Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about balance. As a person who loves exercise and prides herself on eating pretty healthy, it’s sometimes hard to find the balance between “taking care of myself” and not being over-concerned with my body weight. As much as I would like to think I have totally arrived, I still have a long way to go in loving my body. It really is an inner, daily battle to love and appreciate my body for what it is. It’s not easy to live in a world like where we are bombarded with messages that we aren’t good enough, and to just say “Forget that. I’m going to love me for me!”

One of our readers left a very thoughtful comment recently in which she mentioned how hard it is to love her body:

“I was just thinking today about how hard it is to love and appreciate my own body all by myself, let alone when anyone else feels the need to share an (unwelcome) opinion about it. My mom is notorious for this, although she acts like she’s trying to “help.”

Although I’m a strong advocate for this type of thinking, I certainly have not mastered it yet. Sometimes, regardless of what I know and believe, I reject the mentality that I know I need to have. I give in and allow myself to feel “gross” or “fat” or like I need to shed a relatively insignificant amount of weight in order to be back to an ideal size that I have in my mind. I allow myself to feel like I’m not skinny enough or pretty enough; like my butt is way too big for my body and my thighs are too close together. (Yes, I know…shameful. Just tryin’ keep it real)!

And then I stop and ask myself why. Why do I allow myself to go down a road that I know only leads to misery? Why would I allow myself to momentarily succumb to a line of thinking that will end up tearing me down rather than making me feel good about myself? I’m not quite sure I have an answer to that yet.

We’ve had this blog for two years now, and although we haven’t been 100% active during every moment of the past two years, this blog has become a part of us. Despite my struggle to find a balance and my momentary relapses into body-hating mentality, I truly believe that the “cheeseburger mentality” is absolutely the only way to live.

And here’s why: no matter what, our bodies are never going to look exactly the way we want them too. We may never be that girl who can walk into a dressing room and have everything she tries on magically fit; or the girl who slips into a Size 2 pair of jeans effortlessly. So why keep trying? Why try to be people we aren’t and never will be? Why not embrace what our bodies look like and make a decision to love ourselves for who we are? Why beat ourselves up for not looking like Victoria secret models?

I have come to find in these past two years that there is a balance to all of this. There is no perfect answer or magical path to loving one’s body. But no matter what you believe on the subject, I think we can all agree that constantly feeling bad about what we look like is not the way to live. Whether or not you choose to embrace everything about this blog, and live by the cheeseburger gospel, I hope you can at least agree that love is better than hate and self-acceptance is better than self-deprecation.