I love food. Put all the best New York style pizza, homemade pastries and creamy Italian dishes in front of me and trust that I will eat all of them. I have such great moments and memories with food. The most authentic photos of me are taken while I’m eating.

Loving food so much can be detrimental.

I have been a stress eater since the beginning of high school. As soon as I have a big assignment due, I’m reaching for chocolate or crunchy salty snacks. I am conscious of these decisions while they happen, but I never am able to stop myself.

This might be OK if I did it in moderation, but when I literally eat until my stomach hurts, it becomes a problem. I know that I’m going to feel like shit when I finish that package of Oreos, but I still do it anyway. The act of snacking feels so good.

When I was in high school, I would track every single calorie I ate. Every day I would hit certain amounts of carbohydrates, fat, and protein. I did this when I was very into weight lifting. It produced fat-loss and muscle gains, but it also produced an extremely unhealthy relationship with food.

I would eat at certain times because it would mess my whole day of planning if I was out and had to pick something at random. I would eat at times I wasn’t hungry because it made my calorie tracking easier. I also felt extreme guilt for eating things that were deemed “unhealthy.”

I had an absurd focus on my diet and the effects it had on my physique. At 17, I really had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t at all inclined to care about getting all the vitamins and minerals I needed. This lifestyle made it really easy to develop even more problems with food later on.

When I first went off to college, I gained 30 pounds by Christmas. I had been eating mozzarella sticks every night simply because I wanted them. I would eat them after a whole dinner. Then later I’d have even more snacks.

I knew I was so full, but I still continued to eat.

I went from being the leanest I had ever been, to not even being able to recognize myself in the mirror. I felt like I was so far from where I had been that It didn’t even matter how much I ate because I was already too far gone.

The wake-up call happened when I realized how unhappy I was.

I wasn’t eating right or going to the gym anymore. I just wanted to feel like myself again. I didn’t want to be as neurotic with my diet or exercise this time around, I just wanted to feel good about myself again. I started working out every day again and being mindful of my eating. I noticed changes within a week.

I will never be, nor do I desire to be, the skeleton I once was, but at least I feel like I’m at home in my body.

Honestly, it’s been over a year since that “a-ha” moment and I still feel like I struggle with either eating everything in sight or nothing at all. I am trying to be at a moderate level. A level where I will eat ice cream if I’m craving it, but also remember that I need to have a filling healthy meal sometime during the day. Sometimes I track things when I’m curious, but sometimes I forget about the ability to track anything for months at a time.

It’s a process unlearning all the tendencies that I acquired in my 19 years of life. I try not to be too hard on myself. I recognize that I will fail sometimes. I also recognize that I have the full capability to get to a place where I am happy with my eating habits and stable in moderation.