The other day in stories I received this question: What’s the one thing you wish every woman knew?
My immediate thought was, “That’s a tough question to narrow down!” So I’m cheating and giving you the top TEN things I wish every woman knew: 🙂
- Your body is created GOOD, right now EXACTLY as you are. It’s ok to have health goals – I have them too! But shame over our bodies is what keeps us in chains to diet culture, comparison, obsession with exercise, and nit-picking every flaw. Shame over our bodies keeps us from living abundant lives, and it STEALS the precious minutes we’ve been given each day with the people we love. Believing your body is GOOD RIGHT NOW is the first step in finding freedom.
- Leaking is common but doesn’t have to be your normal AND is often pretty simple to fix. Every day I talk with women who thought their leaking was just a normal part of being a woman or mother. They are shocked when I tell them it’s actually fixable! Every single week I get to work with women who are literally only doing 5 min of exercise/per day and in just a couple of weeks, they are already seeing change! Most of my patients average 2-4 visits and many experience great results in my 4-week online course, Pelvic Core.
- Most prolapse and diastasis do NOT need surgery. Many women think diastasis and prolapse are a death sentence – that either they just have to put up with it or will eventually need surgery to fix it. But I’ve worked with SO many women who have experienced complete relief in prolapse symptoms and healing in their diastasis. Both, most of the time, are VERY treatable with therapy and should never need surgery.
- Giving birth on your back and unnecessary inductions are one of the main reasons birth doesn’t go as planned (ending up in c-section or with long labor/deliveries/tearing). Research shows this to be true and I see it all too often. Women are induced NOT because there is a medical emergency, but because the mom was sick of being pregnant, there was maybe some low-level concern that baby was possibly too big (which most of the time is not the case), or the OB was going to be out of town and they decided to induce early. All too often these mamas will end up in c-section or with a cascade of interventions that they never wanted, because baby simply wasn’t ready to come yet, and if they would have waited a bit longer, the outcome could have looked very different. In the same way, giving birth on back (which is how 60-70% of women give birth in the US) decreases the size of the pelvic outlet where baby exits, and is associated with the highest rates of tearing, episiotomy, forceps/suction delivery, nerve damage, and misdiagnosed cephalopelvic disproportion, meaning it was said that baby’s head was too large for the size of mom’s pelvis, when in fact baby could have made it if mom got off her back.
- You should NEVER just “put up with” painful sex. This one is self-explanatory. Pain is never ever normal. Never. Please don’t believe you have to suffer. There are lots of causes for pain that are very treatable. Please seek help from a pelvic PT if this is you.
- Movement is Medicine and should be treated as a necessity for daily living. I truly believe that we’re designed to move. Our modern lifestyle and sedentary jobs have made the necessity of moving minimal, and our health (mental, emotional, and physical) is suffering for it. Movement should be like eating, drinking water, and sleeping. It is an essential part of each day.
- Preventative care needs to be our #1 health plan. This works in the exact opposite way of health insurance and how most of us think. We don’t worry about our health until there is a problem, and then at that point, we look for medication or surgery to fix us and for health insurance to pay for it. We’ve left our health care in the hands of insurance companies and this is simply NOT the way to thrive. Medicine and surgery, though at times essential, should not be our #1 plan. Our first option should be preventative care: eating nutritious food, getting good sleep, moving our bodies, seeing a therapist, fresh air, drinking water, decreasing our screen time, making relationships a priority, and working on stress reduction. These plus many more should be our essentials, and using health insurance, medicine, and surgery are the final options if necessary.
- Diets are dumb and don’t work. I feel like this is SO obvious, but the diet industry continues to thrive. Look at the statistics – diets don’t work. Their failure rate is as high as 95%. Why? Because most diets are not sustainable long term. How you lose it is what you will need to do to maintain it. My opinion? Seek to live a healthy lifestyle you can maintain forever.
- You have a unique calling in life and it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. As women and/or moms, it’s SO easy and common to compare what we’re doing to everyone else around us. Do you work full-time, part-time, or stay at home? Where are you volunteering? What are your kids involved in? Do you own a business? Have a side hustle? Work a 2nd job? But the real question is…am I enough? As a woman who has struggled with this question, it took me years to finally feel secure. I didn’t find it working full-time, part-time, OR staying at home. Instead, I found it when I found security in who GOD made me to be, and followed obediently in His calling on my life.
- Your worth is not found in your body, your career, or even motherhood – Your worth is found in the One who made you! You can’t lose it or earn it. This is related to #9 – it’s so easy to look for our worth in what we’re doing, what our title is, if we’re married or have kids, etc. But we’ll always fall short or feel empty when we look for any of these things to define us. The only way we can FINALLY feel secure is to understand that our worth will never be found in anything here on this earth, but instead was given to us by Jesus’ death on the cross for our sins. He makes us worthy and adopts us as His own. It’s our worth as His Daughters that brings fulfillment, JOY, and Life Abundant!
