I noticed recently that I love myself. It really was a breakthrough; I have never really had the best body image, and was never confident as I am. I always told myself that I would feel beautiful if I lost this many pounds, these many inches, clean up my skin, grew my hair, to the point that I quickly became obsessed with counting and cutting calories last summer. I tried very irresponsible and unhealthy diets, but to no avail. I tried to starve myself, hoping that by some miracle I would loose the 25 pounds I felt I needed to loose. I fasted for days, and went weeks without eating more than 500 calories per day, less than half the recommended value for girls my age.

And then everything changed. After a summer in which I only lost 3 pounds total, I was frustrated and done with everything. I pledged to stop trying to loose weight the unhealthy way and began to eat healthily again and started to work out in order to get stronger. I knew that I really didn’t want to start eating, but I did so anyway.

After I came abroad, everything changed again. Gone was any sense of control over my life, let alone my diet. I had a tough last six months. Due to difficult circumstances, I was stressed beyond belief and very depressed. My growing unhappiness and general hatred of life was only exacerbated by the fact that I just seemed to keep gaining weight! Despite promising myself to stop starving myself, it quickly became evident that my heart was not in this. I tried to start eating the way I had the past summer, but to no avail. I would hardly eat all day, only to pig out in the evening. I hated myself and my lack of willpower. I told my friends about how dieting gave me a sense of control. They looked at me as if I were crazy and told me, “that’s how you develop an eating disorder.” After a particularly horrid week, I took online eating disorder tests and each told me the same thing: I had an eating disorder. I wasn’t skinny, I hadn’t lost weight, and I didn’t look like I had one. But as I thought more about it, I realized that I did have thinking patterns symptomatic of a budding eating disorder. It was then that I realized I had two choices: to continue to hate myself and constantly strive to eat less and less, or to learn to love myself and be healthy.

It wasn’t even a conscious choice, but I guess sometimes life gets in the way and forces your subconscious to decide for you. I will never know how or why this happened, but I recently realized that I look in the mirror and think that I look good more than I look in the mirror and despise what I see there. Let me tell you: it’s a great feeling to finally see yourself as something more than your daily calories or weight. I fought my way through depression and difficult circumstances, and arrived on the other side with my sanity still intact. I am strong. I realized through this that I am more than a number on a scale, or a reflection in a mirror. I am a complete person, worthy of more than starving. That one hundred and thirty-something number which shows on the screen when I step on the scale is nothing compared to the fact that I am a kind, helpful, strong, resilient, positive, and all around awesome person. My intelligence and personality are more important than my clothing size. The things that I am insecure about are the things that make me unique. Yes, I still want to lose weight, yes, I’m not perfectly healthy, yes, I still get jealous of naturally thin girls, and yes, I am not completely comfortable with my self. However, I don’t want to starve myself to get skinny; I want to eat healthy foods and work out to get strong and healthy. I want to complete a triathlon, not almost pass out from hunger. I want to cook food, not crunch on celery. I want to be able to kick someone’s butt if I have to, I want to do self-defense classes, and I want to improve myself. I have learned that I need to love myself in order to change; hating myself got me nowhere. I love myself, curves included. I am beautiful as I am; nothing can change that. I don’t need other people to validate me, and I don’t need to fit into society’s ideas of “beauty”; beauty is being unique and proud of what you were given. I am beautiful, and you are too.