You ARE enough!

The way you view beauty on the inside will be how you see yourself in the mirror. I use to think I was not enough and when I would look in the mirror all I saw was an ugly, fat, sad girl staring straight back at me. It was emotionally draining and horrible. I valued the world’s standard of beauty over my own self-worth. 

Everywhere we look, we are subconsciously surrounded by a certain standard of beauty. We all know the models we see in the magazines are photoshopped to an unattainable standard … an unrealistic standard even the models themselves can’t reach! Okay, so we know we can’t realistically attain the photoshopped ‘holy grail’ of beauty, so instead we need to aim to be as close as possible to it. I’m not saying don’t strive to better yourself, not at all … I’m just pointing out that we’re told the journey there isn’t a happy one. Its like the Pilgrims Progress, sad, straining, stressful and miserable. Health magazines tell us this all the time, with before & afters. The before pictures more often than not look sad and depressing, while the afters are brighter, smiley and happy. It’s not a bad thing if you need to lose weight (or gain weight) to be healthier … but why does the ‘before’ journey have to expressed as being sad and depressing. It doesn’t make sense to me! 

So why do a lot us believe this message and subject ourselves to it? 

Just before I separated from my husband, I started to change the material I fed myself. I’m an avid Pinterest fan and spend way to much time looking at stuff. I realised I was feeding myself this ideal standard of beauty, and that I had to be miserable if I didn’t get as close as possible to it. I hated it and stopped ‘Pinteresting’ for some time. It was during this time I begun to wonder if there was material out there that met me on my journey that was beautiful … and there was! 

I don’t think we can escape from this message of ‘beauty’, but I know we can retrain our minds to see a new type of beauty. We just have to stop sitting in front of the tv, magazines or pinterest and feeding on material/idealistic crap and go look for it ourselves. If you’re constantly comparing your body to photoshopped images, you’re going to feel like you aren’t enough. I was the worst at sabotaging my self-image because I would scroll through pinterest and try inspire myself to lose weight. IT NEVER WORKED! By the end of a pinterest sesh I would feel like I was never enough. Don’t do that to yourself, please! 

By putting the ‘ideal body’ on a pedestal you are diminishing your own self worth. You are saying to yourself you are not worthy the way you are now and the journey you are on is miserable … I am not saying don’t aim high. I am saying where you are on your journey, at this very moment, you are enough! When you feel like crap the last thing you want to do is eat a salad and hit the treadmill. If you view your self worth as being of value then you will become motivated for change because you are worth it. 

YOU ARE ENOUGH!