Member-only story
Why losing weight should not make you happy
A story about my weight loss journey
My weight has been bugging me for a long time. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been having issues with my appearance and the space my body occupies. Usually, the issues were about me being not particularly skinny.
As a young teen, I felt normal. Yes, there was a little bit of a belly, but hey, we can’t all be Jessica Rabbit.
Still, I chose to start watching my weight, along with my parents. We did the Montignac diet for a while and I shed some surplus kilograms.
Things started to get serious when I was seventeen and had to lose ten kilograms to join a semi-professional dance group. After that, periods of dieting were followed by periods of not thinking about my nutrition at all. Periods of being heavy, periods of not wanting to know, periods of ‘it’s okay’ and even a period of being thinner than I’d ever been — apart from the time I passed those numbers on my way to weighing more, that is.
And all that time, I never knew what was really the issue. You see, weight is just a symptom. It’s not a goal, and it certainly is not a way to measure how much you’re allowed to love yourself.
In fact, the largest part of the issue with weight is loving yourself.
