I naturally am a very reflective person. I often find myself thinking about past choices I’ve made and their future implications, brief phases of my life where I was interested in this activity or had a crush on this classmate, and times in which I was filled with happiness and optimism or despair and fear.
But above any of these life-altering experiences that I reflect on, perhaps the most significant is my relationship with the way I eat, move, and look at myself in the mirror. My journey with food and body image is far from simple; it’s been filled with challenges, ups and downs, highs and lows. Nevertheless, it has been empowering and educational, and I hope that in sharing my story, I can inspire someone else to take steps to reform their own relationship with food and appearance.
If asked to point to the specific time in which my issues with body image started to develop, I would look no further than the many years I spent as a child in competitive dance and cheerleading. I don’t regret my time in cheer and dance at all—in fact, I loved being involved in those activities and intend to encourage my future children to dance or cheer if they express interest—but growing up in an environment filled with tons of young girls in leotards at dance class and sports bras at cheer practice naturally led to some internal comparison. I had this deep desire, this craving, to have a similar body to my teammates. They were all so petite and tiny, looked their age; meanwhile, I was forever situated in the back row, eternally relegated to lifting stunts instead of flying in them, because of my tall, athletic build that perpetually made people mistake me for being a few years older than what I was. I grew to be ashamed of the few inches I had over my peers, so much so that I would try to pretend I was short, always slouching down and refusing to wear any heeled shoes and looking up YouTube videos on how to stop growing.
I had continued insecurities about my height for most of elementary and middle school, and I eventually grew to feel self-conscious about the size of my thighs as well. However, this never really translated into a distinct difference in my eating and exercise habits until I started high school. During freshman year, my body started to change as I went through puberty. While many of the other girls in my class happily celebrated their newly wider hips or bigger chests, I panicked. I had never felt so out of control, and almost overnight, I started scrambling for a way to fix these changes. It started with me marching around my house, monitoring the steps on my phone’s pedometer app in hopes of burning extra calories. When that didn’t result in much progress, I downloaded the MyFitnessPal app and started tracking everything I ate. And when that didn’t prove successful either, I became so infatuated with trying to make myself smaller that it felt like food and calories were the only thing ever on my mind. I have an obsessive personality—a common trait among people who struggle with disordered eating—so once I had settled on this mission to lose weight, the idea never left my thoughts.
I remember the shame I felt on one Easter Sunday as I sat at the dinner table with my family, trying my best to enjoy the food on my plate, even though all that was on my mind was the number I saw when I had stepped on the bathroom scale minutes earlier, the number that told me I didn’t deserve to eat. I remember walking outside after the meal was over and tugging at the sides of my dress, feeling how tight it was against my skin and wishing there was more extra fabric. I had paced back and forth on the pavement as I frantically tried to burn off the calories that I had just consumed.
I soon realized that this was far from a positive relationship. I thought I was being healthier by rigidly counting my calories and increasing the amount of exercise I did, but in actuality, I was simply overwhelming my mind with this obsession, constantly doing mental math to find out how much I was allowed to eat, always weighing myself and determining whether I was “good” or “bad” based on the way that the scale moved. Further—and perhaps most importantly—my reduction in calories didn’t lead to an improvement in nutrition. I wasn’t eating more fruits and vegetables and nutrients; I still had a relatively unhealthy diet that severely lacked in many macronutrients, but I thought because I was eating less, I was doing myself a favor. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I knew it was time for a change.
Once I stopped restricting my food intake and forcing myself to do sit-ups for hours in my room, I was faced with the decision of how to approach my relationship with food going forward. It was so weird to me to watch my friends and family eat meals during this time. I envied their ability to eat whatever kind of food whenever they wanted without having to endure an internal battle, without plaguing guilt taking over every time that they felt that they were violating a dietary rule. My friends would decide that we were going to grab some coffee after school, or my family would say that we were going out for pizza. I would cheer outwardly and pretend that I was excited, and to a certain degree, I was excited. But almost immediately after, I was overwhelmed with such intense shame. This voice would slip into my head and tell me things like you don’t deserve this meal, or you’re eating out again? It’s gross how little self control you have.
It was at this time in my life, around my sophomore year of high school, where I stumbled across the body positive community on social media. Seeing all of these beautiful women of different sizes, races, and abilities made me feel more at home in my own body. I resonated with model Iskra Lawrence in particular, as we had relatively similar body types, and seeing her success in the modeling industry and the compliments she received from other Instagram users helped me to find the beauty in my own frame. I would have short stretches of a few days where I would revert back to old habits, tracking my calories and lecturing myself in the mirror, but ultimately, I would watch an empowering Ted Talk or say some affirmations of self-love, and I’d be filled with an abundance of confidence all over again.
In this phase of my life, I realized that being at war with my body and appearance was a waste of energy. I had so many more valuable things to do with my time than to fixate on the size on the back of my jeans or the number on a scale. However, during this phase, I also had no regard for how I took care of my health. The only way for me to block out the voice that said I needed to obsessively workout or decrease my food intake was simply not to think about nutrition or exercise at all. While this was less than ideal, through this lifestyle, I could feel good about myself and rid my mind of toxic thoughts, and that was more than sufficient.
I continued to have this perspective for more than two years, until everything changed during February of my senior year when some of my classmates and I went on a nutrition field trip to visit a dietitian in our town. I had been intimidated by the nutrition community for so long; in my mind, I had made dietitians and nutrition-conscious people out to be perfect robots who worked out all the time in expensive exercise clothes and drank all sorts of protein shakes and never ever dared to get fast food. But when I met this dietitian, I quickly noticed that she was nothing like what I had assumed. She was so cool and approachable and raw, and she wasn’t scary or judgemental at all; in fact, she encouraged us to use less judgment with ourselves when it came to eating. She introduced me to the concept of intuitive eating, which is built on the idea that we need to honor our hunger cues and eat when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full. She also opened up about her own past difficulties with having a healthy mental relationship with food.
To see nutrition in such an accessible light filled with people who had navigated the same struggles as myself was eye-opening, to say the least. It was at this point that I realized I could have it all. I could love my body, I could have a healthy diet, I could go out to eat with my friends and family guilt-free, I could workout without every movement feeling like a punishment, I could build up the strength to protect myself, and I could do every single one of these tasks while feeling complete happiness from the bottom of my heart. It is fair to say that this day shifted my perspective entirely moving forward.
Mere weeks after this field trip, the whole world shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Being a senior, I was crushed by the idea of losing my prom, graduation, class trip, and final days with my high school classmates. However, I made the best of the circumstances, and I used my new abundance of time during the lockdown to explore my newfound relationship with health and nutrition. I read all sorts of articles and posts about the importance of balance in diets and started implementing the 80-20 lifestyle, which suggests that we should focus on eating more nutrient dense foods 80% of the time and freely eat traditionally “unhealthy” foods during the remaining 20%. I started teaching myself how to make fun, delicious, and nutritious recipes at home, including smoothies, kale chips, homemade pizza, and breakfast sandwiches. I found exercises to do at home that kept me moving my body in an enjoyable way, and ever since my local gym opened back up this past June, I’ve been going several mornings a week and even found a passion for weight lifting, rowing, and cycling.
Both physically and mentally, I am healthier right now than I have ever been in my life. I have the deepest and sincerest gratitude for all of the individuals who I have learned from and been guided by throughout this crazy journey. I am certain that, while everyone’s experiences are unique, I am not the only person in the world who has had trouble with body image and nutrition. So, to anyone who may be struggling currently, just know that there is always light at the end of the tunnel. It can understandably be very difficult to balance mental and physical health, nutrition, fitness, body changes, and more, but no matter how daunting of a task it may seem, I promise that, in the end, all of the adversity will be more than worth it.