Growing up in Northern Mexico, a very Americanized region with lingering traditional roots, made for an interesting indoctrination into health, weight and diet. The people I grew up around were very complex in matters of weight. Some would tell you that being chubby is beautiful. It’s almost considered virtuous to consume huge amounts of food at meals; it can be a compliment to the cook as well as a personal triumph to be able to clean your plate. You got praised for doing it, whereas not finishing your food, even if you were full, was frowned upon.

And yet, growing up Mexican, many of us probably had that tía telling us straight up that we were too fat, or worrying aloud to our mothers that we might grow up to have weight issues, even as she ladled endless food onto our plates and wondered why we weren’t eating enough.

In my nuclear family, we never considered what we were eating, we just ate. But outside my nuclear family, everybody talked about being fat and losing weight. One time I heard my uncle, a professional taco maker (no joke) say that our family has a special “gene” that makes us gain weight when we inhale too much air all at once. One of my grandma’s cousins, a self-acclaimed lady of piety and an door-to-door evangelist of pasta casseroles, looked pityingly at my scrawny teenage arms and said, “I looked like you once. It doesn’t last. Obesity runs in the family.” Another time I heard my aunt triumphantly explain how she had painstakingly dieted when she was a teen to fit into her quinceañera dress, writing down every last bit of calorie she consumed.

In such an Americanized region as I grew up in, though, the foods of our grandparents and the obsession with being skinny tried to coexist but couldn’t. The only way that seemed possible was by adopting fad diets and counting calories obsessively—there wasn’t a notion of health thrown into that equation unless a dark circle around your neck threatened a darker future with disease. The results of this intersection, I think, are often seen in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which borders with Mexico. My hometown, McAllen, is currently the most obese city in the States, and I have seen the culinary culmination of the “Tex-Mex” hybrid cuisine, which can produce literally heart-stopping monstrous creations.

I didn't really become fully exposed to the Standard American Diet until I ate at the college dining halls, where "freshmen fifteen" didn't stop at fifteen. In addition to that, I developed food intolerances and got a closer look at my mental health. I got so sick that I reached the point of despairing at the prospect of waking up another day and having to go through my busy school schedule like the efficient machine I was supposed to be when I felt so dysfunctional. However, as I talked to friends and acquaintances, I realized I wasn’t the only person going through this. The amount of people with similar stories made me feel like there was a silent epidemic nobody was talking about.

I went to at least five different doctors over the next few years, and they all had different opinions. There seemed to be no treatment that fully helped. Each doctor gave me specific treatment for a specific problem based on their specializations, but I really wanted someone to recognize that the body is an interconnected, complex organism in which everything affects everything else. I wanted my health to be treated holistically. Neither of these doctors told me that diet had anything to do with my problem.

Fed up with the lack of feedback I was hoping for from the people who are supposed to uphold some semblance of the Hippocratic Oath (at least as far as insurance companies allow), I took matters into my own hands and dived into a search for a lifestyle that would allow me to regain my health and thrive.

I tried all kinds of exercises I could get my hands on: pilates, high intensity interval training, yoga, running, spinning, weight-Lifting, and crawling. I tried multiple diets, too: Paleo, raw vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free. My body fluctuated like a line chart full of ups and downs; every year I felt like a different person and I wondered if I would ever reach a good place where I was happy with who I was and with what my body was capable of. But through these ups and downs and through the diets and exercise regimes, I learned how to shake off the fads and embrace health instead. I learned that health isn’t an individual endeavor, and that health isn’t a human condition only.

I would also argue that I became a valuable guinea pig for science, so you’re welcome science.

Without further ado, I learned that:

There’s no “one diet fits all.”

As obvious as this sounds, it can be hard to remember when we’re in desperate circumstances and we’d do anything, anything to feel like a fully functioning human again. I spent so much energy diving into diets with my whole heart, clinging to them like saving cures, only to come away disappointed. I had to learn how to tweak certain diets in order to properly nourish my body, and figuring out what those tweaks looked like has lasted four years and counting. One of my housemates is currently doing something akin to Paleo (high in protein and fat, low carbs), and I’m a vegetarian (I love complex carbs!). We go grocery shopping together and we work out together, and so far it’s been so much fun and it’s worked for us respectively, because our metabolisms and bodies are entirely different.

What loving your body actually means:

There is a huge Body Positivity Movement going on right now. From “mermaid thighs” to embracing our curves and strength like Lady Boss Gina Rodriguez. I’m all for it, but I honestly don’t think complimenting your reflection in the mirror has enough depth to actually transform how you think of yourself, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re loving your body.

Loving your body, besides feeding it nourishing food, giving it good sleep, water, exercise, and satisfying interpersonal relationships, also means respecting it. We often use domineering language when talking about our bodies, like we’re going to mold it or beat it into a desired shape, and we don’t like what our bodies look like until we get them into that shape. The problem with this is that we’re not grateful or appreciative of what our bodies can already do. We don’t rest until we get to the goal. And while it’s good to keep up that determination, I realized that I wasn’t letting myself live in the moment because I was so obsessed with getting to where I wanted to be. If I ate something I shouldn’t have eaten, I’d be consumed with the thought of how hard I was going to exercise the next day and I couldn’t wait until that moment came. I wouldn’t be at peace until it did. And in the meantime, I’d be stealing away attention from people around me, from spending time with loved ones and devoting my thoughts to better things. In rushing to the day when we think we’ll finally be satisfied with who we are, we take the time in between for granted. And I think we all find out, at some point or another, that this life is fragile. No minute of it is guaranteed.

Seeking health, as opposed to seeking merely the aesthetics of muscle-building and being trim, taught me to be content in the moment, and to give myself grace. I knew I was on a journey towards health and fitness that lasts a lifetime, and feeling bad wasn’t going to get me there faster; it was only stealing my life away from me.

My health and the planet’s aren’t enemies.

I learned that switching to a plant-based diet with fewer processed foods, if any, is not only good for my body, but it’s good for our down-trodden planet. It takes 1,799 gallons of water to raise one pound of beef. Only 2.5% of all water on earth is freshwater, and only 1% of that tiny percentage is easily available to humans. And we are giving it all to cows that live in lifelong abusive conditions because we don't want to use less water to produce more plants.

Not only are we unnecessarily depleting our water supply, but we are warming up the planet with the production of gases from the meat industry in America—not just the fuel used to power the machinery, but also all that cattle flatulence. Yeah... Animals can’t digest corn, and that’s mostly what they’re being fed. We are literally being killed. By cow farts.

The politics and conflict of interests of food production means that big industries get to produce surpluses of their crops and meat because of the monetary foothold they have in Congress. The myth that our well-being and the earth’s well-being are in competition is a lie powered by an industry’s desire to get richer. And in the process, the health of our planet and ours is flailing.

Compassion and respect for others.

It’s really easy to judge people when you have never experienced their struggles. All my life I had been a sickly sort of skinny, and yet people looked at me and probably thought I was fit, even though I ate junk food and did not exercise. When I started taking care of my health, it was harder to see my progress, and it was easy to get discouraged. I gained so much respect for each and every person who is trying or wanting to make a change in their lifestyle for good.

Beauty is functional, not material.

Society, especially the media, wants us to get stuck in a superficial dimension in which beautiful and ugly are dichotomies based on appearances. The reality of being human is that beauty and ugliness are so much more complex than that. What I learned about beauty is that true beauty is defined by function, or actions. As much as the beauty and dieting industries want you to believe that beauty is a product you can buy, it’s not. A friend once posted about her struggle in wearing a sleeveless dress to a wedding. Instead of being self-conscious of the insecurities she usually had about her arms, she thought of what truly made them beautiful and strong. Those arms had held her nephews, they had lifted up a discouraged friend, they had worked hard and embraced the lonely and sad. A sleeveless dress could not show that. But those actions of love towards others are never forgotten, they are burned in someone’s memory, beautifying that person and everyone else around them.

We were not made with all the answers; we were made to seek them.

My search for health was a travesty of endless trial and error runs. Besides learning a LOT of patience, this search for answers led me to a better understanding of what it means to be human. As cliché as that sounds, this was a big revelation for me because I grew up in a Christian tradition in which a Sunday school teacher told us that if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned, we would’ve known everything and I wouldn’t have had to take any math classes (I held a huge grudge towards Adam and Eve after that). But I think that even if humans had stayed in a paradisiac garden, invention and curiosity would still be in our DNA, and the potential for development and evolution would still be in the raw materials and biology of the earth. We weren’t handed all the answers then, and we don’t get all the answers now. I wanted somebody to just give me an outright diagnosis so I could get well again, but I had to do a lot of trial and error in which I grew curious and empowered as I learned more about my body’s interaction with its environment. The endless searching and questioning have opened wide stores of knowledge about the earth, molecules, metabolites, mental illness, politics, economics, agriculture, nutrition—you name it!—that otherwise I would’ve remained ignorant of.

Once we decide to take this journey towards better health, it's important to establish clear, long-term goals. However, learning how to truly take care of our bodies, being patient, and enjoying what we already have can make for a better journey towards health than obsessing constantly, counting calories instead of nutrients, and comparing ourselves to others.