Serene Gabrielle: Love is all around you

It all started with one sentence: “Your ass is too big to haul yourself up the canoe”. I was just 17 and those words came from a guy that I kinda had a crush on. I have always been heavy-bottomed and I never felt conscious about it till that fateful day which turned my life upside down for seven years. I battled with eating disorders from one spectrum of anorexia to the other end of binge eating. I remember the times that I only ate a piece of apple a day. It came to a READ More

Janet Koh: You can make a difference for yourself

I was a skinny kid when I was younger and never had any weight issues, until I went to study in Perth at age 17. I was staying on my own, so I reached out to all the fast food that I could lay my hands on – pizza, burgers, KFC fried chicken etc. Winters were not helping either as I got hungry easily and added supper to my meals. My weight naturally ballooned as a result. I came back to Singapore after I graduated and my family doctor was appalled by my vast weight gain READ More

Shaheera: Everything is possible with determination and hard work.

I was small-sized and thin from the time I was in secondary school up to my ITE days. After I gave birth to my first child, I realised I have this “baby belly” which every woman has after giving birth. The first criticism started when I was working in a retail store. My friends and I were sitting and chatting during break time when they looked at me and said,”Hey, you have a fat tyre there at your belly.” Since then, they always teased me, often telling READ More

Claris: Start making a change now

So basically, “skinny” is never a description in my dictionary. My mum was like any typical Singaporean mum. She controlled what I ate and how I ate from a tender age of seven. No matter how thin I was, to her I was always FAT. So because of that I would always pig out whenever I could, especially when she is not around. She would often compare me with others, be it friends or cousins of the same age group and I would always be “The Fatter One”. After while I READ More

Caren Keung: The love I feel for all of you, in turn helps me love myself

My self esteem and regard for how beautiful a person I was inside and out, plummeted when I entered secondary school. For six years (secondary school through JC), I was constantly bullied, and my friendly attempts at making friends would often be regarded as desperate, pathetic or weird. This would very often be because of (a) my being labelled as ugly/unattractive, (b) people misinterpreting my intentions and actions but never clarifying them, (c) peer influence and/or (d) vicious spreading of READ More