As a child I was always told that I was too thin by family members. In fact my cousin had once mentioned how a broomstick had more curves than me. The only one who praised my skinny-ness was my mother. In freshman and sophomore year of high school I started to do Cheer and track and noticed that my body was changing, I gained more weight and developed more muscles. My mom had bought a scale and told me to step on it and when she saw my weight she told me I was eating too much and that’s why I had gotten bigger.

I hated my body, I wasn’t unhealthy, and there was nothing necessarily wrong with me, but I was a black woman with a muscular tone, and a small chest and bottom. Back then muscular bodies weren’t popular, so I honestly felt like I looked like a man. That summer after sophomore year I swore that I would lose all the weight I had gained. Initially I started out fine but then it snowballed into something else.

At first I would just cut back on eating fast food and drinking more water with a little cardio. Eventually that became doing cardio for about 4 hours a day, eating only one meal a day consisting of fruits and vegetables and water. When I started to see the changes in my body I became so proud and so did my mom. She would tell me good job and comment how she could see a weight change. A diet like this however is not something realistic. I realized I was always so very hungry and tired all the time. I ended up sleeping for multiple hours of the day just so I couldn’t feel the hunger, it was almost unbearable but I pushed through because I was actually seeing results.

I got to the weight I wanted but I didn’t look how I thought I would look and so I decided to keep losing weight. It was becoming harder and harder. One day I was constipated and my mom gave me a laxative, I noticed that afterward I had lost a couple pounds. So, when my mom went to work I would sneak in her room to steal her laxatives. I think she started noticing because eventually I couldn’t find them anymore, but she never said anything to me. By this time I had lost a lot of weight but my body was still toned, I still felt like a man.

I then watched a video about this woman who went to the gym but didn’t own a scale because she said that a number tells you nothing. You can lose weight and your body still won’t look how you think, same thing with gaining weight. So she just focuses on what she sees in the mirror. I then realized that the body type I had was a muscular one. I could loose all the weight in the world but my toned body was something I was born with. I stopped exercising but that diet changed the way I saw food forever. Even now I still don’t have a healthy relationship with food, or my body but it isn’t as bad as it was back then. I think it’s funny how parents will comment things about their child’s appearance without thinking twice.