To the girl who is on the journey to becoming a woman~
I want you to know I share these words of wisdom and advice from a place of love. I was once a girl who was impressionable and desired to be loved. I want you to know you are fully loved, accepted, and valued just the way you are. Your Creator says you are, "wonderfully and fearfully made".
Here is the cost to questioning, doubting, or looking to others, the world, or anything else for a different truth.
It will cost you your mental health, physical well-being, emotional stability, basically it costs you everything! Mentally you will sacrifice your thoughts, every moment of every day, will be consumed with thoughts of comparison, food, restricting, binge eating, and any other unhealthy thoughts pertaining to food or body image. You're basically at war with the thoughts in your head. "If only" will consume your thoughts, pertaining to body image, food consumption or lack thereof, and exercise routine. It's exhausting, leaving little energy for the things in life that truly matter.
Physically, eating disorders destroy your body from the inside out. You may have a "thin" body but inside your body is striving to survive. Eating disorders can affect the heart, the stomach function and create infections, issues with the glands under the jaw, bowel problems, the list goes on. Seriously, taken to the extreme it could kill you or leave you with life long health issues.
Emotionally, chasing after the "thin ideal" costs you experiencing peace, oy, happiness, and laughter. It devours you with feelings of insecurity, fear, anxiety, isolation, despair, depression, guilt, shame, emptiness, judgmental and critical of self and others, anger, frustration, withdrawn, and numb. It may also bring on other unhealthy habits such as perfectionism or OCD. Chasing the "thin ideal" takes you away from the present and throws you into the fears of the "what ifs" of the future or the "if onlys" of the past. It costs relationships, missed opportunities, living out your purpose, a healthy relationship with food and your body. You don't have to look or be like anyone else, if people reject you, they are missing out. Be true to your Creator, Lord God Almighty and believe He created you with intention and perfectly imperfect. Don't look to the left or to the right, just rest in knowing Jesus and you can stop striving.
Rest in Him, Marissa Menth
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