(I originally wrote this article for The Beauty Message Challenge website, but wanted to share it all with you too. I hope you find some insights & inspiration from it. Enjoy!)
For the past couple of years I have had the chance to help women around the world with find peace with food and their body. They come to me out of frustration, stuck, and wanting to have a better relationship with food…and with themselves.
Many of the women I work with email me or tell me their stories and asking for help and guidance in trying to be and feel better around food and with their weight.
All of them at some point have dieted – most of them dieting for years. Going on and off diets so many times they’ve lost track. Or maybe they’ve tried every diet and self-help book out there, yet can’t lose those last 20 pounds. Or sometimes they’ve lost weight and fearful of gaining it all back.
They are trying to live a life with purpose, a life that goes beyond thinking about food all-day and worrying about their weight and body size.
During this process I’m constantly amazed by just how many women suffer from this. The food compulsions, self-hatred and body obsessions that keep many women trapped in a prison that for them has become intolerable.
And I know as I’ve done my time….I’ve served my sentence. I’ve lived through the destructive and damaging impact of being in this prison, so I am well aware of how easy it is to believe that your worth is tied to your weight or body size. And that your beauty is defined by the number on the bathroom scale, or the size of your jeans, or the number of calories consumed (or not consumed) in a day.
We keep waiting to get to some destination (a pants size, or weight), wondering when the heck we will ever arrive – and how many calories or pounds lost it will take to get there.
But I’m here to tell you to stop waiting until you reach some destination before you start living. Before you start looking at yourself as someone beautiful, no matter what your size or weight.
Because beauty doesn’t come once you arrive at some number.
Beauty is already there.
If you’re waiting until you reach that ‘perfect’ weight before you see that, you are really missing out on life. Don’t wait. Live now. See your beauty now. Because once you see your own beauty, it’s like wiping off glasses that were full of mud and dirt. You can start to see clearly.
Everything becomes more beautiful around you, including yourself.
Don’t wait until to reach some number to feel beautiful. Don’t let your weight hold you back from pursuing some dream. From living a life of passion, love and full of excitement.
If there’s one thing I know for sure it is this: No weight is perfect enough to do the unique job of creating happiness.
Because no matter what your pants size, or what the scale says, or the number of calories you consume in a day – none of it will ever make you happy. Or beautiful.
In my own journey I’ve learned that hating myself, my weight, and my body hindered me instead of helping me. For years I thought if I could get to that “perfect” weight, I would like myself and be happy. I’d finally be and feel beautiful.
Yet that perfect weight doesn’t exist. And when I look back at photos when I thought I was ‘fat’, I only to see pretty girl with a beautiful smile.
Luckily I got to a place inside myself where I stopped “weighting” – I stopped waiting to be at that perfect weight before I started living and feeling beautiful.
Because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have traveled to far-off places like Italy, Portugal, Greece and India. I wouldn’t have lived and worked on the beach in the Caribbean, or on the ski slopes of Colorado. I wouldn’t have lived in France where I ate amazing foods, met wonderful people, had awesome experiences, and met and married my husband.
And if I waited to reach that magic number — I wouldn’t be living the amazing life I’m living now helping hundreds, if not thousands, of women who want and need to have a better relationship with food and with their body. That makes me feel more beautiful than any dress size.
So go out and live, and be the beautiful woman you already are. Because your life, and your beauty, is happening now, not 10, 20, or 150 pounds from now.
Though at first it might be hard to believe, but your thoughts, feelings and attitudes toward food began a long time ago. Probably when you were a child.
Dinneen Diette is a certified health coach, intuitive eating counselor and healthy lifestyle expert. After overcoming her own personal struggles with food and weight, she has helped thousands of women around the globe become normal eaters and shed excess weight without dieting, guilt or giving up chocolate.