I don’t remember the first time I became aware of my body. I think it was more of a gradual process. Just as children slowly become more and more aware of their surrounding – such as what is appropriate to say, and how they are supposed to act in particular settings, I became acutely aware of the fact that your body, especially for a girl, is a crucial part in the way that people treat you.
The term ‘little girl’ always struck me, since I never fell into the description. In every one of my class photos from kindergarten until grade eight, I towered over not only every other girl, but every other classmate. While all of the other girls my age were still shopping in the children’s section, with access to whimsical – age appropriate clothing, I was already raiding my mother’s closet to find a shirt that would fit. I was never overweight, I was just proportionately larger than every other girl my own age. My mother used to laugh, saying that in photos I looked as though I was a few grades ahead of everyone else. Since I had been conditioned to put my looks, and body, as a priority, I always felt as though it was restraining me from being like the rest of the kids.
If you could see a photo of me in grade seven, with my height, boobs, large feet and acne, it would be fairly obviously that this was when I started to go through “the change” (as my health teacher at the time would have described it). If you did, in fact, pay attention in your health class, you would know that I was going through the time when a girl’s bodies starts to develop. Unfortunately for me, at this time, I was the only girl going through the ‘change,’ so while every other girl still had gangly arms, flat stomachs and thin legs, I had full – blown ‘womanly curves.’ I didn’t know how to deal with my changing metabolism, and I quickly found out that eating whatever the hell I wanted to no longer worked very well for me. I distinctly remember looking at my legs in band class one day. Since my school had uniforms, every single girl was in an identical skirt and knee socks. When I look at my legs, squashed against the chair, all I could focus on was how they weren’t like anybody else’s. My knees weren’t as pronounced and pointed, and instead were soft and rounded, and my thighs weren’t thin and toned, but flared out, pushed against each other, making a weird pattern where they met.
In that moment, I blamed myself. I blamed myself for not looking like the other girls in my class. I blamed my size as the reason why I wasn’t being asked out on dates, and for not fitting in socially. I realize now, in retrospect, that it wasn’t the other children excluding me for my figure, but it was my insecurities about my size that were holding me back from acting like everyone else.
Then I got my very first iPod at the beginning of the summer – a first generation iPod touch, and thats where I found My Fitness Pal, an app that let you put in your weight, your goal weight and how many pounds you wanted to lose per week. Based off of that information, it gave you a goal number of calories to consume per day, and the ability to track every single thing that you ate and how much you exercise (estimating the calorie gain and loss of each). I was instantly obsessed with maintaining 1200 calories a day, and before I was even a teenager, I knew the calorie count of every single item in the grocery store.
Initially, I received a lot of praise for prioritizing my health – my parents were proud that I wasn’t going to be one of those kids who sees nutrition as ordering apple slices at McDonalds, and my mom was ecstatic that I finally agree to go on long runs with her. For various reasons, during the summer, my parents decided to switch me into a different school, and my obsession with transforming my body became worse. I associated thinness with a better life. I assumed that the more weight I shed, the happier, prettier and more popular I would be. Quickly, counting calories became a game for me, and I daily tried to eat less than I did the day before. By the end of that summer, I had ‘accomplished’ an intake of 600 calories per day – and I was only truly proud of myself when the number was less than that.
When I entered the new school in the fall, my newfound thinness didn’t get me into the ‘popular’ crowd – the mean girls were still awful to me, I didn’t get attention from any of the boys, and my experience was not what I had imagined it to be when I was going to bed hungry and forcing myself to workout for an extra hour. Instead of understanding that thinness did not magically equate to happiness, I just assumed that I still wasn’t thin enough. Now smaller than most of my classmates, I continued to diet like this for the next two and a half years.
It took two things to eventually ‘fix’ my problem. The first was a photo that was taken of me in a swimsuit while I was on vacation with my parents. It wasn’t a flattering shot – and for the first time, instead of being proud of my gauntness, I was disgusted by the way that you could see my hipbones sticking through the fabric, the way that my eyes has sunk in, and how the colour and fullness in my face had disappeared. The second was the way that my parents felt when they saw me in that swimsuit. For the past year, I had been hiding my body in loose clothing so that they would stop begging me to eat, and I had been manipulating the amount of food that they thought I consumed in a day. In that moment – they were disappointed in themselves – not me. They felt as though my internal struggles with my body were their fault, and somehow reflected the way that they had raised me. At that moment, thankfully, something switched inside of me, and slowly, I started to get better. I allowed myself to indulge in foods that I hadn’t touched in years, and stopped beating myself up for not working out every day.
That was four years ago, and I would love to say that my problem is ‘fixed’. However, I don’t think that the struggles and insecurities that I have with my body will ever actually go away entirely. I can spend hours fixating on a part of my body that I hate, and although I am an average/hourglass build, I find myself comparing parts of my curvy body to other women’s, wishing that I didn’t have the figure that I do. No matter how many dates I’ve been on, or how many amazing friendships that I have built, I still feel as though my weight is hindering me in some way. Currently sitting here writing this, I am trying to suppress the little voice in my head that is telling me that my thighs feel a bit too big and that I should be spending this time at the gym. Sometimes it takes all of the strength that I have to walk out of the door in the morning, simply because I hate the way that I look that day. I am slowly coming to terms with not only my body shape, but the idea that my insecurities are going to be apart of my life for the foreseeable future. I can predict that on my graduation day I will fixate on the way that my calves look under my robe, and on my best friend’s wedding, I’ll worry that I’m larger than the rest of the bridesmaids. But I think that I’m going to be ok. I know that I have the strength and the will to continue to live my life to the fullest regardless of my weight, and while I realize that I might look better if I lost five pounds, those five pounds aren’t crucial to my happiness, relationships or life.