I've always loved food. I haven't always loved my body. There, I said it. 

I remember it starting as early as the 6th grade. Every morning, I would pour myself a big bowl of cereal, plop down at the kitchen counter and page through the latest issues of Health or Shape--magazines my Mom would get like clockwork in the mail. My perusing began innocently enough, as I admired the beautiful pictures of recipes or scanned articles on "How to get a Butt like Beyonce in 21 days or less." 

At age 11, my filter was large enough that those articles were just words on a page, and behaviors or foods old people, like I thought my Mom was at the time, had to do or eat because they were old! Not because they wanted to change some part of themselves. 

But between 6th grade and junior year of high school, something shifted. The impetus? My involvement in sport. Over time, it didn't matter that I could win every presidential fitness award in gym class, or that I could beat all the boys in the mile run. I wanted the pipes and defined calves to match. I not only wanted to BE the part of an athlete, but I also wanted to look it, and thus, began my journey into wellness. 

That's the thing though. Wellness never looked, to me, like the name implies. If I was truly "well," I should've felt vibrant, not sluggish. Confident, not insecure, focused, not foggy. But through depriving and isolating myself to look like "the part," it became impossible for me to do the things to be "the part". I still look back at the time between junior year of high school and senior year of college as a time where I lost so much of myself, it took me years to find her again. 

And I did. Eventually. But it wasn't without struggle. It was as if some part of my brain wanted me to remain in that place of war between feeling good and looking good because what I found, is neither (feeling or looking good) was good enough for me. 

That was until my desire to look good really began affecting how good I felt. At least in the sense that it became a wake-up call, rather than a side effect I was willing to deal with. Food then started to shift from something that could make my body change in ways I wasn't willing to accept, to fuel that gave fire to my personality.  

So that's where I am right now. Most days, I feel really good in my skin. That said, I am probably never going to love my body all the time. I think loving our bodies can be an unrealistic goal in a society that not only celebrates appearances, but that has an ever-evolving viewpoint on what beauty really is. Let it be known that we don’t need to love our bodies to respect them.