A s I was sitting outside one day, I was graced by the presence of a couple so gorgeous I felt like I was intruding on a billboard photo campaign. I felt dazzled by their hotness, but also incompetent compared to their immensurable awesomeness. After I overcame some of my starstruck-ness, I realized that the pure hotness I often observed at Stanford was part genetic and part work. Anyone familiar with Arrillaga? I was perhaps one of the very few people unfamiliar with it. Heard of the Freshman 15? I was also one of the few people who thought it was a myth. People apparently ate salads and went to the gym religiously. The beautiful bodies that I thought were just genetic lottery winners actually required work on the part of their owners.

The idea that we have active control over the appearance of our bodies was, perhaps, a dangerous one. I was in a blissful ignorance before. I was raised to eat three meals a day (no snacks) and was enrolled for weekend dance classes, one of the extracurriculars that got me into Stanford. So as others ate salads, I ate cookies and steaks (and greens–I do believe in a balanced diet). When others ordered herbal tea, I ordered a latte with an indulgent piece of cake. The realization that people actually worked to get their bodies made me feel guilty about what I ate and how I never went to the gym.

To challenge how much I could get by without “calorie counting,” I sometimes ate about 3500 calories a day between Dim Sum and Döners while studying in Berlin. Of course, I packed on the pounds. Consequently I felt miserable that I no longer looked as good as I had before. So I binged to forget my misery. But knowing that I was just going to pack on more pounds, I became more depressed. Then it snowballed. I stopped having a healthy relationship with food. Instead of eating three meals a day, I oscillated between binging and starving–mistreating my body and never being happy with how it looked.

So I told people that I wanted to lose about 30 pounds–from 137 pounds to 110. The image of attractive Asian girls I was bombarded with were 17 years old, 165cm (5’5”)–and at 45kg (100 pounds), they still came with curves. Therefore, 110 lbs at 5’5” was a “realistic” goal. Upon telling my guy friends about this, they made me feel like I was crazy–because I looked just fine. Then they went off on how they lost so much (muscle) weight upon coming to Berlin, how they do not have six-packs anymore or how they are not as big as before. Then I became the person who thought they were crazy because they looked good just as they were.

Then it hit me–we are never going to be happy with our bodies if we are not happy with them right now. My body has done no wrong to me, yet I have been abusing it, blaming it for not living up to an unrealistic ideal of perfection. If I am thin, I complain that I am not as thin as the Olsen sisters. If I am fit, I complain that I don’t have Jessica Alba’s abs. If I have curves, I complain that I could never be as curvy as Beyonce or Nicki Minaj. There are things that I cannot have no matter how hard I work or how much I beat my body up. Everyone has his or her own genome that determines how he or she could look. To my chagrin, I was never meant to look like Nicki Minaj. I could probably get Alba-abs if I worked hard enough, but let’s be real–no one is paying me the big bucks to do that.

Therefore, I told myself that it was justifiable to compare my body against what it looked like before when I was sixteen. Yet that thinking is still flawed and leaves me unhappy. I am older, so my metabolism has slowed down. I have stopped being as active as I was before (this is particularly true for athletes who stopped doing team sports) and I started drinking (yay, a hundred invisible calories per shot). Therefore, my body burns fewer calories in rest. I am taking in more calories (my normal diet, snacking, and drinking); and I am using less (fewer dance hours). Expecting myself now to look like when I was sixteen is simply unreasonable. It was not my fault. Thus, when I learned to stop beating myself up for not looking a particular way and embracing myself, I became a lot happier and returned to my “happy weight.” I stopped feeling guilty for not caring about my body image because who is society to tell me that I need “to lose 10 pounds in 30 days” or “look better in bed?” I do not need the seductively packaged message that I have to feel bad about my body in order to fit in. The only thing I have to say when people complain about their bodies is, “Shut up, LOVE YOUR BODY unconditionally and treat it with respect!”

Trash your food-guilt or body image issues in Yanran’s mailbox at [email protected].