Real Life Rodeo Queen Secret Number 9

You may not believe it, but I eat a lot.

If you’ve ever seen me inhabiting a hospitality room at a rodeo, you may have noticed a heaping plate always in my hand. No one seems to believe it until they see it, but I eat a lot of food.

I love joking around and even bragging about how much food I can put away, and while I can usually play it off and make those jokes, sometimes I hear things that hurt.

I have actually had strangers ask both my friends and I if I have some sort of eating disorder. As someone who tries valiantly to keep weight on, not off, my body, this kind of judgment can be hard to hear.

So I would like to once and for all dispel the rumours.

One look at my family tree and you can understand my size. My dad couldn’t start steer wrestling until he was 30 because it took him that long to fill out; my mom wore long-underwear under her jeans, even in the summer, when she was a kid to try to make them fit better; and my brother, Kyle, at 6 foot 2, weighs in at a whopping 160 pounds.

The point I would like to make is that no matter our size, we can all be hurt by other people’s judgment. It doesn’t matter how much we weigh, what shape our bodies may take or what our eating habits may be – be kind and don’t make assumptions based on looks, because we all know how deceiving they can be.

So why don’t we leave the judging up to our rodeo officials? They have the much more important job of deciding which competitors will top the leaderboard or make a clean run to win the rodeo!