This is for Me

You can’t choose the life that’s given to you, the only thing you can do is change it. You can't control how you feel about something but you can change how you react to those feelings. You can’t stop time but you can control how you use it.

I haven't loved myself for a very long time. I can't control how I see myself but I can do something about it. I've gained a lot of weight since I started college. A mixture of stress, depression and just bad choices made me gain the weight. But I cannot blame my weight gain on the school food or not having the knowledge to eat healthy, I let myself gain this weight. I chose everything that I put into my body and I chose not to do something about it. When people look at me, I believe that all they see is the weight that I've gained and because of that I have avoided people I went to high school with. I’m afraid that they will leave and say to everyone else, “Wow, did you see how much weight Sara gained? She really let the Freshmen 15 get to her.” My biggest fear is that people will judge me and see me only as a lazy, fat girl who doesn't care about herself. But at the same time, I feel like I am just the lazy, fat girl. I don’t like working out, I don’t really like doing anything physical, and that’s one reason that I don’t work out. The main reason is that when I fail, everyone will know that I failed. Even if I managed to lose some weight, people would ask why I didn’t keep going. I started to go on the treadmill every other day for 30 minutes and someone asked, “Well, why don't you weight train on your days off? Why do you only go for 30 minutes?”

The only person that should be concerned about my weight is me. This is my body and if you don't like how it looks, then don't look at me. I want to be healthy; I want to be able to walk up the stairs without having to catch my breath at the top. Mostly, I want to be able to look in the mirror without crying or crying in the dressing room or feeling like “the fat friend.” What I'm saying is, I want to do this for me. For the first time in a very long time, I'm going to do something for me and only me.