147. A number I see and dread every day. This is not how much I weigh, but the number of calories I’ve burned after running only one mile at the gym.

For most of my life, I’ve unconsciously struggled with what I called being ‘skinny fat’ — not super thin, but not ‘plus size’ either. Constantly fluctuating between sizes, indecisive decision-making on tighter clothes versus oversized, and never identifying with any standard body type is what I’ve dealt with on a daily basis.

As I was packing for college, I remembered doing a drastic clean out of my clothes. There were two piles of clothes split in half: one of where I was at my thinnest, while the other where I was at my heaviest. My collection had every size for shirts as it did for pants because there was never any telling what’s going to work from one month to the next.

Although I’ve been active in sports during high school, I started noticing how my body inconsistently changed when I began to work out on my own at the gym. I was obsessed and almost frightened with this concept of the magical five pounds. Where five pounds more or five pounds less and I’d be either categorized as either ‘heavy’ or finally ‘thin.’ It might have been 10 or maybe 15, regardless, I was motivated and almost haunted by this unhealthy goal I’ve set for my mindset.

By the end of my second semester of senior year, I kept my vow of finding time to go to the gym every day, which even meant going after practice. I was pushing my body and never giving it a day to rest. As prom and graduation came, I still felt like the skinny fat girl but now with a body that felt sore and completely overworked.

However, as I look back on how I went about changing my lifestyle I was never focused on being healthy. I never trusted the process and was demanding for the results. No matter how much I worked out, I still was very unhappy with what I saw reflecting back at me in the mirror. A girl who had relatively toned legs and arms, but a pudgy and not so flat stomach.

To this day, I still haven’t really learned to accept myself for who I am and what I look like. Treating myself with care is something I am trying to learn, especially feeding myself with food that will actually fuel my body to undergo all of my intensive workouts.

I still dread going to the gym and running that one single sad mile for my warm up, but I should at least give myself the credit of exercising among the sea of fit girls who always wear gymshark leggings and buffed guys that chug their gallon water bottles.

This is my strenuous cycle of being ‘skinny fat,’ something I’m not proud of but slowly working on and overcoming through every sweat I drip and weight I lift with a groan at the gym.