One of the most amazing people I have met has a blog. She blogs about food, her family, and the things in her past pushing her in the present. There are a few things in her last blog that resonated with me that I wouldn't mind sharing and molding them into how they affect my life.
The blog started on how her mother went to the Y and she never really watched her mother work out because ultimately she was ashamed to look at her mother’s body. This is when I started to feel guilty and the welling of tears started to come over me. Why? Because this was me. I did the same thing when my mom had worked so hard in the early nineties to lose 100 lbs. She still had loose skin, that didn't seem to bother her as much as,taking guilt from things that had happened when she was a teen, losing her 4 year old sister at the age of 8, losing her house shortly after a divorce, her two fathers (another story) dying and ultimately losing contact with her sister (adopted) and mother, oh and in the mix she lost her biological mother also. She had two children left. She had gained all of her weight back and then some. Today, I still see her yo-yo dieting. She tries this, tries that and nothing seems to work. I was too young to remember when she was really heavy. I remember when she was a physical fitness instructor, loving life and helping those who were struggling, even though she wasn't stick thin and had bulging muscles. That is my mom. The happy mom. The mom that was out playing on the play ground with her daycare kids, running around with her kids. Now I just glaze over the fact that she is heavy again. Terrible, I know. Continuing through the blog, J talked about how she had the same body as her mother. Every girl does. This is finding to be 75% true in my case. I am about 2 inches taller than my mom, My legs are longer and I have a little broader stature. Everything else however is the same. We have the same facial features, the same hands, the same feet, and yet the same struggle with food. I have always been an emotional eater, just like my mom. Her emotional eating exceeded her to the whole box where I wouldn't eat the whole box but would buy enough other stuff where I could have just enough of ALL of my favorite things =a box of whatever she was having. I ate when I was happy (had a pizza after my C-section birthing my daughter, dinner when I got married, and every family function). I ate when I was sad (divorce, selling my prized horse, animals dying, my divorce, deaths of family and friends, loss of boyfriends, etc.) and I just ate (I thought I was hungry, social functions, etc.). So I ate. I was eating myself to look like my mom. The final moment when I woke and realized (and maybe I did realize but didn't understand it completely) that my daughter is in the same curvature I am and looks just like me when J pointed out that she too has a daughter that is just like her. Her daughter has her body. My daughter has my body. My daughter is built on point, just like me. There is barely anything that she gets from her father. She also has drive, determination and a love for salad (something I had to develop an acquired taste for). She keeps me active and yet, the junk food still is there sometimes. I am a lot better at not cooking out of box from what our poor family was used to BUT it is still a struggle to not inflict the things that were bred into me that I continually fight against, to her. She deserves more than that. She deserves a mom that she doesn't have to be ashamed of. She also deserves to be a daughter that doesn't sit at home and worry if her mom is going to be dead when she shows up to her house, and wonders when her mom is going to really start taking care of herself. I am not saying that I am ashamed of my mom. I love my mom. I love the valuable lessons that she has taught me in my life and most importantly above everything(something she was never taught), she taught me how to love myself enough to push myself to get what I want, to never give up, and keep fighting. I am saying that I am scared for my mom in a way a daughter should never be scared. I have fallen off and on the diet track, the fitness track throughout my life. I remember her telling me that she would buy me these cool shoes if I got up and went with her at 4:00 am to the gym, that lasted about 6 weeks, and then I just had a new pair of shoes. But, i also remember her telling me how beautiful I was no matter what. How I was so athletic no matter my size. Even though I never really believed her, she was changing something in her daughter that her mom never told her. My mom would always receive the "your would be so pretty IF". J’s blog really struck me, it really hammered home the point that, loving our body and building a strong bloodlines of loving ourselves and creating enough passion in ourselves to be healthy is much more important than looking, weighing, and being a number. Life is so much more than that. LOVE yourself enough that you want to be healthy. LOVE yourself enough that you want to be STRONG. BE strong enough to love yourself.
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