Eden Cafe

Throughout high school I thought I was sexy. I had some minor body insecurities, but I knew that I was hot. My summers were spent sweating through various dance and band camps. My falls were spent twirling flags and running all over the football field during the halftime shows. All of that exercise kept my body tone in all the right places. I wore shirts to show off my flat stomach and belly button ring. I wore pants that flattered my curves and allowed my lacey panties to peek out over the top. I use to swish my hips a little harder when I walked past a cute boy and listen for the inevitable ‘Damn, look at that ass!’ that followed.

I thought I was hot shit.

Even though so many guys seemed to think the same thing, I didn’t really have many boyfriends. I either wound up being the girl on the side, the friend with benefits or the one that they didn’t want to ruin their friendship with. I would sit with my friends during lunch and gossip about all the hot guys and their unattractive girlfriends. I never understood why they would want to date those girls. I thought they were fat, or ugly, or weird but they would be in pretty lengthy relationships with these boys. I was so jealous. I didn’t get it. I was so much prettier than those girls and so much skinnier, but they were holding the hands of the guys I liked.

I graduated from high school, single and so ready to start college. I moved to a new town with my mom and had all my paperwork ready to go but that summer I met Chad, fell in love and got pregnant with our first child. During the first part of my pregnancy the doctors and nurses would comment about how I was losing weight instead of gaining it. They were concerned, but I was secretly very happy. I didn’t want to wind up fat. Fat was ugly in my mind. After about six months I started gaining weight pretty rapidly. I had started the pregnancy at around 145 lbs and I was 204 lbs the day before I delivered.
When I pushed my son out of my body, I remember sitting up and looking at my deflated stomach. I paid more attention to that than I did to what my son looked like as he was being carted off to the NICU to check to see if he swallowed any meconium. My doctor must have noticed because she said ‘See! Look how flat it is now!’. It wasn’t flat. It looked like a blob. It was jiggly and covered with giant purple stretch marks. The next couple days that I was in the hospital I remember getting out of the shower and walking past the mirrors in our room naked. I would look at my profile, tugging at the loose skin (gently because it was so tender and sore). I would try to suck in my belly. I was so embarrassed. I had no idea that this is what my belly would look like after I gave birth. Where had my flat, sexy stomach gone?!

Every week I was digging through my old clothes, trying them on to see if I’d lost enough weight to get back into them. My mom kept reminding me that she wore her size five jeans home from the hospital after she had me. My sister-in-law had given birth to my niece a month before I had my son and she was already fitting comfortably back into her skinny jeans. Yet here I was, nearly two months out from giving birth and I couldn’t even get my jeans up over my hips. I felt like a cow and I hated what pregnancy had done to my body.

In a way, karma came back around to bite me in the ass. Hard. I had become exactly what I use to make fun of. I thought about all those girls and how I had been such a shallow bitch towards them. I felt awful. I knew how it felt now to have people be rude to me about my size. I knew what it was like to watch the skinny girls flirt shamelessly with my husband, while I was standing right there pushing our kids in a buggy. We would go shopping at the store he was a manager at and they would call him over, feigning the need for help with something. It didn’t matter that there were 3 managers working in the store that day and it was his day off. They absolutely needed his help. They would giggle and play stupid, pretending to not even notice that his wife and children were standing behind him. As he and I would walk off I would hear them say the very things I use to say about other girls who were dating the guys I wanted. Why on earth would such an attractive man be with such a fat woman? He’s too sexy for her, she’s ugly.

I started to wonder the same thing. Why would he be attracted to a woman who had let herself go like I had?

Slowly I began to realize that he fell in love with me, and not my weight. There is so much more to being sexy than having a slim, trim figure. It’s in your body language, your smile, and the way you talk. He loved my sense of humor, my wit, and my charm. He loved my body the way it was. This helped me learn to love myself the way that I am. I found the Shapely Prose blog and began my journey of fat acceptance. I stopped feeling guilty for the things I enjoyed eating and started doing exercises I thought were fun, like belly dancing and yoga, instead of trying to lose weight. I started buying clothes that fit me instead of trying to squeeze into something because I was embarrassed about the silly little number on the tag. When people would make comments about their weight or other people’s weight I would call them out on it. Sometimes it was to encourage them or remind them of their good qualities, sometimes it was to tell them to shut the fuck up. My perspective on everything was shifting.

Even though I’m 100 lbs heavier than I was when I got married, I’m still happy with my body. I love the curve of my hips and my full breasts, and I love the way my husband looks at my body. I don’t hate my stretch marks anymore. When I go in public I dress like I know I’m hot shit again. I don’t hear those comments from the jealous girls anymore either. In fact, my husband catches his employees looking at me now and has even embarrassed a couple of them when they realized who it was they were gawking at. Sure, I still have my bad days. We all do. We’ve been programmed to think that everything on our bodies is imperfect. Advertiser’s want us to think we need jeans with flattening tummy panels, mascara to lengthen our eyelashes and deodorant that makes everyone want to feel how soft our armpits are. When I’m having one of those days now I just go look in the mirror and start complimenting myself. We’ve got to love ourselves because self confidence is the sexiest accessory we can have.