized that life doesn't start at your goal weight.  Life has been going on all around you for days, months, years, and all that energy you've been putting into hating yourself, into compulsive exercise, into depriving yourself, means you've been missing out on a whole lot of wonderful things.

Every day as women we are bombarded with rules for how we are expected to live: not currently dieting? Not good enough.  Don't look good in your bikini yet? Try harder.  The season's latest styles don't flatter you?  There must be something wrong with you, because there is clearly nothing amiss with a fashion industry based on a size 2 when the average American woman is (wait for it) a size 14.  It's no wonder we come home at the end of the day degraded and debased, still struggling to uphold an impossible ideal and killing ourselves, literally and figuratively, in the process.

But what if, instead of buying into the notion that you can't possibly be beautiful with what the scale read this morning, we decided to start a revolution?  What if every morning we woke up and looked in the mirror, and instead of slowly identifying every pocket of fat, every patch of cellulite, every scar and stretch mark and wrinkle, we simply looked ourselves in the eyes and reassured ourselves that we are unequivocally beautiful?  We are more beautiful and powerful than we could ever imagine.  We are dynamic, strong, fierce, resilient, determined, alluring, charming, delightful, sexy, elegant, gorgeous, magnificent women. Can you imagine what we could accomplish, us girls, if we stopped trying to live up to the standards society has defined for us and started trying to live up to our own potential?

I recently read about the very feminist suggestion of what some are calling a "diet detox:" a process of giving up our perpetual feeling of needing to diet (and thus binge) and instead replacing it with something much more reasonable and much more natural, simply eating consciously.  The fact that becoming conscious of our hunger and eating accordingly is even a moderate change just goes to show how out of touch women have become with their own bodies, replacing consciousness and acceptance with the unending and impossible pursuit for perfection.

It is with this realization that I have decided to start down a long journey of finally learning to love and accept myself, "extra 10 pounds" included, once and for all.  I start this blog with the intention of using the energy I usually direct into dieting, deprivation and self-hatred and instead channeling all of it (ALL of it) into realizing that I, just like all of you, am a wonderful human being deserving of love, respect, and acceptance, from everybody in the world but, most importantly, from myself.  I am starting this journey because I want to change my life, and I hope that my journey will inspire you to realize how truly amazing you really are.

It is time we women remember that our bodies, just the way they are, are beautiful and incredible and immeasurably more wonderful than we could ever imagine.  We can, without any change to our weight or our waist measurement, breathe in a cool sea breeze, walk down a beach and feel the sand squish between our toes, leap off a dock into the cold lake water below, run and jump and fly and do so many thousands of things that we take for granted. 

It is at Day 1, the beginning of my journey, that I propose we reclaim our bodies for ourselves once and for all, for our own pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction, and finally say "To Hell" with anyone who wants to bring us down. #