True Beauty

I recently told a friend at a RS activity that I hate when women get together and complain about their weight to each other. This is one of the reason I don’t frequently attend RS activities. I told her when someone mentions the caloric count in something, I walk briskly away. I know where this conversation is going and don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t even keep a scale in the house.

I do these things because it keeps me from comparing. Comparing is definitely a vice I have. I compared everything growing up. Which is why in college I decided that I would stop this destructive behavior and not tell anyone anything like, test scores, weight, dress size, scholarship money, GPA, etc. This also meant I didn’t want to know this about others. And once I stopped, I was much happier. I was more accepting of myself and those around me.

I looked up this talk by Elder Holland to address another vice but I realized that I have been wanting to blog about women and diets for a while.

What is true beauty? What influenced you to come to the conclusion of what true beauty is?

I have been blessed with two boys, so my house is all about cars and sports. Matt and I both agreed that having a girl would be so much harder. Trying to help her understand her worth, her own beauty, and her potential seems much harder than helping a boy understand those issues. Mainly because women tend to compare EVERYTHING, and this doesn’t seem to change with age.

I am not sure when I started to feel self-conscious in a swimsuit but it probably was way too early. I always heard mothers talk about which fad diet they were on. How many pounds they had lost, or how many pounds their neighbor had gained since something happened.

My major was public health education, and in this major, you are required to do incredible amounts of presenting. Presenting on every health topic you could think of. But one topic really opened my eyes. How unhappy women are with their bodies, and how their constant dieting affects their daughters.

The National Eating Disorder said that, “It’s like trying on Mom’s high heels. They are trying on their diets, too.”

"If their mothers diet, it's a marker of how important weight is in the household," said Alison Field, lead author of the Harvard study and an assistant professor of pediatrics.

Most parents would never let their teenage daughter apply a fad diet to their lives, but what makes it right for them? Children are not born healthy eaters. They learn how to eat, how to feel about what they eat, and how to care for their bodies from a parent’s example.

I love that the more you learn, the more you see truths behind the gospel. Elder Holland’s talk, To Young Women, aligns perfectly with all the research. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the talk.

“I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different.”

“…almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said, ‘you can’t live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let people’s opinions make you self-conscious you give away your power. … The key to feeling [confident] is to always listen to your inner self”

“And if you are obsessing over being a size 2, you won’t be very surprised when your daughter or the Mia Maid in your class does the same and makes herself physically ill trying to accomplish it. We should all be as fit as we can be—that’s good Word of Wisdom doctrine.”

“In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women, face in the modern world. And if adults are preoccupied with appearance—tucking and nipping and implanting and remodeling everything that can be remodeled—those pressures and anxieties will certainly seep through to children.”

How do we as mothers and women rectify this problem? We love our bodies and we advocate being healthy. Not excessive, but to use exercise as a way to enjoy life. No more diets in our house but focus on lifestyle changes. The key to successful weight loss is a lifestyle change, not a diet.

Because even small cues of self-deprecating remarks about our body or being ecstatic about losing a few pounds puts value on being a “perfect size.” It tells our daughters that being a certain weight is associated with being happy.

I will admit I still complain every now and again about my body, but it is to my husband, behind closed doors. I complain to him because I know he sees me differently than I see myself. He loves the message that the Bruno Mars song, “just the way you are” sends because that is how he feels about me. And that is how we should feel about ourselves.

“Because you are amazing, just the way you are.”