I love/hate my body

I'm trying to work on accepting and loving my body. Trying so freaking hard! Why is it so hard sometimes? 

For the record:  I believe that the woman pictured here
could be ANY size, and the message
would still be true.  This is not a size-ist blog.

In theory, I love my body.  I mean, it's the only one I've got, and it's gotten me through my entire life so far.  I appreciate my body, and want to do only right by it.  

I'd like to believe that my body is not just useful, but beautiful.

I'd like to believe that it doesn't matter if my body is beautiful, because I don't owe the world a beautiful body.

But in actuality, sometimes I hate how it looks, and I hate how it lets me down (e.g., breaking to the point of necessary surgery when I rolled my ankle).  And I always ALWAYS always blame myself for how crappy my body can sometimes be.

I feel like lately, I've quickly done a 180 on this blog's mission statement.  When I switched the blog from "Leah: The Kind Weight Watcher" to "Leah: Not Otherwise Specified", it was with a purpose.  

I mean... when I wrote this, I was so inspired to leave my dieting ways and my obsession with weight loss in the past.  I was ready to love my body and accept that I may never lose any more weight, and to just focus on healthy habits for the sake of health.  I was ready to throw out all of my dieting books, along with my scale and measuring tape.  I accepted that my EDNOS had morphed into a diet addiction.

Somehow, I lost the message over time.  I stopped accepting my body and practicing healthy habits.  Instead, I gained more weight because of emotional binge eating, and became determined to lose it, and have been dieting hardcore again, which had led to the dieting cycle.  Ultimately, I dived right back into my EDNOS thoughts and behaviors and my diet addiction.

[source]
Seriously, google "dieting cycle".  There are so many
gems out there that really made me think.

Anyway, enough is enough.  I am tired of making blanket statements about how I'm going to "eat/exercise/feel about my body" from now on.  

I want to keep on trying to improve myself, while also accepting and loving my body.  It won't happen overnight, so I won't pretend that it will.

But here's what I'm going to do for now.

1) Take better care of my skin, hair and nails.  This has been rough on me lately, as because I don't have a shower stool and am afraid to try standing in the shower with one leg, I always need assistance to wash up.  I just need to be more assertive in asking for help.  Sometimes I think that Stacey forgets that I used to shower EVERY day...

2) Add one or two new healthy behaviors/habits to my life every week or two (depending on how hard of a change it is) until everything feels normal.  I have become very out of whack with my health since this injury.  I don't drink enough water, eat enough produce, have a solid post-surgery exercise plan, etc.  But because of my all-or-nothing thinking, I continue to stick with "nothing" because "all" is just overwhelming.  I want to keep this a positive behavior, so things like "more water" and "more veggies" instead of "less junk food" or "no chips".  The "yes rules" are just a better way to go for me I think.

3) Read more.  I have spent the last couple of months in front of screens.  And only a small portion of it was my Kindle screen.  I consider myself to be a reader, a book-lover, a bibliophile.  And yet given an extremely unlimited amount of immobile time to myself, I chose the boob tube over my books time and time again.  I still read a little bit every day, but not nearly as much as I'd like.  Zoning out to Netflix or YouTube is much less rewarding than getting completely lost in a book.

4) Better communication with loved ones (and add some new loved ones to my life).  I tend to isolate myself from too many people, because of my depression.  It's time that I start contacting family more (the ones who I actually want to talk to, anyway) and it's time to make some new friends (book club perhaps, cleverly combining two of these new goals).  Now that my leg is well enough to get out of the house now and then, it's time to actually do so.

I think that those are enough goals to start with.  I'm ready to get back to at least part of Leah: NOS's original mission statement, which was all about loving myself and moving away from dieting and my EDNOS thinking.

For now, I have a love/hate thing going on with my body.  And that's okay, because it's where I'm at, and it's honest.

What about you?  

Do you truly love your body as it is, or do you love/hate it?

My body, right this second, aerial view.