The Obsession with Being “Perfect” and How I Learned to Love My Body

Since I’m a girl I’ve been struggling with my weight. After six years, my parents’ divorce made me find refuge in food.

In the stage of life when I started to grow up, and I went from being a child to being a lady with “curves”, menstruation and pimples, they conflicted a lot and my shy and introverted personality became stronger.

When I finally got through my teenage years, I started to fall in love with my body and my curves, but it didn’t take long to get back to feeling insecure about my appearance.

Every day on TV, newspapers and social networks, I saw prototypes of bodies that for me were simply impossible to achieve, and this caused me great insecurity and sadness for not fitting in with these norms imposed by society.

In my early 20s, I was 1.70 cm and weighed 85 kg; for me I was fine, but according to my weight and muscle mass, for some of my family, I was still “fat”.

Everyone tried to convince me to lose weight, it was one of these that I fell into the tale of society’s obsession with exposing women and showing them what it’s like to have a “perfect” silhouette.

I decided to consult with a nutritionist to try to lose a few pounds. Surprisingly when I went in for the appointment, the doctor told me that I was within my pedo, the only thing that should go down a little bit was the amount of my muscle mass.

And so began my obsession with losing weight.

In less than a year I was already weighing 60 kilos, but I always thought “losing another 1 or 2 kilos wouldn’t be bad at all”

The problem was that I couldn’t stop anymore. Vanity got the better of me and once I couldn’t lose any more weight (thank God our bodies are wise and have a limit), I started exercising in a totally obsessed way.

I weighed every 3 hours from Monday to Sunday. If I stayed a day without regret I would freak out.

My body couldn’t resist this intense and murderous lifestyle. It only took 1 year of totally aggressive exercises for me to have a spinal injury.

At the age of 25, I would have to undergo a very delicate surgery, a long recovery, and a doctor who diagnosed me with vigorexia.

Vanity and my need to be “perfect” made my life a daily effort to regain my health.

After 10 weeks of complete bed rest, I was finally able to walk better with my new life. I finally learned the best lesson in life: accept and love myself the way I am.

It wasn’t easy, but over time, as difficult as it was, I started to accept that the most important thing is to take care of my life.

As time went by, I began to notice that others saw me in a different way than I thought.

Today, it’s been about 3 years since I discovered that life is all we have, and that it’s meant to be enjoyed. I eat chocolate, sweets, bread and I learned to eat healthily and know that all of this is now good for me.

I hope my story helps many other people. I hope it helps you understand that the most important thing in your life is your life.

Understand that there will always be people who have some criticism about you to make you, the important thing is to ignore and focus on your well being.

I learned that if I change something about myself, it’s because I want to feel better, not because others say it’s bad.

As women, we have a daily struggle against the beauty standards imposed by the media and it is also in our hands not to listen to it.

This is the body that God gave you. Take care of him before it’s too late. Good luck 🙂

Ps: Long live the curves and damn the standards placed by the media.

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Time to fly, butterfly girl!