By: Heather

In today’s society it is extremely common for women to feel insecure about their body image. This is predominately due to the fact that in the fashion industry (and media in general) women who are perceived as “beautiful” are stick thin models or celebrities which, lets be honest, are either starving themselves or they have a team of professional nutritionists and trainers to help them maintain their figure. As a result of all this false perfection, it is so easy to lose sight of how beautiful we are as individuals. That being said, I have personally struggled with my body image my entire life. At a very young age I was considered “clinically obese” which basically means that my doctor wrote those words in my medical file when I was in the 5^th grade.

Now as a child I didn’t realize that body image was that big of a deal, they were just words on a page they didn’t define my amount of friends or my personality, little did I know that they had the potential to affect how I felt about myself for the rest of my life. My insecurity with my size began when I was ridiculed not only by my peers but also from my actual family members and as a small child that was incredibly taxing on my self-confidence. After years of trying and failing at dieting, I was an eighth grader who was sick of being the fat kid in school and I promised myself that the next diet I would go on would be the one I committed to, because I could NOT be the fat kid in high school. At first my diet started out totally harmless, I was exercising regularly and eating healthy and in smaller portions and the weight began to melt off like butter. I began receiving praise from the people I saw on a regular basis that told me things like “keep up the good work” and “you’re looking so much better” and, in my adolescent mind, all those encouragements made me want to do was lose weight at a faster rate and, if I kept getting those types of compliments, that meant that I was making steady progress.

Keep in mind that I was in grade 8 when all of this was happening, so my idea of a healthy body was 90 pounds and stick thin, like some of my friends at the time. However, this ideal goal that I had was what led me to eventually having an eating disorder. I started eating little to no food everyday and I stopped exercising because I was too weak due to lack of nutrition. It got so bad that after 3 months of crash dieting I had lost 60 pounds and I was severely underweight. The real problem was that I was so focused on just losing a few more pounds that I began to overlook the serious medical conditions I was putting myself in and I was eventually hospitalized for anorexia because  of my severe malnutrition. In fact, it was so bad that my doctor told my mom that my heart could have stopped at any moment. In the years that followed what can only be described as a psychologically traumatizing week in the hospital, I went through periods of binge eating and starving myself until I eventually gained more weight than I had originally set out to lose in the first place.

It was only when I graduated high school and I began to exercise and actively focus on a healthy lifestyle that I really began to love my body. Eventually all the feelings of NEEDING to have a perfect body RIGHT NOW started to fade away because I had found something that worked for me and that made me feel good about myself at my current size. What I hope you all take from reading my story is that sometimes outside opinions and societal norms can push us to do some very intense and almost life-threatening things just to attain the societal view of beauty and that is something that our generation needs to stop dead in it’s tracks. I’m not promoting my lifestyle to every person that reads this article because frankly, every individual person has different ways of making themselves feel beautiful. What I AM promoting is for you all to go out and do those things. The media might portray their version of what is perfect but we are here to show them that “perfect” can come in every shape, size, and color. Loving yourself is a lifelong journey, and God knows I am still fighting to love myself every day, but it is the little battles we conquer on a daily basis that shape us into the amazing women we are and will continue to shape us into who we hope to become in the future.

 

Stay beautiful xx