Loving your stretch marks

You need to start loving your stretch marks and stop this love, hate relationship with them! They are a weird one, because despite being completely natural and beautiful, people are still self conscious about them.

Before even getting pregnant, majority of individuals have stretch marks, whether it’s on their thighs, hips, boobs or some other part of the body. They shouldn’t be thought of as this alien thing that is making you imperfect. There is no such thing as perfect or imperfect bodies. We should all be embracing our bodies, not wishing for it to be different. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve yourself. However just know that you don’t have to change yourself to love yourself. Self love is a journey that a lot of people are on and on thing is for sure, you should never stop working on yourself.

Each one of your stretch marks is a story, especially after you have just had a baby. Your body just did something incredible. It made another human being. You are a badass woman who made a miracle happen. There is a lot of pressure to ‘snap back’ after having a baby and to get rid of all that excess skin. After you have literally pushed another human out of you, your focus should be on your baby. When you look at yourself in the mirror you should be so incredibly proud of what you have just achieved and what your body did for you.

It can take a while to get to the point where you look in the mirror and love the reflection. But once you get there, it is so freaking amazing! Please don’t live in fear of what other people think, that is their problem and not yours. The truth is, if someone has an opinion about you, it’s probably a reflection of their own thoughts about themself. It has nothing to do with you at all.

Love Yourself

Learning to love yourself can be hard but it is possible. It is scary and social media doesn’t necessarily make it easier, but it doesn’t have to be the bad guy either. Surround yourself with people who are going to bring you up, not knock you down. Loving yourself doesn’t mean you are vain or selfish, confidence is sexy.

It is so amazing to see stretch marks more and more in the media. All over Instagram, celebrities are being more transparent which is making others share their own stretch marks. Women like Ashley Graham, Cara De La Hoyde and Millie Mackintosh are sharing the realities of post partum body’s and the changes that happen to women’s body’s.

 

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A post shared by Pregnancy & Parenting (@pregnancyparentingmagazine) on Apr 30, 2020 at 11:54am PDT

Stretch marks are also incredibly common in women who haven’t been pregnant and is very refreshing to see more images of women that haven’t been airbrushed/retouched. This is working towards normalising stretch marks and turning these ‘imperfections’ into beautiful perfections.

Start loving your stretch marks because they are apart of you and by loving them, you are beginning to love yourself maybe for the first time.