I had and interesting conversation with my best friends mum last night about being your true self. She was saying that you can't really live your life until you are honest with yourself about who you are and stop trying to be what everyone else always wants you to be.
It got me thinking a lot about myself and what I change about myself in order to please other people.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Lets start at the beginning....

I haven't always been the person or the size I am now. Over the last 2 years I have lost about 30 Kilos with the help of Lap Band surgery.
I was always a big kid, very sporty and active, but still big. It didn't seem to matter what I did to lose weight it never worked and the amout of exercise I was doing was only maintaining my weight.
After high school I went to uni and stopped doing a lot of the sports and extra activities I was doing all through my school life and I gained a lot of weight. In fact at my biggest I was 109 Kilos!!!
I tried so hard to lose the weight I had gained while at uni and nothing was working. I had been to the doctor and they had done all the usual tests for things that can cause obesity, yep I was classified as morbidly obese!
Because there was no medical answer as to why I wasn't losing weight it was assumed that I just wasn't working hard enough and not eating right etc etc.
I was so depressed and frustrated and angry that I conducted a little experiment. I went to the gym everyday it was open for a year, I ate well, I had a personal trainer for some of that time and I only lost like 2 Kilos!!!
Can you imagine? All that hard work and effort for next to no result.
I went back to my doctor and insisted, after telling my story, that they do some more investigation.
It was actually my mum who found an article about Polycistic Ovarian Syndrome that described me almost perfectly that got the ball rolling. I went and got a series of tests for the syndrome and I was dignosed. FINALLY an answer!!
After that there was medication and special diets for the disorder, which I followed for a while, but got fed up with pretty quickly!! I was studying at drama school at night and working full time during the day and just didnt have time to prepare special meals let alone try to eat 6 times a day. That was when I made an apointment to go and see a specialist in Laparoscopic banding and the rest is history.
I have had the band for 2 years and lost around 30 Kilos. It hasn't always been easy, I had to basically change the way I ate. I can now only eat about a handfull of food at a time, a regualr main meal can sometimes take me up to 2 hours to eat (makes going out to dinner intersting at times), so I usually just order entrees, and I get hungry more often as my stomach is now 1/3 of the size it used to be.

So going back to what I was saying before about my conversation with my bf's mum, all my life I think I have been wanting to lose weight to please other people, either my parents, my friends, the people who used to make fun of me... It was never really something I wanted to do. And believe me all the different diets I did were not fun as a kid either! I used to have to take my Jenny Craig food to school with me, talk about embarassing!!
It wasn't until I got older and made the decision for myself and my health etc that I have really been able to find out who I am and what I want out of life... not that its all figured out of course I am only 25! But for the first time in my life I am coming out of my shell and finding the person who has always been in there but has been hidden for a long time.
A big part of this process has been talking about my experiences with other people. If someone who I haven't seen in a while asks me how I lost all the weight I tell them. I really want more people to be aware of Polycistic Ovarian Syndrome and that the number of people who have it is actually quite staggering. It effects different people in different ways, which is what makes it difficult to diagnose sometimes.
And also from my own experiences I want people to start to think before they judge people based on their appearence. I know what it feels like to be looked at like you're nothing. I know what it feels like to go shopping and have the people who work their look at you like you don't belong in their store. And I know the shame I felt about buying clothes in a "plus size" store or section (although I always refused to do so).

I hope that through this campaign everytime any of you who read this look at my poster around town, remember my story and that you can't judge a book by its cover, because covers change!!