When I was 22, I took a job as a hostess at a hibachi restaurant in Huntington Village, the Long Island, New York, town I grew up in. Hostessing was lonely and boring, but I got free carrot ginger dressing that Id scoop into small bowls from the vat in the kitchen and eat like soup. That alone made it worth it.

At that time, it had been over a year since I had started losing weight on my own. Two years earlier I had been discharged from the last hospital I had lived in for six months in Virginia, where weight loss was the misguided treatment prescribed for my Binge Eating Disorder.

From the age of 8 I was told how bad my body was. I was put on Weight Watchers, taken to doctors and nutritionists, and warned if I didnt start changing my body, I would never have a fulfilling life. People laughed at me, and strangers screamed at me from their cars as they drove by. I was frequently scolded by doctors and told that I didnt understand how dangerous it was to have a body like mine.

The constant shaming and forced dieting didnt help me, it merely contributed to my struggle with a severe eating disorder, which along with my mental health issues, landed me in multiple hospitals over the next 12 years and influenced two suicide attempts. How do you stay alive in a world that tells you that you dont deserve to exist as you are?