(this is kind of long)
I've struggled with body image a lot. I'm going to summarize and say that as a girl who was always a little curvier (in high school I was at the top end of "normal" when the other girls were at the bottom) and with no one in school or media or at home to reflect positive body image I didn't even know what I was doing wrong. It didn't help that I was on and off half a dozen depression meds.
I've fluctuated several times in the last 12 years, between the low 160s and into the 200s but it finally occurred to me that I felt the fattest and the ugliest when I was smallest. Largely because it had taken months, sometimes a year, of abusing myself, starving myself, and berating myself in order to lose the weight. By the time I got close to my goal I literally wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I had no confidence left, couldn't stand for people to look at me at all, I couldn't take a compliment, I didn't want to make eye contact. Each time I got to the lower "overweight" weight I had taken to reading fat hate forums to "motivate myself." But hearing how "any woman over 130 should be shot in the head because they're such stupid disgusting cows" did not motivate me. I finally realized that what I was doing to myself was the psychological equivalent of cutting (which I had done as a teen and early 20 something) and that it was just as destructive. And, I surmised, maybe full of just as many lies. So I promised myself I'd stop the inner hurting too. It is far better to be sane than thin.
It took time, and I gained weight again, but at least as a (truly) bigger girl I was confident that when people liked me it was because I was actually likable, and not because I fit a social expectation.
Later I decided that my weight was uncomfortable, but I resolved in my head that I could not try to "lose weight" as I had before. So I began a journey, that I'm still on, of trying to learn to love myself in the way I would love someone else, to give them what is best. Though self-analysis I realized that no matter what my weight, I look the same in the mirror to myself, so if I did lose weight I couldn't expect to see someone different, and that part of that expectation had caused the old disillusionment. I started trying to like myself, even if I didn't, and resolved to be healthy. I stopped eating all sweeteners, not as a punishment but because I had come to the conviction that it's poison, yummy yummy poison, and things with added sweeteners but I made an effort to never leave myself feeling deprived.
I found a way to work out that I liked. And, I stopped shaving my legs, because I realized that for me the act of shaving my legs had become a ritual of reinforcing that I had to change what I was to be tolerable and likable.
My body has changed of it's own will. I've lost 31 pounds since I stopped eating added sweeteners. I still see the same person in the mirror, I still feel just as big as I did 31 pounds ago. I'm trying to like that person, so other people can like that person, and so other people can like who they see in the mirror too.