Like every girl in the world, I've always struggled with being insecure about my body. It's either you're too fat or you're too skinny. You either eat too much or don't eat enough. For so long, I let the numbers that popped up on my scale when I stepped on dictate how I felt about myself. I always thought to myself that no guy could ever love me because of how much I weighed, because I wasn't the average one hundred and twenty pound girl. I let my weight define me, and that is one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made.

I've always looked around and compared myself to every girl that I saw. And the first thing that I'd notice was that she was always automatically better than me, because she was skinnier than me. Looking back, I wish I could grab and shake myself for ever thinking that me being a bigger girl made me any less than the girl next to me.

The number that pops up on the scale when I step on means absolutely nothing to me anymore. You look and me and see a bigger girl? Of course I have big hips, a bigger butt and big thighs, but the biggest part about me, is my heart.

I can no longer be defined by my weight, but only by who I am as a person. Some may say that what I weigh is a part of who I am, but weight is just a number. Weight is the number of pounds that I weigh, not the number of times I've gone out of my way to help others, to do good deeds; my weight is not not who I am in my heart. My number that comes up on the scale will never be more than the number of times that I've made someone smile, the times that I've wiped away the tears from a friends face, the times that I've made a difference in someone's life, or the times that I've comforted someone in need. The number that comes up on the scale will never be able to tell me what kind of person I am.

Life is full of numbers: age, weight, salary, or even credit score. But the funny thing is that those numbers will change one million times before life is over. So I've learned to stop focusing on the number that pops up on the scale. Instead focusing on the number of times that I can make someone laugh on a hard day, the number of times I can make someone smile through their tears, the number of memories I've made with the most important people in my life, or the number of times I can look in a mirror and tell myself how beautiful I am not only on the outside, but on the inside as well and really truly mean it.

I've grown to love who I am as a person, my weight included. I may weigh more than I'd like, but the number of times I've made a difference, will always be greater than the number on my scale. I may not always be happy with my weight, but I've learned that it truly doesn't define who I am as a person. It may determine how much my body weighs, but it'll never be able to show how big my heart is, and that is truly all that matters.