Reasons

Let me start with a simple fact: Never have I ever been skinny.

Well, not when it counted. I was born underweight, and the few pictures my parents took tell me I was a normal kid. I didn't start ballooning up until elementary school.

Now, here's where the story splits. Mom swears that the doctor told her that I needed to gain weight, so she started making me eat more. Dad says that she wanted me to be unattractive so that boys wouldn't like me and I wouldn't be pregnant at 17 like she was. Either way, she always made sure I had plenty on my plate and didn't leave the table until I finished. When she left dad, she mostly stopped buying vegetables, and when she did, they were hers. No I couldn't have some strawberries, those were hers, if I wanted something sweet why couldn't I just have the ice cream?*

So here I am, growing larger and more shunned by society, so on, so forth. I don't have anything resembling self esteem. And since 18 I've gone through more than a few rounds of starving myself, the occasional bout of bulimia. I went a month where I didn't eat anything solid, once. Made it twenty days into the ABC diet. And now, thanks to the new ownership of a technological device made after 2008, I've downloaded myfitnesspal and started doing it the "healthy way".

My bestie Tony and I were getting lunch today, and I mentioned that I couldn't wait until I was thin. He looked at me for a moment, choosing his words carfully, then told me that he wasn't always sure that my reasons for losing weight were healthy, or that they made sense(and that he wondered who did that to me, who gave me those ideas).

It made me realize something extremely dishearting: losing weight will never be a healthy endeavor for me. It doesn't matter how I do it, I'll always have an unhealthy mentality. I'll never love myself, at any size.

I might learn to tolerate myself, though.



*In hindsight, this is actually an emotionally abusive tactic. Make healthy food inaccessible, then berate me for being fat. Cripple the self esteem in it's formative years and you've got... Well, something that won't think they can ever leave.