Today is Day 1 in Mel Wells’, Self Love Week. I woke up this morning to an email with two challenges.  The first was to comment on her video about “diet culture” (Mel is a food psychology coach and works on setting women free from diet culture, amongst other things).

The second was a little trickier. I had to come up with one thing I love about myself. This was hard but once I got going it was surprisingly easy and I’ve come up with two things.

When I go to the gym, I have a preference for weight lifting over cardio, and when I lift, I go heavy. By no means am I the stuff of champions, but when I tell a guy I could deadlift him and being told “you’re not just strong for a girl – you’re just strong” it makes my day. So number 1 on my list is my STRENGTH.

Number 2 on my list was going to be my smile (I honestly have THE WORST resting bitch face if I’m not smiling) but then sometimes my smile doesn’t meet my eyes. And that’s not genuine happiness. So actually my second thing is my eyes. I’ve gone through times in my life when I’ve really hated them. They’re rubbish. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses (which I also hate!) But after a recent problem with optic neuritis (I went blind in my left eye – it’s back now though) I realised just how important they are. I love the freedom that they give me and realised that we shouldn’t take them for granted, with or without glasses. They’re the window to the soul!