By Brooke Kelly
She was only 7 when she decided she hated the way her stomach protruded farther than her hip bones, and then, at age 10, jealousy dug its nails into her thigh as she failed to button a pair of denim shorts loaned to her by a friend, but it wasn’t until 14 that she looked into her lunch-box and decided that she didn’t want the blue-eyed boy to see her eat; sometimes, she thought could tell by the look on his face that he was worried, but it wouldn’t be until she after she turned 17 that a different boy started bringing her breakfast to school and watching her eat it, and perhaps it was her aversions, her sensitivity to the topic of food that led to his inevitable decision to walk away, but, by the time she turned 18, she no longer thrived on an empty stomach. Just before she crossed the threshold from her teens to her 20s, she braved the climb onto the scale, and she found—for the first time in her life—that seeing a number did not bring her heart into her throat.