About Back in Skinny Jeans

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 ;-)