My entire life has been a struggle with my body. I feel like ever since my tiny baby eyes were opened unto this world, someone had something to say about it. My issue was that my body always seemed to be “too” something. At the tender age of 18, I have been through the emotions of being underweight, overweight, and obese. I'm not going to focus on numbers too much, but my body got to be about 30 pounds over a “normal” weight during middle school. That weight crept into the obese territory.

Let me tell you how big of a shock this change was to people. As a baby, I was skinny and tiny. I was expected to be quite tall and keep my slender figure as I grew. But that never really happened. As I entered middle school, I truly started to eat a heck of a lot more junk and move entirely too little. The first time I was called “fat” was a kind of a huge shock to me, because I had never been called that in my entire life. People started talking about my body and the way I looked under the guise of discussing my “health”. After a while, I became obsessed with not being that. And that is a slippery slope to be on my friend. The summer before my freshman year in high school, I lost 38 pounds. I know that number exactly, because I weighed myself twice a day, religiously. I exercised more than I spoke. I ate entirely too little, and if you asked that tiny pre-pubescent child if she loved herself, she would say no.

Right now, I am technically underweight. And are people content with my body now? The answer is no. The criticism remains, just aimed at different things. I've receded back into my original form. Except I'm small everywhere I don't want to be. I'm a certified member of the itty bitty tutti committee, and I'm pretty sure I'd be jailed for perjury if I ever referred to myself as “bootylicious”. To be quite frank, I've been through periodic times of loving and hating my body.

But so far, I haven't been very open about it, which has helped me keep my journey to self-love very private. But I think that people need to hear about it. Because a lot of the time, people go through the motions of not loving the way their body looks with the mentality that everyone else is completely okay with their own bodies.

Spoiler alert, they're probably not. Because humans are funny like that. They're not content and they really should be.

I'm not at war with my body anymore. We haven't made peace, but I'm definitely not actively destroying it. It's entirely too much to catalogue in one article. But I think it's a good start. And in all honesty, it's fitting because the self-love journey itself never ends. I'm in a good place right now. That's pretty big progress, I would say.