The Strength Of A Confident Woman: The Body Confidence Blueprint

By Tina Horwood

ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Strength of a Confident Woman; a transformational journey to guide women on how to create a positive body image, to love the skin they are in and be empowered to live their life purpose. In this powerfully emotive story of adversity, heartache, lies and body bullying, Tina shares her own story on how, in the quest for a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Winston Cartier Publishing
• Release date: Sep 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648288107

Tina Horwood

Tina Horwood is the Founder of Body FIT Melbourne & Tina Horwood Health & Wellness Consulting. She is an author, public speaker, facilitator of change and personal trainer. Tina is on a mission to help busy, time-poor and frustrated women create a healthy lifestyle that supports their business and personal goals. Tina helps women tailor their own health & wellness blueprint, that supports their lifestyle, business structure and style. She has co-authored in two anthologies, 'I Said Yes' and 'The Unstoppable Woman of Audacious Confidence'. Tina believes that a healthy lifestyle and a positive, balanced relationship with food and exercise is the key to success in life and business. Being in an optimal state of health is vital to the success and longevity of every confident woman. Contact Tina: Email: [e-mail] Website: www.tinahorwood.com.au Facebook Public: https://www.facebook.com/tinahorwood Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/body_fit_melbourne Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinahorwood

Book preview

Chapter One

The Power of Words

Body confidence, or the lack thereof, doesn’t only stem from being the perfect weight; this is my experience and my story. Over the years I have met many women who struggled with body confidence because they felt either they were too skinny, or their hair was too curly, or they had a big nose or large breasts. Everyone struggles with something different. Each of these women have had to go through their own journeys, to look within and to uncover their true essence and create their own body confidence blueprint.

You had a purpose before anyone had an opinion! There is so much power in the words we speak. Words are used to empower, compliment, act as direction, instruction, and encouragement. They can build us up or tear us down. We all have the power of words, how we use them, however, is a choice. How we choose to receive them is even more powerful.

The messages we hear daily from the media on how our bodies should look, how seeing celebrities have bounced back within weeks of having a baby, or how thin they are, often drives us to unhealthy and unrealistic expectations. Affecting the moral core of how we should look and feel about our own bodies. At the end of the day, what matters most is how you feel about YOU. It doesn’t matter if the woman next door, or the man down the road thinks you’re too fat, too thin, too muscular, or that you can’t run a marathon. You are YOU!

YOU have been given a purpose on this earth to live your life to the fullest. If you feel led to focus on being a mother, then do it with 100% of your being with no comparison to anyone else. If you feel drawn to a corporate career, to run your own business, trade the stock markets or play an elite sport, then follow that passion and dream with every fibre of your being. There are always going to be people around you with an opinion, but whoever you choose to listen to, remember, the words of others are just that, an opinion! It is your choice to allow their words spoken over you to impact you or not.

As a child, the words spoken to me and around me impacted my life significantly. I grew up in a very strict religious home, where the word Jeez was punished. I was very naive and was taught to believe that all secular music and any books not purchased in a Christian book store were evil and to be avoided. At school, I was bullied for my name. With a surname of Rowntree I was often called ‘Tina Square bush’ (get it, round tree – square bush) or I was taunted by the boys who would follow me around calling me ‘Tina Turner’. At the time, I had no idea who Tina Turner was, all I knew was that she was a singer in the secular world and I was offended.

I was often called ‘fatty’ and even my school principal used to call me ‘Strawberry’, because of my blond hair and blue eyes. At the at the time, it made me very uncomfortable and I wondered why they couldn’t just use my name. I was a very quiet kid during primary school, indeed, I went to great efforts to remain unseen, to just blend in and be invisible. I was very conscious at this time about my weight and how my body looked, compared to most of the other girls in my class. I had a big belly and a round face. I didn’t consider myself pretty at all, I felt average, unattractive and fat. I saw other kids who were bullied worse than me, and I didn’t want to end up in the same place. When I reached high school, things changed significantly.

I attended a small country school, where all grades from prep right through to year 12 were on the same campus. I lived on a rural property with my parents, two sisters and a brother about 30km out of town. We had to catch the bus in every day. In summer, it was a hot and dusty ride, but we had our pecking order and as we progressed through school, we automatically became the ‘big kids up the back’. I was a country girl through and through and enjoyed hanging out with the boys much more than I did hanging out with the few girls that were in my area. By the time I was in year Ten, I was the only girl in a class of four. I did everything with the boys and over the course of the year my physical strength improved and I became less worried about my size. I also embraced my physical strength; I could do anything the boys did, and in many cases I did it better. I loved playing football, getting dirty, being hands-on with the farm chores and my choice of outfit was often trousers instead of dresses. To me, a dress was impractical and restricted me from what I enjoyed doing. I remember being told on many occasions ‘you’re such a tomboy’, and ‘why don’t you wear more dresses?’ In retrospect, I would often question myself; ‘Why did I need to wear a dress?’ These words made me feel like I wasn’t good enough, or girly enough and because of that I didn’t fit in. I had this war going on within me; I loved all these things, they made me happy, yet around me there was this expectation of how I should behave and how I should look.

At school, I was treated like one of the boys, and I loved it! However, with puberty, things soon got very interesting and confusing. You see, the boys that I so happily hung out with as mates, and who would pick me for their teams were starting to become quite attracted to me, and it got awkward. I started to become very self-conscious about my size and about how I looked. I felt I didn’t measure up to the social expectation. I began to compare myself to the other girls in the lower year level than me, whom I believed were beautiful, perfect examples of what boys liked. I stopped hanging out with the boys, stopped doing what I loved because all of a sudden, I didn’t know who I was. The boys kept telling me I’d changed, and were a little jealous that I was now hanging around the girls more than them. It was a very confusing period. I remember during this weird and awkward time that I was lucky enough to start ‘dating’ one of the popular boys. He was tall, and sporty, quite good-looking, and he often brought me gifts and wrote me notes. He didn’t seem to have an issue with my size, and I really liked him.

He was an exception to the other boys in my year who did not feel the same about me. It was during my senior high school years that I began to see the power of self-belief and how standing up for myself changed a situation. One particular day at school, we were on our way back to the classroom from a physical education lesson where we had played ‘t-ball’. I was quite good at sports, so always enjoy whatever sport we played in the lesson. On this particular day, one of the boys in my class had been niggling at me all morning, calling me names, making rude comments towards me and just generally being annoying. I had responded a few times, with what I can recall as choice words, and the teacher had spoken to him a few times, but to no avail. He was getting out of control. As we left the oval, I was walking in front of him carrying the t-ball bat back to the storeroom. He had a softball base in his hand, and in an attempt to get a rise out of me, he threw that base at me. It hit me hard on the back of the head, and I reacted! I swung around, bat in hand, enraged. As I turned, swinging, he jumped, and luckily for me the bat only clipped the bottom of his feet. It was enough, however, to knock him off balance and he landed hard on the ground.

I do not in any way support violence, but as a fifteen-year-old girl who was tired of the taunting, this was what I had at my disposal at the time to simply make him stop. Connecting with his feet scared me, because I realised that there could have been a much worse outcome, had he not jumped. But that day, it did show me