I was a chubby kid growing up as I was pampered a lot by my maternal grandma. She was a great cook and her way of showing love was to feed me with really delicious food. On a typical weekend, I would have roast duck drumstick rice for lunch, her home-cooked food for dinner and cereal prawns for supper. It wasn’t surprising then as a primary school kid to weigh my heaviest at 54 to 56kg. Currently, I’m 154cm so imagine my height then – I was even shorter!

There was a period of time were I had to wear Giordano Men’s bermudas size 27 or 28. It was really bad. I was often criticised by my family because of it. My family and relatives would constantly make remarks about my weight. There are a few different painful memories about their comments and actions that still haunt me till date. One of which is sitting by the side watching my relatives having their supper while I am not allowed to have any because I was too 'fat'.

Not surprisingly, I suffered from an eating disorder during my adolescent years which started when I was in secondary school. It lasted for years. That love-hate relationship with food was detrimental to my mental health. I binge and purge and starve myself while starting to exercise regularly. I started running and eventually, I lost a lot of weight. Yes, I did manage to lose those excess weight but the trauma of growing up in an environment where people you loved constantly put you down because of your weight, there is no escape from developing unhealthy beliefs.

My self-confidence and self-esteem go up and down with the numbers on the weighing scale. However, the turning point was when I started having gastric pains and I realised all the induced puking affected my throat. The capacity of my stomach shrunk too, I could no longer eat a healthy adult portion. That's when things went back to normal and I was eating normal sized portions.

But my eating disorders returned after I gave birth a few years back. My pregnancy was tough and I had morning sickness that lasted throughout the entire day. My weight was at its lightest even though I was six months pregnant. I was quite satisfied and wasn’t too concerned about my weight. But after birth, while I was breastfeeding, I became constantly hungry. My appetite and stomach capacity went back to ‘normal’ and I was alright with it until people started commenting on how fat or big I had become and I was told to eat less. That’s when I grew really conscious about how I looked and the eating disorder started again.

This time it lasted for two years. I did not lose a lot of weight and eventually had to be admitted to the hospital for gastric again. Finally, I started to get better only after a painful experience that triggered my past grief and traumas which I had avoided healing for many years. I went for counselling and therapy to learn healthy coping mechanisms. It was through a painful separation that taught me that self-worth and self-love are very important, and being worthy is my own birth right, no matter how my body look.

I am still very conscious about my body; there are still days where I feel ‘fat and heavy’; days where I feel guilty for eating ‘more than I should’. But being aware of my thoughts these days help when I feel the negativity. I thought I will never be able to get away it, that I will always be labelled as fat. Things changed. I changed. Now I am working on rewiring my mind, do away with unhealthy toxic beliefs and form new healthy ones. I started exercising and working out, and eating cleaner with the goal of good health in mind. Needless to say, of course I want to look better too, but I am no longer indulging in toxic behaviour to get that.