Teenage Girls Please Read This

I joined this group just tonight, with the title "Healthy Weight," thinking I'd see exercise ideas, recipes, recommendations for how to stay motivated, etc.

Instead the first ten posts I've seen were from young ladies 14, 15, and 16 years old stating their age and their weight, and sometimes their height with a poll asking other females, "Am I too fat?"

I'm 35 years old. I'm going to share some hard-learned wisdom with you, as a woman who has been every size from 0-22 in just my 20s and 30s.

In your lifetime, many things will affect your weight: your health, your activity level, your diet, medications, alcohol/drug use, lifestyle choices, hereditary conditions, fitness level, career type, birth control, etc.

Your weight will never define your humanity. If you lose too much weight, someone else will judge you for being too thin and say you have an eating disorder. If you're too thick, you'll be call fat.

There are worse things in the world than being fat. You can be an asshole. You can be judgmental. You bring other people down.

We all have fat on our bodies, but that does not mean that we ARE fat, no more than we all have two eyebrows; but we would never say we ARE eyebrows. It's ridiculous to label your identity or reflection as only one part of the whole list of parts that make our human body.

Fat is not the worst thing a human can be--there are FAR worse things. Trust me on that.

A year or two or five will go by, and future you will see the present you in a photograph, and finally see present you's beauty. Future you will regret all the time present you spent loathing your waistline, and will wish you hadn't wasted that much time on the most youthful version of you that you'll ever be.

I promise so much, there are so very many things that are worse than being fat, and I challenge you--the next time you start wasting time worrying about your waistline, make a list of personal character attributes that are far worse than *having* fat...because we ALL *have* fat--that does not mean we *are* "fat"...

And yes, I am a teacher, and issues like this weigh heavily on my heart. Be confident that the same God of the universe that created every star in the sky and fish in the ocean, decided that the world needed one of you, too. You were made perfectly whether thin, thick, or in between.