, too: It can lead to constant exhaustion, brittle nails, hair loss, insomnia, recurrent injuries, and more.
I didn't want to be a part of that statistic anymore. I wanted to have a full life and a college experience filled with amazing memories. I wanted to stop hating and punishing myself for what I ate. I realized my body does so much for me — it helps me go places and meet up with friends, it allows me to dance, and it keeps me alive and healthy. In response, the least I could do was treat it right.
I didn't go right into exercising another way, though: I had to take a break from working out first. I had to make myself okay with skipping workouts and saying"no" to the disordered parts of myself. I had to realize my lack of strenuous exercise didn't make me a bad person. I had toas something that could make me feel good mentally rather than something that would affect my weight.
Once I became healthier, I dove back into dance, an exercise I truly love. I attended Zumba classes with an old roommate and didn't try to figure out the calories I burned. I started taking dance technique classes with a dance group on campus, in which I learned how to do jumps, turns, and leaps I'd always wanted to do but never learned how to growing up. I realized how cool it is andmy body can do so many fancy, impressive dance moves.
We live in a diet-culture-filled world, in which feeling okay about what we eat and how we look is close to impossible sometimes. But, let me tell you this: a life free of diet culture and body judgments is one worth fighting for. It's worth the hard days and therapy sessions. It's worth the awkward conversations in which you have to"call in" friends who engage in"diet talk" and"fat talk.