Jasmine

'When I was younger I had a terrible relationship with food and my body. I wasn’t healthy unless my stomach was flat, I stayed away from carbs and counted every single calorie and it made me ridiculously unhappy. I took dizzy spells as signs of success and weighed myself day in and day out. I was absolutely miserable, but I convinced myself that it was fine. Skinny means healthy, right?

Wrong.

Here I am, years later with a lot more weight on me, and I’m more comfortable in my skin than I have ever been. It took me a while to realise it, but healthy is more than just a dress size. It’s about the mentality you have towards eating, the way in which you treat your food, and the respect you give both your body and your mind. Yes, what you put in your body has a massive impact on your wellbeing, but nutrients and balance are so much more important than the calorie count. Over time, I’ve learnt to love having fruit and veg in every meal and cook with balance and proportions, but I’ve also learnt to not fixate on portion sizes and hate myself when I eat unhealthily every once in a while.

Right now, my BMI dictates that I’m of healthy weight, and even so, I know that 15-year-old me would look at my flab and see it as not good enough, but the truth is, it’s me. I like the way that I look in my clothes, I’m aware that having rolls when you sit down is completely normal, and I recognise that no matter how skinny I was, that old version of me would have never been happy. My problem was never my weight or my body, it was my attitude to it all; my mind told me that I wasn’t good enough and I had to change, and yet looking back at myself there was absolutely nothing physically wrong with me.

I’m back to going to the gym now and I’m back to monitoring what I eat, but my mentality has completely changed. It’s okay to want to lose weight or want to change the way you look, you just have to make sure that your mind is in the right place when you tackle these issues. I want to be stronger, have more stamina, and make sure that I’m treating my body with the respect that I deserve; the days of calorie counting and purging are behind me. Weight loss is no longer the goal, but rather a welcomed effect of treating my body well.' www.thoughtsfromjasmine.wordpress.com