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Guest Post: Health Coach Discusses SHAME
Jenn Bonner is endorsed by Fit2B Studio as a health coach. She shares more of her story about being obese during pregnancy with us today…
Shame – what a shameful word. Unfortunately too many of us women live with shame every day. There is a range of shame women and moms go through on a daily basis.
- I didn’t get my kids homework in their backpack like all the other mother’s did.
- I ate the rest of my child’s breakfast when I didn’t need to.
- I got mad at my husband in front of my kids.
- I couldn’t fit into my favorite pair of pants.
- I don’t look like the other mommies. Especially the other mommies that look put together, sophisticated and with it.
- All I can think about is sitting down on the couch, watching a brain-draining movie and eating the bag of chips in the pantry.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have some kind of shame following me around. In highschool I felt shamed because I didn’t look like my friends. My pretty-popular-every-guy-wanted-to-date-them friends. Oh yeah, even the guys that I liked wanted to date them. In college I felt shamed because a person I considered a very close friend did everything in her power to make me feel shame about how I looked (we ceased being friends quickly). In the ‘real world’ of corporate careers I felt shame because I didn’t look intelligent. My clothes were big, baggy and frumpy. Watch this…
The shame I felt when Trey and I found out we were pregnant was so overpowering, I honestly couldn’t figure out what to do with it, so I took to burying it deep inside. I wasn’t shamed that I was pregnant. I was shamed because how could I allow myself to bring a child into this world with me as a mother? This child that God had blessed us with had a future of heart ache and pain because of her mother. Not because of who I am, but because of how I lived my life. How could my baby be proud of me when I ate from morning to night and did no physical activities? How could my baby be proud of me when I had to buy clothes that were described as 4X? How could I raise my baby to be healthier than I was and why would my baby choose health when her mother obviously hadn’t? Watch this …
But with shame, comes a lack of hope. I didn’t have any hope in my heart or soul that I would be anything besides a morbidly obese sore spot in my daughter’s life. I didn’t have the hope that I could ever change and that I could ever be anything but a morbidly obese wife, mother, friend, daughter and sister. The nights I spend crying about my lack of hope are too many to count. I can’t describe the black cloud that I carried with me. Nobody could see it except for me and I saw it everywhere, in everything I did.
That all ended in June of 2009. That was the month that I decided to follow Trey onto the Take Shape For Life health plan and take back control regarding my health. June 6, 2009 was the day when hope started to outshine shame. To learn more about us, click here!
