Hi I’m Tracy.

I know, I know Tracy sounds like the name of a hot stripper who’s a gold digger with a lot of emotional baggage and only knows her value when she’s high. I swear I’m not at all like that.

Although I’m not a stripper there’s something as devious that I like to do. It’s pretty normal to me but everybody else finds it strange, cruel and even disgusting.

I weigh everybody in life, I weigh them to see how far they are in life. I weigh people before they become my friends to make sure they’re the right weight. I weigh my friends daily to see if they lost or gained weight.

If they lost it, I become proud of them. I hug them, kiss them and celebrate. I spend the whole day encouraging them to keep it up and occasionally scare them that they will gain weight if they eat the dessert. If they gained weight, I insult them. I tell them how much of a loser they are and how they’ll never reach their goal. I tell them how fat they’re and I become extra critical and judgemental of what they eat. I constantly remind them that they gained weight and some days I even suggest that they starve themselves. I basically spend the whole day putting them down.

I never realised that what I was doing was wrong. I mean I’ve been doing it since I found out about calories and that looking like the models in magazines and television is something that we should all aspire to be.

Recently my friends intervened about this behaviour. They told that this makes them feel like they’re nothing more than just their bodies and that they’d really appreciate it if I started loving them for their personalities and stopped viewing them as an empty body. At first I was like ‘ha!!’ but then realized they were serious.

With their help I spent most of my days getting to know them beyond the skin. I started loving them for their kindness, compassion and open mindedness instead of their tiny waist and collar bones.

Hit the breaks before you judge me because you do the exact same thing I used to do. Only you do it to the most important person in your life, you. You weigh yourself and you start critising your body. You compare your body to other people’s bodies. You set unrealistic weight loss goals for yourself and beat yourself up when you don’t achieve them. You body shame yourself. You focus on how you’re not ‘body goals’ and seem to forget all of things you’ve achieved, your personality and how far you’ve come. You punish your body in so many ways in the name of weight loss.

At least I stopped, when will you??