Dear body confidence, please come back!

There I stood, at the doctors office, wondering if my lunch was hanging on me like a bad smell and explaining that I’d been having reoccuring heart burn.

‘Well miss Carrack, the reason you’re having such symptoms at the tender age of 20 is because you’re a big fat, fatty, whale woman’

Okay he didn’t say the last bit, he said the more polite doctor word(if there is one, because I’m pretty sure it all counts as verbal abuse)the ‘o/w’ word. And there I was, all inch/pound/molecule of body confidence was a) stomped on and then b) thrown out the window.

I had to stop myself from bursting into tears, I was humiliated, I was surprised. I felt personally victimised for being short and thus having poor BMI. I was saying ‘but I do 10,000 steps a day and I work out…’ but all that doctor heard was ‘excuses, excuses, excuses’. At that moment I stopped caring about any other achievement like being able to speak another language or that I wad happy and loved, all that mattered was that number on the scale.

I didn’t want to write this post, to be honest I wanted to lock this memory in a zip-lock bag (don’t ask me why ) and toss it into the deep, dark depths of my mind where any dark drunken memories from my teenage years are kept. I told people about what happenef, they told me I was being ‘stupid’ and that I’m ‘fine’. I started staring at my stomach, legs and arms wondering if the quite healthy looking person in the mirror was actually in real life much different. I felt this distorted perception of myself, I just wished I could see how other people saw me (you know like Freaky Friday).

It ruined my mojo (?) For the whole festive period ), I felt every butter soaked calorie slop straight onto me. I went from denial ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ to great pangs of sadness.

And when I think about why… that upsets me even more. We all have this contorted concept that beauty, success and power comes from being ‘slim’. For many of my teenage years, I was a lucky one that managed to avoid these feelings, even just before I went to the doctors I refused to give into the notion that thin=happy. Now I have well and truely caved, and it worries me. I’ve fallen off my pedastool of being content with my body just by somebody measuring my BMI.

So please if you see my body confidence, tell her I miss her very much.

Love Robyn

P.s this is me being the ‘o/w’ word amd also being weird (not related…I dont think).