When I very first saw this picture after getting back home from my trip to Croatia (more about that to come in another post), I sent it to my best friend and told her that it almost brought me to tears.

I’m sure she knew exactly what I was getting at, but the rest of you may not know that once upon a time in a beautiful place called college, I struggled with an eating disorder. It wasn’t your typical bingeing and purging, or anorexia. And from the outside looking in you would actually think that I was 100% healthy. In fact, I had people tell me all the time that they needed to “get on the Tasha diet” or that they wished they had as much self control as I had.

Here’s what a typical day looked like for me at that time: Wake up and eat breakfast, go to the gym for a morning Body Works class or 45 minutes of interval sprints on the treadmill, go to school, eat lunch, go to a private tumbling class for an hour, coach a cheer practice for 2 hours, drive back to school for my own cheer practice for 2 1/2 hours, drive home, eat dinner, go to sleep around midnight — wake up and repeat.

Sounds pretty busy, right? Here’s what I was eating to fuel that day:

So yeah, I was eating healthy and working out. Basically doing all the “right” things. But I was nowhere near healthy. I won’t go into all of the details here because it’s just way too much (let me know if you’d like to read a post about how I recognized that it was a prob and got myself out of it), but I struggled with this for about 4 years before finally getting my shit together and realizing that my version of “healthy” wasn’t actually healthy at all.

Which brings me back to this picture. Three years after going through Hell and a lot of fighting with myself to get back to a normal healthy routine, I looked at this picture and almost burst into tears. Because I spent years of my life LOATHING my body. Wishing that I could have a thigh gap. Literally imagining what I would look like if I didn’t have muscle or fat. (I did that thing I think many girls have done where you stand in the mirror and squeeze the backs of your arms or your legs or your stomach to catch a glimpse of what you could look like “if only.”) I cursed the day my mom put me in gymnastics where I built the same muscles I have today.

And now, muscle and fat is in. And here I am, able to jump off a cliff in Croatia and flip into the water because I have it. (Also, being able to flip drunkenly has won me multiple contests so — thanks gymnastics.)

I wish I had known that growing up. Because the funny thing is, like clothing and social media trends, body image is also subject to fads. Stressed because kids are making fun of your big lips? Just wait it out — in 2016 a celeb family is going to make them so popular that women will actually PAY to have lips like yours. Wishing you were stick thin like all the models instead of muscular? Guess what — in ten years EVERYONE is a model on Instagram and people will buy guides teaching them how to build muscle like yours. Got a unibrow? Just a teeny bit of tweezing in-between will give you brows like Cara Delevigne while the rest of us pencil them in.

What you see as a flaw today might be the hottest trend tomorrow, and embracing it now will only put you ahead of the curve(s — no pun intended) when everyone else figures it out.

I will proudly say that these days I love my body. I’m not the skinniest I’ve ever been, or the most toned. And I’ll still never have curves more dangerous than Laurel Canyon Road on the first rainy day in LA — but I am healthy, and able, and a little jiggling really helps get the point across during my karaoke performances of Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda so that’s a plus.

Most importantly I am happy with where I’m at whether I miss a week of workouts or not, whether I eat two cupcakes on someone else’s birthday or not (jk, there’s never a “not” — I do that every time), and whether I drink 100 ounces of water or margaritas on a weekend.

Loving myself took me way too long. So I hope that if you’re reading this and you’re still working on recognizing your own beauty, that this helps you along the way.