ATTENTION WOMEN OF THE WORLD!
I don’t care of you are 66.78 pounds soaking wet or if you are 29480237031092 pounds with your clothes off, you are beautiful! Start believing it and don’t second guess yourself. If the world doesn’t feel that you are beautiful, its their own damn fault. You are beautiful. Let it be known. NOW.
I say this at this moment in my life simply because I know how hard it is to be a stick and how hard it is to keep your skin even. I know wrinkles come and hair color fades. But that doesn’t make you any less beautiful than the next girl.
I haven’t always felt beautiful. And sometimes, even today, I doubt my beauty and self confidence.
When I was in high school/early college, I had an… issue. Yea, lets call it that because I don’t like the word “disorder” and I don’t think that this word describes me. My issue wasn’t a disorder. I got over it. Almost. But it was a big issue for me.
In high school, I got it in my head that thin was beautiful. I feel like this is typical for us ladies. We see the girls in the magazines and the women who many men find to be “beautiful” and we assume we have to be like them to be loved. So, in high school I started dieting.
It wasn’t a healthy kind of diet. It was pure starvation. And I feel kind of raw stating this allowed right now. But, at the same time, I feel like a very raw person these days and raw is all that I can be.
It started out kind of small. Food made me sick. Just looking at it. I would think about how fat that piece of chicken was going to make me or how many calories that apple had in it. It really didn’t matter it it was a so called healthy food, I would still stress about it.
After months of counting calories, I had reached a weight that should have been acceptable. I looked good. I felt light. And I loved it. But, instead of stopping, I picked up a few more bad habits.
Every single morning I would weigh myself to see how “fat” I was. If I hadn’t lost at least a pound, I would kick myself mentally. I would call myself a cow all day and tell myself that I was ugly. This would lead me to not eating at all. After all, if I wasn’t thin I wasn’t beautiful. And I just had to be beautiful.
When weighing myself and counting calories wasn’t enough, I started puking. Yes, yes… I know it is gross. But you would be surprised how many people do it to try and stay slim.
The puking was most deffinatly NOT my finest hour. I would take the end of my toothbrush and gag myself until I vomited all of the food I had eaten during the meal before up. In fact, I even timed myself. I would give myself up to an hour to go to the bathroom and get rid of my food. I usually liked to aim for thrity minutes… But sometimes circumstances made it so I couldn’t do it within that thirty minutes. If I hadn’t “gotten rid of” said food by an hour after eating it, I would feel defeated and spend the rest of the night in bed telling myself how fat I was.
It was an ugly cycle. I would get so hungry I couldn’t take it anymore so I would eat food. Then I would go and throw up said food as quickly as possible. It hurt. A lot actually. And I don’t even mean emotionally. I am talking physically. Sometimes I would puke up blood. But instead of being worried, I would look at is as another pound off the scale.
Then came the smoking. The first time I lit a cigarette was with my best friend. We bought a pack and split it in celebration of my 18th birthday. When I realized that smoking made it very hard for me to be hungry, I made it a habit and continued doing it. It was a great breakfast to me and I loved the feeling of not being hungry.
So I was a calorie counting, scale obsessed, puking, smoking idiot. And though at the time I felt it was all good for me because I kept getting skinnier, it really hit me hard. I was always dizzy and always hungry. This was honestly the worst times of my life. But I was thin so did I care? Not so much.
I never thought I was malnurished or even that I looked thin. People tell me all the time how thin I supposidly was but I still don’t believe them. I think they are just blind. But realistically maybe I was? Who knows. I’ll never listen to all that.
When I got to college, I started walking every where I went. To class, to people’s houses and even to go out and do things. My college campus wasn’t easy to drive around. So most of the students just walked. I started to get dizzier than normal. A kind of dizzy even I, as Gabi Freakin Madden, couldn’t quite take. I knew I had to eat so I did. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have had the energy to get out of bed in the mornings. (which happened a lot my first year there) So, I started eating like a real, breathing person again and I give the credit to me getting over my “issue” to leaving home for college.
Every now and then, I would still make myself throw up the food I ate. I’d go to the dorm bathrooms and thrust the end of my toothbrush down my throat, gagging up anything that I thought might make me fat. Sometimes I still do this today. It isn’t often. But, a habit like that is hard to break. So, on the rare occasion, I will thurst my finger down my throat and let it all go. I won’t lie, I feel better right afterwards. But, then again, I feel like shit. Because it is such an ugly habit…
As hard as these times were for me, I don’t regret going through it. I know now how hard it is for some women to stay thin. I also know what it is like to feel so beat down and so ugly to go to these extremes to be beautiful. This experience makes me feel closer to women who also struggle with their self esteem.
Above all else though, I realize that it isn’t how thin you are that makes you beautiful. It isn’t about your outsides at all really. It is more about how much love and happiness you give to the outside world.
I am now by no means thin. I haven’t been thin for awhile. I am a curvy girl and I am now able to embrace that because I had these struggles in my early life. I don’t want to go back to being dizzy and weak. I just want to be healthy. Sometimes people tell me I have gained weight in the last couple years. And sometimes it hurts me because I automatically think they are calling me fat. (I think almost anything anyone says has to do with me being fat so I am still very sensitive about these things.)
Honestly though, I know I am not as thin as I used to be. And I am okay with that deep down. Because I KNOW the things I went through to be the so called “thin.” I know how much it hurts and how much energy it takes to maintain that. So it puts things into perspective for me.
I also realize I will never be that thin again. There are times where I wish I still had this “issue” as I call it. I still wish I didn’t eat and that I had the balls to shove my toothbrush down my throat to make myself puke. But I won’t go back to that. I won’t hurt myself like that again. And this is a promise to myself.
By no means do I wish to be obese or incredibly hefty. But this isn’t because it isn’t attractive. This is because it isn’t healthy and I would like to be there for my family and friends as long as I can. I don’t want to wear out my heart or not have any teeth. But, I can honestly say I am content with who I am. I’m not a bulemic, thin, malnurished child. I am a curvy woman and I am okay with that.
I believe that working out, eating healthy and being healthy is all that is truly important, no matter what size you are or what the number the scale says.
So here is what I am getting at: I’ve struggled. That’s how I know other women struggle. And no matter what that struggle may be, I respect it. And I want YOU to KNOW that you ARE gorgeous. You’re gorgeous, both because of that struggle and because God never created no garbage, as my mother and father used to tell me.
Right now, the world has an idea of what beauty really is. Especially America. We see thin supermodels, thin actresses and we assume that is how we have to be. We assume this because they are always in our face, screaming at us not to eat that sandwich or that bag of chips. But it isn’t true.
Thin isn’t beautiful. Fat is beautiful. BEAUTIFUL IS BEAUTIFUL. And until the women (and I guess the men too…) of the world start believing this, we will be constantly bombarded by fad diets and bony thin pictures of people we are supposed to be like.
Women of the world, in this moment, right now if you are reading this… I WANT YOU TO KNOW YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. I WANT YOU TO ACCEPT IT. I WANT YOU TO RELISH IN IT. No matter your struggles, no matter the number on the scale, no matter the amount of make up you do or do not put on.. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.
Start believing it now. And maybe, together, we can change the world.
<3