When you pull yourself together after swooning over Chelsey Curtis’s perfect Instagram pictures with her adorable daughter, gorgeous home, and bangin’ body, scan down to her captions.
This is where the blogger and founder of Housewife2Hostess gets 100% open and honest. You’ll quickly learn Chelsey is as real as your best friend.
“If you follow me, then you’ll know who I am after only a few posts,” says Chelsey. “That’s the way I want it to be.”
No subject is off-limits to her. Want to know how she’s successfully lost and kept off more than 80 pounds? She’ll break it down for you. No diet secrets here.
Wondering if she still has cellulite? Oh, honey. Just wait for the bikini pics. NO filter. And that perfect skin, how does she do it? She has no problem admitting it’s botox!
It’s all on display. For better or worse. But, it wasn’t always this way. Chelsey learned she needed to get real if she was going to be happy, healthy and successful.
Now she’s sharing it all to help other women understand that ‘picture perfect’ doesn’t mean flawless. Life is messy. The beauty is in embracing it.
Coming to Terms with Motherhood
“I always had a dream of being a stay-at-home mom. But, three weeks after my daughter was born, I realized I needed to work,” said Chelsey in an interview with HER Magazine.
The perfect image she had in her head of keeping a meticulous house while loving every minute with her newborn didn’t turn out to be so perfect after all. The Housewife turned Hostess began to feel depressed and quickly gained weight.
Housewife2Hostess was originally meant to get her career back on track, combining her experience as an esthetician and formal culinary training into one fabulous beauty-tip-sharing, recipe-building blog. The problem? Her posts went on and on about loving motherhood. But Chelsey didn’t really feel that way.
No one read it.
“When I started, my blog was so fake,” she admits. “I acted like I loved being a new mom so much, but it was a total lie.”
So, Chelsey began opening up about what was really going on. Sharing her strained relationship with her own mom helped readers identify with her. Admitting that motherhood can feel terrifying and isolating encouraged followers to share their own stories.
Housewife2Hostess became less of a means to prove her perfection, and more of a journey to better get to know herself.
Finding Inner Strength
At the same time, Chelsey took up boxing as a way to get excited about exercise. Not only was she dropping pounds, but the lifestyle blogger began a battle with her inner-self. The individual sport taught her to love the process and love the progress.
Her weight loss, business success and overall attitude about life have a lot in common.
“Get ready to cry, to struggle, to lose sleep and to choose differently. Nothing happens overnight. My intent is to be helpful in sharing these experiences, because I think we can all build each other up by doing more of that.”
She dropped the act, eased up on her expectations and allowed her self-confidence to grow, the way you grow muscle, the way you raise up kids – by digging deep and working at it.
Read the full interview with Chelsey Curtis inside HER Magazine. Access April’s issue by downloading our magazine in iTunes or Google Play. (it’s free this month)
