Growing up, I was always a little bit chunkier than the other children. As a child, this never bothered me; it wasn’t even ever something I noticed personally. You know children don’t care what they look like. We have seen little kids wearing the most unexplainable patterns together without a care in the world. Think about weight from a child’s perspective.
Following up into middle/high school those teenage years, where looks became the predominant worry I began to perceive my body as a flaw solely because I was a little bigger. I let this destroy me and become a controlling factor in my life. Whether it was sitting on social media feeding my brain with constant comparison, trying every diet known to man, or limiting myself in ways due to my weight, such as what I let myself wear.
I became so self-focused on my weight that it genuinely take a toll on my everyday life and overall well-being. I believed that losing weight would solve all my problems, and I mean all my problems. I got to the point where I convinced myself that if I was smaller life would be better. More people would be attracted to me, I would be happier and things would come easier where my mind was at.
Coming to college you begin to recognize that the people around you are so worried about their own lives that what you do or look like is not any of their concern. Not sure if this is a part of growing up, but the self-growth it allows is tremendous.
Coming into a place where you felt free, not surrounded by judgment allows you to live your life for you. And that’s exactly what I did, I started to not give a single care about my weight. I wore what made me confident, and I no longer felt insecure attending the gym which allowed me to embrace a new type of confidence.
This is when the weight started to come off when I started not to care about the number on the scale.
I started feeling so good about myself like the weight did make a change. Although it didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t it. I still struggled with confidence issues. I couldn’t wear certain things out, and suffered from anxiety my life was honestly the same.
We as a society spend so much time obsessing over how we look, but what if we took the time to accept that didn’t matter? The number on the scale does not change you as a person you are still you. Spending life believing that it could be better with a smaller number on the scale is irrational. Stop spending your life obsessed with how your body looks, embrace your beauty, and honestly just throw away that scale for your mental health!