On her first birthday I made a decision that I wasn’t going to tell her how much I loved her. Instead…I decided to thank her for loving me. Loving all my imperfections, perfectly. Now today, on her second birthday approaches I plan to do the same thing.

Before becoming a mom the thing you hear most is, there is no love like the love you have for your child. Everyone talks about how much they love their child. I am no different, I love my almost two year old daughter so so much. But I want to talk about something no one talks about. No one talks about how much our children love us.

Whether you’re a mom, or an aunt, or a sister, or a wife, or a best friend, or all of the above, when you think of yourself poorly look at yourself through someone else’s eyes. To them you’re perfect. They love you and because they love you, you should love yourself too.
One thing I made a promise to myself I would never do is never talk poorly about myself verbally in front of my daughter. We as parents are responsible for teaching our children about the world. And that means they don’t need to hear us in front of the mirror saying “mommy looks fat.” They don’t need us to verbalize our imperfections. Stop talking about wrinkles and fat and cellulite and stress in front of them. To them we’re perfect and there is no reason to teach them otherwise. And pointing out our imperfections will only teach them that method of self love. I want to raise a strong woman who loves herself. Therefore I need to be a strong woman who loves herself too.
Happy Birthday to Penelope!!!! Or as she calls herself, Peppy

I took this pic a few days after I gave birth to send it to my best friend (doesn’t everyone send their BFF photos like this💁🏻‍♀️) I always cringe when I scroll past it in my camera roll, cringe thinking my body looked this way at one point. Actually disgusted by this photo. But for some reason I’ve never deleted it. And today, when I was seeing all the posts about #internationalwomensday I was thinking of the how I could join the conversation and I thought of this picture. It’s insane how amazing our bodies are and to think we vilify them constantly is so disheartening. Gals, we are so freaking strong in so many ways, this is just one of them, but a small reminder that we should celebrate this strength with photos

The definition of metabolism is: a series of chemical reactions that take place inside our body to sustain life. I know that shocked me too but I always assumed metabolism just meant the process by which someone is fat or skinny.

So then why is the word metabolism so closely associated with weight loss ?

Well, the bodies ability to sustain life (think back to the definition) boils down to the bodies ability to use 4 bio molecules, protein, fat, carbs and something called, “nucleic acids.” Nucleic acids are things like DNA & RNA.

So in the simplest terms we eat food to obtain these necessary bio molecules for metabolism. But every food we eat isn’t the perfect configuration of what our body needs. So what happens is, a food is broken down during digestion into simple and more scientific sounding particles. I like to think of each piece of food we eat as a bowl of rainbow M&Ms that then get separated by color. So after digestion we take our food (bowl of rainbow M&Ms) and break them down into 4 bowls of individual colors (blue, red, green and yellow)

So you’ve eaten a food that contains protein, fat, carbs & nucleic acids and digestion breaks it down into fatty acids (fat) glucose (carbs) amino acids (protein) & nucleotides. With me so far?

Then we need to use what our body needs. So we take the configuration of colors our body needs. And that takes energy. So the same food we eat is being broken down but also built back up at the same time. It’s a cycle. And guys…what regulates that cycle?! you guessed it…hormones.

And it is still very confusing. So did I help? Eh, not sure:)