It's Tough to Fit in

I, like many other teenage girls I went to school with, had an issue with my body image. I was never large by any means, but you could have never told my fourteen year old self that. I thought that all the other girls were skinnier than me, wearing smaller, cuter clothes than I was, and therefore, more beautiful than I was.
This all started in the sixth grade, I was eleven. It is hard to imagine an eleven year old girl so unhappy with the way that she looks that she would eat half a bagel a day and call it good, but that was who I was. Looking back on it today, I now realize how illogical it was; I am always cold now because of the way my body metabolizes things, my metabolism itself has slowed down entirely making any weight that I want to lose harder to get rid of, and my blood sugar flounces around like nothing else.
Since then I learned that I pretty much fit the book of a typical girl to develop some kind of eating disorder, not that I am looking for an excuse. I was raised in a middle-class family by parents who had high expectations for me, I had a strong desire to fit in, driven to succeed, and wanted everything in my life to be perfect.
Now, nine years after this all started, I fight the urge to step on a scale every time I walk by it, or suck my stomach in when I pass a mirror. I think every day about buying those bathroom scales that measure your fat content too, but I also have to fight to eat healthily. I want to have a child within a year and I can’t let these issues get in the way of me having a healthy child.
Not only that, I fear that my little girl will go through the same thing. If there is one thing that I could tell anyone, it would be that you are normal. Half of the girls your are growing up with wish that they weren’t as big as they are, which means that very few girls actually are this ideal size. I would tell her that the benefits far outweigh the lifetime effects this could have on you. That eventually you do grow into your body, to love what you have. It is not realistic to be a size zero, and if you are a size four it’s not the end of the world. Be happy for who you are and don’t risk your life or your sanity to fit in.