I don't know why you want to be skinny, it gets like really cold in the winter

-some smart idiot

To all the people struggling with eating disorders and body dysmorphia, you will get through this

A/N: Lol so like i have been workin on this piece for a while, and if it sucks I am sorry. It kind of took alot to write and publish this to the world lmao. Yeah so anyway ONWARD.

Alright so this here is like my favorite topic ever because, its something that i struggled with alot and was such a huge source of my depression. It was only when I was able to look at myself in the mirror without wanting to vomit, that i started to come out of this hole.

As a girl there is a huge pressure to be "slim thick" and perfectly toned and this and that and bluh bluh blah. This is just a fact. But combine that with a southeast Asian family and you got yourself a damn problem.

In southeast asian culture there is a simple equation for success as a woman: Intellect + Excellent Body x Ravishing Beauty = Success. And honestly I am not blaming them for having such standards. Being a woman in this day and age is difficult and I get that our families want us to have it all. A perfect body is unattainable but a healthy one is just on the other side of our self-doubt.

NEWS FLASH: WEIGHT IS JUST A NUMBER

Now this, boy oh boy did it take me forever to realize this. For years and I MEAN YEARS, since I was maybe 7, the number on the scale determined my mood. Because of the fact that I was at least a foot taller that all of my classmates I was easily 15-20 pounds heavier than all of them. And this made me increasingly insecure. If I put on a pound or two I would not eat anything all day, and vise versa. My life was controlled by calories. It was controlled by this obsession for dieting, and it wasn't helping that I was being encouraged by family to continue dieting. By the time I was 10 I was eating 400 calories a day and walking for 2-3 hours. And its funny because we think that by starving ourselves we will loose weight, quite to the contrary. In fact because of how i was eating my body went into starvation mode and I stopped loosing weight.

So I thought to myself what is the point of dieting and started eating again. But this time abnormal portions. I'm an emotional person, and one who wants to be liked and have lots of friends. I've always been that way. So, when I had no friends at school, and felt alone more than ever, I turned to the one thing that was always there, and never made fun of me or turned me away... food. And between the summer of 2016 and the winter of 2016, I had gained 40 pounds. And on the body of an 11-12 year old that is ALOT.

My mom saw me spiraling out of control and did exactly what she thought she should do, she was helping her daughter lose weight because it was upsetting her. She was doing exactly what she had done herself for years. They did the best they could to help me. I do not blame them for putting me on a diet in 4th grade.

My parents would have never wished this struggle upon me, this problem isn't even common in my fast metabolism family, so even though some of the behaviors I learned as a child contributed to my unhealthy relationship with food, I have no interest in blaming my parents for my eating disorder.

I did diets off and on for years. I would start, lose some weight, feel better, quit the program and go back to bingeing until I'd put on 20-30 pounds and need to get it off again and the cycle would repeat.

Then one day I was working on a psychology essay, the topic was eating disorders. I don't know why but eating disorders seemed like such an alien concept. I always thought eating disorders were just for skinny people, not girls like me. I talked about anorexia and bulimia, when I stumbled across something called a Binge Eating Disorder. I was suddenly intrigued and started reading in depth about it. I asked lots of questions because I'd never heard of it. Reading the article was almost an out of body experience because when the article explained it, it was almost like these websites had crawled into my deepest darkest secrets and exposed them to me for the first time in my life. Now I am not necessarily saying that I had BED or an eating disorder but I was definitely getting there.

My life has been one big hate-fest of my body.

I don't know when or how it developed, but I have been comparing my body to others' for as long as I can remember. I was never happy, never good enough. There was always work to be done, goals to achieve.The negativity didn't stop there. I hated others too. Women with "perfect" bodies were a major source of jealousy and envy for me.

After realizing that what I was doing was neither good for my mental nor was it good for my physical health; I began by simply realizing that I didn't feel good physically with the way that I was eating. I was either eating too much or too little. So in the very beginning of 2017 I ditched dieting. I started eating things that I thought would make me feel better, alot of fruit, no processed food, and no more diet food, and just like that I had lost 10 pounds. I was eating 10 times the amount I was eating before and still loosing weight. But it wasn't even that, I was just happier.

But that sure as hell wasn't the end of it. It wasn't all rainbows and sunshine after that. I had become so obsessed with the weightloss and the compliments that I had now developed Orthorexia which is literally an obsession with eating healthy. I was terrified of food that didn't fit within my idea of what was healthy. I refused eat out with family, or shop at certain grocery stores because of my intense phobia. I literally developed anxiety that was so overwhelming that i would get reoccurring migraines and then lash out on my loved ones. I would not eat anything with artificial coloring, flavoring, or sweetener; MSG; white rice; sugar; table salt; anything canned and packaged. I hate putting labels on my problems, saying that I have had anxiety or depression of eating disorders made me uncomfortable, but at this point in my life I had gone from one eating disorder to another.

One of the things that's tricky about our culture is that orthorexia is socially acceptable and often even heralded as a great statement of self-control and doing the right thing for your health. So how did I get rid of that? I didn't. I know that is probably not what you need to hear. I have good days and bad, I have to convince myself that it is okay to live a little. When I go out, I opt for a healthier entree and dessert, and that is a big deal for me. Did I throw all of my good eating habits out of the window? No. But I did promise myself from that day forward that I was gonna be really healthy but also that i wouldn't feel super guilty if i ate a couple Oreo's once in a while.

Its been 6 years, I am 14 and I have a WHOLE lot more to learn, but I'll tell you this. I eat burgers and ice cream AT least once a week, but I also eat chicken breast, broccoli and fruit; i take pride in the fact that I am ALOT healthier and more aware than most the kids my age. I still struggle sometimes, especially when life gets sucky. But as cheesy as this is going to sound, we just have to brave through it and promise ourselves that we are going to be better.

It comes down to this, your body is making sure you breathe while you sleep, stopping cuts from bleeding, fixing broken bones, finding ways to beat the illnesses that might get you. Your body literally loves you so much and i think we should start loving it back. And you know what? We spend to much time picking ourselves apart, the world is already doing that to us, so why should we be our own enemies.