FAT

If you’re anything like me, maybe your New Years Resolution list looked something like this:

1. Stop watching Netflix on my e-reader and read my e-reader. (Darn you, Netflix app-my yearly BOOK IT! points dropped drastically from 3 to 1.5, guess who’s NOT getting a personal pan pizza for free….AGAIN. Dang.)

2. Stop rewarding my daughters’ bad behavior with my iPhone.

3. Stop checking Facebook all day long…obsessively…I mean, really?

4. Stop sleeping in my make-up.

5. Stop being fat.

Obviously, resolutions 1-3 would’ve been pretty Marty McFly before 2007, when life got super weird and technological and we started getting obsessed with it and also disgusted at ourselves for said obsession.  Resolution 4 is gross, I know, but I’m lazy, sue me. But number 5, that baby has been around for generations and generations. And it stays on everyone’s lists, perhaps masked by shinier language like “be healthier,” “eat less processed foods,” or “join a gym.”

Confession. I have spent the better part of my life believing myself to be fat.

As I type this post, I’m ok with the my weight, for the first time since my wedding almost 7 years ago. Other than now, there was one, (just one) other time I felt this way and that was when a bad breakup taught me why the phrase “gut wrenching” exists.

The rest of the time, I’ve been “fat.” And let me lay something out there…whether you are or aren’t, literally fat, most of us have felt this way… a lot.  Maybe it was the doctor in the 8th grade who told my mom I needed to lose weight (I didn’t) right in front of my face. Maybe it was the waifs that graced TV royalty in the 1990’s. Maybe it was the endless images of airbrushed “beauties” on magazine in the grocery stores. Maybe it was workout videos promising a certain result with just 20 minutes a day of sweat.

But whatever it was…that word, fat, was and is an ever-present and disgusting part of my vocabulary. It is more offensive and demeaning than any other word I could say. And it has to stop. We’ve all been wounded from growing up in a culture obsessed with weight. Some of our wounds have become scars…still there, but healed. Some are open and bleeding and mother, it’s time to heal. It’s time to take this word away. It’s time to bury it and start afresh.

Why?

For me, because of this little face…

And this one, too…

I recently saw this ad in which little kids in Thailand asked adults for a light for their cigarettes. The response was as you’d imagine; grownups were appalled at children smoking. Oh the irony.

Mothers, friends, beautiful sisters-what will you do when your daughter tells you she thinks she is fat? What will you do when you hear those heartbreaking words spill out of her mouth? What will you say when you look at her perfect little face that is attached to her child body? Will you weep? Will you lament the culture you’ve born her into? This culture that tells us we are nothing if we aren’t thin…if our mid sections spill over a little, we are undesirable.

How do you think that precious baby feels when she hears you utter such blasphemy against yourself?

How can we raise little girls who are comfortable in their skin if we are not?

Mothers, we must start to love ourselves, in the bodies we’ve been given.

We might not ever be able to change our culture, but we can change the culture in our own homes.

It starts today.

How can you change the culture in your home?