My relationship with my body has always been a little complicated. I danced until my junior year of high-school, so I was constantly in an environment that caused me to evaluate and compare how my body looked and performed in relation to everyone else. I was always a bit on the heavier side, and my relationship with food has always been weird, so my weight fluctuated quite a bit, which just made my relationship with my body all the more messy. I started recognizing the influence my body had on how I saw the world and how others saw me. I would get more attention from boys when I was skinny and this quickly solidified in my head that I was only desirable if I was skinny. My freshman year of college I lost a bunch of weight probably from the stress, the awful cafeteria food and the convenient running trails. That was great until I moved, and I put a ridiculous amount of pressure on myself to maintain the same routines with none of the motivation.

But this isn’t about my “weight loss journey.” In this coming holiday season, I want to focus on being thankful for my body. I always enter the holiday season trying to lose weight and monitor my eating because of the increasing fear that the weight will come back, that my high school friends won’t see me as a success and that I’ll undo all the work I’ve done. But I want to approach this year differently. I want to encourage everyone to embrace this holiday season differently. I want to be happy and enjoy my time with family and friends and eat without all the internal pressure to make healthy choices. I want to curl up in bed with a movie rather than stress about how I need to go running, but I don’t want to go running because it’s too freaking cold. Don’t get me wrong, eating healthy and running are awesome and I hope to do a lot of that through the holidays, but I’m taking the pressure off. I’m taking the pressure off my body to be consistently thin and never indulge. Instead of pushing and punishing myself, I’m just going to focus on being thankful for all the amazing things my body is and can do.

With all that said, I’m thankful for how strong my body is. I'm thankful for how I look and what I can do. My body can climb mountains and run and work hard. It is strong and it is beautiful. I am strong and I am beautiful. It doesn’t matter how much I work out or what I eat, those things are still true.