from punishment to self-love: how i rebuilt my relationship with my body

this is the honest story of how i stopped fighting my reflection and finally started taking care of the body i'm in.

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okay, i hesitated a lot before hitting publish on this one, because it’s more personal than what i usually share. but i don’t think i’m the only one who has struggled with body image, and honestly, it’s still a work in progress for me. as women, we’re told from a very young age that the way we look is tied to how people see us, how much we’re worth, how deserving we are of being appreciated and loved.

for a long time, i thought taking care of my body meant controlling it. measuring it, shrinking it, forcing it into a shape i had decided was the “right” one. i called it discipline. i called it self-care. i even called it love, sometimes, when i wanted to feel better about what i was doing. but none of it was love. it was an exhausting war i was fighting against myself every single day, and i was losing without even realizing there was another way to live.

this is the story of how i stopped (or at least, how i’m trying every day).

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the teenage years, or when the mirror became the enemy

i grew up in a family where doing things correctly was almost a slogan. be disciplined (in every sense of the word), hold yourself well, get good grades, don’t embarrass anyone. i understood very early that to be loved, or at least appreciated, i had to be a living example of everything considered proper. and for a while, i pulled it off. i was the good student, the polite girl, the one adults nodded at approvingly. i learned the shape of what i was supposed to be, and i squeezed myself into it.

the problem with being the perfect example of anything is that there is no room to be a person underneath. you become the performance. and when the performance slips, even a little, the panic is immediate.

i was a perfectionist before i even knew the word. i remember rewriting entire pages of homework because one letter looked wrong. i remember crying over grades that most kids would celebrate. i remember the feeling of my stomach tightening whenever i thought someone might be disappointed in me. that feeling became the soundtrack of my childhood, and then of my adolescence, and eventually of almost everything i did for the next twenty years.

things got harder when i hit adolescence. i was always very thin. i don’t want to pretend i know what people in bigger bodies go through, and i’m not here to compare struggles, but being very thin can also mess with your confidence in ways people don’t talk about much. especially when you hear, on repeat, things like:

“you look sick. you should put on a few kilos. your legs are too skinny”—

comments meant to be caring, maybe, or meant to be jokes. they all landed the same way. they all told me my body was wrong.

i was bullied as a kid, and in my teenage years it got worse. that’s when my need for validation and my fear of other people’s eyes became a full-on obsession. every mirror was a tribunal. every photo was evidence. i spent hours analyzing my body from angles i didn’t even know existed, convinced that if i could just see myself the way others saw me, i could finally fix whatever was so obviously wrong.

and i was a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s, which did not help. if you lived through that era, you know. the magazines lined up in every corner shop, telling us which celebrities had "let themselves go" for gaining three kilos. reality tv shows that treated women's bodies like entertainment. the infamous "heroin chic" aesthetic making a comeback every other season. britney's abs on loop. the low-rise jeans that required a certain kind of hip bone to even wear.

every piece of media was telling me the same thing in slightly different words, and the message was loud and consistent:

you are never thin enough, and when you finally are, you still won’t be thin in the right way.

because that was the real trap. even when i was thin, i wasn't thin the way i was supposed to be. i was "too skinny", not soft in the feminine places. you had to be thin, but with the right attributes, the ones that made you look like a woman instead of a kid.

i didn't fit. i never fit. and instead of questioning the rules, i decided the problem was me.

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the internal voice that never shut up

the voice in my head during those years was relentless. it pointed out everything. the way my shoulders looked in a tank top. the fact that my thighs didn’t touch. my arms, too thin. my face, too tired. the meal i had eaten, too much. the meal i hadn’t, not enough. and underneath it all, the constant accusation of being lazy.

i was so afraid of being judged that i judged myself first, pre-emptively, to beat everyone else to it. it felt like armor. it was actually the knife.

i couldn’t be kind to myself. i didn’t even know what that would look like. kindness felt like letting my guard down, and letting my guard down felt like an invitation for someone else to point out what i had missed. so i stayed vigilant. i stayed critical. i stayed exhausted.

all of that internal noise had to go somewhere, and it went straight into my relationship with my body. food became a system of punishment and reward. exercise became a way to earn the right to exist in my own skin. i went through phases of eating as little as possible, telling myself it was discipline. i tried every restrictive diet that promised to fix what the mirror was telling me was broken. i did hours of cardio i hated because someone told me it would make me smaller, and smaller was the only goal i knew.

exercise, during those years, was not something i did for joy. it was something i did as punishment. punishment for not looking like the version of myself i had built in my head, a version that did not exist and never would, because she was stitched together from magazine pages and impossible standards.

i wasn’t trying to take care of my body. i was trying to correct it. and i treated it the way you treat a problem, not the way you treat something you love.

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how strength training reshaped my relationship with my body

there was no dramatic moment i can point to and say “that’s when everything changed.” it was quieter than that. it was a slow accumulation of tiredness. i was tired of counting calories, of hating what i saw, of performing discipline for an audience that was mostly in my own head.

and one day i just thought, i cannot do this for another twenty years. i cannot keep waking up inside this fight. something has to give.

i didn’t know what i wanted yet. i just knew i wanted out.

i never thought of myself as athletic. i admired athletes, the way you admire people who speak a language you were told you’d never learn. strong women on magazine covers, runners crossing finish lines, gymnasts doing impossible things. i thought they were incredible, and i thought they were a different species. that wasn’t for me. my body wasn’t built for that. i wasn’t built for that.

when i first walked into the weights area of a gym, i was sure i was doing something wrong just by standing there. i believed every myth about lifting. that it would make me bulky. that women who lifted were doing something extreme and i should stick to the little pink dumbbells in the corner where i belonged.

i started anyway. mostly because i was too tired to keep doing what i had been doing. i figured if nothing else worked, i might as well try the thing that scared me.

the first few weeks, i had no idea what i was doing. i copied people. i watched videos. i asked dumb questions. i was bad at everything, and for the first time in my life, i didn’t care that i was bad at it. that was the strangest part. my perfectionism, the thing that had ruled me for decades, seemed to take a step back at the squat rack. maybe because i was so obviously a beginner that there was no point pretending otherwise.

somewhere in those first months, a small shift happened. i added two and a half kilos to a lift i had struggled with the week before, and something in my chest cracked open. not because i had burned calories and earned a meal. because i was stronger than i had been seven days ago, and i could feel it in my hands.

that feeling is the closest thing i’ve ever had to a turning point.

it was the first time in my life that my body had done something for me instead of being something i had to fix. the first time i had a reason to be grateful to it instead of angry at it.

slowly, my workouts started to look different. i stopped tracking them by how sweaty i got and started tracking them by how strong i felt. i stopped focusing on burning calories and started focusing on getting stronger. i stopped chasing smaller and started chasing more. more weight on the bar, more reps, more food to actually fuel all of this, more rest so my body could repair itself. every single variable flipped in the opposite direction of what i had been doing for twenty years, and for the first time, i was getting somewhere that felt real.

people often ask me what changed, and the honest answer is that it wasn’t one thing, it was a handful of small rewirings that stacked on top of each other until i was standing somewhere new.

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from how it looks to what it can do

i want to be honest with you. i won’t pretend that i don’t care about aesthetics, about how my body looks. there’s this idea that chasing aesthetic goals in the gym is futile, something only dumb, illiterate influencers do. and i don’t agree with that. for me, wanting to change your body is not a problem in itself. the problem is the culture around it, but that’s not the point of this article.

so yes, i still want visible abs and defined shoulders, and there’s nothing wrong with that. the difference is that now, i want those things for reasons that don’t involve pleasing others. i have my own standards of what is aesthetically pleasing—like a jacked upper body, which by society’s standards of feminine beauty, is not what women are supposed to look like.

what i want you to take from this is that i spent years convincing myself that my body was a problem to be fixed. strength training gave me a completely different way of seeing it: something i'm building, something worth investing in. that one reframe changed how i eat, how i move, and honestly, how i talk to myself.

the small shifts that made a big difference for me:

🫀 learning to see movement as respect instead of punishment

when i go to the gym now, i'm not there to atone for anything. i'm there because my body is the only one i get, and showing up for it is a way of saying thank you.

🌸 accepting that constancy beats perfection, every single time

perfectionism had kept me stuck for years because anything less than the perfect week felt like failure, and failure felt like a reason to quit. once i let go of the idea that a workout had to be ideal to count, i started showing up on tired days, bad days, unmotivated days. those are the days that actually built me.

🦋 learning to listen to my body instead of fighting it

hunger is information, not a character flaw. fatigue is information. energy is information. i spent decades overriding every signal my body sent me, when really it had been trying to help me the whole time.

🧠 redefining what “in shape” even meant

for most of my life, being in shape was code for being thin. now it means being able to carry heavy groceries up five flights of stairs without thinking about it. it means waking up with energy and lifting something today that i couldn't lift last year. the definition got bigger and more honest, and suddenly i was already in it.

⛓️‍💥 detaching from other people’s eyes

i still catch myself sometimes, wondering what someone thinks of how i look in the gym, what someone thinks of the plate on my bar. but it has less power now. building confidence through actions instead of appearance is a completely different kind of confidence. it holds.

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it’s not about becoming someone perfect

i still have bad days. i still have moments where the old voice tries to come back and tell me something is wrong with my body. the difference now is that i don’t automatically believe her. i listen, i notice her, and then i go to the gym and do the thing she told me i couldn’t do, and she gets a little quieter every time.

i am stronger than i have ever been. not just physically, though that too. i eat more than i ever have in my adult life, and my body is the most functional, most capable, and most trustworthy it has ever been. i train because i love what it gives me, not because i’m trying to earn my place. i am still a work in progress, and for the first time i think that’s beautiful instead of terrifying.

if i could tell my teenage self one thing, it would be that self-love is not always soft. it is not bubble baths and affirmations in the mirror, though it can be. more often, it’s choosing what is good for you even when it’s uncomfortable. it’s eating the extra meal when your brain tells you not to. it’s resting when you’d rather push. it’s letting yourself be bad at something long enough to get good at it.

it’s stopping the war in your mind.

self-love is not about becoming someone perfect. it is about learning to treat yourself like someone worth taking care of. that’s it. that’s the whole thing.

i did not wake up one morning loving myself. that’s not how it works, and anyone selling you that is lying. what happened is slower and, i think, more honest. i stopped treating myself like someone i hated. and from that small shift, everything else started to grow.

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