One Important Lesson I Hope to Teach My Daughter

Body positivity has become such a big movement and while I’m all for encouraging women to love their bodies, I think it’s important to not commercialize it for companies and to remember that as people it’s often a journey.  I specifically wanted to write about my personal journey with body acceptance and the one important lesson that I hope to one day pass along to a daughter.

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One Important Lesson I Hope to Teach My Daughter | From the Beginning

Growing up it was almost impossible for me not to hear the word fat.  It always had a negative connotation and from a young age I knew that being fat was something that I wanted to make sure I wasn’t.  It wasn’t until more recently that I started to think about how this impacted how I viewed my body.  When I think about raising kids one day {hopefully}, I know that I want to raise them to be kind, thoughtful, and well-intentioned human beings. The shape of their bodies has absolutely nothing to do with any of that.

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When young girls are repeatedly hearing, “I’m so fat,” “I need to diet,” “I’ve got to lose weight,” from their mothers and other trustworthy people in their life, they’re receiving the following message: your weight is an important factor that can impact your happiness and success.  It may seem ironic for a style blogger to say, but your appearance is far from being the most important part of your life.

One Important Lesson I Hope to Teach My Daughter | Being Kind to Yourself

I’ve written a lot about giving yourself grace and taking care of your mental health by doing what’s best for you, but I think it’s also important to think about that self talk. While most of my negative self talk centers around achievements, things I think I should be able to do better, etc. it’s easy to get caught up in negative self talk about my body.  I’m certainly guilty of thinking or even saying, “I wish my thighs weren’t so big,” “why do my hips have to be so wide,” “I hate my stretch marks,” the list goes on.

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One Important Lesson I Hope to Teach My Daughter | Breaking the Cycle

While I doubt I’ll ever totally eliminate negative self talk, I have found myself trying to be more conscientious of how I talk {and write} about my body.  When I started to think about how the women I look up to in my life talked about their bodies and how I don’t want to continue that cycle with my daughter, I realized that it was a cycle I had already thoughtlessly fallen into.

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Raise your hand if you’ve sat around with girlfriends listing out the things you want to change about your body.  I’ve definitely done this and when I forced myself to think about the impact it had beyond me, I realized that my negative words about my body could easily make another woman in my life start to question if something was wrong with her body. Face it, most of us think our friends’ look great so you wouldn’t actually want to say something that makes them rethink that.

One Important Lesson I Hope to Teach My Daughter | It’s a Journey

In many ways, I’m glad this thinking hit me at this point in my life and not after or right before I had children.  It really gives me the chance to revamp my thinking and break the habit I had of putting down my body in front of others.  But I’ll admit, old habits die hard.  I think in many ways, being a blogger and influencer has made body talk more apparent to me.  So many people talk about their diet, their weight loss plan, their macros, their workouts, etc.  While being healthy is definitely important, it’s not just about a number on a scale. Being healthy is about how much energy you have, how you feel, how your mind feels.  I hate the idea of making an off handed comment about needing to lose weight, suck in, put Spanx on and have someone that reads my blog or follows me feel like they aren’t good enough because they don’t do those things.

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And despite being aware of that now, I still sometimes will mess up.  I’m guilty of joking that I need to work out because I ate junk food, I’ve complained about parts of my body that I wasn’t happy with, and talked about needing to eat less; for me the body positive community can be intimidating because I am still apt to mess up, but I think the most important thing is to be mindful and try.

One Important Lesson I Hope to Teach My Daughter | The Outfit

Admittedly, I was super nervous about shooting a bathing suit; while swimsuit season is always a time when I’m more conscious of my body, this year I’ve felt more nervous than usual about going to the pool.  At the same time, I’m ready to move past harping on something that has such little standing on who I am.  Being ruled by how I look in a swimsuit is tiring both mentally and physically.

And so it was really exciting when this Pink Blush swimsuit came in; I was immediately reserved about the cut of the suit.  The higher leg means a more cheeky bottom, but I’m going to try and embrace it — the bottom is still family friendly.  The material of this suit is thicker which I prefer in my swimsuits and the white piping really takes it up a notch.

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