***Disclamer: This post is going to be of the vulnerable variety, so I apologize.***

The very first time I remember feeling insecure about my body was in sixth grade. It was during the time that we were learning about our bodies, like sixth grade requires, and for one particular lesson, my teacher was weighing the whole class. When it was my turn to walk over to her desk, she asked me to step on the scale, and I did so without thinking twice, still naively unaware of the evil living inside of that small machine. She waited for it to calculate my weight, and when I looked down between my feet, the digital scale told me I weighed 100 pounds.

I looked up, shocked, and my teacher must have seen the panic in my eyes because she kindly told me that it was okay. “You’re tall, so that’s part of the reason,” I remember her telling me with a very kind and genuine smile on her face (I was barely 5 feet tall and haven’t grown more than five inches in the past ten years since that conversation). And I believed her. Mostly because there was a small part of me that knew I didn’t have the tiny frame of most of the sixth grade girls in my class, but I hadn’t had a reason to feel insecure about it yet or realized that I should have felt insecure about it (not that I should have, but that’s what society says, right?).

I can pinpoint that moment as the exact moment that insecurity about my body started to creep into my mind. And just as a side note, I’m not blaming my sixth grade teacher or anything for making me feel insecure or giving me body image issues. In fact, she was the one who tried to stop those negative thoughts from even taking root in my mind. But, in this day and age of body-shamming, it just wasn’t enough.

Fast forward ten years and I am definitely not that sixth grade girl anymore. In many more ways I’m confident in who I am: I know what I want to do (mostly) with my life, I know what I like and what I don’t, and I feel like I’m a pretty true version of myself. But coming to know myself hasn’t made the body image issues go away.

In fact, in many ways it has made them more poignant. Because it’s one area that I don’t feel confident in, it’s on my mind constantly (and if you know me at all, you know that I have an obsessive personality, so that doesn’t really help this issue). I try to tell myself to focus on the things I love about my body, or to realize that being skinny isn’t the most important thing in the world, but that works for maybe 17 seconds. And then the negative thoughts creep back in.

For example, last night my family went out to get ice cream and I spent almost twenty minutes trying to find an outfit that would make me look skinny enough so people wouldn’t judge me for being fat and wanting ice cream. Eventually, I settled on wearing running clothes because at least if I looked like I was a fitness fanatic, then maybe people wouldn’t judge me so harshly.

I realized that after I thought those things that I was being ridiculous. Who cares what people think about me, right? I can eat ice cream anytime I want, when I want, and I shouldn’t worry about what other people are thinking about me. But I honestly can’t do that. And I honestly wish it was that easy.

I spend most of my day comparing my body to other girls’ bodies and hoping that I look skinnier than that girl over there because if I do, I don’t have to feel as bad about myself. And if I can find someone in the crowd that has a body type similar to mine who is beautiful, then–and only then–I can feel beautiful, too. But if I don’t, I immediately feel down.

Obviously, some days are better than others and there may be a handful of days that I don’t actually feel insecure about my body, but those days are few and far between.

So, what is all this leading too? Am I just ranting about how insecure about my body I feel, in hopes of getting dozens of comments of how truly beautiful I am? Definitely not. And I actually prefer that you don’t do that because contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t actually make me feel better about my body.

What it is actually leading to is a conscious decision to try and change the way I feel about my body for myself, once and for all. And sometimes making it a public declaration makes that a binding contract that people will hold you to. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping for.

So, what that means for me is seeing eating as a way to nourish my body and working out as a way to keep my body healthy. I know I won’t be perfect, and those negative thoughts will definitely still be present, but I plan to use those as motivation to change the way I think about my body. If you want to work out with me or treat me to a healthy meal once in a while, hit me up! I need some partners in this to keep me on track!