Hi! I’m Stephanie Quilao, nice to meet you, and thank you
for visiting my blog!
The blog beginning
Back in Skinny Jeans first opened blog doors in November
2005 and was about me going on and on about the dream of getting back into those skinny jeans sitting in
our closet. What woman doesn't dream of that? If you're one, good for you! Besides providing tips on getting rid of that muffin top, documenting
my journey to drop 25lbs and sharing my own struggles with an eating disorder,
I pontificated about pop culture’s influence on our body image, particularly
the photoshop fantasies in magazine pictures that drives us to want to look
like people who don’t even look like themselves in their own pictures.
The blog evolution
After 2 years and 7 months of focusing on the topic of
weight loss and body image, I decided (and announced on May 21, 2008) that it
was enough, and time to move forward and evolve because at some point in every
woman’s life, we have to stop making our body and our looks the focal point of
our lives. We have to evolve and get to a point where we stop building our life
and our self worth around what our jeans size is, what the scale says, and what
we think other people want from us. In order to evolve as a person, I had to
stop blogging all day long about the very thing I needed to let go of.
What really matters
It is important to care about feeling good and looking your
best, and I’m not negating the significance of that because like every girl I
too like to play with makeup, shoes, and clothes. What is important is that we
no longer make our looks and our weight the focal point, the #1 priority, the all
consuming thought that drives our lives.
You as a woman are far more dimensional than your body alone and have a magnificence that is built on something far deeper and meaningful than a number on a tag on a pair of jeans. Stop letting the scale steal your joy, and believe you me I know exactly how much harder that is said than done which is why I have shared my own “messy middle” stories in “Steph’s Life Story”, the parts of our lives where we fall down, mess up, relapse, and fail.
At the beginning or in the middle of your
own “success story”
When I am in the middle of my messy life moments, I like to
remind myself that I am simply in the middle part of my success story. In the
movies, there is always a mad dramatic middle because how can you appreciate
the hero/heroine’s success if you can’t see what they had to go through in
order to persevere and become “successful.” If you’re feeling like life is hard
right now, another way to look at things is that you could be at the beginning of your own success story.
What Back in Skinny
Jeans can offer you
In deciding to let go of blogging about weight loss and body
image all day long, I learned something very important about what made BISJ
successful, and it had nothing to do with how I looked. People came back
because I offered a wise and inspiring perspective on life. I helped people
feel less alone and stigmatized by their imperfections. The most common
compliment I received from readers was, “You’re like the big sister I always
wanted.” I find that to be a huge honor, and I actually never saw that until I
started to let go of my own body focus.
So, the theme of this blog is now about the “uplifting wise sister” view on life which encompasses far more subjects like life purpose, love, personal growth, career, technology, and money. The new theme is also the inspiration of the new tagline “Beyond the tag.” Because, once you let go of the body focus, you ask, “Now what?”....I wonder that too, so let’s blog about it, and share our journey together ;-)
