learning to embrace beauty

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Over the past 9 ½ years of dealing with the complications of infertility, my body-size has bounced up and down between a size 6 and a size 16. No joke.

It pretty much sucks.

And to be honest, I haven’t dealt well with it. My husband has literally gone so far as to take the scales away from me when I’m struggling. “Your body isn’t functioning properly,” he tells me, “so this isn’t an accurate picture of what you are.” (he’s a good man, eh?) 

At one point in this journey I was eating a diet of no fat, no flour, no sugar, no dairy and no meat. (you’re right, that’s just about everything that tastes even remotely yummy.) I was desperate to lose the weight, partially for the sake of my looks and partially for the distant hope that losing weight would stimulate my reproductive organs enough to allow me to get pregnant.

Amazingly, after being on that strict of a diet for 6 weeks I lost a grand total of one pound.

Dead serious.

(Now, with the knowledge of nutrition that I have gained, I know that I was putting my body in starvation mode and every bite of those vegetables and brown rice, without the proper fats and nutrients, were going directly into storage.)

When it comes to infertility, natural treatments are slow and time consuming. Going the medical route brings its own joys, like hormones being injected into your stomach (i.e. needles into your abdomen) that cause bloating. Or fertility pills that cause weight gain.

The moral of this story? Infertility wrecks havoc on a woman’s body.

When my friend Trina told me she thinking about writing a book on style, I almost rolled my eyes. My sense of style disappeared somewhere around the time that my waist disappeared.

But then God really started to get a hold of me. I wrote a post about my realization that my issues with my weight were directly linked to pride. And then Trina started sending me chapters of her book.

Now, this book was written by a Mom, to moms. She covers topics like dressing when you’re pregnant or when you’re nursing. She’s not infertile so it would seem that her book could hardly apply to someone like me…

Except it does.

Because the majority of the book is about learning to love the way that God made your body. It’s about choosing to embrace the beautiful every day. It’s about learning to dress for the size you are, right now, instead of always dreaming of someday being different than what you are.

And it gets even better than that because she also shares about what God thinks about beauty. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still working my butt off (I hope!) to lose weight and keep myself healthy. This isn’t about ignoring the negative impacts that excess weight can have on you. This is about rejoicing in beauty.

And I’ve started to enjoy getting dressed again.

Tomorrow Trina will be joining me with an interview (woohoo!), but in the meantime, I encourage you (no matter where you are in life) to check out her book.  Embracing Beauty is available in PDF version (readable on any computer), Kindle, Nook, and in Paperback.

p.s. She totally quotes me in one of the chapters (isn’t that precious?!) where I describe how I use accessories to make myself feel feminine while still wearing work clothes on the farm. This is the outfit I was talking about (my go-to farming look) and I have to say, put together on here it actually does look stylish. 😉