Personal Narrative: Changing My Internalized Eating Habits

“Always finish your plate” was a phrase my parents always told me. As a child I never questioned my parent’s rules. I became comfortable with the idea of eating even when I wasn’t hungry. This habit continued to grow and made me an overweight child. Being overweight brought obstacles in my young adolescent years that influenced me to change my internalized eating habits. The bullying that was brought by my peers was what directly influenced me to change my weight. At a young age I had to go against my parent’s views and had to challenge them to be able to build my own path, to help myself and in a way help them too. Being overweight began to be an issue when I was in middle school. In my family no one ever teased me about my weight, since innocently it wasn’t seen as an issue. Being a little

At first the reason why I couldn’t stop playing was because of its fun factor. The idea of losing weight didn’t develop until later. After the first month of playing I lost around seven pounds. Losing those seven pounds brought a change in the way people in my environment treated me. I started receiving compliments from family members and from peers at school. This feeling was alien to me since I was never noticed in that way before. It created a feeling that I wanted to replicate, which made me come up with a plan. I decided I had to continue to lose weight because this was going to end the negativity in school. As a teen what was inspiring me was social expectations and I didn’t realize that losing weight also mean’t lowering my risk of health complications. Feeling this type of love coming from people who used to treat me badly helped me create my self-esteem. The reason why I say create and not enhance is because my self-esteem was non-existent before this point. The feeling of self-worth in me was finally starting to grow. I started to feel like a normal kid. This video was the key to changing my