Learning to Love Your Body (Even When It Feels Impossible)

This body has a history: births, surgeries, injuries, years of pushing too hard in the gym. It has been cut open and stitched back together and asked to keep going, and it kept going. I’ve fought my body image my whole life, and I’ve made myself a little crazy with workout schedules and macro counting and every other way women are taught to perform discipline with their bodies.

That’s not a bumper sticker. That’s the actual history of this body.

And here’s what I know now that I didn’t know for most of those years. I was waiting for my body to be “right” before I lived in it. Waiting to feel acceptable before I let myself take up space. That was the whole trap. The finish line kept moving because the finish line was never the point. The point was to keep me working and shrinking and not quite there yet.

I’m done with that. I wrote about the day I decided that in I stopped shrinking.

The way we’re taught to treat our bodies is broken

The way women’s bodies get talked about in health and fitness makes me genuinely angry. Women are not small men — the exercise physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims has built a career on that sentence, and she’s right. Our hormones, our cycles, our histories shape everything about how our bodies work and look and respond. Telling a woman to “eat less and move more” while ignoring all of that is lazy at best. At worst it manufactures decades of women who feel like failures at a game the system never set up for them to win.

My body has been through it. And it still shows up.

It was a moral problem before it was a fitness problem

But fitness culture didn’t start this war. It bought a franchise that was already running. Before a single macro got counted, I’d spent decades in a world where my body was a problem to manage — where inches of fabric were treated as a measure of my goodness, and where being looked at was a hazard, something that happened to you, never something you chose. You can leave a world like that and still carry its tape measure around in your head. I did, for years.

So when the gym handed me a new set of numbers to hit, it didn’t feel like a cage. It felt familiar. Same job, new uniform: keep the body acceptable, keep it managed, keep it apologizing. The day I finally saw that the two systems were the same system was the day both of them started losing their grip on me.

Care, not punishment

I work out now because I like being strong and because it’s good for my brain, not to punish myself into an acceptable shape. That difference is everything. When you move from punishment, you’re never finished. When you move from care, you can actually feel good about it.

There’s real research behind this, if you need permission from someone with letters after their name. The psychologist Kristin Neff has spent her career studying self-compassion, and her work keeps landing on the same finding: treating yourself with the kindness you’d offer a friend does more for your motivation and wellbeing than harsh self-criticism ever has. The inner drill sergeant was never making you better. It was just making you tired.

And the war has costs beyond the mirror, by the way. A body you’re fighting with is one of the heaviest brakes on desire there is. Peace with your body isn’t just self-esteem homework. It changes what’s possible in every room of your life, including that one.

You don’t have to wait

The thing I had to learn, and am still learning, is that I don’t have to love my body to live in it. I can be here, today, in exactly this body, while also wanting more for it. Those two things sit side by side. They have to, because waiting for the first one means missing your whole life.

I want to be gloriously in love with myself. On camera, on stage, in the room, on an ordinary Tuesday. On camera turned out to be its own education, actually. I spent most of my life being looked at under other people’s rules — measured against standards I never chose and could never quite meet. Placing myself on screen on my own terms, with the frame and the limits mine to set, is a different experience entirely. Being seen on purpose is not the same thing as being watched, and my body was the place I finally learned the difference.

That’s not bravery. It’s what happens the day you stop treating your body as a project to finish before you’re allowed to show up.