Hello Ladies,

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of posts about body image, weight loss/gain, and size discrimination, and as a result, I wanted to dedicate this week toward discussing some of the battles I’ve faced and what helped me to overcome them in the hopes that other people may be helped.

When I was younger, I was athletic and lithe—the latter so much so that I was nicknamed “Two by Four” because of my complete lack of womanly curves.  While the rest of my friends were bragging about their training bras and speaking in a foreign language about “cup sizes” and “underwires,” I was still running around bra free.  At first, the disparity between my bust size and theirs never bothered me.  I was more preoccupied with what sport I was playing that season than whether I needed to move to a B cup.

Then, I had sleepover for my birthday, and my 13 year old friends (already way more into being a “woman” than I was) complained about how they were moving up a cup size or how bras were torture devices but necessary because of how big their boobs were now.  Since my bra consisted of a boy’s undershirt, I had nothing to add, so my “friend” turned to me and asked what bra size I wore.  When I replied that I didn’t know because I didn’t wear one, the girls burst out giggling.  “Well, your chest is so flat anyway that I don’t see what the point of wearing a bra is,” one sniped.

Until that point, I never felt bad about my body even if I was less curvy than the other developing girls in my class, but in one fell swoop, I was indoctrinated into the body hate cycle.  Suddenly, the body that allowed me to play competitive sports with boys, complete 30 or 40 push-ups without breaking a sweat, and eat 1,000 calorie lunches with no weight gain wasn’t good enough anymore.  It was flat.  It was angular.  It was wrong.

Soon after, my parents can attest that I sat in front of my bedroom mirror staring at my chest and praying—no, begging—for my boobs to finally grow.  All of the women in my family are busty, and I thought for sure I was going to be the one that stayed flat-chested forever—a fact I had now been peer-pressured into thinking was the worst.

Then, shortly after I turned 14, puberty truly struck with a vengeance, and my boobs weren’t the only body parts to come into their own.  The Meredith Behind (as my grandma affectionately called it) jutted it out in the back while my hips curved on the sides.  No longer was I a “Two by Four.”  At the time, I was 5’3″, probably a 28FF, and a size 4.  Life was good.  I had just enough boobage to feel good about my size but not too much that I attracted unwanted stares or comments.

I was nearly 18 before I hit my final growth spurt, however, which resulted in over 3″ in height, multiple cup sizes, and a lot more curves on the lower half.  It was also shortly after this birthday that I started battling my weight and would welcome the days of getting taunted for being thin.

What strikes me now, as an adult looking back, is that my body hate and discontent did not originate from within but only arose because “friends” in so many words told me that I should hate my body.  For their own personal reasons, they felt my body was inferior to theirs or perhaps their ideal body, and because they would have been unhappy to look like me, they thought I should be unhappy in my own skin.  After all, why do we make comments like “Eat a cheeseburger,” or “Lose weight, etc. if not to convey our would-be dissatisfaction if we had a body like the target of our criticism?  I wonder how many of us would feel good about how we look if we had never been on the receiving end of these kind of comments.

Erica