I have spent most if not all of my life hating my body. I would look in the mirror and examine with such hatred and disgust. My thighs touch and jiggle and are speckled with cellulite. My stomach is soft and round and striped with stretch marks. My breasts sag and are bigger then all of my friends (combined). My face is too round and my nose is a bit crooked and one eye is just a touch bigger then the other. I could list everything I hate about my body in a list that would probably be a mile long. I once had a therapist ask me what I liked about my self physically it took me a good two minuets to find one thing. the color of my eyes. All of the things that I used to hate (and to be honest still do sometimes) we all things that society had deemed ugly and unworthy of love. There weren’t girls who looked like me in magazines or movies and on the off chance there was a girl who did look like me she wasn’t the love interest. She was the funny best friend or the weird girl that got bullied. Even in the books I read the main character was always described as slim, willowy, small, slender. Words that I don’t think anybody would ever use to describe me. Even in my own home my father would make comments on what I was eating and that I should take better care of myself. Now I can confidently say, on most days, that I am hot. Like I am an attractive person with curves for days. I love every cellulite dimple and stretch mark on my body because they are apart of me, plus I have a pretty kick ass personality to boot.

Learning to love my body has been a very long and very difficult journey. It doesn’t just happen over night and it is something I worked really hard for. I was about 18/19 years old when I realized that I was just exhausted from hating myself. I mean lets face it hating yourself and being cruel to yourself for so long is pretty exhausting. At first I would just fake the confidence but slowly little by little I actually became more confident in how I looked and felt in my own skin. Affirmations also really help, although they do feel a bit funny to begin with. Its on odd feeling to look yourself, or more accurately your reflection, in the eye and say things like “You’re beautiful” or “I love you” at first but they really do help. Yes my thighs touch and my stomach looks more like Winnie the Pooh’s then Jennifer Lawrence, but that just means that A) I can cook a mean meal, B) there is more of me to love, and C) I will never not finish your fries. In the wise words of Queen Latifah, “I ani’t no salad eating chick.”

Learning to the love the body you have doesn’t mean that you don’t want to change things or improve on things. I have been going to the gym fairly regularly and have been trying to eat better and for once its not so I can loose weight ans finally be beautiful, but its to feel better mood wise, to boost my energy and to look even hotter then I already do. Loving yourself even when you not completely happy with how you look is the first step to enacting change, because when you love something you treat it with kindness and respect. When I finally started loving my body I stopped the bad habits that kept me hating it, the over eating when I was feeling emotional, the pushing my self way past my limits when I did workout, skipping meals. I still have my days where I eat nothing but fast food or where I force myself to go way to hard at the gym or when I only eat one meal in a day, but overall the way I treat my body has vastly improved over the years and will continue to improve with time. Its okay to stand up and say that you are beautiful inside out and not only worth of love but deserving of it. Having a few extra pound doesn’t make you ugly. Having a crooked nose, arms that jiggle or thighs that touch doesn’t make you ugly. The things that we hate about ourselves doesn’t make us ugly. What makes a person ugly is a person who says that the things we hate make us unworthy or unimportant. A person who is ugly is someone who is mean and cruel to others and that has nothing to do with how someone looks and everything with their personality. I have know some of the prettiest people have the ugliest harts.