body image

What’s In My Newsfeed?

/ Bethany / 5 Comments

Earlier this year, I came upon a blog post titled “How to Break Your Body Shaming Habit.” It was since removed from the website that posted it, but I managed to find an excerpt. The blog post promised that there was something someone did, in just 15 minutes, that helped her end her body shaming habit. Not 15 minutes every day. 15 minutes, PERIOD.

She changed whom she followed on Instagram.

“I realized I was looking at certain women in my Instagram feed and feeling bad about my body,” she says. “So I unfollowed them and followed more women who were beautiful, but in a wider variety of shapes, sizes and colors. I just added more variety to the images I was seeing every day when I scrolled through my phone.”

After a few weeks, she also started following women who were doing things with their bodies that she wanted to do. Strong things. So she followed Olympic weight lifters. Javelin throwers. Women doing handstands and flipping logs.

“I was enjoying following them so much that the ‘fitspiration’ crap on my Pinterest board started looking stupid. Those women were just skinny and sweaty. So I started unfollowing them, and my Pinterest board started to look like my Instagram feed. And I was feeling even better about myself.””

I love this advice. I also did this early last year, and I highly recommend it. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my favorite groups, people, and pages I follow on Facebook. I’m not on Instagram, but many of these pages have Instagram counterparts as well.

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Dear Parents Who Struggle With Self-Care

/ Bethany / 4 Comments

Dear Parents Who Struggle With Self-Care:

Are you feeling guilty about not taking better care of yourself (whatever that means to YOU)? Maybe you took great care of yourself (whatever that means to YOU) before you had kids, but now you feel pretty far off course?

I get it! The other day I caught myself thinking  “It is crazy how far off course I was from living a lifestyle conducive to self-care.” If you knew me when I was in my 20s, you would probably say the same thing. I was the most health-fanatical person of anyone I knew! Now, I’ve been working on habits that I would have considered pretty basic back then.  I would have thought that these habits were not nearly enough to maintain my health.

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Role Models Part 3: Self-talk and Self-Listening

/ Bethany / 2 Comments

This is the third post in a series about role models. (You can read the first post and the second post too).

One of the reasons I chose habit-based goals instead of outcome based goals is that I wanted to keep myself open to whatever outcomes may come as a result of adopting healthier habits. I did not want to attempt to force certain outcomes on myself, which I ultimately could not control anyway.

One of the really nice outcomes I’ve been experiencing as a result of walking away from weight loss pressure is getting a lot more practice speaking to myself kindly – the way I strive to speak to (and listen to!) my own kiddo. I want to care for my kiddo as best I can, and that includes a sense of a emotional safety. Why would I want to do anything different for myself?

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Body Image Progress

/ Bethany / 8 Comments

I wanted to share some body positive successes I have had in the last week. I don’t always have “good body image days” (said in the same spirit as “good hair days”). My body positive attitude development has been an exercise in patience, just like my strength development.  But I had two experiences last week that showed me that I am making progress in this area, even if every day is not great.

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