Hi everyone, just as a precaution, I would like to issue a trigger warning for this writing, as I will be talking about eating habits and weight. Enjoy:)
As I begin to step into my 20s and start to leave the teens and enter adulthood, it’s so hard to avoid the existential dread that comes with it. Constantly being told that this is the prime of my life makes me think that it only is going downhill from here (and to be completely blunt, I wonder how much worse it can really get?). The biggest thing that pushes me down this hole is getting my hands on pictures of myself from high school. For one part of this, high school was always something family friends would tell me was the best part of their lives and that I should enjoy it, but boy, oh boy, did I hate high school. Of course, looking back now I often catch myself wanting to go back because things were so much easier. But you have to remind yourself that high school may have still been really hard and hindsight is 20/20. That is a sad parallel to college I think in many ways. I don’t want to take advantage of these amazing years I have now, but that doesn’t mean that college doesn’t suck. Because it does. But it’s also really awesome! While those seem to be the two opposite ends of binary, it has become apparent to me that about 99.9% of life is going to suck and be awesome at the same time. Often, it really isn’t a rollercoaster because in that moment life would have to be up or down. I have started to learn that while you’re at the bottom, there is always something positive happening in your life, no matter how big or small – and it absolutely goes the other way around. Once you step out of the binary mindset that your day, week, year, or life has to be good or bad, you really start to take things into your own hands and can deal with the balance a little better. Along these same lines, looking at photos of myself from high school has been hurting my heart a little more lately because not only did I hate high school at the time, but I really hated my body too. Growing up as a girl, as far as body standards go, I don’t think has ever been easy; but I think the rise in social media has had a really hard impact on that specifically. I spent numerous hours researching fad diets, my BMI, how to make my hunger dwindle, watching ‘To The Bone’ in an effort to trigger myself into a week long starvation. Like many other girls, I thought to be skinny is to be happy. I would try my hardest to make myself throw up after meals just so I didn’t have to take in those calories. I would get into random sets of doing 150 sit ups every night to burn off that extra piece of chocolate I had after dinner. I would drink nothing but water for months because the extra 200 calories wasn’t worth it. I weighed myself every night like clockwork. My entire mind was intertwined with numbers. This entire time, I truly thought I was overweight and I didn’t like how I looked. I strived so hard to be a different person. I hated taking pictures because I never recognized the person in the mirror and the person in the picture.
Fast forward a couple years, I move into college. I got started on a couple different medications and a new birth control. The environment was different, my routine was all over the place, I was away from home and had to start over emotionally and physically. I had never been so free and independent. Free to roam the town at midnight to any fast food restaurant that was open, free to loads of calorie high alcohols, free to whatever I could cram into my throat in the 10 minutes between classes, free to whatever groceries I could afford. Stepping away from the small town, everyone-knows-everyone vibe, where everyone knew my name, address, and family really allowed me to step into a new version of myself. I found more pride for myself and began to feel some of the anxieties slip away from me in this new environment with people who loved me. The clothes standards were different so I found myself in clothes I wasn’t even allowed to look at years prior. There was such a bigger range of people that there wasn’t really a ‘norm’ to adhere to. Eventually, the year began to come to an end and after the freezing winter, warmer temperatures rolled around and I couldn’t even step foot into the shorts I wore the year prior. Throughout all of the buying of new clothes, I didn’t even realize that I was sizing up until I was nearly 3 pant sizes bigger than I was before starting college. I lost access to a scale in my dorm room that was never something I even considered until moving home for the summer. Setting foot on the scale and seeing almost a 40 pound increase from the summer prior, I sobbed on the bathroom floor for what felt like hours. I had never felt more like myself and a completely different person at the same time. Again, things that seem like the opposite spectrum but conflicting simultaneously. Over the last year, I was able to strip myself of so many heavy negative thoughts and embrace the new lifestyle I started and release myself from the calculations, but coming on top of the scale and straying even further from what I thought I wanted felt like a punch to the gut.
And suddenly, it came back like riding a bike. I became a keto enthusiast and would track my calories like I was praising the Diet Gods. There were multiple days that I would consume less than 800 calories and receiving the notification from MyFitnessPal of “this is not an amount of calories that is conclusive to a healthy lifestyle” gave me the biggest adrenaline rush of life. Sure enough, it worked. Dropped 15 pounds in two weeks and I really told myself that I was going to get back down to my sophomore year high school weight and all of my problems would go away. I wanted my 19 year old body to look the same way it did when I was 15. Scrolling through pictures of myself from high school, all I wanted was to have that body again. I hated myself for allowing me to lose grasp of what was almost mine. This was something that I fed into my brain over and over again – I was worthless, I was ignorant, and I was not pretty. I continued with my diet fad for almost two straight months, not giving in for anything. There was nothing in the world that tasted better than the idea of standing in my 15 year old body again.
I was sick, I had no energy, my emotions were all over the place. I eventually connected the dots that I broke everything I built for myself and if this was what happiness was, it wasn’t worth it. I had found a true place in my heart for myself and I spent the last two months destroying it for something that was nearly impossible. Once outgrowing your childhood body and growing into your adult one, they are not going to be mirror images. Your body – and your ever growing mind – is going through so many changes behind closed doors. Change is good. Mental peace will forever and always make you feel a million times lighter than a few less calories would. At the end of the day, I decided that 20 extra pounds wasn’t something worth fighting for if that meant I would lose the peace I found in myself.
Sometimes, I will find myself looking at a little 15 year old me and I wonder how I ever thought that was not perfect. I have to remind myself that in another 5 years, I will most likely feel the same about the nearly 20 year old version of my body I have now. It isn’t perfect, it isn’t Victoria Secret Angel status, but it’s mine and it gets me to where I want to be. That’s all I can ask for. Sunsets and flowers are both pretty but look nothing alike – pretty isn’t set on a binary. Be kind to yourself today.
XOXO,
SAUxHC mnk<3