As women, we often look in the mirror and want the same thing: to be skinnier. As wonderful as it sounds to be considered a “skinny” girl and feel good about your body, coming from a “skinny” girl, I can tell you it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. After a while I realized being called skinny feels like less of a compliment and more of a competition.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve lived your whole life with a fast metabolism and could truly eat whatever you wanted. You didn’t even make it on the weight charts as a child and in high school they called you anorexic (which by the way, you understand is just as offensive as being called fat). Yes, we eat, even though it doesn’t look like it. Many girls wish for this, but I can tell you from the other side, it’s just us hard for us skinny girls as everyone else.

What bothers me most about being a “skinny girl” is the tremendous pressure. All my life I’ve taken pride in the fact that I feel like and have been told I have a nice body, but eventually it becomes something that is no longer effortless. And while it’s not all lost physically, it feels like it is. It's difficult to not want the body back you had before college happened. I don’t forget about the times I would look in the mirror before my shower and was truly satisfied with what I saw. I never used to look at calories, I never use to think I had a gut, and I never wasn’t the skinniest girl in the room. I’m not fifteen anymore, and my body shouldn’t look like it is, but that doesn't mean I still feel like a "skinny" girl, or even want to still be categorized as one.

We did not ask to be born skinny, just like people do not ask to be born overweight. The standards we are made believe we need to uphold are just as high as people who feel that they need to lose weight, the difference is we just aren’t used to it. It is truly hard to change your eating habits, no matter what size you are. It doesn't matter how skinny you used to be, or how many people still tell you that you are. Hearing it all the time does not change how we actually feel about ourselves.

At one point we are all going to look in the mirror and not like what we see, and being a size zero is not an exception to that. Another skinnier girl is going to come along and make us feel like we have run six miles a day to keep up. We want to be as skinny as we once were, and it’s just not possible or realistic now, even though it was effortless for most of our lives.

So the next time you see a girl you think could use a cheeseburger, remember it probably isn’t as easy as it looks for her. Chances are she probably just ate one. She’s either working really hard to keep the body her genetics gave her, or she probably doesn’t feel as good as you think she looks. Don't make another girl feel like she can't worry about her body, too.