Please welcome Lindsey from “Pop Culture and Caffeine” as my Mom Sexy Fridays guest blogger this week! Lindsey and I connected on Twitter a while back and she always makes me laugh…and I didn’t even freakin’ realize that I wasn’t FOLLOWING her on Twitter until last night. It’s official. I’m a complete and total asshat. Sorry about that Lindsey!

Here is a little more about Lindsey in her own words:

Lindsey is a self-proclaimed pop culture and caffeine addict who is completely famous in her own mind. In reality, she works full time, attends school part time, and is a wife and mommy all the time. Lindsey longs for her stay at home mommy status back, and feels she should be allowed to sit at home and blog all day!

Make sure to check out Lindsey’s blog and follow her on Twitter and Facebook!

It’s Mom Sexy Friday, and Damn It, I’m Mom Sexy!

This is NOT Mom Sexy.

This is the picture I saw when I finally realized that I was fat and everyone knew it. When I gained 30 lbs. several years ago, I really thought it was my best kept secret. Being 5’11″ tall, I’ve always worn bigger sizes than my petite friends, so for the better part of my adolescence and adulthood, I had this paranoia that I was much bigger than I actually was because of the number on the tag in the back of my jeans. For years, I was assured by friends and family alike that because I’m TALL, I don’t look like a big girl, regardless of weight or pant size. So for years after I gained weight, I thought only *I* and I alone was the only one that really noticed.

Now I come from weight obsessed stock. My mother has always been concerned with her weight; one of my childhood memories was trying to drink her Slim Fast shakes and just thinking she was a total meanie for not sharing with me. She could never quite explain to her 7 year old daughter why this wasn’t okay for her to have. Good for you but not for me? I don’t think so. I was a slender child, and grew into a slender awkward teenager, and grew into a skinny adult. I was fortunate that I ate what I wanted, was never active, and was just blessed with a hot body. BLESSED.

This was what I looked like on my 20th birthday. I will never look like this again.

When I met my now husband, I was still rocking this physique. Once we fell head over heels in love, and decided we wanted each other for the rest of forever and moved in together, I started to put on weight in a hurry. I’ll never forget for the rest of my life being in the Old Navy dressing room in the Cambridgeside Galleria in the Fall of 2003, CRYING because I refused to be a size 12. I AM NOT a size 12. I left the store that day with nothing.

When I started to gain weight, it became an issue with the female members of my family. I will always remember Christmas Eve 2004, my mother taking me over to a picture of my stepfather and I on our family vacation in Jamaica from 2002, saying “Don’t you miss being able to wear a bikini?” Nor will I forget having a party with my fiance to introduce our families in the summer of 2007 and having my grandmother poke my stomach to see if that was my shirt making me look like that or if I was actually that fat. The icing on the cake was at a whopping 9 months pregnant, hosting my mother’s 50th birthday dinner, just mere inches from me my mother defending my weight gain to my aunt and grandmother (“She’s only gained 34 lbs., I gained way more with my pregnancies.” “Well you were a lot smaller than she was to begin with, she was already heavy”). I really never understood why my mother was so frantic about her weight until I started to be the recipient of the peanut gallery commentary. She grew up with this her entire life, and thankfully, I never did. I know now that’s because I was naturally thin growing up, and that if I wasn’t I would’ve had a very different childhood. And really, that’s kind of a shame.

Believe it or not, this commentary didn’t affect me as much as one would think. I’ve found weight loss to be like quitting smoking; you’ve got to be ready for it. I smoked for 10 years, and I LOVE smoking. I still to this day get a hankering if someone is near me and they are smoking a menthol cigarette, but my days of smoking are done, and have been since April 25, 2009. And when I saw that picture, I looked at my husband and asked “is that REALLY what I look like???” I expected him to say the husbandly things like “Oh honey, that’s just a bad picture/angle/lighting, and no that is not what you look like.” But do you know what his answer was? “Yeah.” Just a simple “yeah,” and it wasn’t malicious or intentional, just a nonchalant ‘of course that’s what you look like.’ I was HORRIFIED. And done. Now I was ready get serious about losing some weight.

I joined Weight Watchers in August 2010, after fighting with my own personal bias against it. My mother used to send me money in the mail when I first gained weight to pay for a Weight Watchers membership, and of course I lied and told her I was going, but instead I took her money and drank it at the bars just to spite her. But this is something I honestly haven’t tried, and I knew I needed some sort of help and structure to meet my goals and get thing done.

In the picture at the beginning of this blog, I was pushing size 16. And while I’m not at my final weight loss goal yet, this is what I looked like on my 30th birthday in November:

Not quite that svelte 20 year old I once knew, but certainly not that cow climbing on a mechanical bull, either! I have 7 lbs. to go to have a total weight loss of 30 lbs. Will I keep going from there? I’ll have to see when I get there. But I feel better than I have in years. I can chase my daughter around on the playground and not be winded. A big part of this transformation was doing something I had never done- I work out. I swelled with pride when my fitness instructor and friend told me that what I was doing in her classes now I couldn’t have done when I started. That kind of progress was keeping me so motivated for the longest- then the holidays hit.

I’m not going to lie, I haven’t worked out since the week before Christmas, and am trying to unlearn my oldnew habit of consuming everything and anything remotely delectable. But today is Mom Sexy Friday! I want to embody what this Mom Sexy thing, and I will hit my goals. Its not about the number on the back of my jeans anymore… its about looking good and feeling good, eating right, and setting a POSITIVE example about body image for my own daughter.

I’m a work in progress.  I’ll keep you posted!

Thanks so much to Lindsey for sharing her amazing Mom Sexy journey with us…keep up the amazing work, girl…you look incredibly Mom Sexy!

I’d love for you to be a part of my Mom Sexy Fridays guest post series going forward this year. If you’d like to participate and share whatever it is that makes you feel Mom Sexy, or how you got your Mom Sexy back, please email me at themommyologist(at)gmail(dot)com. I’d love to hear your story and share it with other women who want to get their sexy back!