When I was younger, I used to think it was so strange that women wouldn’t ever talk about their weight. It was extremely impolite to even ask a woman how much she weighed. At that point in my life, it didn’t make sense because it was simply a number, no different than your blood pressure or your respiration rate, and it had no secrecy to it.
As I approached the middle school and high school years, things began to change. The girls around me became fixated on the foods that they were eating, the exercise they were doing and the size of their clothes. At that age, our brains are sponges, soaking up influence from situations and people all around us. I was no different. Pretty soon, I became overwhelmingly fixated on a set of numbers. One time, I even broke down in tears in a dressing room because I couldn’t fit into shorts smaller than a size 6 in the brand that I wanted. It seemed like the world was ending to me in that moment.
I would like to say that things got better from there, and sometimes I tell myself that was my lowest point, but that is far from the truth. The next year, as a freshman in high school, my sister and I both decided we would try to be a little healthier before our Homecoming dance in the fall so that our tight dresses would look great. But once I started to lose a little weight, it became an obsession. I felt an immense thrill seeing the number on the scale beneath my feet drop lower and lower each day. Within a few months, I had lost about 25 pounds, could hardly keep a size 00 on my body and had become a shell of a human. The malnutrition made me intensely irritable and sensitive. A number dictated my happiness, and if that number wasn’t going down, I was devastated.
One night, after sobbing on a hotel floor because I had eaten ice cream on vacation and I was so certain that it was going to destroy my number, I finally realized that I couldn’t live like this. I couldn’t define myself by an ambiguous number on a scale or by society’s thoughts on what beauty was. It took time, and it was an extremely difficult process to get my mind into a more rational state, but I finally did and started to realize that I am more than a number, and a number cannot dictate my happiness.
This period in my life is certainly a part of my past, but the other day, I saw a post on Instagram that truly warmed my heart. The Instagram account is called mysweatlife and the owner of the account posted an image containing three photos of her. The first was before she adopted healthy habits, the second is when she thought she had reached her goal and the third is when she realized that a goal should never be a number on the scale.
The message that this woman is sending out is one that needs to be heard by everyone. Self-esteem, happiness, self-worth -- none of that should be defined by the scale. Instead, we should be focusing on our strength, our endurance and our ability to push on every day. We should focus on the beauty of the world around us and the love of our family and friends. The number on the scale will never be able to tell someone about the hours you labored studying for finals, the days that you spent training for a marathon or even the kindness of your heart. You are enough, just the way you are.
