I remember when puberty hit me. I remember the girls who watched me every time I walked down the hall. They tried to whisper, but their words followed me down those halls. "Why are her hips so big?" I remember wondering the same thing. I'll never forget getting my first pair of skinny jeans and feeling so confident. That confidence didn't last long when that perverted boy told me how huge my thighs were. Those weren't the last times I was told parts of my body were wrong.
Unfortunately, being constantly reminded that my body was flawed rubbed off on me. The bleach blonde with the six pack of abs and the pre-pubescent boys influenced the only person whose opinion about my body truly mattered, mine.
I started calling myself fat. I really believed that my 120 pound self was huge. I started hating every single square inch of my body by the time I was 12 years old. Once I started calling myself fat I created a hunger that could never be satisfied. I compared myself to the photoshopped models on the Internet and cried about how I didn't have a thigh gap. No matter how much weight I lost I still hated myself. I still thought I was fat.
Until one day I realized something when I was at the heaviest weight I've ever been at. I realized that it was OK that my thighs rub together when I walk. It's OK that my stomach isn't perfectly flat. It's OK that I'm not a size 2. I realized that calling myself fat did more harm than good.
When I stopped calling myself fat, It became easier to put on that size 6 pair of skinny jeans and realize my butt looked good in them. Seeing myself in the gym mirror wasn't scary anymore. I started looking at how slim my arms looked instead of focusing on the extra fat around my hips. I began losing weight but this time around I felt proud of how far I've come instead of obsessing about where I could be.
I have areas on my body that aren't chiseled to perfection. I have hips that make it a little harder to find pants that fit right and thighs that jiggle when I walk. My body is far from perfect, but I stopped calling myself fat because I realized that if I didn't stop I would never like my body no matter how it looked. I realized that if I didn't like myself at my worst, I would never be able love myself at my best.
