meet kara.
Hi everyone! My name is Kara Korosec and I’m so excited to share my story with the Sole Fitness community. I’m so inspired by everything Sole Fitness is doing to encourage women to be healthy and love themselves!
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been self-conscious of my appearance. I’ve always been ‘petite’ as my mom likes to say, at just over 5’ tall. I’ve never been happy with my figure, always thinking I’m too short and not fit enough. I remember asking my mom in eighth grade if I could try Weight Watchers. I was constantly comparing myself to everyone around me and with every one of those comparisons, I was going deeper and deeper into this dark place of self-criticism.
It got to the point where the person I saw in the mirror was no longer the person God saw in me. I had completely forgotten that He made me in His likeness. I was constantly dieting off and on, but not in a healthy way. I was depriving myself of everything I loved and overworking myself in the gym, and for all the wrong reasons. All I wanted was to look perfect on the outside and I was losing who I was on the inside.
Shortly after I got married, I started putting on weight really quickly and soon got diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, an auto-immune disorder that attacks your metabolism. I thought to myself, “Great. I’ll never be pretty.” I became addicted to running and exercising, and was tracking all of my calories. My husband was constantly telling me how beautiful I was and that I didn’t need to change a thing, but I shut him out and only listened to this voice in my head telling me I wasn’t good enough. I was praying that God would help me lose weight.
One night, I was lying in bed at night, just asking God to speak to me. Suddenly, tears came to my eyes as I heard Him tell me that I would not see progress until I learned to love myself just as I am. I realized at that moment that the only opinion I needed to care about was my Heavenly Father’s.
From that point on, I saw a shift in my thinking. I began seeing myself as a daughter of God and realized that I don’t need to change a thing. I began to be motivated to eat right and work out simply to be healthy and take care of the body the Lord has blessed me with.
I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out. There are still a lot of days when I’m really hard on myself. But now, I always have this voice in the back of my mind telling me that I’m made in God’s image and for that reason, I don’t need to change a thing.
It can be so hard in the world we live in to stop comparing ourselves to others. I don’t know that I’ll ever fully be able to shake that urge, but we have to take every effort to encourage and build each other up. Even though I didn’t believe my husband in the moment when he was telling me I was beautiful, his words stuck with me. If we all make an effort to remind each other how uniquely beautiful God created each of us to be, we can start to shift our thinking. Having a healthy lifestyle should be about taking care of ourselves and the vessel God gave us to spread the gospel rather than it being all about appearance. Choosing joy can be hard when the pain feels overwhelming but joy is always greater than pain and I say we should all choose joy.
"Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised."
Proverbs 31:30
