&#and i could write a book;;the one they’ll say that shook the world;;and then it took;;it took it back from me#&

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I had intended to write this and leave it closed so no one could read it, but then I was talking to a friend about its contents and realised she felt exactly the same way about a lot of it – for this reason, I am opening most of my previously-passworded posts. Maybe some day someone will read them and realise that they are not alone in their pain.

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I think it can be safely assumed that, for most teenage girls (and guys too, I guess, though that area is generally not where my experience lies), the body and appearance are an issue; for some though, it is much more constant and plaguing than it is for others.

We live in such a superficial world that these kind of thoughts are rather inevitable, but it’s also because of this that certain people feel like they are not “allowed” to have these thoughts, and that’s where I’m going with this: I feel guilty for thinking that I need to lose weight when I know my body, really, is fine anyway, or so I am told. It’s as if it is wrong of me to even contemplate the desire when other people have worse bodies than I do. But why shouldn’t I be allowed to feel like this? I can’t help it, so why should I have to feel guilty as well? Do they think that I want to be like this? This constant swinging between thinking my body is fine, and being filled with self-loathing?

I don’t know what’s wrong with me though; I know my body is fine. I know other people think my body is fine. And yet I still hate it.

People say that if I want to lose weight, I just need to be really healthy and do lots of exercise. Well what if I’m already doing that and it’s not coming off? Is it necessary to cut absolutely everything bad out of my diet? That’s no fun. I used to have times where I’d say I’d be really healthy, and it would last for about a week, until I had one bad thing; then I just thought “Oh well, I’ve already had that,” and it would just spiral downwards, which leaves you feeling worse than before, because now you have the guilt of knowing you failed.

My answer last year was to starve myself. It wasn’t really a conscious decision; I just started skipping meals. Often I would go through an entire day only having eaten a very small amount of dinner – the only meal my mum was there to see me eat. It lasted for a number of months. And to be honest, it was the best my body’s ever been. I am in no way saying this is the best option, but for me, it did what the other conventional methods didn’t – it worked. Yet I still knew I couldn’t do it forever; even though I didn’t feel bad about doing it, I still knew I shouldn’t be, and I didn’t want to become that girl with the eating disorder.

Earlier this year I was choking on some food and I had to force myself to throw up. As I did, fleetingly it went through my head “That wasn’t hard, you could do that,” but I immediately felt guilty for even thinking it, because even though it seemed like a plausible option for a moment, I knew it really wasn’t. The thing that I hated most about that moment though was why I knew I couldn’t – I didn’t want to screw up my HSC. I hated myself so much for my reasoning, but there it is, plain and simple. I stopped myself from heading down a very dark path not because of a love for myself or because I knew subconsciously it was wrong, I stopped because I wanted to do well in some exams, and I knew throwing up all my meals wouldn’t allow that.

This post isn’t going to end in some revelation about how I realised you just have to live with what you’ve got and accept your body for what it is and love yourself and all the crap – I still don’t believe it. I just needed to write this all down somewhere, because carrying all this agony around can only be adding to my weight.