The "Perfect" Body

Dear Reader, I want you to take a look at this picture and tell me what you see. I rediscovered it recently, right before I gave birth when I was nesting like crazy and trying to get everything in order before the arrival of my son. It's a picture of me. In a bathing suit, on the beach. Now that I've given birth and am starting the long process of losing the baby weight, it seems like it'll be forever if at all that my stomach sees the light of day, let alone looking as good as it does there.

Here's why I am sharing this picture of me with you. No, it's not because I want to flaunt how hot I think I am to you. Rather, it's because before I became pregnant I thought I was fat. Well, I didn't think I was fat, exactly, but I didn't think I was thin...or thin enough. I didn't think I was fit enough either. I was softer in some places than I thought I ought to be, regardless of the fact that I could run thirteen miles without even thinking about it. I wasn't "cut" like I thought I should be, even though unlike movie stars I didn't have all day to work on my abs.

I rediscovered this pic about two weeks before I gave birth, when I was bigger than I have ever been, when I weighed more than I ever have. Of course, I was large with pregnancy, not from sitting on the couch eating cupcakes all day...although that concept has its appeal. It was only then, when I realized I'd soon be staring down the barrel of 30-odd pounds to get back to my pre-pregnancy size, that I realized what a great body I had.

Then I felt guilty--oh so guilty--about having beaten myself up all these years over NOTHING. My husband, even from the time when he was my boyfriend almost ten years ago, was always (and is always) telling me to stop being so hard on myself. He always thought I had a great body--why the heck didn't I listen to him?

I think it's partially because in this world you can never be too cut, too thin. You can never be too rich. You can never be too anything. Since there are no limits there is no end to what we'll do to ourselves to try to achieve an impossible ideal. It's a real Catch 22.

I look at this picture and I see something else. I see a happy gal having fun. I see a healthy woman enjoying her time. The body in this picture is without disease or any other ailment. I should have been THANKFUL for the body I was given instead of wishing it were somehow different, in my mind "better" all the time. There is nothing, not one thing, wrong with the body in this picture. I feel terrible it has taken me so very many years to realize this.

Actually, it wasn't until I was pregnant that thoughts of this nature could've entered my mind. No, it's not just because the grass is always greener, that I was so big the old me looked really good in comparison. For me, being pregnant brought out all the confidence I'd lacked all those years. Here I was using my body--the healthy one I'd taken care of with proper eating and good exercise--to grow another human being! Talk about a feat of nature. I stopped thinking of what I wanted to look like and started to realize just what an asset my body already was...and always had been.

So here's what I say. Yeah, I am dealing with my post-baby body every day, and yeah it's been tough already dealing with a stomach that looks currently like it's made out of pizza dough, but let's stop beating ourselves up already. Can we stop looking at our bodies in the mirror, or at pictures of ourselves, and seeing only what is wrong, what we'd like to change?

Yes, we should exercise and eat right and commit to fitness and health. We should strive to be fit and challenge ourselves physically to stay in good shape. But let's do it for the right reasons, like to maintain what we've been given, to take care of and celebrate what we have, not lament what we perceive as flaws. Are you with me here? I really hope so. This summer let's not worry so darned much about having "perfect" bodies (whatever those are). Instead, let's make a pact to realize we already have them.