“I started to find ways to cope with my perceived flaws and insecurities… Now, I can go through my day feeling content within myself with absolutely no concern for anybody else’s opinion, only my own.”
*TRIGGER WARNING: Eating disorders.*
I have the type of body that fluctuates continuously – some parts of the year I am thinner than usual; other times I can be a size or two bigger. I have, what could be considered to be, two wardrobes – I have my ‘smaller’ jeans and my ‘bigger’ jeans and vice versa with the rest of my clothing.
Having a constant fluctuation made me feel really insecure about my body and it has been an issue throughout my entire life. When I was in secondary school, my self-image and self-esteem was at it’s peak of pressure stemming on to eventually create lifelong issues for myself, even now. The comparing and the contrasting in body shapes; the overbearing constant supply of uncalled for opinions on my body, saying I was ‘too fat’ or that I should ‘eat more pie’.
The unhealthy desire I had to hide my body because of the stretch marks or the fact that I wasn’t happy with it at the time, consumed me.
It was extremely damaging to my mental health, my body and my general happiness. In some ways I was lucky because I started to find my way to cope with my flaws and insecurities in my early twenties and now I can go through my day feeling content within myself with absolutely no concern about anybody else’s opinion, but my own.
When I was fifteen, my school’s physical education lessons began to start taking us to a local leisure centre where we could use the gym, use the swimming pools, play tennis and badminton. I utilised the gym and found a love for it. Every Tuesday and Thursday I would spend the entire two hours working out furiously. I then decided to get a membership and what was once two days a week, became seven days. It was safe to say that I was overworking my body massively; I was shedding unhealthy amounts of weight and the predictable thing was that I still was not happy with how I looked.
I then began to calorie count; eating as small as an apple, or even nothing, a day. I remember trying on a dress and my friends freaking out because they could see my ribs far too clearly. I was quite tall and curvy naturally – it was not normal for me to look that way and certainly not healthy. After a few months I started to struggle keeping down food. I was being repetitively sick and it got to the point that I went to the doctors to discover i had a severe eating disorder and borderline anorexia. My doctor made me aware of the fact that my addiction to ‘looking perfect’ was leaving me developing an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food. Even now, in my twenties, I sometimes still have a day or so where I really struggled to force myself to eat the right amount of food to maintain a healthier balance. In other words, my relationship with food today is far better, however, it is not my best friend; it is incredibly triggering to me. I eventually stopped working out and started to eat more, but it took over four years to get better.
By college, I had fixed my eating with thanks to the support of my nan whom I was living with at the time. College was extremely hard for me; I was suffering mentally in a way that at the time I was incredibly unaware of and so I started to experience depression. I was in a relationship with someone and slowly over time, i gained more and more weight. To begin with, I didn’t really mind or notice it much until my partner began making digs to me about my body. Once again food became my biggest fear and I would begin to starve myself all day for days on end. The difference was I didn’t lose the weight at all – if anything it made it harder because I was not giving my body the things it needed to function successfully.
By the time I got to university, I was exercising more and eating regularly which without noticing, created a much healthier balance for me. The constant dependence on walking everywhere increased my fitness without me even realising which therefore triggered my appetite as I felt hungrier more often because of it. It wasn’t until I was trying on some clothes one day and everything was hanging off me that I knew I had lost weight.
Insecurities are considered to be negative and destructive towards our personal outlooks that we have on our own bodies. But I don’t think that they are – I think it is incredibly normal to like certain parts of our body more than others. I like my lips, my waist and my eyes more than I like my thighs, my belly and my arms. The same way I love the colour purple, but also like the colour yellow – it’s not my favourite, but I don’t despise it. And that is the attitude that I began to adapt over time, practice and self-care. I knew how it felt to lose weight unhealthily – the consequences that I could be experiencing now if I hadn’t stopped would have been terrifying.
The part of my body that I was most insecure about was my stretch marks. Because of the fluctuation of weight that I had gained and lost, my skin had stretched and shrunk in near all areas of my body which made me want to hide. Now, they don’t bother me – it’s like a freckle, or hairs on my body to me – completely natural; apart of me and what makes me, me. I’ve noticed that if you care less and love yourself more, so do others. I used to feel insecure if my partner was looking at me when I was getting changed in front of him. I would attack myself thinking that he was looking at my stretch marks and thinking about how ugly I was – when actually, he was simply admiring me.
Loving yourself and your body is a key to feeling secure in the insecure parts of yourself. Think about the functions of your body; your arms, legs, hands, feet – these parts of you that allow you to move and work every day; they allow you to walk to your favourite spots, drink your favourite drinks and hold hands and hold the ones you love. So rather than bully them, we should appreciate them on a whole new level.
My stretch marks today remind me that I was once in a really unhealthy place and that these marks show me how I have moved forward, gotten healthier and taken care of myself. Kind of like how people get tattoos of meaningful things. My stretch marks remind me of the strength and love that I have for myself.
If I exercise now, I do it in a way to relax, de-stress and burn some energy – not to lose weight. When I eat I do not criticise myself because it isn’t healthy – I do not count the amount of calories that I am consuming to burden myself from consuming them. I eat when I want to eat. I found a major love for cooking – cooking became a way for me to educate myself on the food I am consuming, it became therapeutic for me to do.
I make my food with love and care. I enjoy cooking for others and it’s made me more conscious of what we as a civilisation have done for the environment – now I eat less meat and dairy and that has benefited me massively. Not only do I feel I am helping the environment, I am also helping my mental health in the act of cooking and I am maintaining the needs of my body by eating the kinds of food that works for me.
It is so important that we work on how we feel within our mind and skin. Being secure with the insecure is about, despite feeling as if we need to constantly improve the way we look to fit the expectations of others, accepting who we are and learning to love ourselves because of it.
This is what a healthy mind and body looks like; with rolls, loose skin, hair and scars. It is normal and it is beautiful, and if the world today, tomorrow or in a hundred years cannot accept that, don’t let that stop you from accepting it yourself. The areas of my body that I may like less than others have transformed; the acceptance of them made them beautiful.
I am not going to hide how I look because someone else doesn’t like it – as long as I like it, that is all that matters.
Disgraceful Magazine 