“Your daughter is 170 pounds at 11 years old, Mrs. DiMatteo. She’s obese.” A doctor said to my mother one day at an appointment in an office in Staten Island, New York.

“I don’t care what I look like.” A tiny version of me replied since It took my mother so long to respond.

The doctor looked at me through smiling eyes, as if she knew a secret that I would soon find out. “Oh, but you will.”

And she was right, a few years later it suddenly mattered to me that I was the only one who wasn’t liked by any boys. It mattered when someone told me I was fat, I was chubby, and that I was ugly when so many other girls were being told they were skinny, thin, and beautiful. When I looked into the mirror I saw what they spoke of: a big, fat Italian girl who was disgusting in everyone’s eyes including my own.

I was unhealthy, but that was due to a blood disorder called ITP. I had taken medicine for it twice a week through an I.V. in a hospital in Staten Island, and I still have the I.V. scar in my left arm to prove it. The medicine made me bloated, weighed down from water weight, and constantly hungry from being so dehydrated. My mother didn’t know what to do other than to feed her little girl that she loved so much every time she begged for more food.

Because of the disorder, I wasn’t allowed to do any exercise. My doctors made sure I was banned from gym class because if I were bruised the bruise would stay there for longer than two or three weeks. The purple spot would grow red dots on the surrounding area because my white blood cell count wasn’t high enough to repair it.

Due to that, I stayed inside most of the time, listening to the radio and my CD’s and reading anime and Harry Potter books. It wasn’t until the start of middle school that I was allowed to take gym class regularly again and stay off medicine for good. The weight from that shed off my body within a year, however, the excess pounds of extra fat and stretch marks remained. I went from 170 to 150 too fast, and my skin is still ridden with white stretch marks to tell the tale.

Although I lost 20 pounds I was still bigger than all of my classmates, and it wasn’t until someone drew a picture of a whale with my name on it during art class and handed it to me with a big grin on their face did I realize what I had to do.

That’s when my first eating disorder developed.

I didn’t stop eating, and I didn’t throw up: I counted every calorie I ingested and stuck to a 500 calorie diet. Within months I went from a size 13 to a size 7. I exercised twice a day with sweat pants and sweat shirts on to sweat until my skin started to form heat rashes. On hot summer days, I would wear garbage bags and long black pants and run for hours outside. Everyone noticed I was losing weight, but no one knew my secret.

To be honest, in my head, this was perfectly normal behavior. However, obsessively memorizing calorie amounts on packages and fruits and vegetables in books and eating so few calories just to burn four times the amount off later in the day for weeks at a time is not normal.

Sometimes a normal day’s diet would look like a 100 pretzel calorie pack, a packet of goldfish from my schools vending machines, and then I would wait to get home to maybe eat some Greek yogurt only to wake up and work off all of the calories I ate plus whatever I was planning on eating that day and more. Some days I would do this and then eat anything and everything I found in my fridge. That, I found out too late in life, is called binging and purging. Something they don’t teach you about in your school’s health class and do not classify as an eating disorder to you until after you’ve felt so empty inside that you have to look it up yourself online because you know there’s something wrong with you. You know that’s not normal behavior, and then you read all about it online and wonder why no one told you it wasn’t healthy.

No one told you because they figured you should know yourself that it’s not, but you never do while it’s happening. You develop this false sense of self and every time you look at a picture of you that someone else took, or see a reflection in the mirror or window, you see this other person that’s bloated and at least 20 pounds bigger than you actually are. That’s when you see that it’s so necessary to continue your diet and your exercise. You should be ashamed of how you look, no one could ever love you until you look the way everyone else does. You begin comparing every inch of you to your friends. You start wondering why you can’t fit into a size that they can, why you look so much differently than they do, why you’re so unlucky.

Years later, I remember these thoughts and I look back at pictures and see that I looked just like them. I was the same size that they were, I even borrowed their clothes from time to time.

Until recently, I had thought so poorly of myself. I’ve fallen into so many patterns of binging and purging, over-exercising, shaming my body, and telling myself that I’ll never be beautiful until I’m at least 30 to 50 pounds lighter than I am. Yet every time I dieted or every time I worked out on a regiment I was never happy and gained the weight back immediately.

It took a long time to be able to look into the mirror and tell myself that I’m beautiful. To eat the foods I wanted rather than what I felt I should eat. To look at my friends and instead of feeling jealous that they’re so beautiful, to be happy that I have such beautiful friends.

It took a long time to tell myself I am enough. I am beautiful. I am thinner than I think I am and perceive to be.

Everyone has a weakness and this is mine. I was the big girl, but I’m not anymore. I haven’t been for six years now. It took me until a few months ago to see that after so many people have ensured me that I’m not.

Love your body, I know personally it can be hard but you need to love it in order for others to as well. You are beautiful no matter what shape you are, what size you are, and what color you are.