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22nd July 2024
04:10pm BST
Weight is never an easy topic to discuss. It's triggering, personal, and emotional, but it also doesn't matter in a way. The size of our bodies and how much they weigh mean so little in the grand scheme of things, but it's something I'm never not thinking about.
I don't think a day has gone by where I haven't thought about my weight or body image in some form, whether it's a negative or positive thought.
I know it shouldn't matter but growing up in the era where Bridget Jones was called fat and Special K was the only food women should eat warped my view on diet and body size.
Since I was a young teenager, I always felt like being skinny was the most important goal. It was something that made you better, more acceptable, more desirable.
I felt guilty for being over a size 10 and panicked about the number glaring back at me on the scales. In my head, I was too heavy, but in reality, I was perfectly fine.
As I matured, I slowly started to realise that I was causing damage by obsessing over how much I weighed, so I decided to stop focusing on the scales.
I let go of the power it held over me and tried to embrace body positivity as much as I could.
For years, I never felt the need to weigh myself because I stopped letting it matter, but that changed this weekend.
We don't keep a weighing scale in my house, I highly recommend chucking it out, but I spotted one in my family's bathroom when I was visiting this weekend.
It caught my eye and I couldn't help but wonder what weight I was. I stepped on the scale, and I did feel a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach, but then when the number appeared I felt nothing.
And I didn't expect to react in such a way.
It all felt so unimportant and the number looking back at me had lost its power. It didn't matter how big or small it was because I didn't care either way.
At that moment, I couldn't quite believe the progress I had made since I was a teenage girl obsessing over being skinny like Ashley Tisdale or Vanessa Hudgens.
The number on the scale was just a number. The significance that was once connected to it was severed after years of basing my worth and self-confidence on that one number.
It didn't change who I was or how much I mattered or even how people thought of me.
It was just an irrelevant little number.
That moment proved that we are worth so much more than the size of our jeans, the label on our dresses, and the number on the scales.
The moment I weighed myself made me realise that we need to let go of the power the scales hold because you feel beyond empowered when you do.