The {Real} Beauty Project

For some time now the topic of beauty has been on my mind. More accurately, REAL beauty. The kind that the world many times calls ugly. The world would have you believe that you can only be beautiful with plastic surgery, size 00 jeans and flawless skin. But this obsession with perfection is the real ugliness. And it scares me. It scares me for all the women out there who feel that they can't have a baby without practically killing themselves to get back down to their pre-baby weight within a month. It scares me for the little girls who look at magazines and think, "that's what I'm supposed to look like if I'm ever going to be happy or find love." It scares me for myself. Because I have thought those things. I have counted calories - allowing myself only 1000 a day - while taking hydroxycut and working out and still thinking when I was a size zero that I wasn't small enough. That unless I looked like the air-brushed model on the magazine, I wasn't beautiful enough. But one thing I know for sure - those are the worst kind of lies. Those are the kind of lies that Satan wants us to believe. So we will give up on ourselves. So we will give up on being happy because we'll never amount to that kind of perfection. And honestly, I know that the world won't stop trying to cram these ideals down each and every woman's throat. So, I've decided to start The {Real} Beauty Project. I don't even know what that entails right now. It could someday be a foundation much like the Dove Beauty Campaign that strives to show girls and women around the world what beauty really is. Or it could just be something here for me. To show my future daughters. To remind myself what beauty is on those days I'm feeling inadequate. Either way, it's something I've got to do. Because women - we are freaking beautiful in ALL our shapes and sizes. We are beautiful for e v e r y t h i n g we do. So plan on seeing real beautifulness exploding out of this blog from time to time. And in the meantime, remember: