For most women who head off to college for the first time, there’s always a fear of that “freshman 15.” The early stages of adulthood, and being away from home for the first time, means navigating what to eat, when to eat it and how to balance cafeteria food with an apple every now and again.
For Allison Kimmel, college was hyper-focused on her body.
“For quite a while I felt completely disconnected from the entire college experience,” she writes in an Instagram post. “There weren’t many things I could control so I began to focus on obsessing about my body. I didn’t realize at the time, but I was in the beginning stages of my body dysmorphia, disordered eating and excessive working out. I was so insecure and I allowed my belief that I wasn’t good enough to hold me back from SO MANY opportunities in my young adult life.”
Allison says she spent the next 10 years gaining and losing hundreds of pounds. She fluctuated up and down from a size 4 to a size 18 and suffered through the roller coaster cycle of never being able to love her body for what it was.
Until now.
Instagram
About a year ago, Allison started an Instagram account to start the conversation about body diversity and self-love. She says it was her way of chronicling her journey, and healing her 15-year-old-self from the negative path of destruction she’d spent a decade on.
“I struggled for so long to fit it and feel love, only to find at the age of 30 that it was within me all along if I had just allowed myself to feel it. I knew that I didn’t want anyone else to waste another single second being at war with themselves and so I took to Instagram to attempt to free women with daily inspiration.”
Her account has helped thousands of women to know they are not alone in their body-battles.
Instagram
She recently shared a conversation with her children that quickly went viral because her daughter called her fat. Allison’s response has moms everywhere applauding her for the way she handled the otherwise-devastating blow: