Content Warning: Body Dysmorphia, Obesity, Eating Disorder
I woke up this morning staring at my outfit in dread. Why did I pick out those jeans the night before? That t-shirt? I rolled out of bed, eyes half-closed, and attempted to pick out an outfit.
I started with baggy jeans and a cropped hoodie. Baggy, I think, perfect. But then, I check the outfit in my full-length mirror, and all I see is myself being drowned in thick fabrics, accentuating my dark under-eye circles, and making me look sloppy. The droopiness, I thought, made me look fat. Too fat. I mean, I was already fat. 5’2 and 145 pounds. Not fat in the medical sense, but fat. My stomach puffed out, and when the baggy sweatshirt that should have concealed it all didn’t, and it made my stomach puff out more, I chucked it into my laundry basket out of frustration.
I then shift to my skinny jeans and baby tee. The jeans hugged my butt perfectly when I checked myself out in the mirror, but then I turned around and saw my stomach hugged, accentuated, making me look like a pig wearing Forever 21. How I wish I looked like every other girl around me; flat stomachs, flat stomachs, flat stomachs. I’m young, and I run every day, until the point of exhaustion, so why on earth am I fat?
Every time I look in the mirror, all I see is obesity. A cloud of fat taking up the entire
mirror. There was nothing else to see: just rolls, sag, looseness. I always pull in my stomach with force, amounting to a gigantic amount of newtons, just so I look barely acceptable in my mirror.
But I’ll never actually do anything about it. I’ll never work out more than the 30 minutes of running that I require myself to do. I’ll always eat too much because food is always there, and it’s always warm, and when it goes bad, you can just get more. But every time I eat, I feel a wash of guilt, a punch to the gut of shame, because why should I eat like this if I’m this way?
