Seventy-five pounds. 

That’s what it took to build and grow and care for my two kids. 

That’s also the amount of weight I didn’t know I needed to gain in order to finally heal. It took seventy-five pounds to realize that I didn’t have to ride the excruciating hamster wheel of diet culture anymore. My pregnancy weight gain turned my whole world upside down, and I’m still thanking my lucky stars it did. 

In fact, I have no plans to lose a single pound of it.

Yep, you read that right.

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I personally believe the most freeing moment you can have is when you take a good, hard look at the seemingly unlovable parts of yourself and find ways to love them. IMHO – self-love DOES NOT mean forcing yourself to feel fabulous when you don’t actually feel you are. It DOES mean showing up for yourself with compassion & a willingness to believe that the reason you don’t feel fabulous is not because of anything you necessarily DID in the first place. Look – we live in a world that constantly tries to analyze, label, & categorize us. Social hierarchies are created in just about every industry & privilege is handed to one person & not another for the most ridiculous of reasons. But we ALL – all of us – are capable & worthy of being loved, respected, & having our best life in whatever physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental state we are in. Despite the massive efforts I underwent to grow & birth my kids, I still look in the mirror & see my postpartum belly & at first glance, feel like crap when I focus on it. SO this is the part of me I practice the most to love. By turning the tables on my negative self-image & questioning my lack of love for my tummy, I’ve come to realize that soft, loose, stretch-mark laden bellies are only a cause for self-hate because of the massive cultural conditioning we have all received as youths & adults to create a cruel sense of body hierarchy in our society. When I sit alone with my stomach – when I really take in her soft peaks & strong valleys – disgust turns to awe as I begin to find a lovable story in the perceived flaws. And that is when true healing has been able to begin for me. Bodily shame is most definitely something that has much deeper roots than merely hating on one particular “flaw.” It’s about a world that has us convinced we need to feel disconnected from our truest, most loved selves to produce highly within it. Today, I encourage you to take a chance & send some love to the most vulnerable parts of you that are begging for your care, curiosity, & attention. You just might be able to find a little bit of inner freedom in the process. 🦋 . . . #youareworthy #selflove #bodyacceptance

A post shared by Lindsay Wolf (@thelindsaywolf) on May 7, 2019 at 4:30am PDT

I give zero fucks about losing my pregnancy weight. I’m quite happy to stay as I am, thank you very much. 

And let me be clear, this isn’t some kind of gimmick where I’m pretending to be happy with myself, because I’m a new mom, and I just want to let my body “be” for a while. I am telling you, with 1,000% certainty, that if my body was to look and feel like this for the rest of my life, I would be A-OK with that. And this includes forever embracing all of the pregnancy stretch marks, cellulite, loose skin, and extra cushion-for-the-pushin’ that’s there.

Courtesy of Lindsay Wolf

Let’s just say I went from praying for a bigger thigh gap to letting my thick thighs save lives.    

Quite honestly, they saved mine.

For far too many years, I’ve placed flimsy bandages on the gaping wounds of my body image struggles. Since I was twelve years old, I’ve gone to tremendous lengths to keep myself as thin as physically possible. I binged and purged. I severely restricted my eating. I dove headfirst into a 4-year diet pill addiction. And I was a regular attendee of weight loss membership programs, despite not actually needing to be at any of them.

Nothing ever satisfied my aching desire to be skinny. And no one ever asked me if I was hurting myself to get there. Not only was I physically damaging my body to make it thin, I was also battling against a mind that constantly told me that my ability to be loved was synonymous with my weight loss efforts. I became so obsessed that I began to see a painfully dysmorphic version of myself every time I looked into a mirror.  

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There’s a grief that comes along with saying goodbye to the body you thought you wanted. I spent so long – two decades, to be exact – battling against my physical frame to make it as thin as physically possible. And I went to some majorly destructive lengths to do so. There are ten years between these two photos. The young woman on the left would go on to immediately ask her mom if her legs looked fat after she saw the image of her body & felt disgusted. She was also attending regular Weight Watchers meetings to lose more weight (despite having no actual need to be there), and she was constantly focused on taking up as little space as possible in a photograph. The woman on the right has quite possibly the most love for herself she’s ever had. She has learned to value every inch of her body for the miracle it all is, she understands now that weight gain or weight loss has absolutely no bearing on a human being’s worth, and she is completely comfortable taking up space in a photograph. It’s amazing what can happen when you learn to stop struggling against yourself and choose love instead. It’s amazing what can happen in ten years if you decide that your weight is not a measure of your true potential and that your pant size going up or down is never EVER a measure of your lovability or value. 🦋 . . . #effyourbeautystandards #youarewothy #selflove #transformation #bodyacceptance #plussize #motherhood #edrecovery #traumarecovery #innerworth #allbodiesaregoodbodies #fatisnotaviolation

A post shared by Lindsay Wolf (@thelindsaywolf) on May 16, 2019 at 7:31pm PDT

I was stuck in my own body image prison, and it seemed like nothing could bust me out of it.

And then I got knocked up.  

Sometimes, the most inconvenient moments can be catalysts for growth in ways we never expect. For me, getting pregnant and the weight gain that came with it was unbearably inconvenient. 

At the beginning of my postpartum journey, I desperately tried to drop as much weight as I could. I exercised, began dietary cleansing, and basically fell back into old, destructive habits. I also believed anything anyone told me about postpartum weight loss. One mom friend was adamant that breastfeeding alone would help me shed the pounds. Another emphatically shared that when she stopped nursing, she dropped a ton of weight. Neither experience led to weight loss for me. In fact, nothing I did let to weight loss. 

No matter how much I dieted or exerted myself, my mom-bod just wouldn’t budge. It was as if my body had decided it was done changing for a while and kept wondering why I couldn’t just let it be.

 

I remember the endless compliments I used to receive in my bone-thin body and how they always provided fuel for more drastic attempts to keep losing weight. Then when I started gaining weight during my pregnancy, loved ones were so worried that some literally said things like “I just hope she gets her body back.” This led me down a rabbit hole of shame for the entire first year after my daughter was born, when the attempts to “get my body back” seemingly failed. 

That is, until I realized something totally profound. It has been my true north anytime self-doubt starts to creep back in. 

There is no going “back” in this physical journey, because my body never left me.

Courtesy of Lindsay Wolf

My body has been here with me this entire time. It has been showing up for me since day one. Despite my every effort to turn it into something it’s not, my body has continued to be there for me in whatever way it can. It has loved me in the best way it knows how, and it has forgiven me again and again whenever I forget how magical it truly is. 

But during my first year postpartum, all I could think about was how much I hated my body for just doing its job. I resented it for everything it transformed into so that I could meet my firstborn, hold her in my arms, and look into her beautiful eyes with so much love. I was fighting against the miracle of my daughter entering this world by blaming my body for the physical evidence left from her journey.

Courtesy of Lindsay Wolf

Isn’t it amazing how far we will travel away from ourselves, just because society has taught us to hate the necessary physical changes inevitable in becoming a mom? 

I’m so fucking grateful I didn’t get pulled so far away that I couldn’t come back to myself. One photograph was all it took to tip me in the direction of self-love.

Courtesy of Lindsay Wolf

I had asked my husband to snap a picture of me just after I gave birth to our daughter, and I found it in an album a year later and couldn’t take my eyes off of it. In the image, I still looked pregnant, my stretch mark game was strong, and my body took up a whole lot of space. And yet, I looked so goddamn happy. I had just done this awesome thing, and I felt so proud of my body for everything it did to get me there.

Then, it happened, little by little. I’d start passing my reflection in the mirror and seeing the extra curves and dimples and grooves. And for just a moment, I’d acknowledge how beautiful I felt in a bigger body. Those moments began to stick with me longer, and before I knew it, I was knee deep in the body positivity movement. Seeing myself take up more physical space felt fucking great, to be honest. I started to feel free, like I could finally breathe for the first time.

Courtesy of Lindsay Wolf

I have been breathing fully and deeply for over two years now. My body-acceptance levels have reached epic proportions, and yet I still weigh about as much as I did when I birthed my son last fall. At least, I think I do. I only get weighed at the doctor’s office these days. There are no scales in my home, and I have every intention of keeping it that way.  

Of all the things in the world, I never expected my pregnancy weight gain to help set me free. But it did. And now, I’m moving forward in this life choosing to enjoy myself, regardless of how much or little I weigh. I’m choosing to soak up each moment, make some lasting memories, and get into the goddamn picture. And I’m choosing love for every single shred of evidence on my body that shows how I grew and birthed two amazing kids. 

I’m letting my fat flag fly loud and proud for all to see these days, and I don’t give a damn if anyone cares. Seventy-five pounds gave me my life back. I couldn’t be more grateful. 

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