21-year-old Lesley Miller had always grown up being larger than all of her friends. Ever since she was three, she had been targeted by those around her because of her size and her weight, been asked questions about why she was so large. At seven, she recalls, “I lied to the lady at Weight Watchers, desperate to sit in on meetings full of middle aged women trying to shed a few pounds.”
She went to weight loss camp at age nine and had her first weight loss surgery at 11. The doctor had told her how happy she would “finally” be after this procedure. Lesley would be the youngest person ever to undergo weight loss surgery.
When she was 15, she began to cut herself. Because of the way others had made her feel, she felt that she deserved it.
But when she turned 20, she set herself on a new path. In nine months, she managed to lose half her body weight, driven perhaps in part by her desperation to watch the number on the scale decrease each passing day.
When she turned 21, Lesley “got tired of waiting.”
For 18 years, Lesley had hid her body. All these years, she had been too embarrassed to let herself and her body be seen before it looked “the way it was ‘supposed’ to.” She had always felt that she wasn’t “thin enough, happy enough, confident enough” to allow her body to be visible to others.
Earlier this month, Lesley stopped waiting and decided to go all out.
She went and bought her first bikini, proudly sharing her purchase with a photo for everyone to see on Facebook: “You can see it all.”
And Lesley does show “it all” to us. Her happy smile and her healthy body are more than enough for everyone to realize that she and her body were, and are, always “acceptable” and “enough” for anyone to love.
“…the secret is,” Lesley writes, “I was always enough. And you are too.”
