ShiroiHikari (post: 1451708) wrote:Do it cuz you want to, not because other people think you should. That's the way I feel about it.
Yeah. Actually, gaining weight was kind of my adolescent rebellion.
My mom put me on a diet when I was 11 or 12. That really did a lot of damage, I think. And honestly, when I was in middle school and my first couple years of high school, I was a perfectly reasonable weight for a girl my age. Sure, I wasn't a stick, but it's natural for girls to gain weight and fill out at that age. My last couple years of high school, my brothers moved away to college, so I didn't go out and exercise with them as much. I just gave up. When I went off to college, I really started to gain a lot of weight, and the more my mom bugged me to lose, the angrier I got with her and the less I cared to change. I mean, I never got over 200 pounds, yet she accused me of having a binge-eating disorder. That's just messed up.
It took me deciding that I was going to do it for me to lose the weight. I don't do it based on what other people think I should or shouldn't look like. I do it because I feel better when I exercise and eat healthier, and it's nice to feel like I look better. The only person who can tell me I need to lose weight is my doctor, because he would know, and so far a doctor has never told me I needed to lose weight.
EDIT: About my mom, we're good now, and she's forgiven. She doesn't do that stuff anymore. She was, I think, projecting a lot of her negative body image onto me. She was in ballet as a teen, and even at a reasonable weight, her ballet instructor told her she needed to be skinnier. She couldn't help that she was a little (and I stress A LITTLE) curvier than other girls, but that instructor was pretty nasty about her weight. So I think that damaged my mom's body image a lot, as well as other circumstances in her formative years that I won't get into.