Dear Younger Woman,

If you hate your body, intend on losing weight, and/or feel inadequate to any capacity because of your physical appearance or otherwise, please take no further action until you read the following.

By now, you have been bombarded with ideals of the “perfect body” for quite some time. I apologize on behalf of your peers, your family, and society for what you have already undoubtedly been through. You’ve seen models in low-rise jeans flaunting practically concave midsections for as long as you can remember. Lines at grocery stores and pharmacies bear no shortage of magazine covers touting “secrets” to losing X pounds in X days. As you and your childhood friends compared fat deposits you did and didn’t have, you all learned thinness was equal to beauty. Your callow psyche has been molded by being constantly told you’re not enough — not good enough, smart enough, worthy enough, thin enough. The latter, you seem to have come to the conclusion is within your control. Alas, nothing is free.

The price of striving for what you have come to idealize as the “perfect body” is not just hunger, although there will be plenty of that. You’ll begin to think to yourself, “I have enough self-control to go without for a bit if it means I’ll finally be beautiful.” Counting calories takes so much of life’s limited time. Weighing out every component of your side salad will take you far longer than it will to eat it. You’ll count calories in gum and vitamins, and spend way too much time Googling whether zero-calorie sweetener is really zero calories. Eventually, every food you know will have an associated number. You will look at a food and see a numeric value threatening to make your daily allocated calorie bank, and therefore you, lesser. Meals are replaced with coffee, diet coke, and cigarettes. Not much else will pass your lips unless you’ve “earned’ it. You will fixate on how little you can manage to eat, and give yourself pep talks to try and make it just a little longer without food. You will begin playing a dangerous game of how low of a number you can record for the day, smiling at the minuscule amount on your MyFitnessPal.

Eventually, you will feel so deprived and starved you will find yourself in the midst of a compulsive frenzy, of which you will have no control over. You’ll consume everything and anything in your wake, the dopamine high taking over. Once your stomach is protruding and your jaw is sore, guilt will permeate any other emotion or thought you could possibly possess in that moment. Voices will start screaming at you from within, wielding hatred and disgust. When the voices become too loud to bear, you will find yourself on your knees, elbows on the toilet seat and face in the bowl as you attempt to quell the internal rampage. When punching your abdomen and dry retching begins to hurt too much, you swear to yourself you’ll expend what remains through restriction and exercise. You will become acutely familiar with the anatomy of every crevice of your bathroom and will be surprised at the distance ejecta travels. The combination of puke and bleach is not a smell that can go unnoticed by your roommates for that long. Purging will become so taxing, you’ll do anything to avoid it. A “trick” you’ll adopt is to binge without swallowing. You’ll take pride in counting up the calories of your swollen bag of mastication to see how many you’ve “saved”. You’ll be pleased with your “self-control”, and reward yourself by eating something more than mushrooms for dinner that night, because you’ve earned it.

Prepare to develop a set of specific, rigorous, and odd exercise habits. You’ll seek out sets of staircases just to climb them each at least twice in between other obligations. The gym will become your penalty box, where you’ll work off any energy your body somehow still managed to retain. Long walks in the beating sun to get your step count as high as it can possibly go will be a daily routine, and you will not be allowed to go home until you’ve achieved at least a certain number. You will feel guilty if you sit to wait for the train, and you’ll load your backpack with heavy books you didn’t need to bring to increase your energy expenditure. Only after honoring your compulsions will you feel worthy to eat a salad or cup of fruit.

Numbers will swim through your head on a constant basis — the most significant of which will be the one staring up at you as you stare down at it. The scale will house your daily sigil of self-esteem, and you will regard it with devotion. Any downward fluctuation will be celebrated and reveled in, fabricating a confidence you’ll carry with you for the remainder of the day. Any upward will send you spiraling into a bottomless pit of anxiety as you plan the remedy to your “failure”. The number will brand itself in your mind, constantly and incurably present. You’ll think of little else, and find any way to bring it up in conversation to seek validation of your thinness, and subconsciously, your worth.

You’ll spend every waking moment thinking about your weight, what you look like in other’s eyes from every angle. You will never be safe from reflective surfaces ever again, no matter where you may be. Mirrors will become an apparatus for self-destruction. Hours will be spent squeezing, pinching, slapping, punching parts of your own body for daring to exist with fat on them. As you stare yourself in the eye and spit words so disgusting you didn’t think anything like them could come from your own mouth, you’ll be overwhelmed with shame for every mouthful of food you had dared to consume. You will become your body’s enemy, and it yours.

If you are still considering this path, please understand happiness does not lie within a number. Not the one on the scale, the ones tacked onto the food you eat, and not the one stitched onto the back of your jeans. Worthiness does not lie in a constant caloric deficit. Beauty is not seeing as many bones through your skin as possible, nor is it vomit on your bathroom walls. You do not have to lose weight for the sake of conforming to a meaningless societal construct rooted in wildly outdated patriarchal beauty standards that remain in place solely to capitalize on women’s insecurities. The price of striving for what is deemed “ideal” is too great a cost for any person to bear, and there is no reward to be reaped. You will find so much more joy and vitality in confidence and self-acceptance. You are enough, as you are, today.