A doctor first advised me to lose weight when I was eight years old.

I was eight when a doctor first told me to lose weight. I started to look at labels and check the sugar and calories. In the summer, I skipped lunch while I was at camp, even though I was supposed to take my medicine with food. I threw up a lot that summer, but I thought that was just fine because I would lose more weight.

I remember my white grandma saying my hips and thighs were “too Latina.” She said I got the fat and brown parts of my body from my father. She praised my slim calves and small wrists. Even when I was overweight, I could always touch my pinky and thumb around my wrist. She taught me to be proud of that.

I was eight when I went on my first diet. I also had epilepsy, so the doctor recommended low sugar and low carb. I would give all my Halloween candy away to my classmates, but I still enjoyed trick-or-treating.

I was 20 when a doctor finally said I was a healthy weight. I was there because I was fainting at random times. I was losing hair and eating 500 calories a day. I was 5’2” and 109 pounds. I felt like I wasn’t skinny enough to have an eating disorder. I was finally healthy. This is what it took to be healthy.

I was 25 when I weighed 200 pounds. I was being abused by my lover; I was fighting to continue in graduate school. I was briefly homeless and slept at school under a desk with a warm blanket. I believed I deserved how poorly I was treated because I had allowed myself to get so fat. The embarrassment, the destitution, the darkness all threatened to overwhelm me.

I was 28 when I dropped the weight, but I never went back all the way to 109. I don’t know how much I lost. I stopped weighing myself as it provoked the eating disorder I told myself I didn’t have. I put myself into dance and HIIT courses and kept telling myself that I loved myself and would not starve myself only to hear that approval…to hear a doctor say I hit the correct number.

I was 30 when I had a custom bikini made and snapped photos, and 33 when I finally got the confidence to ask a doctor not to give me my weight unless it was important to the visit (they could weigh me, but I didn’t want to see it).

I was eight when a doctor first advised me to reduce weight, and I’ve been battling for that approval ever since.

I’ve been concerned my symptoms will be overlooked because of my weight, symptoms that were validated when I went in because I couldn’t open my left eye and was encouraged to lose weight.

I was eight years old when I first related fatness with badness, fatness with color, fatness with less than, fatness with being part of a "problem," with being weak, with deserving less.

It’s a lesson I’ve been unlearning ever since as I learn to take care of and cherish my body for myself, and not for someone’s approval.