Last week I've decided to put on my all time favorite pair of jeans shorts. They were my first pair of jeans shorts, bought during holidays with my family.
Long story short, when I put them on they were actually larger than expected.
That shouldn't have cause me any kind of emotion probably, but the opposite happened.
I kept on staring at the mirror with a facial expression which was a mix of sadness, satisfaction, fear and I can't tell which other contrasting feeling.
I have never struggled a lot with my body image, not even during high school, where for the first time I got exposed to an environment which was completely different from the comfort zone of my family.
When I was a child, we were always really active: ski, karate and swimming during winter time and skating, bike riding and walking in summer, just to mention a few. Being active was just our lifestyle. We did all those sports, because we had loads of energy and it was fun. In high school things changed as I realized that maybe I was not very similar in body shape to many of my classmates, but I didn't made such a big deal out of it. If I had to do some sport, I did what I liked the most and for me that meant ice skating. I was seriously into this sport because it made me feel so elegant and light, but at the same time powerful and with no fears.
I have never focused a lot on my body, as I have always put shaping my mind and heart in my top priorities. At the end of last year I have started realizing that maybe I needed some balance between the care and effort reserved to my thinking process and the little time spent to take care of my outer shell.
I have kept this thought for a while in my mind, evaluating pros and cons and trying to understand what stopped me from trying. A turning point in my life gave me the final push, and with the support of my best friend, I have decided that we would have tried exercising almost daily. That was almost three-four months ago.
Now that I see some results and changes in my body, I don't even know if I should be happy or sad. On one side, I am surprised of how committed I was in those months, and that makes me believe that I could achieve anything I want in life if I don't stop working for it, but on the other side my fear of changing has decided to appear. My biggest concerns when starting all this, were that maybe my family would not understand and that all my clothes would become too big for me to wear. I know my family supports my change, but I still don't know what to think of all this. That is the reason why the other day I could not stop looking in the mirror..
I did not do all of this to become skinnier or because of dissatisfaction of the way I look. And now that I look slightly different I am worried that this could transform from a healthy habit into an addiction.
Thanks God all the years of hard work on my mind are paying off, since I am still analyzing myself with clear head!
PS: isn't it amazing how easy it is for me to overthink even the less over-thinkable subjects? :)
