Self-image

Lately I have been struggling a little with my self-image.  Especially since I have put on a little weight with all the yummy meals Spencer has been treating me to at the Cannon center.  Wedding dress shopping didn't help either-- I swear 99% of the wedding dresses out there are made for skeletons, not people!  Grrr!
And then, just to top it off I realized this week that most (if not all) of the pregnant girls in my water aerobics class are skinner than me (minus the little bump in the tummy)!  Ouch.

So, I was feeling pretty discouraged and I decided to come up with this list of all of the reasons I'm glad I'm not skinnier:

1. I don't have to agonize over gaining a pound and thereby wrecking my "perfect" figure.
2. I don't look like a walking corpse.
3.  I have a fiancee who loves me, even if I'm not anorexically thin!
4.  People enjoy my cooking (after all, who can trust a thin cook?)
5.  My nieces and nephews still think I'm great!
6.  Didn't Anne of Green Gables always envy Diana for being "plump" and rosy?
7.  I don't necessarily have to be thin to acheive any of my life's goals.
8.  Micah is still fatter than me (ha!)
9.  It gives me an excuse to buy women's clothes instead of girls' clothes.
10.  Have any great women in history been ultra-thin?  Possibly, but I can't remember any off the top of my head.
11.  Isaiah 55:2
12.  It won't be such a shock to start gaining weight when I first get pregnant
13.  I Samuel 16: 7
14.  Thinness is not required for eternal salvation
15.  I have motivation to go walk down and visit Becca, Suz, and other family members/friends more often!
16.  Two words:  DARK CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!
17.  I'm alive.
18.  I have a body!  Which is a lot more than Satan has (ha!  take that Lucifer!!!)
19.  More excuse to take long walks with Spencer!
20.  I am a child of God and He loves me just the way I am.

"I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: “You can’t live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let people’s opinions make you self-conscious you give away your power. … The key to feeling [confident] is to always listen to your inner self—[the real you.]” And in the kingdom of God, the real you is “more precious than rubies."
--Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "To Young Women," Ensign, November 2005.