What kind of success story do you want to write?

It’s almost the end of the year, which means that it would be about now that I’d be looking for People Magazine’s “Half Their Size” issue.

You know the one...it’s their annual start-of-the-year issue that features people who have lost a bunch of weight and they share their success stories. 

I’d buy the magazine, flip right to their stories, and binge read them. 

“Ok, if they can do it, so can I,” I’d tell myself.

Nothing wrong with a little motivation, right?

Except then I’d choose some restrictive diet plan and willpower my way to eating less and making myself workout more. 

And I might keep that up for a few weeks, and then it was back to my usually scheduled programming...skipping workouts, eating something I “shouldn’t,” and feeling like I had failed again. 

It never occurred to me then that I was using those “success stories” as a way to just beat myself up. 

When I spent time looking at those “Who wore it best?” features, judging the women in those pictures, I was also judging my own body right along with them. Even if I wasn’t reading about weight loss specifically, I was consuming a consistent stream of society-approved attractiveness, and I didn’t see many people who looked like me. 

Years later, as I began to take better care of myself and lose weight in a more sustainable way, I began to scrutinize the messages I was consuming -- especially on social media.

I started to wonder...what was I looking at and not even noticing? And more importantly, what did I want to see in my news feeds? 

More women of various sizes and ethnic backgrounds who show up as strong and beautiful? 

Yes, please.

Learning to be more intentional about our visual diets is one step towards being kinder to ourselves, and turning down the volume on our own self-critical voice. 

That helps us to care for the bodies we have, and to not care as much about measuring up to someone else’s image.

If we can begin to see the beauty of others at all sizes, we can also see it ourselves. 

And that’s a success story I want to write over and over.