My Body vs My Mind

I can't look at myself naked

Feb 27, 2025

I received a compliment, like twenty minutes after my previous post (this was started on the 12th of December), and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s not like I don’t receive compliments often (like have you seen me?), but this one came so unexpectedly and unprompted that the little hating voice in my head really went silent and had no counter statement.

So I was working, as one does, when a lady walked inside my office. She looks at me and asks, “Is that your natural hair?”. I say yes. My coworker looks at her in confusion (because my natural hair had been out for about two weeks) and she says that the last time she saw me, I still had braids in. I nod in understanding, thinking it ended there. Then she says, “You just have everything”

I knew she complimented me with that statement, which I smiled and thanked her for, but I thought she was just talking about me being beautiful and having long hair.

My coworker then asks, “Everything as how?”.

“She’s tall, has body, has beauty and has long hair too? Leave some for us na.”

Shocked is an understatement for what I felt at that moment.

What most people in my life wouldn’t know upon seeing me is that I’ve always been insecure of my body. Growing up a Disney kid, most of the girls I saw on TV were petite. About 5’5 and probably a weight of 40kg. It messed with my psyche. They were beautiful in my eyes so that’s the body type of the beautiful right?

Imagine my shock when I started puberty and got taller than most of my female friends. And it wasn’t a model build, I actually had body. Thick arms, thick thighs, big stomach. It messed with my mind. I looked at myself in the mirror and I wasn’t the image of beautiful that I had established in my mind.

When anyone called me beautiful, I just assumed they were talking about my face cause in my mind, I was a fat person.

In my mind, to be truly beautiful, I had to lose weight as I couldn’t reduce my height.

Now the problem with my weight loss plan was that I’m lazy. I can’t exercise to save my life. The next best thing was to starve myself. I would go days surviving only on tom-tom. This plan barely worked but it wrecked my appetite. I stopped being able to eat enough food. I would eat one pack of regular sized indomie (not super pack, or hungryman, the smallest one) and be okay.

I stopped this plan because it killed me inside (as someone who really liked food and really didn’t want to get ulcer). So I was back to square one, hating my body.

So when you hate your body, compliments like that tend to surprise you. Your friends compliment you and think maybe it’s due to the outfit you wore that day. It hid the fat well. You feel like an imposter for a second, bask in the praise, look in the mirror for a moment and fall back to square one.

But the thing is, the hate is of the mind, not of me. No matter what I do, how much exercise I perform, how much weight I lose, as long as my mental ideals don’t change, I would never feel beautiful

Everything above was written last year (the second personal post from the one where I get a little to real, the first personal one being watered down into the one about pink and oblee), the last two paragraphs written before I wrote Let Me Bleed Alone (this inspired it sef cause I couldn’t write this and I got frustrated)

On starting this I was trying to navigate what caused my self image issues. The more I typed then, the more layers I peeled back to discover the root of this, the more I found out it was a mental thing.

After I found out it was a mental thing I took time to observe it.

And I noticed that when enough people compliment me, the tug of war between me thinking I’m ugly and I’m beautiful shifts towards the positive side. I’m like okay maybe my body isn’t even fat. Maybe I don’t need to be Ozempic-level thin to be beautiful.

But when the compliments stop rolling in, the rope moves to the negative side. To the side of all the multiple voices in my head screaming that I need to lose weight. To the voice of my mother making a joke that I’m getting too big, to the voice of my aunt looking for food in the kitchen and jokingly asking if I ate it all.

In my observation, I also noticed that this inner fatphobia I developed wasn't my fault. It was how I grew up.

With me being 13, and my so-called friends in school finding a word, Acromegaly (look it up), which they called me relentlessly because I was taller and had a bigger palm.

With me being 14, serving my dad his dinner that I made a little late and him telling me to serve him earlier so it could digest faster and he doesn’t end up with a big tummy.

With me being 15, sitting in my best friend’s (at the time) room and listen to her roommates talk about sucking in their tummy the entire day because a big stomach was not “it”.

With me being 16, taking a picture with my mum and she says her arms are fat but they look okay to me.

With me being 17, wearing jeans and everyone saying how big my stomach was and them commenting on how flat my sister’s was.

With me being 21, driving in a car with my mum on Saturday and her saying she needed to lose weight and she was fat (if you’ve seen my mother, you know for a fact, that beautiful woman isn’t anything close to fat)

These are few of the incidents I remember.

So, it wasn’t just at home. It was in school. It was online. It was everywhere I went.

Fat arms, Fat tummy, Love handles. They were all a no.

Now the question shifts to if this mentality of mine can be changed.

If my extremely internalized fatphobia can be removed.

this is where this stops being a minor essay/article and I get a LOT more personal

If I can learn to look at myself in the mirror naked (this question triggered a minor breakdown so enjoy it’s effects. Thank you)

I never look at myself naked. Isn’t that funny?

That I hate seeing myself naked to the point I want to actually lose the weight so I can look at myself in the mirror and feel good about myself.

That I’ve hated my body for years.

Since I was in primary six and described as medium because I wasn’t fat but neither was I thin.

In every classroom I’ve walked into since the moment I randomly grew taller than all my friends in JSS3.

In camp when I told my platoon coordinator I wanted to run for a pageant and he looked me up and down and told me to my face that I’m not thin enough for Miss NYSC but not big enough for Miss Big Bold and Beautiful.

Small wonder I have body image issues right?

Okay, minor breakdown over. I obviously still feel a lot emotionally anytime I think about it, or dress up in the morning.

Y’know people always ask me why I love baggy clothing. I always answer that it’s due to it being comfortable. That’s not the whole truth.

It’s because when I wear them I can’t see my body. I can cosplay as thin for a while. I can lie to myself. I can look at myself in the mirror and admire myself. So I learned to associate being comfortable with baggy clothing.

This body image issues is also the reason I hate taking pics or videos of myself that aren’t selfies. I always immediately note how much bigger I am when I take a pic of myself.

Sigh, I actually needed this minor truth-telling to myself. I don’t think I’ve ever uttered these words out loud. I have peeled so many layers today but listening to hype songs while making a very personal post is a weird kind of euphoria cause you can’t even properly be saddened.

Like I genuinely just remembered this acromegaly thing and felt the hurt of SS1 me again, this is why I have blocked all secondary school memories

But now to answer the question before my minor breakdown. Can my mentality be changed?

I think it already is.

I’ve started wearing more form-fitting clothing. I’ve started wearing crop tops and shorter skirts.

I do have days, like this morning, where I dress up for work, look at the outfit and immediately hate it, not because of its fitting but because I hate how it looks on me. (and its very important to me to like how I look before I go out because I am a firm believer of if you think you look good then you feel good and have confidence)

But these days are few and far in-between and I’m still learning to love myself and my body.

I will still be planning to go to the gym but for once it’s not with the aim to lose weight but to actually exercise and get healthier (my stamina is absolute shit, I can’t run simple 100m) and I personally think that’s an improvement.