To everyone who is fat/chubby/slender/skinny/just right/fit, but unsatisfied with your body, this one's for you.
I was a few weeks into my diet when I decided I just couldn't do it anymore. I made all sorts of excuses that pushed me to break my commitment. To me, the mind is a powerful weapon, and if you cannot let your mind tell you what it needs to then you will lose whatever battle you are trying to win. To achieve something difficult, one must rely on mental strength even if he is aiming for physical results. So I asked myself, what was wrong with my mindset this time around?
A little back story might help. When I was in high school, I was second-class obese, bordering on 215 lbs. You can just imagine how hard that was for someone who lives in a society wherein our physical appearance is basically our currency. I could not stand how people treated me differently from everyone else who "looked better". (To most people, thinner is better.) Naturally, people began to talk. Almost everyone around me told me that I would look beautiful if I just lost weight. (As if I had no chance of being perceived as anything close to that in the current shape I was in.) I learned to loathe myself because of the way people looked at me, eyes glazed with rejection. I hid behind baggy clothes and large jackets, and drowned myself in gallons of unhealthy food for most of my high school life. I couldn't accept the fact that I had a health problem and, beyond all means, refused to look in the mirror.
One day, my mom told me that it was finally time to do something about my weight issue. She introduced me to a strict diet and told me that being thinner would make my life easier. I would no longer have trouble looking for sizes, I would start to look good to everyone around me, and I would feel better about myself. I have to admit, it was tough at first. I ate nothing but boiled meat or fish and vegetables in every meal. After I started to see results, it became effortless. I consumed less than 800 calories a day, and lost 80 lbs in a few months. My mom turned out to be right.
As time went by, I learned to look at the mirror and straight into my reflection. That seemingly permanent fear to see what was staring back at me was finally gone. I started to feel good about myself, about my weight and about my body, but I had this underlying notion that something was wrong. So I associated this good feeling to my ability to lose weight, and decided that this problem was that I was still unsatisfied with my reflection. (Good feeling = lose more weight, bad feeling = not good enough)
I started to obsess over my weight and exercise. In this phase I struggled with bulimia, and what was probably a mild case of anorexia. I wasn't just looking in the mirror anymore. I was nitpicking every single imperfection about my body. I hated myself more and more with every growing measure, so I exercised until I couldn't feel my body. I vomited everything that wasn't considered healthy. It seemed like an endless pit of insecurities and self-loathing, and I just couldn't save myself from drowning in it.
It wasn't until my first year of college, when I met my boyfriend, that I began to realise that there wasn't actually anything wrong about myself. He accepted me so effortlessly for all the reasons that I could not, and for doing that he made me see that everything that I was nearly killing myself for was pointless. I want people to know that you do not need a boyfriend or girlfriend to make you realise this. That's why I'm writing this right now. You just need to see things from a different perspective, and I was just lucky enough to have met someone who forced me to open my eyes to the truth.
The bodies that we drool over on magazines and websites are false. They are the lies that drive us to vomit, to hurt our bodies, and to hate our reflections. As regular human beings we don't need to look the same, I mean we were born as individuals for a reason. In the beginning I used all of them as a source to base all the imperfections in my body, until I realised that the problem wasn't that I didn't look like them, it was that I was too busy looking at them with so much desire and admiration to see the true beauty in the reflection staring back at me.
I know now that I can have the goal to be a better person physically and emotionally, but that will never be dependent on what everyone thinks anymore. I will never hurt myself for something as superficial as the physical. And most of all, I will treat my beautiful body with the respect it deserves. I'm definitely not going to allow some photo-editor dictate my choice of meals and methods of exercise. It's time to love myself the right way.
I learned all of this as I took some time off from the diet because I felt like I was doing something wrong. I guess I was right. So now I'm starting fresh, with a new perspective on things. It's never going to be Good feeling = losing weight, Bad feeling = not good enough, it's going to be Good feeling = Being healthy, Bad feeling = not realising the worth of my own body.
To everyone of you who has cried over their own beautiful reflections just like I did, I encourage you to see things the way you want to and not the way everyone else does. Strip your mind of society's expectations of you and strive to become as healthy and happy as you can be. Don't deprive yourself of anything you deserve. Love every sexy curve and bone in your body and don't let anyone make you feel inferior.
