I have always struggled with my weight. “Always” for me being remembering praying to God at age 8 that I would promise to stay fat forever if he saved my baby sister’s life. I don’t know from where exactly I knew that I was fat, but I knew it like i knew the sky was blue. Looking back at those pictures now I was most certainly of average size for an 8 year old, but somehow I had learned my body was wrong.

I have also always been athletic. I swam competitively, played on soccer and baseball teams, and took dance classes. There was not a single season from 1st grade through college where I wasn’t on a team. I played DIV1 sports all through college, and was actually recruited for the teams. Through all four years I met with endless doctors and nutritionists who kept taking food groups away from me, or claiming I was lying about how much I ate. If I couldn’t finish a run, or lost a match, it was always because of my weight, not because I was starving myself for the doctors so much that it was making me lightheaded.

When I went to graduate school I had had enough, so I stopped exercising the 40+ hours a week I had since high school. I ate like my friends ate and gained about 70 pounds in two years. That was hard on me. When I graduated my parents, one of whom is a doctor, sat me down and said enough was enough and I should consider weight loss surgery. Looking up the LAP band (the choice they suggested) with all the complications and horrors that went with it terrified me. Two weeks after my parental intervention I told them I would try again on my own.

I took up running. I did a couch to 5k program, and while I had always hated running, I found great pleasure in making my body move faster and get stronger. 9 months after I ran my 5k I ran a marathon. I am now on my 2nd year of competitive running. I have lost the 70 pounds I put on in grad school, along with an extra ten, but I am still considered obese by the BMI chart. I have been to a doctor who I trust who says my blood work shows that I am in perfect health, not perfect health for my size, PERFECT HEALTH.

Last weekend I finished in 2nd place in a short 5k race. I posted online the results and was so proud. Someone emailed me last night asking if that is really my time, because no one my size can run that fast. It is heartbreaking.

I have crash dieted, gone to weight loss spas, and done insane, soup only diets, getting by on less than 1000 calories a day while still running ten miles every morning. None of it works, or if it does, it doesn’t last. This is my body. I am strong, I am fit. Physically there is nothing I can’t do, except be smaller. I found this blog this morning and have been reading it through since. I don’t know why I felt compelled to write but I do.

It is not ok to live in a world where it is assumed that I am wrong, or not ‘enough’ because I have larger fat cells in my body. It is not ok for people to feel inspired to try running too because “well if you can do it I can do it for sure”. I don’t want people to be inspired by my 'fatness’, people should be inspired by me, not my weight. Most importantly it is not ok for me to feel like I am a failure or that I am flawed because of my weight.

Thank you for this blog, it helps more than you may know.