If like me you’re looking at the bikinis in the shops and thinking about your holiday wardrobe and panicking about how ‘beach ready’ your body is – then this one’s for you!
I tend to stay out of the ‘beach ready body’ debate. I think so long as you’re moderately healthy, which is different from what your body looks like, your doing fine. I do find it difficult that we as Mamas especially worry so much about what our body’s look like and what messages that means we are passing on to our Smalls. The media in all it’s forms, is constantly telling us how we should look.
Beach Ready Bodies – constantly meaning something new!Coming home from our Italian campsite last summer which was home to thousands of women from a range of nationalities, Dutch, German, Italian, Swiss, British I can report we’re all looking just perfect!
It was a family campsite, 90% of the women there were mums, mostly with children under ten, mostly with two or more kids and we were wading knee deep in the toddler pool and sitting on the shore in our swimwear as it was gloriously hot!
I was Mama-ing without make-up, with my pear-shaped chunky thighs, c-section over hang and boobs that have fed three small infants. And while I can’t admit to splashing into the sea carefree, as if I were Pamela Anderson in Baywatch, I did my best to try to ignore my inner thoughts telling me I wasn’t looking how I was ‘supposed’ to look.
Mama; in a bikini or a maxi dress, I’m still a Mama
I was witness to all sorts of body shapes from all sorts of nationalities in that pool. What struck me most was that none of what I saw tallied with the ‘beach ready’ images I’d been bombarded with before departure. Tummies were worn with strechmarks, over hangs and scars having housed the growth of a couple of humans, boobs were wobbly having provided food for a baby or two, hips were wide having sacrificed good diet and time to exercise to the much greater need for sleep recovery.
The biggest trick to not worrying about what your body looks like is not worrying what other people think your body looks like like. These are such good messages to pass on to our Smalls. We’re always telling them – ‘it doesn’t matter what they think’ well we need to start practising what we preach, it REALLY doesn’t matter what they think!
While we worry about our own figures way more than we should, we so rarely have anything to compare them to other than the mass media pictures of toned, non saggy women. Word up folks, those pictures you see are not of ‘normal’ women. Normal women are the ones I saw hanging around the holiday pool. Scooping up their little ones on to their we’ll worn hips, squashing their thighs into the sand to help build a sandcastles and pulling toddlers on to their soft tummys on a sunbed.
You are not fat or curvy or wobbly or saggy or scarred. You’re normal! Perfectly normal. This is your body, eat healthily, take a little exercise because it’s good for you, not because you want to be beach body ready – trust me you already are! Mamas you’re looking perfect! Pick up that bikini, wear it with pride and trust me that it really doesn’t matter what other people think of your body, it’s YOURS!
Bless you, just what we all need to hear, thanks for that x
Ahh – thanks Heidi! xx
Currently in Spain on holidays and all mummies around are just like me, a bit too much here and there, some scars, stretch marks and big smiles on their face when they see their kids having fun.