How to Unlearn Hating Yourself

Body positivity and topless sunbathing

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

I’ve always had a difficult relationship with my body. It all started when I was called fat by a classmate. I was 10, I wasn’t fat, and I didn’t really know what fat meant, it wasn’t a concept for me. At that minute I just learnt that fat means ugly and only skinny is beautiful.

It was all downhill from there.

Decades of dieting, exercising and self-hatred followed. The feeling of not being good enough was closely linked to what I thought of my body. I did every stupid diet, every lifestyle change, I suffered in silence first from anorexia, then from bulimia. I did juice fast for 90 days. I gained and lost weight easily and not so easily. I had periods when I overexercised and ran 10k every morning.

There were times when I was healthy and fat, and times when I was unhealthy and skinny. But my relationship with my body was surely unhealthy. I tortured and punished it — never loved it. Throughout the years each diet and lifestyle change failure taught me to hate my body even more and justified my hatred at every turn.

I learnt to cover up my body and show only parts that I thought were pretty or acceptable, for the fear of being judged. I never learnt to take a compliment on my looks — except on my eyes. My…