Every pregnant woman worries about weight gain. When I look back at my diary from the first time I was pregnant, the very first entry is a pregnancy meal plan I made for myself to ensure that I was getting what my body needed without taking in excessive calories.
I also remember staring at my beautiful, folic-acid-filled lunch and thinking, I don't want to eat any of this. I want gummy worms.
Every pregnant woman worries about weight gain because every woman worries about weight gain. We've all stepped on a scale and cringed. We've all been told since birth that our appearances give us value.
I'm generalizing, of course. This is not every woman's struggle. Some women are not worried at all about becoming fat. Some women struggle to gain weight before and during pregnancy and to maintain a healthy weight while nursing. You may be tempted to say, I wish that was my problem! But please stop and recognize that being chronically underweight is just as difficult as being obese. The point is, we all struggle.
This post is about how I overcame my own personal weight struggle. This post is not about some magical diet I discovered or the best fat-burning exercises. This post is about conquering self-hate.
The only logical place to start is the beginning: I was in the third grade when I began to think of myself as a chubby kid. My mom and grandma were the ones who made it painfully obvious to me. They weren't trying to be cruel. My grandma doesn't think that calling someone fat is an insult. "It's just a fact," she says.
Chubby became part of my identity, part of how I viewed myself. I weighed 135 lbs all through high school. This is a perfectly healthy weight for my height, but no one had ever told me that healthy weight ranges vary from person to person. I thought a girl ought to weigh less than 125 lbs. A girl ought to be dainty. I wasn't particularly thin, so I continued to think of myself as chubby.
In my freshman year of college, I educated myself about these things. I learned to eat right, learned to love running and weight training. I spent one glorious summer wearing sundresses and weighing 128 lbs. My thighs never chafed!
Then classes got harder. Stress eating happened. I got up to 140 lbs. I felt bad about this, but not awful. I knew 140 was the top of my healthy weight range. I believed I could get back down once I wasn't so stressed.
But then I had a miscarriage. It was a very dark time. I gained 20 lbs in a matter of months.
So when I got pregnant with my daughter, I was in the 160s. I tracked my weight for a while, promising myself that I wouldn't let it get out of control. But my pregnant appetite was insatiable. I ate constantly. When the scale got above 200, I stopped looking.
After giving birth, I weighed 190 lbs. I'm nursing, I told myself, so the weight will just fall off. I had seen this happen for my sister-in-law who had given birth 6 months before I had. She was now thinner than she ever had been! Breastfeeding would make me thin, too!
But it didn't. When my daughter's first birthday arrived, I was still 190, and I was drowning in self-loathing.
It infected every area of my life, and it was particularly harmful to my marriage. I begged my husband to help me. I don't know what I expected him to do. Snap his fingers and make me thin? Become my personal trainer? His approach was to counteract my negativity with compliments. He told me I was beautiful every day, and every day I hurt him when I scoffed in response.
It's impossible to lose weight when you hate yourself. Every weight loss effort is really a punishment you're inflicting on yourself for not already being thin. I starved myself out of hate and then gorged myself out of pity. I couldn't approach weight loss as an attempt to be healthy, because I didn't feel I deserved good health. I sabotaged myself at every turn.
Finally I reached out to my mom. "I hate myself," I told her. "I'm sorry," she said, "that's my fault." She was right. All my life she had equated fat with ugly and used both words to describe herself. So when I looked in the mirror and saw the shape of my mother's body, all I could think was 'fat and ugly'.
I decided to pretend that I loved myself. Fake it 'till you make it, right? When I had negative thoughts, I counteracted them. I said to myself, I'm beautiful, and I love myself.
I had some success with this approach. I went to a birthday party for my friend and pretended to be my old, confident self. I talked to strangers and danced and had more fun than I had had in years.
I struggled on that way for a few months, pretending I loved myself. Practicing cognitive restructuring. Some days were good, and some days were difficult. Then one day I had an epiphany.
I was just driving to the beach, thinking about motherhood, and I realized that I never ever not once in my entire life looked at my mom and thought she was ugly. And no one ever looks at me and thinks it either.
When I got home, I told my mom what I had figured out. Tears formed in her eyes, and she said, "I've never thought my mom was ugly!"
My sweet dad is a children's minister at church. He's always asking what he can do to help young girls have good self-esteem. I'm sorry to say, I don't think there's much he can do. We learn our insecurities from our mothers.
It's not often that a problem is truly solved by an epiphany. Usually realizations require some sort of action afterward. But I have felt beautiful every single day since then. I felt beautiful all through my twin pregnancy wherein I gained thirty pounds. I feel beautiful after the c-section with all my loose skin.
I feel beautiful because I am beautiful. I've conquered my self-hate. I hope my story helps you conquer your self-hate, too.
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