Be Beautiful Be You

Hello lovely ladies, I hope you are all well. I've been wanting to get a post up for ages about 'true beauty' seeing as anyone who reads my little blog either has their own beauty blog or is completely beauty obsessed like I am. I've never done a serious blog post on here before, but I thought it was about time, so I'll warn you now - I'm not sure 100% where I will be going with this, I'm just going to type and let my thoughts spill onto the screen, so it maybe long and seam like a little bit of a ramble (though sometimes we all love a good ramble on) and I hope by getting all my little thoughts out I maybe able to help if some of you relate. 

So... The other day I posted the '50 Random Things About Me' tag and my last random fact was I am a huge believer in the saying 'you must learn to love yourself, before you can expect anyone else to love you' and I had quite a few responses from you lovely ladies saying that it was a good way to think and it made me realise that we all need to take a few more moments out of our lives to think on the positives about ourselves, myself included. It is far too easy these days to get down about the way we look especially seeing as there as are so many constructed ideas in society of what beauty is and how we should all look. It brings the question to mind 'what is beautiful' and are we all showing the world and ourselves our 'true beauty'. I think it's fair to say that every woman, girl no matter how old or young are all far to aware of our flaws and sometimes it can be far too easy to focus on these, so much so that it makes us feel down about ourselves and just miserable. I don't understand why us ladies can't look in the mirror more often and see the good things staring back at us in our reflection, instead of picking out the bad and letting it get you down for the whole day.

Over the last few years I have really tried hard in trying to see the positives that makes me beautiful and really focused on changing my negative mind set about myself. I'm aware that that sounds incredibly vein, but I honestly believe each and every single one of us is beautiful in our own way and it's up to us to find our true beauty, embrace it and let it shine though for the world to see. I want to be completely honest with you beauties, for most of my life I used to have the most negative mind set about my body image and it caused me nothing but misery and had such a negative effect on myself and those around me. When I was around 5 I went though a stage of not wanting to eat at all and as I grew older this love/hate relationship with food developed into an eating disorder. When I was around 17 my body image was completely distorted and I lived my life for a good 6 years, not eating, looking in the mirror only to see flaw after flaw. Magazines and images online (which I know are all mostly photo shopped) gave me this idea in my head of what being beautiful was and I felt the need to look a certain way and be a certain shape and size. I became obsessed with looking in the mirror, standing there for hours on end thinking 'I look too fat', the longer this went on, the more weight I lost and the more I found myself hating my body image. My opinion of myself became so low, that I lost so much of my confidence, pushed all friends and family away because the only thoughts that I had room for was, loosing weight, food, the scales, the mirror and thinking when I can fit time in to exercise as much as possible. I got stuck in a horrible cycle for 6 years where  the only words in my mind constantly were - fat, ugly, imperfect, disgusting and 'I want to be skinny'. The truth was I was skinny, way too skinny and I found that not only was I looking terrible on the outside I was feeling pretty terrible on the inside too. My once bubbly personality was gone and I lost my 'spark' as so they say. At 22 I had caused the people that love and care about me way too much worry and reached out and got the help I needed to put me on the right track again... and the right track is where I am now. Yes there are times where I have my moments, but I've not counted a calorie for 3 years and haven't put myself on any ridiculous diets or intentionally tried to loose weight. 

I know my story shows an extreme way of how you can get down about the way you look, but I know that all of us beauties have our own battles with our appearance and I see it in those that are close to me down to women that come into work, trying on clothes; we all have our own body flaws. Which brings me on to my next point - How do we change our way of thinking and start to see how beautiful we all really are? Well I don't think it is the easiest task at all, but I do know that we all have something that makes us special and we just have to take the time to compliment ourselves a little bit more so we focus on the good rather than the bad. You may have the most amazing eyes, so take 10 minutes in the morning to do your eye makeup really well, to extenuate this feature. You might have spent years growing your hair, take time to have a look in the mirror and give it a swish and a flick to pop a smile on your face. You might think you have a really big bum, but could have the most beautiful smile in the world - focus on this. I honestly believe that for every bad thing we could find about our body, you can find at least two good features to outweigh this bad and this is what we need to focus on to help us feel more body confident. My number one tip to help with having a good body image though ladies has to be 

Don't compare yourself to anyone else, just be beautiful and be you!

I found that it was way too easy to compare myself to someone else, thinking I wish I had her body, looked like her and all that do will make you feel crappy about ourselves.I used to cringe thinking about what features I liked about myself, but I found that starting with others can be a great way into building that confidence up. If you find it hard to compliment yourself try complementing those around you and let others know that they look beautiful; this will be sure to spread some good beauty love around and will help others to be more body confident and I can guarantee that it wont be long before the beauty love starts to come back your way. Most of the things we don't like about ourselves can be changed, although there can be extremes as I have mentioned, but I've learnt that it's so important to just be comfortable in our own skin. We can change the way we look, but our bodies are always changing everyday anyway, which makes it all that important to learn to love the things about ourselves daily and embrace your body confidence in the moment.

Being beautiful is not just about looking beautiful too, true beauty definitely comes from within and the saying 'the best accessory a woman can wear is her smile' couldn't be more true. I think its very easy for our personalities to shy away when we get wrapped up in negative thinking and as a result you miss out on all the important things that are going on around you and you aren't showing the world how beautiful you really are. I love how we are all so different and each have a bit of sparkle in us that makes us beautiful on the inside and out, we just need to embrace this and love ourselves a bit more. So ladies before you leave the house tomorrow be sure to be happy about one thing about yourselves and try to leave the house with a smile on your face. What you feel is what you are and what you are is beautiful (can anyone name that song). 

I would love to hear your thoughts on this ladies, let me know if you have any good tips on being body confident so we can really spread the beauty love. And remember you are beautiful!!

Lot's of Love