It was a hot day, and I wore shorts – something that I never wore, because I was convinced my legs were far too huge to be seen. But, I wanted to weigh in as low as possible on the public scale, so I wore them anyway. The backs of my legs stuck uncomfortably to the plastic chair where I sat at my first-ever Weight Watchers meeting. The scale that day read 226.2 pounds; I didn’t know it yet, but it would never read that number again. I didn’t know it yet, but I would someday weigh in at almost half my largest size. I didn’t know it yet, but I was making a life-altering decision, and I would never be the same. Not just because that number would change, but because I would change in ways that cannot be reversed. There was a lot that I didn’t know and, in fact, there is still a lot that I don’t know – because even though I now weigh only 120 pounds, my journey is far from over.

I have struggled with my weight, eating, and body image for my entire life. What I didn’t realise for a long time was that my weight was a symptom, and not the disease. I blamed my weight for everything wrong in my life. I believed I was unlovable because I was fat; I believed the number on the scale determined my value as a human being. I thought that my size prevented me from being allowed to participate in life – surely nobody wanted to be burdened with the sight of a fat girl out in the world?

I let the number on the scale rule my life, and though I wanted to change it more than anything, it also seemed like the more I tried, the harder I fell. I would cut out sugar for three weeks, lose 10 pounds, and promptly break down sobbing over cake, give up and gain 15 pounds back. It was a vicious cycle: hate myself, start a new diet, lose a little, hate myself a little less, give up, gain it all back, rinse and repeat. It wasn’t until I stopped trying so hard to change the number on the scale that I actually saw my life change.

The first step in my weight-loss journey had little to do with food and a lot to do with changing the way I talked to myself. I was my own worst coach – trying to motivate myself with insult and abuse rather than empowerment. I was telling myself very damaging lies, which I had to address before I could make any sort of permanent changes in my life. The most harmful of these, I’ve already addressed: that my weight determined my value. But I also told myself things like “I’m too fat to be loved”, “everyone sees my fat first”, and “I’m too fat to eat in front of people”. Moreover, I began with the damaging mindset that gaining weight meant failure while losing weight meant success. This, I believe, is what kept me on the rollercoaster for so long.

The truth is that weight is a number; it’s not a grade or an indicator of one’s value. And, it will change over time, going up and down at different points. Making those digits appear in any given order is not going to fix everything in your life. In fact, there’s a lot of things that losing weight has not done and will never do for me: it will never make me good enough – I am good enough already. It will never give me a healthy relationship with food – it will not make it into mere sustenance to me. It will never make me beautiful – I was beautiful all along. It will never fix the turmoil in my relationships or make people love me if they didn’t already. I cannot control things in life that are outside of my control just by losing weight or trying to become perfect. And losing weight will never make me perfect. It will not protect me from disappointment. It will not make me happy – so many other things determine my happiness.

Accepting what losing weight will not do forces one to look outside of weight and food for answers. This can be both terrifying and liberating. It’s freeing to know that a number doesn’t control my world; it’s unnerving to realise how little control I actually have over that world. Throughout the past five years and even still today, I’ve had to look in the metaphorical mirror at myself far more times than in the physical one. And, sometimes the things I see there are hard. Most of what I see there cannot be resolved by dealing with my weight. That is why, today, my journey has switched from one of weight loss to one of life gain. I’ve spent so much of my life afraid of living; I want to spend the rest of my time on earth living fully.