Some thoughts on weight and body image

Well, leave it up to me to write my first actual blog post about the hell that is the relationships we have with our bodies.

I find it hard to just "learn to love myself" even though I know it's the best solution and would ultimately make me the happiest. I'm not fat by any means but telling myself that is harder than it should be. Loving myself the way I am feels like giving up, like failure, even though I'm not.

I'm terrified of how I seem to keep gaining weight even though I am a teenager and it's perfectly normal and healthy. Not worrying about it anymore feels like giving myself permission to just become super unhealthy and overweight - like I have to keep hating my body or it will suddenly morph into what I desperately try to avoid overnight.

Opening up about it feels ridiculous as well, since the people who normally talk about body image have been through all of that, maybe even had an eating disorder, came out on the other end, learned to embrace their body or on their way there and then talk about it. They're also, for the most part, gorgeous and have the ideal body of so many others, so it seems easy to believe that they learned to love themselves.

Trying to embrace my body before I have some kind of long weight loss journey behind me seems like a shortcut, like something I don't deserve quite yet. I'm not saying I think I have to develop an eating disorder to start being happy with my body since I know better... but at the same time I kind of don't.

By no means am I at the end of a struggle, I'm still in the midst of it. Still, I felt the need to write this out after clenching my stomach the entire day. Maybe I can look back on this in a few years and laugh about my immature self or maybe I'll struggle with this my entire life. There's no moral to this convoluted story but I think that's okay. It's okay to struggle with something and not know how to fix it (did I just seriously try to make up a moral there?). But it's important to know when thoughts become unhealthy, when they stop being constructive and start being destructive.

Giving myself advice I'm not going to listen to... well, fuck it, I need to start somewhere.
What do you think about body image and do you have any advice/tips on things like that.