The Healthy Living Summit presentations wrapped up today with a session entitled “Stop Staring Over Your Shoulder: How to Avoid the Self-Comparison Trap” that was led by the incredible Gena and Caitlin. I was invited to open the session with my story about how blogging has impacted my life.

I’m usually not too concerned about speaking in front of people. After all, you’re looking at a Forensics for Kids trophy winner. (Yes, my mom enrolled me in public speaking competitions as a child and YES I was a big ol’ loser.) But this afternoon I was feeling very queasy and nervous about the whole thing. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d never spoken in front of 200 people before. Yikes.

[Thanks for the pictures, Tracey!] Of course everything was fine. I just imagined everyone as cats. BAM. Instant ease. The first thing I said when I got off stage? “Did they show my cats??” And yes, of course they did, in a slideshow behind me. Everyone knows Ralph and Weaz are the real stars of this show.

The following is my speech. Word for word. Because obviously I wrote it all out because thinking about saying it without notes made me want to vomit. Feel free to repost; just link back here, please.

Sweet Tater’s Healthy Living Summit Speech

Hey, my name is Katie, but you can call me Tater, and I blog at sweettaterblog.com.

Some of you may know me in the blog world, and handful of you know me in the real world. But most of you probably don’t know me at all. I assume all of you are surely wondering what I’m doing up here because I didn’t really tell anyone I would be speaking.

To be perfectly honest, I was at the right place at the right time. I happened to be sitting next to Caitlin when she asked a group of us if we knew of someone with an inspiring blogger success story, someone whose life was changed for the better by blogging. I know every single person in this room could share a story like that. I am up here today because I was there when the question was asked and it didn’t hurt that my boyfriend was also there flailing wildly and pointing at me, thus volunteering me to speak in front of 200 people. Thanks, Stew.

So yes, as is true for probably everyone in this room, blogging has changed my life. It is amazing to me that my blog just turned a year old last week because I feel so far from where I was 12 months ago.

My story is probably not unlike most of yours. I spent a lifetime at war with myself. I remember feeling ashamed of my body in a bathing suit, doing crunches on the floor of my room and sneaking food from the kitchen at night from a very young age.

For me, every second of every day revolved around losing weight, but I was doing it in all the wrong ways. I lived on a sad diet of Diet Coke, 100-calorie bars and soups, sugar-free this, fat-free that and undressed salads throughout the day only to binge myself into oblivion late at night. Then I’d punish myself the next day with outrageous workouts and restricted food, and the whole cycle would start again. My life was a not-so-merry-go-round of caloric restriction, bingeing and excessive exercise day after day after day.

In my mind, I was starving myself, but I wasn’t thin so it wasn’t anorexia. I was bingeing like crazy, but I never purged so it wasn’t bulimia [NOTE: I accidentally said this backwards at the Summit. Oops! I've never purged. I was a night eater but I never threw up]. Without having what I considered a real eating disorder, I saw no need to seek real help. I was just another girl on another diet on another mission to achieve the “thin ideal.” Magazines, advertisements, books and talk shows teach us that this behavior is normal. That never being happy with our bodies is somehow normal. We all know it’s not.

What I love about this healthy living blog community and what has contributed so greatly to my change in attitude toward food, exercise and my body is that we expose the “thin ideal” for what it is: lies. The photoshopped images are lies. The fad diets are lies. The supposed “normal” state of discontent with our bodies is a lie.

It’s difficult to reverse a lifetime of unhealthy brainwashing, but I know that by leading by example, this community can make a difference for others as it has for me. These blogs that we all write show real women eating real food and exercising for pleasure rather than punishment, and having a really damn good time doing it. This is a message we don’t always see in mass media, but thanks to blogs, we all have a voice, and our voices are important.

I remember my first visit to a healthy living blog, what I call my gateway blog to this sick addiction I now have. I had actually started my blog a few months prior and didn’t know that this wonderful community existed until a girl from my high school sent me a link to Kath Eats Real Food. I’ll never forget the first time I went to her blog, still in my old, twisted way of thinking and declaring: “That oatmeal is going to make her fat if she’s not careful.”

Isn’t that sick? I was still convinced that diet food, sugar-free food, and fat-free food was the way to health. Because of the photoshopping, fad diets and positive reinforcement of negative body image I’d been exposed to, I didn’t understand that it was ok to eat real food and not gain weight.

But that has all changed. Educating myself with books, DVDs and research journals; cooking myself whole, clean foods full of healthy fats; using exercise to make myself strong rather than thin; and most importantly following your stories has completely changed my life in the past year.

The funny thing is that once I gave up my diet food, I lost weight. I have lost 20 pounds in the past year and a half, but to me, that is so much less important than the dramatic change in attitude that has occurred. The unhealthy way I lived for so long placed an incredible burden on me that was a much heavier load to bear than a mere 20 extra pounds.

I don’t advertise on my blog or make any money at all. I don’t have a huge readership and I don’t get sponsorships. But I do get emails from women (and men) who say that reading my story inspired them to start a healthier lifestyle the same way reading your stories helped me to do the same.

My hope is that we all continue to work together to make our message heard: that food is not to be feared; that exercise should make you strong, not thin; and that none of us is ever alone.

Even if blogging isn’t your full-time job or you don’t have a large following, I hope you know that what you do is valued far beyond numbers. You are all changing lives every day. Never forget that.

[I'd like to say a huge thank you to Caitlin and Gena for letting me speak; to Caitlin, Heather, Kath, Tina and Meghann for putting so much hard work into making this amazing weekend possible; to my new blogger friends and Summit roommates for sitting in the front row because I was nervous; to everyone who tweeted words of encouragement; and to Stew for volunteering me for the job. I love you all.]