I’m going to keep this one short and sweet, but I feel that I need to share what is on my heart for the girls, the ladies, the women. We are living in a society where women are being taught that it is more important to be skinny than it is to be healthy. We are being fed the lie that what everyone sees on the outside is far more important than the actual health of our bodies. We compare ourselves to other women that we see in Hollywood and on social media and we feel like if we don’t look like them, we must have failed. There is more emphasis placed on what size we wear, rather than how healthy we actually are.
As a result of this, I see so many women doing whatever they can to get skinny, but not realizing that being skinny doesn’t automatically equate to being healthy. They will look for the foods in stores that are labeled “zero calories” and do whatever else they can to see those numbers on the scale go down. The problem with this way of thinking is that if our health and well-being is not the first priority, then we will make the wrong decisions when it comes to what we put into our bodies, or even with what we don’t put into our bodies.
There are many items on the shelves in grocery stores that are labeled “healthy” but are really no better for you than the ones that are blatantly terrible for you. There are drinks that have the “diet” or “sugar-free” label smacked on them but are literally just as bad, if not worse, than the regular. Still, we continue to fall into the trap of trusting the labels without looking at ingredients, without trying to understand what makes something good or not good for us, and without caring enough to pay attention to what we are actually putting into our bodies. This is because we are too focused on being smaller and we aren’t focused enough on being in good health overall. I’m not saying that having a weight loss goal is bad. I’m simply saying that in my opinion, it’s not worth it to lose the weight but to still be weak and full of bad stuff on the inside.
When you focus on your health first, the weight loss will come. Do your research. Learn about the foods that you are consuming and why they may or may not be beneficial for your body and health. Don’t trust every label you see just because they have catchy words and phrases like “diet” or “zero calories” written on them. Your body was created and designed to be nourished with the right things, not with those cheap and deceiving substitutes.
Okay, maybe this post wasn’t so short after all, but I’ll just end by saying this…Instead of making it your ultimate goal to be skinny, make it your ultimate goal to have a body that is functioning at its best. Make it your goal to be strong and healthy. Make it your goal to care about yourself enough to pay more attention to the things that you are filling your body with. Everything else will follow.