A pint of Halo Top here. A piece of chocolate cake, shared with your mom, a few days later.

But every time you consume something remotely unhealthy, you look in the mirror and see it set into your body no matter what? Same. Since I was in eighth grade, I have not been able to see what others can supposedly see. My mom can tell me all she wants that I’m “bony.”

My friends can say I am super skinny with a six pack or that I’m going to look “twigger” (new word… it’s getting patented) than I already was when I go back to school, but I will never see that. I was a tri-athlete in high school, volleyball, soccer and swimming, and for my entire life I played year round club sports. I played club soccer for four or five years, swam year round for seven years and played club volleyball for four years. Yes, some of these sports overlapped and it was definitely a lot for my body.

From all of these sports, I have built up muscle that, I understand, weighs more than fat. What will not get through my brain is that the number on the scale will be higher because of this muscle mass. Due to my genes and athletic past, I have a curvier build. But when others see a curvier build, I see fat.

There have been countless nights over the years where I have cried myself to sleep and plenty days let myself feel hungry refusing to give my body the nutrients it needs throughout the day. THIS IS NOT HEALTHY, and I am aware of that. But what do I do to stop it? Why can I not just accept the way I look? Why can’t I have a skinny figure? These questions may not have straight answers, but there are answers I have been told a million and one times before. I just refuse to accept them, and I have straight up said that to people before. I refuse to accept the answers.

Growing up in the social climate that I did was hard on teenage girls and body images. We are surrounded by girls of every body type. We look at models and wonder why we can’t look like them, but we don’t realize that it is not realistic for our bodies to ever look like that. Genetics play a huge role in what body type we have. That is something I am beginning to understand. My genes do not have me built to be a size 2. That’s not how I’m built. We see boys fawn over girls that are so skinny with the thigh gaps that we all wish we had, but that’s not me. What we don’t see or hear are the girls that talk about our body types behind our backs wishing they looked like us and the boys fawning over us too. IT HAPPENS. We just aren’t as aware of it. Middle and high school were hard. I never accepted the way I looked no matter the praise I received.

My mom never let me have a scale in the house for the very reason that I would go crazy over my weight. When buying things for my first year of college last summer, a scale may have slipped into the cart. I have no idea how that happened! I am weight obsessed, and my mom blames herself for this as she bought the scale that I had asked for years to get. I would weigh myself almost daily during my first year, and I watched that number slowly rise.

This sent me into nervous breakdowns. I worked out every day (my friends thought I was crazy), watched what I ate most of the time but yes I went out and about with my friends here and there. BAM, I came home 10 pounds heavier than I was when I left for school… yikes. Yikes may be right, but that’s what the scale is telling me. Not what any other number is telling me.

I now have a nutritionist that gave me insight on what my daily caloric intake should be, what my day to day diet should look like and consist of, and what every number means in relation to weight and mass. This helped me big time. The number aspect is the most important part to me as I have been struggling with it mentally for so many years. My nutritionist also enlightened me on the fact that as 19 and 20-year-old women, our bodies are still changing but changing more now than ever. We are becoming women, which is a scary thought because adulting is hard, and our bodies are responding to the different hormone levels in our bodies.

Clothes that may have fit two or three years ago may not fit now. This is without a doubt the hardest thing for me to understand. I try to squeeze into my size 4 American Eagle shorts from eighth grade and end up sobbing in my room alone because they will not button. Totally realistic for a pair of shorts to fit five years later… NOT!

All clothes fit differently. Every store makes clothes differently. In some stores I can wear a size 6, but in others I wear an 8 or maybe even a 10. It is how the clothes are made. That piece of information goes in one ear and right out the other for me, but I’m slowly starting to accept that it may be true.

In recent years we have heard or read about stores that will purposefully cut clothes smaller so a certain body type cannot wear them. Absolutely disgusting. I now refuse to shop at some of these stores now, because if it is so concerned about having a specific body type wear the clothes, then that store does not deserve my money or my body promoting their clothing.

Before I knew about the sizing differences, I would go in and try on a pair of pants, shorts, or a skirt in the size I normally bought, and it would not fit.

*Cue Meghan’s temper tantrum and tears as she stormed out of the dressing room leaving her mom to pick up her mess.*

The size does not matter. Getting a size bigger in a something doesn’t mean you’ve gained 10 pounds, and if you have gained 10 pounds, it may not even be fat. It could very well be muscle if you have been walking long distances, walking up and down hills or doing more strengthening exercises more often than you have before. Your muscle could have been toned.

The scale does not define you. We joke about age just being a number, but as Obvious Ostrich pointed out to me the other day on Twitter, age is actually a word. Seriously, though, why can’t we accept that weight is just a number, too? Every day we get a little older. Every day we get a little lighter or heavier. That does not mean we’ve drastically changed. Weight IS just a number. Your Body Mass Index (BMI) is also just another number.

This number, just as the number on the scale, does not take into consideration the amount of muscle you have. My BMI says that I am overweight. When I told my mom and a friend what my BMI meant about my weight they both looked at me like I said “I saw a unicorn today.” Crazy.

When I hear that my BMI is considered overweight, though, I automatically assume I am no matter what I see in the mirror. I will find weight on me somewhere to convince myself that I have pounds to lose, and people think I’m insane for this. I do not accept the fact that as a former tri-athlete I may have more muscle than fat on my body. Nope. Not possible. Body fat percentage is just another number, but this number has meaning.

This one is important as it differentiates between what percentage of you is fat and what percentage is muscle. My BF% is considered “normal.” This means I am in a good range, but I could drop 5% to be on the lower range for my weight and height. This is the number I am learning to focus on. I have learned that cardio is not the only exercise your body needs. Your body needs strength training too.

This scared me at first. Strength training? Like building muscle? But as my nutritionist said, “It’s better to have to buy pants in a bigger size to fit over your thighs and be big in the waist than the opposite way around.” Muscle is good. We need muscle to live healthier lives, and as we get older this muscle will be there to support us. This is a learning process for me, too, but the most important piece to remember is that your scale does love you but is mean for no reason sometimes.

As long as you live a healthy, active lifestyle there is no reason not to love yourself. You may not be a size 0 or 4 like some of your friends, but that’s why you’re unique. Everybody is made differently.

Curves or not, people love you for who you are not the way you look, so love yourself the same. That is hard to me to understand too. I always say I can hear it and think about it for a little, but I have yet to accept it. Being able to accept these facts and statements after years of throwing them aside and convincing yourself of something else is the hardest thing to do.

Believe me, I know. But, seriously, eat the dang Halo Top with no regrets and that donut, eat that too. Life is too short to worry about what you look like every second of every day. Enjoy life for what it is, eat a healthy, balanced diet (with the ability to splurge here and there without crying or having regrets an hour later) and stay active. Your weight and BMI are just numbers. How you feel about yourself is what truly matters.