How my weight stopped mattering to me

I had to teach myself that my value exceeded the numbers on the scale


“You’re just built round, you always were,” the recurring pretense of reassurance from my mother as we sort though baby pictures time and again, always admiring my favorite: a healthy curly-haired toddler in a pink leotard and tutu looking positively done with her ballet class.

I started gaining weight consistently the summer before my sophomore year of high school. At the time, the disparity between end of freshman year photos, and being unable to zip up my boots over my engorged calves during Fall of that same year was horrifying. It only got worse from there – I gained weight rapidly and I needed to regain control over my body, though I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder. The summer before junior year I was sent to see a ‘weight and wellness specialist’ who weighed me on a scale not much different from my own at home, asked me what and how much I ate, and how eating made me feel. He sent me to get my thyroid tested, which came back perfectly fine, and didn’t do much from there except remind me to be confident and suggest I try and exercise.

That’s when I first noticed the whispers. My sister took me aside and told me she was concerned about me, and I had officially become “fat” and should really do something about it. A few weeks later, I overheard a conversation between my mother and aunt suggesting I had become too “heavy” and needed to try and cut the weight back. At our holiday party that year, my cousin, who had gone in the opposite direction as I, and perhaps just as unhealthily, sported a skin tight red dress, while I felt like a stuffed body cushion in a supposedly slimming black dress, and spent most of the evening in tears.

The summer before my senior year of high school

It only got worse from there. Before my senior year of high school, another relative encouraged me to lose weight before college because “fat people don’t have friends in college,” and I found myself actually making a concerted effort to lose weight. I wrote down meticulous lists of everything I ate, and managed to lose a whole four pounds, but would lie and say it was fourteen to get people off my back. I had gained over 72 pounds from my ‘normal’ weight, yet couldn’t bring myself to proactively accept that truth.

I believed my lies more and more, while allowing myself to eat more and more, now realizing it was a coping mechanism for the stress that the projected need to lose weight had caused me. I became obsessed. Between Sencha tea, diets consisting of salted seaweed and rice cakes, YouTube workout videos, and mastering the best angles to make myself look thinner in photos, I tried so hard to face the problem that was my weight, without realizing the problem was and, to an extent still is, how I see myself.

The weight slowly shed during my first year at NYU, giving me a new found confidence I never imagined, wearing crop tops in public and even the occasional bikini. Weight no longer became what I obsessed over, and I thrived off people telling me how “slim” I had become. My closest friends would send me pictures of “Fat Laila” and I would laugh along with them at the person I used to know. That is, until it came back… well, at least in my mind.

The winter of freshman year at NYU

One semester at UVA was a tumultuous ride, adjusting to college food once again but also stress-skipping meals, wanting to fit into outfits that I had planned in my mind but not yet tried out and was almost afraid to, and having friends who spoke very openly and often about how desperately they needed to get into shape whilst wearing their size zero jeans. By April, I cracked under pressure, and slowly found myself hating the person in the mirror once again, crying over the size of my arms, and trying to force a thigh-gap in mirror selfies, even though the few pounds that I HAD gained in actuality, and inevitably, were a mere fraction of the reoccurrence that I feared.

Looking at the scale, a pound or two does have the ability destroy me internally, but only because I fear going back. But my methods of combatting it two years later are a little bit different. I buy flattering formfitting dresses, fitted skirts, and cropped shirts, put them on and stare at myself in the mirror until I can find one thing to compliment myself about. From that compliment, I search for another, and another, until I have conned myself into finding more attractive parts of my physical being than unattractive, and then force myself out in an outfit that doesn’t let me hide.

It isn’t always easy, because the fat shaming still hasn’t ended. My mother still hits me with the occasional jab about an outfit being inappropriate for my body or judgmental look, and I still dread the few and far between family gatherings.

I have curves, and there’s no magical exercise, superfood or weight-loss drug that can make me stick-thin, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to be comfortable in my own skin, and spend my free time obsessing over other aspects of myself, like trying to tone my own hair successfully, without going bald, and growing out my eyebrows.

I wish I could say that I’ll never struggle with my weight again, both in actuality and in my own self image, but I know for certain that isn’t the case just yet. I take everything day by day, eat everything I want, in moderation, while promising myself I will never self-harm by crash dieting or starving myself,  and remembering my personal value exceeds the numbers on the scale, regardless of everything my self-proclaimed well wishers have said and continue to say to me.