Learning To Love Myself

Laura Escudé
31 min readFeb 22, 2021

How I Healed From a 20-Year Eating Disorder

photo Rachel Chase, PNW 2020

To help heal a world in chaos, we must look within and heal the self so that we may be stronger to heal the larger collective.

I spent time over the holidays in the Pacific Northwest mountains and wrote about how I healed my eating disorder and finally learned to love myself — why “losing weight” is no longer on my goals list, and why we must dismantle diet culture. This article is mainly about my own personal journey and I believe it’s time to stop shaming any person’s body for radical acceptance, and to finally take down the system of diet culture. When we share our truth, we bring our shadows into the light and the shame around that dissipates. As such, I finally feel empowered to tell my story in the hopes to help folks who also struggle know they aren’t alone.

This is truly the most personal thing I’ve ever written and I’m super excited (and also nervous) to share it with you. I am thankful for the people who have helped me along the way. After reading, If you can relate to my story, I hope you find inspiration in my recovery. I hope one day we can rewrite the diet culture and image narrative and #normalizenormalbodies. Thank you for reading my story. I LOVE YOU!

This article is being released in coordination with National Eating Disorder Awareness Week (February 22–28) #NEDAawareness

Read the first part of my journey here: Hustle Healthier.

As with my music sales, all proceeds from my Medium readership will go to BEAM (Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective) to remove the barriers that Black people experience getting access to or staying connected with emotional health care and healing.

“As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world — for us all.” — Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

“I think a lot of times we say we want inner beauty but we seek to strive for outer

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