When Skinny isn’t What You Think

Skinny.

This is a tricky word. It’s not one of my favorite words either. To many it sparks thoughts of discontentment or discouragement. It has the potential be a  motivating word or an extremely exhausting one. We live in a world that suggests that we define our worth as women based on what we look like. Look at the covers of magazines, ads on TV and actors on TV or in movies. It appears to be all about how we look. It sets the expectations that we should look skinny, fit, toned and pretty much always picture perfect. It’s a standard we can’t meet and can’t expect to live up to. It’s exhausting and stressful and ultimately makes us feel worse about ourselves because of all of this empty striving.

“Sixty-nine percent of girls reported that magazine models influence their idea of the perfect body shape” according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa. The average fashion model is 5 feet 11 inches and weighs 117 pounds, which means that women ages 18-34 have a 1 percent chance of being as slim as a supermodel naturally. Digitally altering the pictures to make these women thinner than they already are creates an image of perfection that is not only unachievable but irresponsible. –Raw Beauty Talks

I want you to know that I want the best for each and everyone of you. Each of our best looks differently and each season of life has it’s own challenges. Your best does not necessarily mean rock hard abs (I have never seen an ab on myself before and don’t care if I ever do) and it doesn’t mean achieving an expectation of beauty that we can’t match. I want health for you! I want you to feel well, function well and heal well. I want you to have energy to live your purpose and follow God’s call on your life.

Health does not equal skinny. And skinny doesn’t guarantee health.

For me, my story has a lot to do with the word skinny.

Growing up I was “skinny” (see, it’s that word again). I was a tall and lanky girl with a big appetite, an active lifestyle and I couldn’t seem to find pants long enough to fit my long legs. I loved my body, I felt good and I did what I did my best to take care of it. My parents taught me what they knew about healthy eating and about taking care of the body that God gave you. Let’s fast forward a little bit to the end of my senior year of high school. There was a lot of stressful things happening around the same time. I call it my perfect storm. It’s when my body had too many stressors at once and the result was a complete breakdown. My perfect storm was graduating high school, getting my 18 year old vaccinations, moving to a new house, preparing for college (and moving 14 hours away from home in the next 3 months) and going on a mission trip to Mexico where I got a parasite. I remember in vivid detail coming home from Mexico and feeling drastically different. I hit a wall hard and fast and I got sick. At that time there was so much commotion that I didn’t quite realize the changes in my body and the impact of the changes in my health and how they were going to affect me long term. Hindsight is 20/20 they say and I agree when it came to my perfect storm. I had emotional, chemical and physical stress happening all in the same 30 day period. It was just too much for my body to handle.

When all of this was happening I had very little natural health knowledge. I knew a couple of things about nutrition and my passion for natural health and healing was too small to win this battle with my health. I wasn’t yet in tune enough with my body. I thought the changes I was feeling were normal and maybe I was just too weak or lazy to overcome them. I thought there was something with wrong with me, why couldn’t I feel good? Everyone else seemed like they felt well. Looking back I think I pushed a little too hard and didn’t give my body enough grace. I felt bad for too long without addressing it. But once again, looking back I may want to change things but the biggest thing is that this was God’s path for me and for my healing. I had to personally suffer and learn a lot of information about the body, walk through my own healing and develop patient endurance and perseverance.

Now back to the topic of skinny.

When I got sick I started to notice physical changes in my body. My long and lanky body became very sensitive. I would eat too late and wake up with a huge stomach ache. I would eat dessert and the next day I would literally feel like my pants were tighter. I started to gain weight and literally saw the shape of my body change. I felt like I no longer knew my body. I felt like it was out of control. Over the years I learned to work extremely hard with what I eat (or what I didn’t eat) because if I didn’t I could gain 5 pounds in a week and then my pants wouldn’t fit. It was a daily battle and this was my only knowledge on how to control it.

I gained about 20 pounds. And to be totally honest, that’s not a ton of weight on my 5’9″ frame. To some people that’s maybe not a big deal. I agree that it isn’t a huge number. To many people, you may look at my pictures and say I still looked good and maybe even looked healthy.

But the difference is I felt horrible as I gained those 20 pounds. Everyday was not only a mental struggle through my day because of how sick I was, but it was a physical battle too. The person in the mirror didn’t look like me. And I hated it.

I felt fat. And I have saying that because it was more than how I looked. I felt in every cell of my body that I was carrying around too much fat. And it wasn’t until 5 years later that I saw a functional medicine chiropractor (at the end of my own chiropractic school career) and he ran a very technical body composition analysis that found I was 36.5% body fat. No wonder I felt “fat”. My body had way too much fat on it and I was storing fat in my body because of how toxic I had become. My cells were so incredibly toxic!

My body didn’t want to loose fat. And this knowledge was the first piece of information that started to set me free. I wasn’t making this up. I wasn’t going crazy and I was feeling what was going on in my body. I have now coined the way I was feeling as feeling toxic. We want to say, Ugh, I feel fat. But we have to stop letting that into our subconscious mind. But the feeling I had was the result of unhealthy cells and a burden of toxins in by body.

I felt toxic. I didn’t like my body. But to many I still looked skinny, healthy and good.

Skinny isn’t what you think, and skinny isn’t always what it seems to be.

Healthy is what we want and should desire to achieve. It’s what I started doing and it changed my life. It changed me physically, mentally and emotionally. It gave me hope. Choosing health is a decision I make on a daily basis. It’s no longer hard. I don’t starve and I’m not deprived. In being healthy I have freedom and I thrive.

Healthy looks different for everyone! I’m not talking the sensationalization of “healthy” we are now seeing. That’s the overly fit, rock-hard abs, in-the-gym-constantly definition of healthy. Once again, that’s just another version of a body we all weren’t meant to have. I’m talking about inside out health. Cellular health, digestive health, brain health. HEALTHY!

We were so uniquely created and do come in all shapes and sizes. Embrace who you are! Love yourself now and if you do need to work on your health, love yourself throughout that journey!

Repeat after me: I am uniquely created, nobody is created like me. Both in my physical body or in my personality strengths and talents. Today I choose to purposefully strive to my body’s definition of health realizing it is a constant journey of information. I choose to find joy in the journey!

Need more encouragement and support in re-defining what health is and what “skinny” is? My Healthy Body Declaration Cards may be what you need. LEARN MORE HERE