A Personal, but Common, Struggle | Teen Ink

A Personal, but Common, Struggle

July 7, 2017
By Delaney118 GOLD, Strafford, Missouri
Delaney118 GOLD, Strafford, Missouri
13 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
~Mark Twain


You always hear people talking about how society influences women to lose weight and stop eating and it causes all these psychological and physical problems and you think "That's stupid. I could never be influenced by other people's opinions or by the media on how my body should look." But then you glance down at the scale and realize you're 12 pounds lighter than you were a few months ago. And you wonder why. Why all of your pants are getting bigger and your underwear were loose when you put them on this morning. So you think about your life in the recent past and you remember that time you skipped dinner because you "had a really big lunch," and you remember the time you passed on your favorite dessert because you weren't feeling good about yourself, but you said you were full so no one would question it. And you realize what happened. You did exactly what you always said could never happen to you. You let people's opinions and the media's opinions get to you and effect the way you thought of yourself. And you wonder why you would fall into a trap like that when you were thin to begin with. So now you're 7 pounds underweight and you don't know what to do with yourself because you know it's unhealthy, yet you love the attention when your friends exclaim "OMG you're so skinny!" Even though you were never an attention seeker and in fact you hated attention until now. Then your boyfriend says he can always tell if you've eaten or not and you realize another thing: you're spiraling, and quickly. The thought of him being able to see that you've eaten embarrasses you, enrages you, and motivates you... to eat even less. He doesn't know the trouble it causes because he meant it as a good thing. He knows you don't weigh enough and always encourages you to eat more, and he genuinely cares enough to love the feeling of food in your stomach. But it only sickens you, and as you remember, once again, when you said that "food was life" and you would always be down for some pizza or ice cream, you push the plate away once more.


The author's comments:

As a 16 year old girl, who now weighs only 113 pounds at the hieght of 5'6", I should never have been worried about my weight. This article was written several months ago. This struggle of mine has finally ended, but it began about a year ago, when I weighed 135 pounds, and was an inch or two shorter. Even then, everyone commented on my thinness...


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