Most of my High-school life was plagued with my struggle with an eating disorder. It shaped who I am today and the journey of overcoming it, is what has brought me here to tell my story.

As a child, I was heavily bullied for the way I looked and in high school, things didn’t change. I surrounded myself with toxic people who only fueled my complex relationship with food. Two of my closest friends at the time would constantly refer to me as a “whale” and make comments about my weight, I was only 130 pounds. It all started with these remarks. My relationship with my body and food was completely transformed into something destructive and terrifying. First, it was counting calories, something that seemed so harmless at the time but slowly became something disastrous. Every day I set a limit to how many calories I could eat, always restricting myself to under one thousand, and some days under five hundred. I became obsessed with what I put into my body. Scanning every food label cautiously and Googling the number of calories in almost everything I ate.

This endless counting of calories was only the beginning of my destructive relationship with food. Counting calories was no longer enough to satisfy me. I went days with eating little to nothing. Eating a cracker or the smallest piece of fruit made me feel disgusted with myself. I started to weigh myself three times a day; it became exhausting but thrilling at the same time. I thrived off of the act of losing weight and watching the number get lower and lower. I thought that once I reached a certain weight I would be happy with myself, but I never was.

After almost a year of being trapped in this obsession with food and weight, I looked in the mirror and couldn’t recognize myself anymore. I never smiled and my face looked ghostly and sunken in. I had been so caught up in the number on the scale that I forget what it meant to be healthy and happy. My life had begun to revolve around calories instead of happiness. I thought being skinny would make me happy, but it wasn’t. Instead of finding happiness I was slowly killing myself through starving. I didn’t understand that skinny doesn’t always equal healthy; for me, it was the complete opposite. I was depriving my body of the core nutrients it needed to survive and thrive and my body was becoming frail and weak. Walking up flights of stairs made me lose my breath, simple everyday tasks became difficult and draining. This obsession that started as something that gave me control was now what was spiraling me away from any form of control in my life.

The road to recovery was one of the hardest experiences of my life but was completely worth it. It took everything I had to defeat this illness that was haunting me for so long. I had to learn how to be okay with eating normal amounts of food again. I had to stop weighing myself three times a day and work towards ending my obsession with the three little numbers on a scale. I tore apart my journal that I recorded my calorie intake in, and learned to stop caring about how many calories I was consuming. There were days filled with happiness and hope and days where I thought everything was falling apart again. Recovery was long and grueling, but eventually, this challenge paid off. I started to gain weight and I was okay with it. I was becoming the healthier and happier version I had always dreamed of being. I was able to look in the mirror and smile at what I saw because I was learning to love myself in every shape and form. I never thought I would be able to do this without crying at the image I saw, but now I could and that is something I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Now almost 3 years after, I am 21 and filled with so much love for myself rather than hate. The voice in my head that used to tell me how disgusting and fat I was is still there and always will be, but now I know how to control it and ignore it. This illness is something that I will carry inside me for the rest of my life, but it will never control me like it used to. Self-love is something that means so much to me because I understand how challenging it can be to love yourself fully. This eating disorder, although gruesome has taught me the meaning of self-love and confidence. Through this newfound self-confidence, I was able to grow and find my passion for fashion. Clothes helped me feel beautiful and allowed me to showcase this new love I had for myself on the outside as well, and that has led me here today.

I hope that this glimpse into my journey to self-love can help somebody out there. Always remember that there is so much more to life than a number on a scale.