I will never have the body that I want.    At this point in my life it really is not lack of trying.   Although, in all honesty I could eat better and eat less cake and chocolate; but what is life without cake and chocolate?   For me though, it really is partly the way my body is designed and shaped.   I do not have an hourglass figure.   As much as we all try, we can never look like those that we see on TV or magazines.   A lot of that may do with the fact they have a style crew, a nutritionist, a trainer, and have many of their photos airbrushed to beyond perfection.    We have all seen where the airbrushing has even gone too far!  Think Kardashian.   Actually, lets not think about her!   But even when it’s not taken to the extreme, it does remove ever “imperfection” making the rest of us mere mortals think somehow we are doing something wrong.

Case in point

Cameron Diaz is a beautiful and fit woman, but she is a normal woman

at least in the first picture!

There are no amount of exercise that will get you to the second picture.

It’s just not going to happen.

Never Ever.

So we all need to stop buying into the hype that we are somehow lacking because that just isn’t the case.   Now, I am not saying that I don’t look in the mirror and see things that I wish I  looked different.   I think that is normal.   I know that I was looking at a picture that my sister took of me at the Philadelphia Marathon.   Rather than looking at the picture and reveling in the accomplishment of what I had accomplished, I looked at it and thought,

“My God is this what I look like from behind!”

Luckily, my next thought was,

“What is wrong with you?   The picture shows you completing a major major major accomplishment!   This is the body that carried you 26.2 miles.   This is what strength and endurance looks like.   This is the way God made you to so that you could do these things.”

Now, don’t get me wrong.   I still wish that I looked more like Cameron Diaz.   I will even take the unedited version.   But in the whole scheme of things, my body does not define who I am.   If you were to somehow put what makes me in a completely different body, I would still be me.    The outside does not define who you are.   It is who you are on the inside.

So I will stick with what I’ve got.   This is the body that carried 3 children.   This is the body that went through 3 c-sections to birth them.  As my favorite expression goes,

It is what it is!