The most beautiful thing a person can do is offer self-giving love. I love Kate’s description of “This is my body given up for you”.

I have seven kids and constantly struggle with this issue. I do still associate my worth with how I look. I know it’s bad. I needed to read something like this.

I used to consciously avoid looking at magazine covers at the store. I need to start doing that again. My daughter picks up magazines and turns them around so the less-offensive ads on the back are being displayed instead of the scantily-clad women and article titles about being better in bed. Fortunately our tv broke at the beginning of the summer…

Lucky

I continually aim to balance my desire to look attractive and be healthy with my need to remember the truth that God loves me just as I am. Thanks for your insight, Kate! I’ll let you know when the new blog is up and running!

Which brings me to my point: how far from God must be those who promote the Hollywood / MSM version of the Ideal Woman, a glamour (in the sense of illusion) that is entirely image and no substance?

“The poor you will have with you always,” Jesus told His followers when one of them criticized Mary of Bethany for wanting to anoint Him with precious oil. And while it is absolutely true that one of the best ways to fight self-absorption is to turn our attentions to those less fortunate, it is also true that eating disorders have a psychological component that cannot be merely ignored or redirected. They must be treated, usually by a competent professional.

Deirdrew, while I think this story about the running nun is fascinating, and a good way for us to practice generosity of heart, I think you could stand to be a little more generous and compassionate toward your sisters right here among you. As you can see from the comments, souls are suffering right here among us. What good does it do to be compassionate in the abstract — toward those anonymous souls in Africa we will never meet — if we cannot love from the heart those in our own back yard?

I think one of the most hurtful things that ever happened to me in this regard happened when my daughter was a teen. I was chaperoning an event she and one of her best friends were at. We were getting ready for bed and I heard her best friend make a comment about my chest. It was something to the effect that if hers ever got like that she’d kill herself and that her mom’s looked just as bad. My daughter chuckled in amusement. I can still see the place, I can still see their faces. They didn’t see a mother who had sacrificed her body for her children, they simply saw someone who didn’t meet their standard of Hollywood perfection. Years later the friend is married, contracepting, and apparently not particularly interested in having kids. My dd is about to be married and wants to have kids ASAP, but she’s also very concerned about what having kids is going to do to her body.

I don’t know how in our current culture we manage to convince, even ourselves, that while being fit is a good idea for people of any age, obsession with youthful perfection is not. Why is it that we see the body of a trim 16 year old as the ultimate in beauty? I remember as a young child thinking that my grandmother’s elderly skin was the softest most beautiful skin I’d ever seen. There are artists who have celebrated the beauty of the aged, but that seems increasingly rare. Perhaps it’s just the beauty of the not yet quite aged that is escaping the artist’s touch. It’s so frustrating to deal with feeling like you look like a frump, despite your best efforts. I know I shouldn’t care so much about what I look like, but ignoring what I looked like and it meant I ended up unhealthy.

It’s very hard accepting your body as a gift from God when it seems like those around you don’t. It’s hard accepting it as a gift from God when you feel like your husband is no longer interested in it, when your kids are ridiculing it, when your daughter says that it doesn’t really matter what you wear. Losing the weight has been helpful in that regard, but I’ll admit there are days when plastic surgery is a temptation (if I had the money that is). I don’t want that to be a temptation. I know it’s stupid to try to recover the look of your twenties in your fifties by endangering your life (surgery is always risky). I’m not unhappy to be the age I am, particularly now that I’m a healthy weight. Yet, even now I feel less attractive than I’d like.

Obviously, this is an area that I like the original writer have to deal with spiritually. However, I think it’s important for people to realize that part of the reason that we have problems loving our bodies as the incredible gifts of God that they are is that those around us don’t necessarily react to us that way. I never ever judged my grandmothers on their weight, their wrinkles, etc. I did find some of my mother’s choice of clothing to be embarrassing when I was a teen (she wore pedal pusher type pants to do grocery shopping when the other moms wore dresses), but I never gave her weight a second thought. My daughter’s generation has no problem at all critiquing the weight, fitness level, diet etc. of not only their peers, but their elders as well. It seems like obsessing about perfect bodies has become the national past time even while as a nation we are getting more and more obese.

The one thing I’ve found helpful at all is to seek out as role models those women my age and older who are attractive in a healthy way. Instead of looking at the clothing of sixteen year olds, the bodies of sixteen year olds, the hairstyles of sixteen year olds, I’ve tried to find the most attractive 60 somethings in our parish and figure out how I can perhaps look like that in a few years. I look at the lovely lady (clearly in her 70′s) that frequently sits next to us at Mass. She reminds me of my grandmother. She always looks beautiful, but she makes no attempt to look younger than she is. She doesn’t wear a head covering, but you get this sense of someone who is quietly modestly giving worship to God. It’s how I’d like my (eventual) grandchildren to see me. It’s really how I saw my own grandmother. Now if we can just get the rest of society to see older women in that light instead of as frumps maybe the plastic surgeons could get back to correcting cleft lips, fixing people injured in accidents, and stop doing breast enhancement surgery and tummy tucks.

As a husband, I feel great pains at seeing her so unhappy with herself and with the beautiful, healthy body God gave her. I see how it’s such a big central concern in her mind and I wish instead that she was free of this and able to put God in that central place. I feel helpless because I (as protector of the family, etc.) don’t seem to be able to do anything to help alleviate this. For a while I actively tried (always as lovingly as I could), and now I instead mainly try just loving and appreciating my wife more, but nothing seems to make much difference. It’s so frustrating also the way it can come between us- there have been happy days and intimate moments ruined because of all this. I just wish my wife could love and accept her body as the gift from God that it is and realize that she is so loved and valued and treasured by me and the kids and by God.