I struggled with excess weight for a long time, but I found a way to accept and love myself and my body, Ukr.Media reports.
How to stop worrying about extra pounds and start living.
So, it's 2014. I graduated from sports school and decided that my future would no longer be connected with sports, which, I must say, upset more than a dozen people (at least my team and coach). This decision was primarily due to the fact that my heart has always aspired to great achievements, but not in big sports, but in the world of fashion.
I was given such a sharp change of course with difficulties and tears – sports were then a familiar environment for me, in which I knew everything from A to Z, and starting from scratch in a new industry was unusual and even scary.
I must say that even in my youth I was not a fragile girl. My weight fluctuated from 75 to 80 with a height of 180 cm, which was partly a consequence of long exhausting trainings and eternal competitions. But after leaving sports everything changed and I started to gain weight, because physical activity became much less, and nutrition remained as before sports.
Once, someone from my circle tactlessly said the following phrase: “You left the sport, but the sport didn’t leave you,” which, of course, was a hint at my eating habits. Given my own overwhelming feelings about this, it’s not hard to imagine what my reaction was. I simply stopped communicating with this person. Now my reaction to a seemingly harmless joke would be to just smile and move on, but at the time this phrase offended me to the core, which, of course, was a consequence of my low self-esteem.
Soon I started spending a lot of time on websites dedicated to a healthy lifestyle and sports. At first I was looking (in the style of “how to lose 10 kg in 5 minutes”) for an easy and quick way to lose weight. I tried all possible diets, counted calories and even starved myself for several days – all to no avail, because after the end of the diet the weight came back, which exhausted me quite a bit, both physically and mentally. At that time I did not yet understand the meaning of the expression Mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body). I needed a push in the right direction, I needed an example to follow.
I once came across an interview with American plus-size model Ashley Graham, in which she answered fans' questions about her career and family. From the very first minutes, I was struck by the way she looked and carried herself during the interview: she smiled the whole time and answered questions about her weight with complete self-confidence.
Everything: every cell of her body and down to the smallest details in her image — spoke of the fact that we were looking at a beautiful, self-confident girl who knew and loved herself, and I realized that this was the person I wanted to emulate.
Looking at her, I realized that all my weight concerns were only in my head, I realized that it is possible to live differently. Some may think it is stupid that a model from America became my role model, but who is to blame for the fact that everyone around me (and me until a certain point) was always in the process of losing weight? Starting from my mother and ending with the stars of show business – everyone around me who had at least a couple of extra pounds constantly wanted to weigh less!
After that, I realized who I wanted to become and applied for a plus-size model show. While participating in the project, I learned a lot and met people who held the same views (which I was incredibly happy about), but more on that another time. The most important thing is that I discovered myself from a completely new side. I realized that during my time as a model, I finally became confident in myself and stopped being afraid to love my body, because it was thanks to it that I found my favorite profession and met wonderful people.
Every day I started now, not with thoughts about my daily calorie intake, but with gratitude for realizing the truth: size really does not matter.
Джерело: ukr.media
