Coca-Cola
I was in grade eight when I decided I wanted to quit drinking Coca-cola. I dragged my best friend with me and took it up with her as a challenge. In my head, I kept telling myself it was the disgustingly hefty amounts of sugar and the imminent threat it posed to my health. A chubby, acne-ridden, and sugar-loving thirteen-year-old girl who decided to remove carbonated drinks out of her life for health reasons seemed like an irony, but I was determined.
Every time I looked at myself in the mirror, I would bunch up the layers of skin on my belly, squeeze it tightly, and think of impossible (sometimes bloody and gory) ways of removing it. I would buy shorts a size smaller and inhale deeply to make my stomach look flat.
I dedicated my nights to excessive, crash-diet workouts from a shady lifestyle website I found off the Internet. It promised that I would lose weight in seven days if I followed their instructions religiously. Many nights after, I skipped dinner to exercise on the rooftop of our house.
During recess, the rice beside my ulam would significantly decrease in amount as I stopped drinking Coke. Another day, it was just a bowl of tinola. The following days, I wouldn’t even step foot in the canteen anymore. The thought of eating felt absolutely wrong.
For a while, I was able to live without soft drinks and with minimal food intake, if any at all. My size 29 shorts finally fit without my having to take a deep breath. My thighs no longer chafed, and I was seeing the changes I wanted in my body. Although I was getting smaller, I still felt like it wasn’t enough. The thought of losing more weight and possibly dropping to fifty pounds or less was exhilarating, as if I were falling in an infinite hole and the floor was too far out of reach. I’m going to get there, I thought. You can never be too thin.
Eventually, everything that I was doing to my body started catching up to me. I ignored my body’s calls for help, from the rumbling in my stomach to the dizzy haze ringing in my head. I thought I felt okay, until I woke up one day and my eyesight turned pitch-black. Next thing I know, I woke up with a scarred concern in my mom’s eyes.
I always negatively viewed my body. I butchered it, made fun of it, cried about it, and I even got to a point where I literally could not look at it. The mere act of giving up soft drinks at thirteen years old was less of a health decision, but more so an admission that I’d go to great lengths to hurt my body and make it suffer so much just to fit a size 26 waist.
Whether in its healthiest state or not, my body doesn’t deserve to be treated so haphazardly. It deserves to be loved, cared for, and appreciated for what it is regardless of what it looks like. It’s beautiful, strong, and can carry the heaviest of things. It’s as sexy and gorgeous as the skinny model I saw on Instagram. If I decide to make changes to my body, it should be motivated by bettering my overall health and well-being, and not by what the cute guys in my class find attractive. My body is a vessel that carries my soul and contains the best parts of who I am. It absolutely deserves nothing less than love, and maybe a couple sips of Coke here and there.
