Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly had an experience that I’ve begun to believe is not uncommon for women, especially those of us in our 40s and beyond.

I’ll see a photograph of myself from sometime in the past few decades ― perhaps it pops up in my Instagram archives or my iPhone’s “on this day” feature ― but it looks different than I remember it. Or perhaps more accurately, it doesn’t look how I remember feeling when the photograph was taken or when I previously saw it.

For instance, the photo of me taken by my mother at a barbecue restaurant when my son was still small and had fallen asleep with his head in my lap. The picture, which at the time actively hurt my feelings because of how “bad” I looked, has become lovely upon review just a few years later.

Looking back at a photo of myself in a curve-skimming leopard print dress, I can still summon the intense shame and self-consciousness I was feeling about the size of my body while posing awkwardly on the edge of an office couch. But what I see when I look at it now are the kind of sick-as-hell curves that would make a cartoon wolf’s tongue roll out of his mouth mid-Awooga. Did I have eyes?!

Of course, the content of the photographs hasn’t changed, nor have I gotten Lasik. It’s my self-perception that has changed — so radically and rapidly that it’s hard for me to understand the gulf between then and now. Most notably, just a few years ago, I would have told you that I had been fat ― or “chubby” or “plus-size” or “curvy” or whatever word I felt most comfortable with at the moment ― my whole life. I had complete confidence that this was true ― until the photos started proving me wrong.

There are reasons for my dysmorphia, of course. For one, you’d have to be willfully obtuse not to have noticed that women, in particular, are pressured to adhere to an extremely strict beauty standard and punished harshly when we fall short. This was even more true in my formative years, when headlines called singer and actress Jessica Simpsons “Jumbo Jessica” for wearing a high-waisted pair of jeans she’s since revealed were a size 4, and Tyra Banks was communally weighing models and then shaming them on “America’s Next Top Model.” Let’s not forget mall stores like the retailer “5-7-9,” in which nothing came above a size 9 in juniors.

I was a chubby kid and a fat adolescent, and severe bullying about my looks made it clear that something was wrong with my body. Luckily, diet culture told me what to do about it. Everyone in my family was large, and fad diets were a family affair, from Richard Simmons’ Deal-a-Meal to Weight Watchers to something where we (evangelical Christians) were supposed to eat like Jesus ate? The low-carb Atkins diet eventually produced the most results, and my sophomore year of college I lost over 100 pounds.

I have a visceral memory of the post-weight loss panic I felt that sometimes drove me to leave my college classes and go to the bathroom just to look in the mirror to make sure I really was still thin.

I was, but like a Jello mold, my self-esteem had already “set,” and I would never really see my body accurately again despite spending the next two decades doggedly maintaining my thinner body. It didn’t help that I yo-yoed back and forth, losing and gaining the same 20 or 30 pounds over and over until I barely had any idea what I looked like or what size I was wearing at any given time.

After college, I began a career in digital media. My first job at a website was as an editor for a men’s site, which I really enjoyed. But when I started writing and starring in a comedic video series, I earned myself a near-constant stream of negative feedback on my body and appearance from the type of Internet Male who likes to call supermodels “mid.”

I once stumbled upon a forum thread that outlined the very specific plan I’d need to follow to become “fuckable” in these dudes’ eyes, including several months of gym workouts and Crest Whitestrips.

I’d like to say it got better when I moved on to a women’s website with a feminist bent, but including photos of ourselves in our articles was mandatory, leading to comments like, “Wow, Emily’s really packing on the pounds, huh?” or one that accused me of having so many wrinkles I “must be lying about my age” when I was 27. On social media, angry men regularly created burner accounts for the sheer purpose of reinforcing these messages as quickly as I attempted to unlearn them.

It’s true that at the top of my weight pendulum, I wore the smallest sizes in what the market considers plus-size clothing, or more often fell somewhere in between the top straight size and the size 14 that then signaled the crossover. But in retrospect, I think that’s mostly because I am 5′11, and have always lugged around a set of bodacious tatas. (Those puppies take up room!)

So even though I remembered how it felt to be fat, and people were telling me all day I was fat, I now believe I owe an apology to those women’s website readers for really, truly not realizing that I was not the best person to be writing essays on fatness and body image and what it was like to wear a bikini for the first time as a plus-size woman.

Whether I was technically “plus-size” or not, and no matter how many mouthbreathers on the Internet called me fat, what I failed to understand was that I was operating in the world with an enormous amount of privilege due to having a body type that was plenty thin enough to receive it.

I wasn’t oblivious to the idea of thin privilege ― I had certainly noticed the differences in the way I was treated before and after my triple-digit weight loss. Those discrepancies were one of the reasons I spent the next several decades committed to maintaining that loss. Losing weight showed me a whole different world, and people there were much nicer.

But I became so wrapped up in the many ways that I had been harmed and was actively being harmed by the ridiculous body standards that women of all sizes are held to that I lost track of the bigger picture.

That harm is real ― the shame and self-loathing I felt around each inconsequential pound gained was crippling to me for a long time and led me to waste decades hating myself while obsessing over and feeling guilty for literally every bite I consumed.

But my personal pain was not commensurate with the systemic social disenfranchisement experienced by actual fat people. After my weight loss, I did not struggle to find clothes to wear in my size. I did not get dirty looks or verbal abuse when taking an airplane or struggle to fit into seats. I did not face hiring discrimination at my workplace due to my size. Feeling really, really bad about myself was not a comparable experience to these things.

How did I finally become aware of this? The hard way, naturally. I got fat again. Starting in 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I slowly regained 70, then 100 pounds of the weight I’d devoted so much mental and physical energy to keeping off for the past 20 years. (You can read more about that if you’d like in this essay I wrote previously for HuffPost Personal.)

I still have plenty of privilege ― fatphobia operates on a spectrum in which the larger your body is, the more marginalized you tend to be, and there are usually a few larger size options than mine at the stores where I buy clothing. (Not to mention the people who struggle to find their size in any store.) Fat people of color are also disproportionately discriminated against, as are disabled fat people.

But I am no longer able to go to the doctor without having extreme options like GLP-1 injectables or weight loss surgery pushed on me, often before the doctor has done any bloodwork or much more than eyeball me. Since I am being treated for an autoimmune disorder and its resulting complications, this is a frequent occurrence despite the fact that none of my health issues are weight-related or would be reversed or improved by weight loss.

This is more than just an annoyance ― discrimination in medical settings keeps fat people from getting the healthcare they need and may cause them to avoid going to the doctor entirely. I spent a long, uncomfortable year suffering from an untreated hernia that steadily worsened because the first surgeon I saw refused to operate on me until I lost 30 pounds. Unless, of course, I wanted weight loss surgery, which he said he’d be happy to perform.

Today, as even formerly fat influencers trade in their messages of self-acceptance for sponsored content hyping walking pads and Mounjauro prescriptions, society’s entrenched fatphobia feels more ubiquitous than ever.

So the point is not just to show you an endless stream of photos in which I am quite obviously not fat despite believing I was, although TRUST THAT I COULD and never stop finding it mind-boggling. The point is not even the sick little number our society does on women to break our brains to the point where we can’t even see ourselves accurately.

The point is that, as I did for so long, too many people treat the idea of “body positivity” as a self-help program for white women who want to learn to “love” their average-sized bodies while still benefitting from the same systems that oppress actual fat people. It’s 2025, and it’s time to wake up. (Oh, and stop posting those “posed” and “unposed” comparison pics on Instagram where your stomach is slightly crinkled in the latter. People who are actually fat can’t stop being fat with a twist of the torso or better posture.)

Not only is the lack of perspective on what it’s like to live in a fat body offensive and alienating to those of us who actually do, but this extended journey to accept yourself for not living up to a beauty standard that is quite literally impossible to meet is just a colossal waste of time.

Today, I am not immune to feeling bad about my body, but my body is also just so much less interesting to me than it used to be. I gained weight, but I lost the core belief that I am somehow deficient and, therefore, unworthy of the things that others receive. You shouldn’t have to be physically attractive or thin to access those things, but also, I never looked how I felt inside, how others conditioned me to feel. Back then, I would have felt “not good enough” in any body, with whatever face I saw in a photograph.

The monumental perspective shift that I’ve had today isn’t just that I was never fat or ugly: It’s that I have always been good enough. And in what ways might my life have been different had I not wasted decades getting here? I let the incorrect axiom that I was “fat” and somehow less “deserving” senselessly drive so much of my life, from what I was allowed to wear to which men I dared to believe I could date. I don’t want to spend even one more day holding myself back with the narrative that there’s a single goddamn thing wrong with me.

I’d rather live my next decades without self-imposed limitations and, much more importantly: working to topple the very real barriers that keep this from being a better world for everyone.

Emily McCombs is the Deputy Editor of HuffPost Personal. She writes and edits first-person essays on all topic areas, including identity (race, gender, sexuality, etc.), love and relationships, sex, parenting and family, addiction and mental health, and body politics.

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