I Used to hate my body

Oh wow, how I used to hate how I felt when I looked at my body. When I’d look in the mirror or at pictures of myself and see the extra squishiness and insanely stretched out skin and acne and limp hair and my chubby cheeks. I was embarrassed all the time. When I’d show up to social functions, to church, or at the pool, I was embarrassed by my extra weight and all the things I thought were wrong with me. 

It felt like a big “fall from grace” for me. I’d been so beautiful and thin and shapely when I was in high school and before I got married. People used to comment often about how pretty they thought I was. I got lots of nice attention from boys for it, and lots of negative attention from girls. 

Then I got married. I was super depressed. I gained 30 pounds. 

Then I had a baby. I gained 65 more pounds. Everything stretched and drooped. Everything hurt. I was so uncomfortable in my own skin—I HATED my skin and what weight gain and child rearing had done to it. I tried never to criticize myself in front of my kids or others, but I felt shameful about my weight. And I felt the criticism from others—people close to me who made me feel really bad about my looks, people who SHOULD have seen the real me and thought I was stunning all along. That was really hurtful and it created SO MUCH shame and embarrassment inside.

Fast forward past a divorce, a scandal, a huge weight drop that left me as thin as I’d been in high school, a remarriage, a move, and then my third baby where I gained 80 pounds again. 

The embarrassment and shame over my body that I thought I’d dealt with and healed from (I mean, I’d been thin for 5 years now!) resurfaced and hit me like a giant tidal wave after my last baby was born. I was in a different place in life now, with a different husband, smack in the middle of a giant religious/faith transition that was incredibly disruptive to our family life, and suddenly I could barely meet Pat’s—my husband—eyes. 

Pat, who fell in love with me back in the day when I was still largely overweight. Pat, who, despite all my prior sexual trauma and shame, made me feel like a bedroom goddess and the most beautiful woman in the world. Pat, who wanted connection and intimacy and to be able to express and show me how much he loved me.  
Do you know how many moments I spent hiding from him while I cried and lamented over what I thought I had lost? I’d wait to get undressed for a shower until I was in it with the door safely closed, and then I’d sit in the water and cry, grateful the door was frosted so he couldn’t see me. 

I would excuse myself to the bathroom and sit on the toilet lid and cry over how much I hated what I looked like and how my flab felt to my own fingers. 

I could hardly stand to be naked at all—let alone in front of him. I lived in a bathrobe and would go into my closet after a shower or soak so that I could put my clothes on in private.

If I opened myself up to sex, sometimes I would have to stop myself from being pleasured because I was too embarrassed by my naked body to be seen or touched. 

If he gushed about my beauty (which he did often, and he really meant it), I would lash out and push it away, deny it, roll my eyes, and not accept it at all. 

How could he think that? I was disgusting. Just look at me. I see everything that’s wrong. 

Interesting, eh? The brutality we show ourselves. The inability we have to see ourselves. The love we push away from others. 

I starved myself for 18 months after that baby was born. I started an intermittent fasting regiment and when I started having success dropping the pounds consistently, I pushed it to the extreme. I ate one meal a day for months, and my stomach had shrunk so much and my metabolism was slowing down, that my calorie intake was too low. 

I did lose the weight—and I daresay I lost it fairly healthily because I ate enough to keep my body functioning fine and I did it over the course of 18 months—but that’s not what got me to my position of self-love that I feel today. I didn’t wait to feel comfortable naked or have hot sex with my husband until it was all dropped. I didn’t wait to dress in fun, sexy, eye-catching clothes until it was all dropped. I didn’t wait to put a bikini on until it was all dropped. 

There were a lot of shifts happening in me during those 18 months as I grappled with leaving my life-long religion, realizing I wasn’t happy being a stay-at-home mom, and changing my internal dynamics. 

I started examining the stories I’d created around my body and what it should look like, going all the way back to my childhood and when I first felt like something was wrong. 

Because this is perhaps the most interesting part: my insecurities didn’t start because of, or when, I gained weight after my first marriage. 

They started loooooooooong before that. 

Once upon a time I thought I was really beautiful. Until I noticed that women around me, who I thought were gorgeous, didn’t like themselves, and they sure had a lot to say about the appearance of others. I noticed that men who I looked up to and was close to, and who weren’t particularly thin or “in shape” themselves, sure had a lot of criticism about the weight and appearance of other women. 

In my household there was a lot of dieting and food planning and worry. Though I was always fit and thin and shapely, the advice given to me was that I shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes because it would make me look “wider” than I was. I should avoid white because it wasn’t slimming like black or darker colors were. My arms were disproportionately big (I didn’t think they were until someone close to me pointed that out and gave me a 20 year complex about it), so I needed to be careful about sleeve length so I wouldn’t accentuate them. Same with skirts and dresses, lest I appear too short. 

It went on and on like that. By the time I got to college and then got married at age 19, I was a mess. My worth was all tied up in my body image. My religious culture and family dynamic exacerbated the problem. The plan laid out for my life was to find a righteous husband in college who would provide for me and the babies I would have, while I stayed home raising said babies and keeping house. 

My world shrunk to how desirable men would find me—and then, because of society and my own family, I thought my “desirableness” came down to physical thinness and beauty. 

So when I got married at 19 as a virgin, and my husband didn’t find me desirable at all, I shut down. 

I shut down the part of me that thought I was really great. That loved my body. That liked looking at herself. That was confident and free. My story was that I wasn’t beautiful because I wasn’t thin. That I wasn’t worth anything because I wasn’t thin. That the reason my sex life was so nonexistent and humiliating was because I wasn’t thin. 

My story? My body needed to be physically beautiful in order for me or anyone else to love it. Physical beauty meant thin = desirable and worthy = loveable = worth = self-love. 

I was ok—I was fine. I survived. I outsourced. I was really “righteous” and checked all the boxes of what my religion asked of me. I was a good mom. I raised my babies. I had some friends.

I think at the point, because I was starting to outgrow my marriage and the limited life-course I was on of inauthenticity and self-shame, I may have actually thought I was beautiful despite my extra pounds, if it weren’t for some particular people close to me, whose opinions really mattered to me, who made it either implicitly or explicitly clear that I needed to look different and that something was wrong with me. 

I let their stories be my story. I let them and their own insecurities and jaded expectations and self-shame become all of mine. 

When I fell in love with Pat, I dropped all my extra pounds without trying. It came off so fast. Suddenly I felt seen, loved, respected, valued, desirable . . . and I realized that my body, which I had thought was disgusting and broken, was actually quite remarkable! 

Pat loved it—all of it. All the things my previous spouse was repulsed by and all the things I was embarrassed by. For many years, until we had a baby together, I did pretty good with my body. I usually liked what I saw in the mirror. I felt sexy and beautiful. I thought I was healed.

Nope.

Instead, I’d just outsourced my self-approval again, based on what I perceived a man’s opinion of me to be. Forgetting and refusing to believe that Pat had loved my soul, and that my body, in all forms and sizes, was just a bonus. He tried everything to express that, but I closed myself off to it. I couldn’t believe him, because I didn’t believe it myself.

So what changed?

First, I had to look at my story. I had to decide that I didn’t want to feel that way anymore. I had to decide that I wanted to love my whole self. And I had to realize that what I’d been telling myself for so many years, wasn’t true. I had to pick apart my beliefs and become hyper aware of why I believed and thought the way I did. 

I did all of that. I saw how my story was twisted and how I’d been dependent on others to approve and validate me. I saw self-criticism and insecurities in my role-models and immediate circle modeled for me that I’d unknowingly adopted as my own. I saw how I’d internalized all of the struggles from my previous marriage and made his story my story. 

And I wanted to change it. I didn’t want to be the victim, or feel helpless, or just drown in self-pity. 

I listened to so many books and podcasts; I read and read; I examined and talked through my deep-seated shameful thoughts with healers, myself, and my husband. 

I started treating my body with greater care. I stopped restricting myself with food. I paid more attention to what actually sounded good and what I knew my body needed, and that’s what I ate. I moved my body and gave it some muscle tone, honestly, that waxes and wanes depending on what season I’m experiencing. 

I looked at how I viewed other people, particularly women, and realized that I viewed their beauty by the kindness of their souls, and that shape and size had very little to do with if I thought someone else was attractive or not. I vowed to start extending that viewpoint to myself.

I painstakingly examined and detached from my old religious conditioning that was inherently sexist and regaled women to the sidelines for only child-rearing. SO much of my body shame was rooted in that. 

I started dressing myself in clothing that felt and looked beautiful, sexy, quality, and fun to me. Despite my weight. I shopped, not worrying that maybe in a month or two either the clothes could be too big on me or once again too small. I knew this was a story that lots hold on to—that spending money on clothing is “not worth it” until their bodies appear a certain way. 

I got ready every morning. I showered, did my hair, put on some mascara and lipstick, and dressed myself in nice clothing, even if I didn’t leave the house that day. 

I even put myself in lingerie (something I’d done frequently in my second marriage pre-baby) and let Pat admire me. 

I consciously stopped refusing compliments from him and others. 

I noticed that the more I started stepping into my own power, particularly when it came to clothing and “showing off” my body, or accentuating it with my dress, those people with stories of insecurity and self-shame that had once been mine but were no longer, reacted. 

They didn’t like how beautiful I thought I was. They especially didn’t like it before I even dropped all my baby weight. Subconsciously, I knew they wanted me to feel as restricted and embarrassed and unsure as they did—and if I was the same size as them, shouldn’t I have?? 

So when I really got confident and then even more weight dropped off me, I made them even more uncomfortable. They expressed it with slut-shame. A real thing! It’s in the dictionary. In my case, it was for my “inappropriate dress.” 

But really, what they meant was that I looked too sexy, and I liked it, and they didn’t. 

That was how I knew I was on to something. I was about to make gigantic leaps in my self-confidence and body love. Because if the people around me couldn't handle a little bit of midriff, shoulders, or leg—clothing that most of the world deems as pretty standard—I was seriously detoxing from all their awful and untrue stories. I was triggering and triggering, sounding their internal alarms of limitation and self-loathing.

DANGER DANGER! Some woman might start loving herself the way I wish I could love myself! And then what do I do?

I had to push through that one too. I had to really look at myself and ask: “Can I love myself regardless of shape, weight, stretch marks and scars, wrinkles, fully clothed or naked, church-approved or just Maren-approved? Can I gain 20 pounds and still love wearing my bikini? Can I show off my legs even when they have cellulite?”

I decided I needed to. I could.

A huge unraveling for me was the confession of it all to Pat. 

It was hard to express such deep vulnerability to him, to tell him how much I was struggling, to cry in his arms from being so tired of feeling pain and inner wounds. 

But it was healing. It was helpful. It served me very well to say it all out loud and give myself permission to admit my inner demons. It was a type of release—to put it out in the air and let the wind take it away. 

How absurd it all sounded when I spoke it out loud. How untrue it felt. 

Eventually, when I got to a very steady, resonant state with my body and had a healed relationship with it, I decided I wanted a tummy tuck and a breast lift. 

I waited 18 months to do so, not for my body to be ready, but for my mind. I had enough awareness to know that if I did that surgery and changed my body from a place of self-loathing, insecurity, and hatred, I would never be satisfied. I would be chasing something unattainable, because it wasn’t actually about what I looked like. It was about my view of myself.

Eventually, when I had made it to my settled, happy state, I had my surgeries. 

Did it change me and everything? 

Nope. 

It made me more comfortable in my clothing, especially pants, and especially bras (because I don’t wear them anymore). It has definitely made it easier to wear certain items, and I do feel more free.

But do I still struggle with body-image? 

Yes, occasionally I do. I have to make a more conscious effort these days to be ok with fluctuating weight changes, and not be hard on myself when I get a little squishier or some things feel too tight. 

I consciously still adorn myself daily as though I’m a goddess. Because I am, right? I am. 

I continue my practices. I continuously examine and rewrite my stories. 

If I’m feeling self-conscious, I’m aware enough now to recognize that and stop and take a minute to examine why. What’s the root? Why do I feel this way? What am I actually afraid of? Is it that men will think I’m ugly? Women will mock me? People will judge me?

I’m aware, and then I move. I don’t smother it. I let it come up and then out. 

I close my eyes, find where the tight feeling is in my body, and I listen to what it’s telling me. I hear its fears and worries, and I also hear what it’s asking. It’s always asking for love and freedom and grace. It’s begging for it from me.

And I work on it. I do the work. I have learned to love the work.

I’ve learned to feel all of my own curves and to appreciate them. 

In high school, at a whopping 105 pounds, I used to stand in front of my mirror before school and put my palms on my hips, trying to push them in, as though somehow I could just shrink them. 

Now, at age 37, I stand in my mirror and put my hands on my hips, remembering all those mornings of hip-shaming. I marvel at how far I’ve come. And though my hips are wider now than they were then, I consciously tell myself how beautiful they are, and how grateful I am for them. I squeeze them with my palms and then pinch my skin, and smile.

So for those who look in the mirror and just cry, I understand. I’ve been there so many times. 

SO MANY TIMES.

But I’m changing it. Because I deserve it. 

I deserve to love my body and treat it as such. 

And so do you ❤️