It all started with one picture.

A picture that showed one too many rolls that I hadn't noticed before.

I grew up with a less than healthy relationship with food. In high school, I focused solely on losing weight. When junior year of high school rolled around, I picked up running cross country. For the next year, I found myself living on granola bars and Gatorade. I was a cross country and track athlete, surrounded by skinny girls and the desire to be thinner and faster. My excuses were that I was always "too tired" from practice to eat. I would give my lunch away at school most of the time or I would talk the whole time and I'd "run out of time to eat." Being a chubby girl involved in a sport where there was such a strong desire to be thin, to be fast, was hard. It definitely took a toll on my mental health, in retrospect. I just wanted to be skinny. Whatever that meant.

It meant shrinking myself into nothing. It meant being chained to my bathroom scale. When I started to lose weight, I started to like being skinny. I started liking skinny too much. Idealizing my habits became too easy. These habits became promises that I would be the skinniest, prettiest, the best. Reality check: it was a crock of shit.

Resisting food became comfortable and safe for me. When being skinny became my obsession, food wasn't about eating anymore. Food was nothing but numbers to me. Every bite was a number. As my calories burned off, so did my sanity. I let a scale dictate my value. I let a scale dictate whether or not I should love myself. I had crazy, unrealistic expectations of what I could make my body look like. Resisting foods became a game to me, a game I slowly became very good at, and I won a lot. I continued to win this game until yesterday's four granola bars didn't carry me over to practice the next day.

Looking back on these self-torturing years, I barely remember who that person is. It's almost like remembering a person that never existed. Our society values being skinny SO MUCH. Teenage girls are grappling with who they are and accepting who they are and society's values just screw them up even more. It forces them, us, to lose our innocence. Skinny can grip your entire mind.

I've seen, over the past years, the number on the scale go up. The changes I made ensured that I gained weight, but I learned that muscle weighs more than fat. I am stronger. Happier. Healthier. Fuller. Not only with food, but with life itself.

This process takes time, but it's worth it. I didn't wake up one morning and just decide to eat more than a handful of cereal for breakfast and pack a granola bar for lunch. I didn't just stop beating myself up for eating a slice of pizza with my friends. I had to learn how to embrace balance. I had to learn that my life wasn't measured by my caloric intake. I had to re-learn everything I thought I knew about food.

To anyone suffering the way I did, just know this: having a relationship with this sort of disordered eating will leave little room in your life for relationships with other things or people. You will become selfish, and your mentality will be jealous and controlling. Disordered eating will not let you build other connections. It supplies you with a mindset that tells you it's all you need and it will make you isolate yourself and give up things you love. It's a rabbit hole leading into loneliness. It will tell you that you are not worthy of love or compassion. It will tell you that you aren't good enough. This relationship with food is not a relationship at all, it is an ownership. Seek the help you need. Your disordered thinking will lead you to believe you don't need it or deserve it, but you do. Take the first step and get help, loving yourself will follow from there.