Keelie Reason of Love Hope Adventure is here with us today! I’m thrilled to have this wonderful marriage blogger provide some practical advice on how to feel beautiful. In addition to the encouragement to embrace our beauty, it’s great to have these specific tips on how to adjust our attitudes to achieve that goal.
Also be sure to check out Keelie’s blog, where you can get practical tips for your marriage and your marital bedroom.
This year, I have seen a lot of great campaigns out there about women learning to accept the way they look. Not only accept the way they look, but appreciate and love their body. It was a topic that just kept coming up over and over.
I read J’s post: Feeling Beautiful in 2015: Fight the Frump and really felt the pull to put together a How to Feel Beautiful Series of my own. Through those weekly beauty challenges, I learned a lot about the way I view myself.
Why I Feel More Beautiful Now Than I Did in My 20’s
When I look back at the pictures of myself in my 20’s there isn’t much difference between the way I looked then and now. So, why do I feel more beautiful this decade then I did last decade?
I’ll give you a hint, it started in my MIND.
Feel Beautiful, Not Look Beautiful
One of the things I focused in on in my series was how to feel beautiful, not how to look beautiful. Ladies, can I just say something? You LOOK beautiful! The problem is that you do not feel that way.
If you want to look in the mirror and like what you see, you have to change your mindset. You can spend hours trying to look better, but if you don’t have the right mindset, you will never see the beauty you already posses.
Take Steps to Changing Your Mind and Seeing Your Beauty
There are some things you can do that will put you in the right mindset to feeling beautiful about yourself. It is so important that you take the steps in the direction of accepting your own loveliness. Otherwise, you can be a runway model and think you are ugly (and believe me, there are runway models out there that feel that way).
Remove Influences That Make You Feel Unattractive
One of my biggest defenses to win the war in my mind is to remove the influences in my life that make me feel unattractive. When I was a teenager, I stopped reading beauty magazines. Even now, I stay away from them.
As much as possible, I limit my influences. If that means I have to stop looking at Facebook for a while, I will…Pinterest a problem? Gone…whatever it is that is making me feel bad about the way I look, I get away from it.
Get Out Of Your Pajamas and Yoga Pants
I love some of the great challenges that Sheila at To Love Honor and Vacuum give about Getting Dressed. For those young mom’s out there with a baby on each hip, I know how hard of a task this can be. Shoot, for those of us that have kids that can dress themselves, it can be a challenge.
Trust Someone Else to Tell You The Truth
Can’t believe yourself when it comes to the way you look? Find a trusted friend and ask them. If you are married, go to your spouse and ask them to tell you specifically a few things they love about the way you look. You can also ask a close family member or friend their thoughts.
The most difficult thing to do is to trust what that person has to say. If your friend or spouse thinks you have nice hair, eyes, waistline…whatever, believe them.
The Benefits Of Changing Your Mind
When you commit to changing your mind and seeing yourself as the attractive person you are, it will have great impact on your relationships. Feeling good about yourself removes the negative thinking from your mind that makes it hard for you to receive love. If you have a poor self-view, you will struggle to go deeper in your relationships, especially your marriage.
I encourage you to do what is necessary to move towards a positive mindset about yourself. Also, it is just as important that you help your spouse feel attractive and good about who they are.
Keelie is married to her high school sweetheart, and they raise their three amazing boys together. She blogs about the marriage relationship at Love Hope Adventure. It is her passion to see couples grow in a deeper relationship that is satisfying.
There are many days I feel great about myself. I can name many parts of my body I think are very nice (eyes, hair, and I have super cute feet just for starters). I take good care of myself and weigh less now than I did when I got pregnant with my first. But I realized through this series that I have a couple of hang ups about myself.
While I believe hubby when he says I am sexy, I don’t believe him when he compliments my breasts. Part of it is my own hang up. I have average sized breasts, but they are not the full, round pillows I hoped and longed for growing up. I wanted to give my husband a glorious pair and I ended up losing that genetic lottery. Then I married a fellow who likes a good large handful, and throughout our marriage he either largely ignored my breasts or would make mention of them being small. It has only been the past year that he seems enamoured by them and actually likes them (apart from when they were gloriously large from lactating). So, I find it hard to believe that he actually does like them as they are.
The other part is I love hubby and wish I could give him his heart’s desires and be all he ever dreamed of in a wife. Instead, he admits he loves me and how I look, but he also settled for a pleasing reality rather than his preference. I am not busty, I am not a redhead (he says no to me getting a boob job and dye job). If I let it fester, it can kill me knowing I am not what he really wanted. It is like a kid asking for a blue lightening bolt iPad for Christmas and getting a plain white one instead. Sure, he still got an awesome iPad and he is happy with that, but his heart was set on that blue lightening bolt iPad. I wonder if hubby ever feels sad he never got the “iPad” he wanted. It doesn’t help that during our marriage he has done Google and YouTube searches for videos and pictures of women of that description having sex. I know it isn’t about me, but rather him, but it still hurts.
Thanks so much for letting me come and share my heart with you guys, J! I appreciate it. 🙂
Keelie, you are so right that it first takes a change in attitude to allow ourselves to embrace our beauty. Everything you mentioned is so easily doable. I especially loved the ‘trust someone else to tell you the truth.’ For the longest time I didn’t trust my husband! He’s the one I should always depend on. Once I chose to let his words soak into my mind, things slowly changed for the better.
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My wife sometimes feels down and at these times I remind her that for me she is the most beautiful woman in the world. I tell her that I asked her to marry me because I loved her and I loved her because she was bright, beautiful and fun to be with. After over 40 years I love her so much more and I consider myself the most blessed of men to have her as my wife. I remind her of this too whenever she feels depressed over something.
Eve, as the capstone of YAHWEH’s six days of creation, was (and is) the most beautiful creature fashioned by the hands of God. Lucifer, aka Satan, once the most beautiful creature in the universe, flew into a jealous rage when he saw her, and he went straight to Eve, bypassing Adam.
No rose, no mountain vista, no sunset–no living creature can compare to the beauty of face and figure of the woman. Sadly, most women just don’t get it.
The Lord, through Paul, in Ephesians 5 instructs husbands to love their wives as they do their own bodies. Ladies, you need to take this to heart. Love the body and face God gave you, and learn to appreciate your husband’s comments when he compliments it.
Eric