Opinion: I don’t feel good about my body, but I’m tired of the violence of diets

A person who gains weight during a period of mental illness has every right to get rid of these physical memories, as does someone who overcomes eating disorders, drug use or other addictions.

Talking about self-love in a society that fosters our self-hatred for profit is a revolutionary act. Especially when that love is feminine and black.

At the age of 23 I was diagnosed with depression and, with many financial difficulties, started my treatment. My family – like most, unfortunately – made fun of my illness and that made everything worse.

In the same year, I met a guy and at the time everything clicked. He treated me with affection and respect and in the first years of our relationship he became my breath. In the following years, however, it was an escalation of violence – one of the reasons that caused my weight gain.

I was never thin. I have wide hips and I wore a size 42 or 44. Between changes of anxiolytics, contraceptives and during this abusive relationship, I reached size 48. Despite being a large size, I never had difficulties finding it in stores, emphasizing that I always suffered aesthetic pressure , and not fatphobia.

I look back and I don’t know where I got the strength to end that relationship, I was so hurt.

I continued to treat my depression until unemployment forced me to wean myself off anxiolytics, which threw me into suicidal ideation in 2015. That year I created the Instagram page @afemme1 with the aim of venting my experiences and perhaps helping more women. There I discovered that I was not alone.

Even without any monetization I continued studying and creating content. Friendships I made there helped me to face needs, until at the end of 2018 I got a job and started therapy.

During the treatment, I healed recent and old wounds, armored myself and learned how to deal with the emotional merry-go-round of life, in addition to facing the obstacles that it always imposes. One of my biggest wins was overcoming depression at the end of 2019.

In recent years, I’ve noticed an incredible upsurge in the debate about fatphobia, aesthetic pressure and the body positivity movement on social media. This movement addresses the beauty industry and how much it promotes image and eating disorders.

There are things that should never be romanticized when the idea of ​​resignification is preached: pain and trauma, for example, must be treated and cured, and not adorned with discourses of empowerment.

You have to understand that the opposite of not loving your body is not hating it. Certain ready-made phrases have become slogans of toxic positivity, which causes the opposite effect of what is proposed and hurts those who seek peace with the body shape they have at the moment.

My healing process was long and drawn out only because I am poor. In early 2020, I enrolled in a gym, but then the pandemic came. She took me to do workouts at home, albeit light. Every day I do exercises.

On my Instagram profile I posted a short video about this process and how today, in 2022, I take care of localized fat, an aesthetic part that I couldn’t change just with food and physical activity.

I dream of a future in which more and more women wear their sizes and not just the numbers on clothing labels. That they stop violating their bodies by squeezing them into smaller sizes, doing miracle diets or taking dangerous drugs. These are the first steps towards building true self-esteem, which is born from the inside out.