I’ve discovered a lot of reasons to love my body over the years, and I wanted to share some of them to help make visible something that really thrives on being invisible: eating disorders.

One of the aspects of an eating disorder that makes it so powerful is that it’s all about hiding; hiding the eating disorder thoughts because you don’t think anyone would understand, hiding your feelings because you don’t think anyone would care, and hiding the eating disorder behaviors because you’re ashamed that you can't stop. But hiding all of these does nothing except put you in a constant loop of reinforcing the eating disorder, because there’s nobody in your brain telling you anything different.

In my experience, once you start talking about the eating disorder, you take away some of its power because you’re showing that you’re not ashamed or afraid of it. That’s important because shame and fear are what really drive the eating disorder in the first place. If you confront your eating disorder by owning up to and overcoming your insecurities, your eating disorder has nothing to run on. It may take a long time to burn out, but without fuel, the eating disorder doesn't have a chance of surviving.

I want to make my journey visible as a stepping stone in my own recovery, but I also want to show other people that it’s ok to make their journeys visible too.

I love my body because it’s kept me alive.

There was a period of time in my life where I could’ve died at any moment because I was so sick. When I was younger, I developed osteopenia, which is similar to osteoporosis. It usually happens as a result of old age, when our bones lose a lot of their minerals and become brittle and easy to break. As a 15-year-old girl, I had the skeleton of an 80-year-old woman because I was so undernourished.

I was also at risk of dying from cardiac arrest because the strain of having to function on so few calories every day for years was almost too much for my heart. It could’ve decided to just quit one day and that would’ve been the end of my life.

Yet, my body is still functioning. How could I not love something that’s supported me unconditionally for years despite all of the abuse that I put it through? How could I not accept every single aspect of my body, no matter what it looks like? I’m alive, and that’s why I refuse to see my body as anything but extraordinary and beautiful.

I love my body because feeling beautiful is about perspective, not physicality.

At my lowest point, I was about 32 pounds underweight. My ribs stuck out visibly, my face had an emaciated quality to it, my abdomen was so sunken in past my hips that it was concave, and I never had the energy to do anything. But even though I had lost a tremendous amount of weight, I still didn’t feel beautiful. Sure, I got a sick sort of satisfaction every time I restricted calories or lost weight, but I didn’t like the way I looked.

I didn’t start feeling beautiful until many years after that lowest point when I had gained a lot more weight. We’re so used to thinking about gaining weight as a bad thing, but for me, it was exactly what I needed to learn that weight doesn’t equal happiness.

Take the past seven years of my life as a prime example of that. Losing weight didn’t make me happy. I was absolutely miserable. No amount of physical change can make you feel beautiful unless you change your perspective on what beauty means.

I love my body because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here… and that scares me.

If I hadn’t gotten help for my eating disorder, I wouldn’t have lived long enough to graduate from high school. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have even lived long enough to turn 16.

It’s been about seven years since I was first diagnosed with anorexia, five years since I graduated from high school and almost a year since I graduated from university. To think about all of the beautiful things that have happened in my life in the past seven years, and then to think about how I almost threw all of that away because I let my insecurities consume me, is honestly terrifying.

I wish that I could just go back in time to 2010, find my 15-year-old self, sit her stubborn ass down, and tell her this:

“Where you’re headed right now is not acceptable. You’re going to regret this. This is going to take over your life if you let it. You are better than this. You have bigger and grander plans ahead for you. I know you don’t think that this is ever going to get better, but it will. It’s going to be hard. Every day is going to be different. Some days you’ll be a body positive queen, and other days you’re going to feel like shit. Some days you’re going to want to end it all, but at some point, those days won’t matter anymore because rediscovering what it feels like to truly be happy is going to be worth all of the pain. People around you love you and I know you don’t see that, but I do.”

I love my body because I’m tired of constantly looking to other people for validation.

When I was struggling with anorexia, how I felt about my body was solely dependent on how other people saw me… or, at least, how I perceived other people saw me. One minute, my confidence would by sky high because someone complimented me on my cute little figure. The next minute, I’d come crashing down because someone looked at me the wrong way and I instantly began to think that they thought I was fat and disgusting. I deserve better than to feel good only when other people say I look good.

I love my body because I’m tired of being so hard on myself.

I’m a perfectionist and an overachiever. I’ve been like that for as long as I can remember. That’s why I always got good grades in school and why I hardly ever got in trouble. I wanted to be perfect, and that desire for complete perfection in every single aspect of my life was what made me susceptible to the eating disorder. It promised to bring me a utopia where all of my insecurities were gone, everybody liked me, and I was happy.

The eating disorder gave me none of that.

If anything, it gave me the opposite. It made me even more insecure, caused me to stray away from my friends, and made me miserable.

My inability to accept the fact that life is messy sometimes and it’s ok to not have your shit together 100 percent of the time was what opened the door for me to spiral so far down to rock bottom. Coming to terms with the imperfections of life was what helped me climb back out of that.

I love my body to show my family that I’m finally ok.

As much pain as I went through personally, I can’t imagine what it was like to have watched it from the outside. I liken it to when someone close to me committed suicide; the sense of utter helplessness I felt knowing that someone who meant the world to me had lost sight of their worth and there was nothing I could do to help them regain it, the sense of utter helplessness I felt knowing that if only I could’ve made them see in themselves what I saw in them they wouldn’t have felt like killing themselves was the only option, and the sense of utter helplessness I felt knowing that - no matter how much I wanted to - I couldn’t make them see what I saw because it wasn’t my fight. It was theirs.

Now I imagine experiencing those feelings every day for several years. I imagine watching someone who I would do anything for, slowly killing themselves for reasons that I don’t even understand because I see all of the beautiful things in them that they’ve lost the ability to see.

I love my body because fuck trying to be something that you’re not.

Fuck trying to please someone who will only like you if you fit a specific set of criteria that they’ve internalized in their mind as being acceptable. Fuck trying to change for anyone but yourself. Fuck letting someone else’s opinion dictate your entire life when that person knows absolutely nothing about you. Fuck obsessing over calories because it’s the only thing you feel like you have control over in your life. Fuck overanalyzing everything you wear because you’re worried it’ll make you look anything but stick thin.

I love my body because I refuse to go back to how things used to be.

I refuse to give up all of the hard work that I had to put in to get to where I am today. I refuse to make all of the sacrifices that my mother made just to keep me alive all in vain. I refuse to miss out on any more opportunities that life throws my way because I’m too consumed by my eating disorder to have the mental and physical energy to take those opportunities head on. I refuse to go back to being that insecure little girl who cared more about what she looked life than her own life.

I love my body because I deserve to be happy.

We all do.