Song of songs 4:7 – You are altogether beautiful, my darling, there is no fault within you.

I have always loved running. I’ve always loved fitness & eating healthy & overall living a lifestyle that makes my body feel good. There’s nothing wrong with this! Heck, I am so lucky that God gave me a naturally athletic body. I’ve come to appreciate that God knew my crazy-energy lifestyle wouldn’t fly with a cute little petite body or a sexy voluptuous one. As much as I would love a tiny waist or at least the slightest evidence of curves, the gifts of my thick muscular legs & little-to-no extra weight in the chest department, lol, allow me to live my life SO abundantly & enjoy the life I was given & that is so good.

However, this year, something has changed. My move to Cal Poly has brought me into a whole new culture where the healthy eating and fitness lifestyle is amped up to a whole new level. And with this, I am surrounded by absolutely STUNNING people 24/7. Every girl I cross paths with God decided to make extra freakin’ beautiful and if I’m being honest my confidence levels have basically gone down the toilet. This energetic healthy atmosphere has made my life so good and spontaneous and adventurous, but what I’m starting to realize is that I’m starting to take healthy living a little too seriously.

Working out and eating healthy aren’t about feeling good anymore, they’re about getting skinny.

I feel like I’m in a constant chase to catch up. That if I skip a day of working out, then well, I better work out twice, if not three times the next day. And if I don’t work out enough, I definitely don’t deserve dessert. Because if I don’t excersize a thousand hours a day and treat myself to dessert to often, eventually everything will catch up and I’ll be fat and worthless and won’t be able to call myself an athlete anymore, & boy oh boy it’s getting warm in California & that means bikini season and –

… hold the fricken phone. This isn’t how life’s supposed to be, this is toxic.

The whole point, the reason I have always enjoyed working out, is because it makes me happy. If healthy living becomes this game of trying to have it all and constantly just trying to improve my physical beauty, what does that say about my spiritual beauty? What does that say about my heart? About how much I value my creator? My god who knit me together in my mother’s womb and called me His masterpiece, made perfect in His image, listens to me spend every day tell him, “eh, needs work.”

God doesn’t care how skinny I am, how toned my abs are, or how many servings of peanut butter I eat in one day (btw a very impressive number). God cares that my heart is focused on things a lot bigger than my body image. God cares that I spend my days loving His people unconditionally and living in the joy of His presence and glorifying his works with my actions, and THAT will always bring me MORE JOY than doing another fifty crunches.

I will always love running. I will always love that God gave me strong and able legs that let me go on little adventures to clear my head. But, if there’s a day when my body is tired or God needs me to take a day off, that is fine by me. I will also always love eating healthy, because God made fruits and vegetables, and they’re dang fricking good. But God also created ice cream, and you bet I will treat myself to that, too.

I will never be a size zero, and that’s completely ok. That’s not the way I was made. It’s more than ok, actually, because God says I am fearfully and wonderfully made. That there’s no fault within me.

It’s time to start fixing my eyes on things that are eternal. And believe it or not, calories are only temporary.