EARLY STAGES: I come from a family of Chinese immigrants. My parents came to the U.S. with only $5. I was always the skinny, little girl out of my family. My family would constantly tell me to keep eating because I was so tiny. At school, I envied kids that had McDonalds because my family couldn’t afford to eat out. Being the spoiled grandpa’s little girl, my grandpa finally bought me a Happy Meal. It was one of the happiest moments in my life. In the Asian culture, we celebrate everything with food and pot luck - and I really do mean EVERYTHING! Moving forward, I started to gain weight. I stayed home, played a lot of video games with my brother and cousins, watched a lot of TV - a very sedentary lifestyle. In fifth grade, I was considered “overweight” based on the BMI Chart that my doctor had on the wall. We had a physical education test in school as well. The teacher had a scale in the front of the room and everyone lined up to get weighed. She announced everyone’s weight out loud besides mine and another “fat kid”. She whispered my weight in my ears. “One hundred and Eleven pounds.” (which to me on this very day, wasn’t even heavy.) I know it was probably out of respect, but she treated me different. Not to mention on top of everything, my mom would always try to compare me with her friends’ kids and saying so and so can do this, why couldn’t I do the same. I felt mentally defeated and scarred for decades.

My heart has been broken many times in my early ages of life. In middle school, I honestly thought there was something wrong with me. “I wasn’t pretty enough like the other girls. I wasn’t skinny enough. I wasn’t rich enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m just not good enough.”

I was always the friend who puts other people first. I care about other people more than I cared about myself. Fast forward in high school, when I thought I found “the one”, “my soul mate”; he passed away in a car accident. A drunk driver was texting and took his life away. (so while you are still reading, please don’t drink and drive, or text and drive.) Anyways, I held those poisonous emotions in and it eventually ate me. My parents were too busy working to notice, plus I never liked talking to them about my feelings because I didn’t feel safe telling them anything. My friends were too busy with their own relationships to care about me. Everything I mentioned at first, eventually broke me. I was diagnosed with depression and I was prescribed anti-depressant pills. It became toxic with my mind and I didn’t have control over anything. I felt numb emotionally and physically, put on a fake smile on every single day, ate large amounts of food hoping to find answers, cried myself to sleep every night praying for a miracle to happen but not taking any action, smoked a lot cigarettes, drank lots of alcohol and prescription pain killers hoping the pain would go away. I was then 200 lbs, depressed, hopeless, and defeated. It soon became very overwhelming for me and I attempted to kill myself, twice.