This year I am going to fall in love with myself. I wrote a bit about it in my post about intentional living, but I want to share more. Self love. It's a difficult topic. People seem to confuse loving yourself with being conceited or self involved. But I don't believe I can be a great mother to my Everly without loving myself. She deserves a mama who loves herself and teaches her to do the same. Everything I do now is motivated by Everly in one way or another. I want to be a better mother, a better wife,  a better person because she deserves better from me. Always. I want to teach Everly that she is absolutely perfect and teach her to love herself. I believe the best way to teach anything is by example. It's becoming more and more important for me to love myself.

There are a lot of things I like about me. There are also things I don't like and that's what I'm going to be working on this year. Every time I look in the mirror I see a flaw. I want to work on turning my flaws into strengths and accepting my imperfect body and soul as they are. If there's something I cannot accept I will change it. It will be an ongoing love affair.

The past year over at Alex's blog she's been writing all about self love and it's been inspiring. Every time I read one of her self love posts I find myself nodding along with her writing. I may not be just like her or going through the same experiences, but the lessons she learning are universal. Alex said "I am okay with embracing all parts of me now. I embraced for the first time this year, my bravery, my creativity, my strong will to survive (more on that in a minute) my sense of humor, my ability to be a good friend, my questionable fashion sense, my impeccable ability to bake desserts, and my way with words. I also embraced the fact that I'm completely negative, I'm a bitch, I despise spending time with people, I despise people, I feel that I have to answer to no one in this life, I'm incredibly difficult sometimes, I'm neurotic, and want nothing to do with the majority of people whose paths I cross. I'm fine with all this! Yay go me self esteem blah blah honesty blah."

Today I'm embracing myself as this imperfect woman, imperfect wife, imperfect mother. Sister, daughter, friend, confidant. I am all of these things, imperfectly. I love that about myself. Perfection is boring. I am a flawed individual. But I am strong and smart and curious and above all I have a good heart, a good soul. I have blossomed from the girl I used to be into the woman that I am. The right words often escape me in describing how deep my feelings run. This is hugely personal to me. When I look at the photo above I can easily pick out flaws. They practically leap of the screen. Today I choose to pick out the strengths. The bags under my eyes are not those of a sleep deprived woman, but those of a mother who loves her daughter so deeply that she stayed up half the night rocking, nursing, and comforting her to allow her to get some sleep. My Everly is young. She will not need me forever. But she needs me now and I am everything for her. The woman in this photo is strong. She is brave. She is vulnerable. And she's a mother who loves fiercely.

xo Sue

Have you ever in your life been unhappy with your weight or how your body looked when you saw yourself in the mirror? Have you ever had someone stand in front of you in a picture so that you didn't seem so fat? Have you ever tried to lose weight or become healthy and quit after a week or two because it "wasn't working"? I have been through all of those things. And let's put a beam of light in saying that one, you are not alone and two, there truly is a light at the end of the long dreadful tunnel. I say long and dreadful because of the pure and simple fact that being healthy and losing weight is a very long and hard process. You will fight with yourself, you will fight with your loved ones, and sometimes you will fight with a workout machine (yes I've done it). But it's worth it. Yes you've heard it before with the whole "oh stick with it you'll get there" speech that your skinny friend or family member gives you and you just want to scream because they make it seem so easy. It's not easy, there's no magical pill, or magical treadmill that will give you instant results. And quite frankly as much as you want to just talk to someone about how you feel it's hard finding someone who actually understands and will listen to you and try to help. Let me just tell you a little bit about my story so that you won't feel so much like I am a broken record or some infomercial about losing weight.

Hi!! My name is Heather and I am what they like to call an emotional eater. If I'm sad, I eat. If I'm mad, I eat. If I'm happy, well yeah I think you get the point. I have struggled with weight loss my whole life!! Having an obese mother and a father who taught us to eat everything on our plate or we'd go hungry it was a struggle to be healthy and I grew up having a relationship with food. Food equalled happiness and fulfillment in my life and that's something I needed because I didn't get it from anyone else. Okay moving on, so like I said I was a chunky girl all the time, well I changed that once I graduated high school. I wanted so bad to get out of the home I was in that I went to join the military. But I was way too overweight for them to even think about recruiting me. So I had to lose weight. A lot of weight. I lost 50lbs before they would consider me and after ending up not joining the military and moving away I lost another 15 or so pounds. And then I got married and ended up pregnant!! Yay!! I had a rough pregnancy, husband was gone a lot (he's in the military) and I had high blood pressure so always getting tested, and being stressed out I'm sure you know what I did... Yep that's right I ate, and ate and ate. And even though I threw up so much of what I ate I still kept eating. It was so comforting. Well after I have birth to my amazing little boy I had lost about 40lbs of my baby weight which meant only 20lbs more pounds to go to get to my comfortable weight yay!! And then reality set in. I was basically a single mother with my husband not really connecting with our son (he's sooo much better now a year & 1/2 later) and my marriage was on the rocks. I fell to a very dark place in my life to where I gained so much weight I was just miserable. I was obese, miserable, and still searched for comfort within eating.

Then there was a weight loss competition on base and I joined. And I was determined to beat a lot of people if not win. I dedicated a huge part of my life to working out and eating right. And when I say working out I mean I was always doing something to burn calories, and I calorie counted (so hard to do!!) I limited my caloric intake and I burned as many calories as I could and I drank A LOT of water!! I worked my butt off... Quite literally. I lost a total of 36lbs between Jan-April, and I won. I won the competition, but even better I was able to play with my son more without feeling like I was going to pass out, I started feeling better about myself, and the best thing is that I had no help, I did this all on my own with my own determination my own will power and my own sacrifices. Looking back I would say that had I gotten help from someone there's no telling how much better it would've been. Since then I have lost more weight to a total of about 50 or so pounds and I am wanting to lose more but am just not letting it control my life right now.

Okay so back to the reason I am writing this. My point in this very long blog is that losing weight and being healthy IS POSSIBLE!! I wanted to quit so many times, and sometimes I did. I would take a couple days off because I was just tired. But when I was done taking a break I went back at it full force because I WANTED TO BE HEALTHY!! And WANTING something is the biggest part of doing something like this. I've done it twice, because I WANTED it, not because someone else wanted it for me. Did I struggle? YES!! Do I still struggle? YES!! Do I still find comfort in food? YES!! But I've worked so hard to get to where I am that I am just not ready to give it all up for unhealthy food. That doesn't mean that I don't splurge and get a cheeseburger over a salad but I've come to a point to where I know how hard it is to work off what I eat, and I am an adult and have to make the decision as to if it is worth it or not and well sometimes to me it is. "One bad meal isn't going to make you fat just like one good meal isn't going to make you skinny" -that's something I've had to learn to live by.

Being healthy and losing weight isn't always fun, or the cool thing to do but it's so rewarding in the end. Feeling good about yourself is something that a lot of people in this lifetime just have never felt because they just don't know how. If you don't like something about yourself change it, you are the only person in this world that you should allow to change something about yourself. Allow yourself to live an amazing long life, feeling good about who you are and what you look like. And most importantly when you feel like giving up, know that you are not alone, someone out there is cheering you on and looking up to you as their inspiration!!

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If you'd like to submit your own story to share with The Discover Yourself project we'd love to hear it. Visit our form here or send an email to thediscoveryourselfproject@gmail.com.

Ask yourself this. What's your least favorite thing about yourself? Now lets change that. Lets change the way we see ourselves. When we look in the mirror lets not see the thin tired mouth, the dark circles under our eyes, or the fly-aways sticking out of our hair. Lets instead see the smile on the lips, the brightness of the eyes, or the curls (or straightness) of the pretty hair we have. Lets take the negatives and make them positives.

I have this idea for people to share their stories. Everyone has a story, right? I know I do. And maybe it's not the most fascinating story that's ever been told, but it's my story. And that matters. We all want to share our stories, to be heard. We talk about ourselves, every one of us. Especially bloggers! We write entire pages on the internet dedicated to ourselves. We like to share our stories because we want to be heard. We want to know that the things we value are important and we are not alone.

Lets start now, and make it a 2014 personal intention. Lets talk about body image and self love. Lets talk about the things that are good and the things that are bad. Lets talk about the beauty of motherhood- and how damn hard it is. No one told me it would be this hard. No one told me it would be this wonderful. Lets talk about the beauty and the hardships of just being a woman. Lets talk about it. 

Lets talk about the fact that while I was pregnant I had more than one person accuse me of having an eating disorder and hurting my baby. I didn't. I had a very dangerous and scary disease called Hyperemesis Gravidarum that caused me to be hospitalized three separate times, triggered pre-term labor, and made me so sick I couldn't move for days. I cried myself to sleep repeatedly because I was terrified that something bad was going to happen to Everly because of this disease my body was fighting.

Lets talk about the fact that childbirth was the most painful, beautiful, intense, emotional, difficult, spiritual, amazing thing I've ever experienced. And when it was over the realness of life began. I had the most perfect daughter who depended on me entirely. She loved me and I loved her from the moment she was born and that love has only intensified with every passing day.

Lets talk about the fact that daily I question my abilities as a mother. I often look at Everly and think to myself that I am not worthy of her. She is superior in every way. She is smart and curious and beautiful and I will fight for her every single day of my life just so she can know happiness. My life is better with Everly in it. I am so lucky she is mine. She teaches and tests me every single day.

Lets talk about the fact that because of my HG I didn't gain any weight during pregnancy, but in fact lost 20 pounds. But now that I'm healthy again my stomach has gone down but it's not where I want it to be. My stomach is my least favorite part of my body. I do crunches, sit-ups, and other exercises and still my stomach is not flat. WHY? I'm learning to accept it, to love it even. I love my stomach. I carried my daughter there for 9 months and even without weight gain it stretched out and changed. And that's okay.

Lets talk about the fact that I love my face. I know, that sounded pretty vain right there, but part of this experience is talking about the good things too. It's okay to say that I love my face. It's not perfect, but it's mine and I really think it's a good one. I like the imperfections too. I honestly do.

This is a small part of my story. I want to share more. I will share more when the time is right. I'm starting this now, The Discover Yourself Project. If you want to share your story I would LOVE to hear it. You can send any and all submissions to thediscoveryourselfproject@gmail.com or if you'd like to share your story anonymously just go to this form and tell me all about yourself and your life.

xo Sue

As of right now, stories sent to us will be shared through As It Seems and The Discover Yourself Project. If we start to get a lot of stories (and hopefully we will!) they'll mostly be shared through The Discover Yourself Project. Please take a few minutes to visit us there, like us on Facebook, and share us with your friends. It would mean the world to us! THANK YOU!