Hair: going grey.

Hips: wider, by a lot.

Tummy: poochy, soft, fluffy.

Breasts: relaxed, like life is a perpetual vacation.

Me: still knows the exact calorie count of every morsel that passes my lips, truly doesn't care. Also, realizes that the activity of analyzing myself part by part is passe. I'm a whole, a sum, the result of adding not bits and pieces but thoughts and experiences. I've slashed and burned enough in this life and now I see that I'm both the forest and the trees.

I am at a place I like to call Radical Self Love, because not hating the body my soul occupies feels downright revolutionary most days.

This state-of-mind destination is hard won and victory is sweet. It presents in the form of revelry in the softness of my skin, in the pleasure I take in feeling my calves work without question as they propel me up stairs. I raise my flag when I lift my youngest child, unencumbered by weighted worries about thickening, flabby arms.

There is no democracy here in my newly-conquered territory. No one else's opinion about this body matters. There will not be an election to determine its steady-handed ruler. It is a dictatorship, and a harsh one, ready to silence dissent - even and especially the most damaging of all... the sort that comes from the inside.

We're all our harshest critics, they say, so I've fired mine and replaced her instead with a cheerleader of pro-football proportion. "Look at you doing great!" she says to me hundreds of times a week. She's so good at her job, I lend her out to others because I don't need her as much anymore.

And that's what I've found to be especially cool about this Radical Self Love stuff - it doesn't end with me. If I'm the sum of my parts, love, I've found, is more like the mathematical result of exponential multiplication. It grows, and fast, like we were taught about compounding interest in eighth grade.

I never found an opportunity to stash money away in a savings account with a compounding interest of 12 percent like Mr. Roland promised decades ago, but I stash away love for myself and have that goodness ready to spend like my 12 year old with an Amazon gift card. It burns a hole in his pocket from the sheer heat of anticipation and my love for this body and life does the same, growing in passion and compassion until I can't help but get up, go to the mirror and say to my usually-unkempt reflection, "Damn, Babe - you did it."

The doing was hard.

It meant releasing expectations. It required me to say, awkwardly and out loud to pictures of super models, "It's your job to look good and you do a great job doing your job. My job is not to look good, but to be smart and put periods in the right place and teach college students about rhetoric and my kids about life and I'm doing a good job at my job, too."

It meant not waiting to treasure who I am now. When I am 90, I am going to look at pictures of me at 40 and say, "My my, what a gorgeous specimen I was!" I do not want to wait 50 years to appreciate my 40-year-old body. I do not want to wait 50 seconds. I touch my lumps and my bumps and flip my greying hair and say, "My my, what a gorgeous specimen I am!" Most days, I believe it. When I don't, I call in the cheerleader.

The doing also meant that I had to be selfish, which is to say, I had to begin to acknowledge that I was a "self" at all. A lifetime of living for others prepared me not at all to care for, let alone radically love, this body. Writing a passionate missive to "anonymous" is a tiresome and pointless exercise. Now my self-care cards are directly addressed not to "resident" but to Brilliant One-of-a-kind Bad Ass at 143 You Got This Gurl Place. I read every one twice and I save them for a rainy day.

That's because there are still occasional downpours. Life is best lived in leggings, but sometimes I have to pull on a fancy dress that clings in ways that make me feel like the ground-up meat in a sausage casing. In the old days I would cast aside the contents, shaming it for not fitting perfectly into its socially-preferred package. Or worse, I would punish it with even tighter casings, stuffing and scrunching my parts into torturous spandex attire constructed to hold me in, always in, when now I know that all I've ever wanted in life was to let my true self out. Today I cast aside the casing. It's not my body that's wrong, it's the dress. I find another that's right.

I did the same with a man. My radical self love isn't dependent on a dude, but in my case, having the human version of leggings by my side hasn't hurt. He's soft, supportive, warm and accommodating - and he rightly won't like being exclusively surmised as an alternative to pants, so I will also say that he's everything I never knew until all too recently that I deserved.

And there's the rub of it. We all deserve to be our own lighthouses. Radical self love means that we do not have to be lit by the compliment of another, but that we glow because we know we are already worthy of love, just as we are. It means that we understand that when we don't see ourselves as a collection of flaws, we're flawless.

Don't feel it yet? Fire your inner critic and replace 'em with a cheerleader.