Read This Empowering Facebook Post About Body Image

Thanks to good old New Year’s resolutions, we spend a lot of January thinking about our bodies. Maybe we want to lose weight, eat better, or meditate more. All that reflection on what we want to change makes it way too easy to think of the things we don’t like about our bodies—the part that jiggles, the part that doesn’t look quite right.

That’s why this Facebook post from Molly Galbraith, a certified strength and conditioning coach and co-founder of Girls Gone Strong, stopped us in our tracks. It’s the good, the bad, the ugly, and ultimately the amazing revelation we could all stand to have. Check it out below:

This is my body.

This not a before picture.

This is not an after picture.

This just happens to be what my body looks like on a random Tuesday in December of 2015—it’s a LIFE picture.

This is a body that loves protein and vegetables and queso and ice cream.

This is a body that loves bent presses and pull-ups and deadlifts and sleep.

This is a body that has been abused with fast food and late nights and stress.

This is a body that has been pushed to the brink of leanness in figure competitions and maximum strength in powerlifting meets.

This is a body that begged for mercy when it was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and PCOS.

This is a body that has been called:

– too fat
– too thin
– too masculine
– too strong
– too weak
– too big
– too skinny

…all within the same week.

This body has been publicly evaluated, judged, and criticized, and those judgments have been used to determine my level of skill as a coach and a trainer, and my worth as a person, both positively and negatively.

Some people say they would “kill to have this body.”
Others say they would “kill themselves if they had this body.”
(Yes, unfortunately that’s actually a thing humans say to one another.)

This is a body that I spent too much time, energy, and mental space wishing would look differently.

And today?

Today this is a body that is loved, adored, and cherished by the only person whose opinion matters—ME.

This is the first year in as long as I can remember that I have made NO resolutions to change the way my body looks.

This is a kind of freedom I didn’t think I’d ever experience, and it feels really, really good.