Trigger warning: mentions of body image issues, eating disorders, underweight, overweight, obesity, diets and nutrition.
I decided to put this trigger warning here just to avoid troubling anyone that might read this so if youāre uncomfortable or triggered by any of these subjects, do NOT proceed!!
So this is summer has been fun ... and by fun I mean it was quite weird, full of ups and downs ... mostly downs (the ups were pretty awesome though tHANK GOD!).
I started off summer thinking this is gonna be the summer where I do something good for myself. My family and I had a big trip planned (after three years of no vacation together and pretty difficult events going on during those three years), I had some summer extra-curricular courses that I planned to take (they were quite fun tbh) as well as some other activities in general.
I thought to myself that I would make the most out of this summer , just learn a lot, read a lot, write a lot, draw a lot, and just DO A LOT of things and have no regrets. Unfortunately though, things did not go exactly as planned. I must say though that Iāve made pretty important discoveries, maybe not the greatest things to discover but still quite important.
To start with, Iāll put your mind to rest about what I did NOT do this summer just so we can get that out of they way. I basically did NOT do much. I didnāt write any new books (despite promising myself that I would finish some project I had been planning since last year), I just barely wrote a few hundred words in some lame one shot thatās still saved unedited in my phone notes; claiming that I have zero motivation to write for some unknown reason ... writerās block? I guess so š¤·š»āāļø I also did not draw ... or more accurately I did not draw much, Iāve done some doodles here and there but nothing of the scale that Iām used to on the regular -regular huh š¤·š»āāļø- (all my NCTzens out there say ayyyyyeeeeeee š) so it made me feel like quite a failure in that department but letās not dwell on that too much.
Why did I started this whole rant thing or whatever?
I was just sitting there on my couch thinking about life and whatnot when realization hit me that
āLou! Youāve finally become an adult!ā
Now you must be asking (or maybe not, how am i to know?), how did you come upon this realization, Lou?
No itās not because my 20th birthday is coming up this monday and Iām finally crossing over the threshold from my teenage years to my tweenes but rather because I found out that now I like dark chocolate.
I know it might not seem like a big deal to some of you but if you had come up to 10 year old Lou and told her that one day she would love dark chocolate, she wouldāve stared you right in the eye as she shoved an entire milka bar down her mouth and said āIMPOSSIBLE!ā.
But not this Lou, no. Almost-20-year-old Lou now genuinely loves and enjoys the taste of dark chocolate and might even favor it over regular milk chocolate in some occasions.
Now donāt get me wrong, I still love regular milk chocolate with all its dairy richness and sweetness but I guess my taste buds have developed over the years and rather than just prefering things that are overly sweet snacks with tons of sugar that mask any other flavors there, I now favor foods of more complex flavors, less sweet and more ... je ne sais qoui š¤·š»āāļø
This rant is not to talk about my dilemma with milk and dark chocolate, and it sure as hell wonāt be about white chocolate (no disrespect to white chocolate lovers out there, but white chocolate to me is NOT even chocolte). This is rant is about something a little deeper than this ... maybe a lot deeper idk.
Iāve had issues with my body image for ever since I could remember. It goes from hating the way my relatives would comment about my large forehead that needs to be hidden by bangs when I was a mere toddler, all the way up to disliking every single inch of my body. But letās not rush into the subject too fast, letās take it a lil slow.
I was underweight as a child. I remember not really enjoying food that much so I didnāt eat enough of it ( or what my family deemed as enough). That combined with the fact that I was a very active child - always fidgeting and running around - as well as training to be a competetive swimmer, all contributed to me being underweight.
Being underweight, I got a lot of comments about how skinny and frail I am, how weak I must be and how I must get sick all the time. These comments usually came from my family, my colleagues at school and sometimes even my doctor. I remember dreading the times people would wrap their fingers around my wrist and laugh as they told me how skinny they were.
Guess what? Many many years later and Iām still not over that āskinny wrist issueā
This ābeing underweightā situation continued up until I was about 12 years old. I hated it. Not necessarily because of how I viewed myself but rather because of how I knew people viewed me. Even my own doctorās comments felt hurtful when whenever we had to discuss the topic of weight.
I remember the number of 36kgs on the scale and how it would not move despite all my trials to just gain even the tiniest bit of weight and how my doctor was upset with me, frustrated and telling me that heād have to prescribe heavy āweight-gainā medication if I donāt try harder to gain some weight.
Now me being the child that I was at that time, I didnāt knwo much about āhealthy weight gainā and all that stuff and so, the only thing that made sense to me in order to help me gain weight, I just thought that I must eat junk all the time and thatāll do it.
My āweight-gain joruneyā or whatever youād like to call it started around the time I was 13. This was around the same time that I stopped competetive swimming because I wanted to focus more on studying and school and it was also around the time that I met a new friend who helped me discover an apetite and appreciation for food after having non of that for all my past years of living. To add more to that, it was also around the time that I hit puberty.
With all these changes in my life happening at once and my determination to gain weight fast so I wouldnāt get yet again reprimanded by my doctor, you guessed it, I gained weight finally.
Seeing 38kgs on the scale for the first time was exhilarating to me. I was so terrified of the idea of having to take medication that the moment I saw the scale move I just wanted to jump with ecstasy.
But I guess things only went downhill from there because I had started something terrible and I wouldnāt figure it out until it was too late.
As you wouldāve guessed it by what I had already said so far, I didnāt start this weight gain journey thing out of health reasons but rather out of frustration. I was sick of peopleās comments about me and my body and how everything would just be perfect if I could gain a few more kilos. I was frustrated with my doctorās disappointed look every time I had to weigh myself. And most importantly
I was FUCKING FRUSTRATED with all the comments about my TINY WRIST!
So as you can see, my intentions were not the best, neither were my means. I could try and justify my actions by saying that I was just a kid but it does not matter anyway because the damage has already been done so might as well own up to it and move on.
For the next year and a half of my life, I continued to steadily gain weight until not only did I become in the healthy weight range but I eventually exceeded that and became officially overweight.
It was nothing crazy, nothing too over the top but it was definitely noticeable. After being underweight for most of my life, to gain this much weight, to become my heaviest at the time and only within a year or so was a drastic change. And thatās when the new cycle began.
Comments were no longer about how much weight I need to gain but rather how much I need to lose.
I guess at that point I shouldāve realized that I would never be good enough no matter what I do but back then I didnāt know well enough to come to this realization.
Coming from a place where I used to be all lean muscle and very athletic and fit, I was not used to my new body. I was not used to all the excess fat, or the dimples in my back or all the new curves in my figures. And I most definitely was not used to the stretch marks.
I guess those were the ones that bothered me the most. As a kid, I only saw my mother with stretch marks and thought that I would only get them by the time I was her age. What I did not know though, was that stretch marks had nothing to do with age and so, to say I was unpleasantly surprised was an understatement.
I tried everything to reverse their effect on my skin but as you all might have guessed by now, nothing worked. By now in my life, whenever I see my stretch marks, I donāt look at them with as much disdain, I sometimes might even look at them and think āoh, cuteā but that took a lot of self training and pep talks to become at peace with this new part of me that I once despised.
Now where is all this going, Lou?
Well Iāll tell you, dear readers.
Last summer (I was 18 going on 19 back then), I decided that I finally wanna turn my life back around and become a healthier version of myself. I did not have the support of many in this, just two of my friends and maybe my mum (my family was so used to eating junk at that point that it was too difficult for them to try and adapt as I was attempting so they did not even bother)
I started working out (at home because I will forever be fearful of gyms and all the social awkwardness that Iām surrounded by whenever Iām there) and eating a healthier variety of foods. I cut out soda completely and only ever ate junk rarely. I started managing my sleep better and even started meditating. I even cut out caffeine (not completely but most of my intake of it .... which was A LOT).
I was seeing significant change. I felt stronger and more active. My skin was clearer (proabably because of my nutrition) and I WAS ABLE TO DO 25 CONSECUTIVE PUSHUPS. I COULDNāT EVEN DO A SINGLE PUSHUP WHEN I WAS A COMPETETIVE SWIMMER LET ALONE 25!
Then summer ended and I got back to uni. I told myself back then that I wouldnāt let my busy uni schedule get to me. I told myself that I would still workout and eat well and get enough sleep.
I didnāt even last a month.
University was so stressful and I had the busiest schedule ever so as you might assume, I went back to stress eating. I barely had time to sleep because of all my assignments #ArchitectureStudentStruggles let alone workout and stay active on a regular basis so I just stopped completely. I didnāt even bother trying to meditate because I had no time for that too.
All the progress that I had made over summer slowly wore away over the course of those next few months of university. I went from being happy, active and somewhat of a healthy mind, body and soul to feeling just awful in general.
I would cry on an almost weekly basis because of college stresses and all the pressures I was feeling. I would go days barely eating anything because I barely had anytime to think about food and then other days of stress binging anything thatās in my way because I was just soooooo hungry and could not control myself.
Worst of all, my dream of clear skin was long gone.
Of course my weight fluctuated again. I lost the little bit of muscle definition I worked so hard for and became once again a version of myself I did not like. But even then I did not have time to dwell on that because I was too busy worrying about my college GPA.
What I did not expect though, was losing a ton of weight by the time finals rolled around (I think that was around April/May/June) but it was not a weight loss that I was happy about. It was what some people would call an unhealthy weight loss. I lost weight too much and too fast because I was too engrossed in my college assignments and projects that I barely ate enough food just to keep going. I looked frail and tired and even though I did not notice it myself but everyone around me did.
There were some the congratulated me and some that were upset about me or for me idk š¤ but I was not happy with either reaction because they both reaffirmed one thought in my mind which is the thought that I got back to that weak frail girl that I used to be.
So weāre back at where I started this whole thing. The beginning of summer when I decided to DO A LOT and that included trying to get back that healthy lifestyle attempt from last summer.
It was tough at first to get back into the habbit of working out and eating well again but eventually I got there and somehow, I even got my family onboard with this. They were not as committed to it as much as I was but any effort is still good effort so I was happy for them. And I thought I would be happy for myself as well.
I thought I would be happy seeing myself healthier, stronger, more active, getting back my muscle definition bit by bit and losing the extra kilos I wanted off. But things donāt go exactly as planned.
Yes, I did get healthier (in terms of my physical health at least), I did get stronger and more active, I have better muscle definition and I shed some of the extra kilos I wanted off. I can even do burpees now (which might not sound as great to yall but I couldnāt ever even attempt them before so thatās progress to me). But for some odd reason, I was not as happy as I thought I would be.
I was rather unsatisfied by everything that had to do with me. Whatever progress I had made felt like it wasnāt enough and never would be. I felt incompetent for some reason and I was stuck in a loop of being upset with myself for not being able to appreciate my progress which made me even more upset which made me more unappreciative and so on and so forth.
I had moments where I would look at myself and convince myself that I did well and that I should be proud of how great Iām doing. I would just look at myself in the mirror and tell myself ālook at you, youāre doing great and you look great and you feel great. Keep going and believe in yourselfā and that would work ... sometimes.
Most days I couldnāt even walk past a mirror because I couldnāt bear the thought of seeing myself and seeing my own body. I was so unhappy with myself and I didnāt know how to explain it to others around me. How do I tell people that after all this effort and work and time I put into this whole thing, I was still not satisfied with where I was in my life.
One day during my family vacation abroad, I spent the entire day trying to keep myself from crying because I didnāt wanna put a damper on the trip and all the fun my family was supposed to be having. That day, all I could think of is that Iāll never be happy with myself, no matter what I do. Iāve seen almost all the ends of the spectrum. Iāve been underweight, ideal weight, overweight, athletic, frail, pudgy, boney, curvey, all of it you name it and not once have I felt totally satisfied with myself.
Do not get me wrong, I will always stand by the idea that having good physical health through healthy nutrition and regualar exercise is essential for everyone but I guess that in trying to work on physical health, I completely ignored my mental and emotional health.
Iām not saying one should focus on one or the other but rather all sides combined. One should work on their physical health as well as their mental and emotional health.
I cannot say that Iām in a better place right now. I still have those days of not being able to walk past the mirror because I canāt stand to see myself but I believe that acknowledgment of the problem is the first step to solve it and so here I am, acknowledging my problem and trying to take the steps to solve it.
I know that itās not going to be easy and itās not meant to be easy but hopefully someday Iāll get there ... eventually.
Finally to end this whole thing: this is not meant to offend anyone or any group of people, this is just me ranting about my current situation and nothing else. So please, spare me any arguments or mean comments.
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