Chapter 1 - Denial

Stella had denied herself of contentment and acceptance of self for nearly 15 years of her life. During the time between when she first realized she had an attraction to fatness at the age of 13, to the time that she was first opportunistically capable of accepting herself for who she was at the age of 27, she had grown to truly hate herself because of her secret desires to be fat.

This internalized hate developed further as years went by. This was due to an immense amount of pressure and influence from society, conventional beauty standards, tumblr “thinspo” pages, her peers, her family, and more. She became forced into thinking that her urges to allow herself to be the fat girl she wanted to be meant that there was something wrong with her—that she needed to fix this issue somehow, as if it were immoral or bad or something to be ashamed of.

All of these variables eventually led Stella to almost entirely ignore who she was meant to be. This lasted for the entirety of her teen and young adult years; her most formative time was spent in hatred of self and denial of inherent desires of her own being. She dealt with harmful habits such as disordered eating that was heavily restrictive, borderline anorexia, as well as body dysmorphia making her think that she was huge, even when she was at her lowest weight around the ages of 17 and 18. Stella always had a bit of a belly, as this aspect of her physical form seemed to be genetic in nature. Still, Stella tried and tried to force her belly to go away entirely, as this is what she was convinced would make her happy with how she looked.

At her lowest weight, she still had her little belly all despite the number "115" that showed on the scale. Only then did she finally realize that her belly would never truly go away, no matter how hard she worked out or starved herself. This realization did not stop her internalized hatred of her body, as she had been trained into this mindset at that point. The years continued to pass by, and over time she fluctuated in weight—she continued with the driving force of restrictive eating that fueled her relationship with food, what foods she ate, and how she went about eating on a daily basis.

As she got older into her early and mid 20s, there would be moments of time that Stella couldn’t ignore her desires any longer. There were periods where Stella would binge for long enough that she would gain some weight, but this was never entirely on purpose. At one point during the pandemic, Stella was noticeably much heavier than she had ever been before. She never stepped on a scale during this time though, as she recognized this about herself based on how her clothes were fitting much more tightly than they had before. Before she got too big, she decided to fall back into her old restrictive eating habits and lose the weight again. So she did.