What I Wish People Knew About Body Love

I have been told, directly and indirectly, my whole life that my body is wrong.

Directly, I heard it from the bullies in primary school who called me "Fatty Miller" and my Year 4 teacher who told me I stood out like a sore thumb. To this day, 30 years on I can still feel the sun on my face in the playground, the hollow ache in my stomach, and the tightness in my chest absorbing these words.

As the years went on, I was told by a doctor that my BMI determined that I was o#ese, automatically placing me at higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer—essentially at higher risk of everything. I was warned that I could expect instant death simply because of my body.

At each visit, my obstetrician highlighted I was "a bit over" and advised that the safest thing for me and my baby was to gain no weight. None. Quite the task when you are growing a human. My goodness the shame I felt walking out of those appointments, takes my breath away when I think about it.

I didn’t have the language or understanding at the time to challenge any of this this, but those interactions had some serious ripples on my well-being and my sense of self-worth. They often sent me straight to the bottom of an ice cream tub in a shame spiral, which makes so much sense to me now I understand how closely linked body image and our relationship to food is. 

In my smallest body, desperate to "lose the baby weight", I was in the grips of my disordered eating. The celebration and applause from my nearest and dearest kept me going. My motivation and willpower was admired as I chased that impossible goal—an illusive number on the scale—but even at my most restricted, I could never quite catch it.

 Chasing the Impossible

Indirectly, society told me that because my body didn’t fit the mold, it wasn’t okay.

If I wasn’t a certain size or shape or number on the scale, I 'should' be investing my life in "fixing" this broken body of mine. Without a thigh gap, washboard abs, or cellulite-free legs, I was told I wouldn’t be lovable, successful or even employable. Especially working in the health space.

Do you know the saddest part though? I believed it.

I believed my body was disgusting. I believed it was wrong, a never-ending project. I believed I was going nowhere in this body—that happiness, success, and love would all be available to me, once I fit the mold.

So I did what society tells us to do. I invested 20 years of my life trying to shrink my body. Twenty years of tracking, measuring, weighing, recording, and either celebrating or commiserating on the scales. I was the perfect target for diet culture because I believed on a cellular level that I was flawed.

I learnt how to control my food to control my body. Well, I thought I did, but really it ended up controlling me.

The Toll of Diet Culture

For 20 years, I was a slave to diet culture. I gobbled up the lies that weight loss was all about motivation and willpower. "Starting again on Monday" became my mantra and I chased every new diet that promised to bring me results.

I didn’t even realize I was trapped in a loop of weight cycling because the culture around me praised that disordered behaviour so intensely. People called me "inspiring" and begged to know my "secret." But the dirty little secret was that my pursuit of weight loss came from a dark place of shame and self-loathing. The things I would do in an attempt to change my body were so incredibly unkind. It makes me so sad to think about it now. I'm sorry body for the things I did to you in the name of 'health'.

Body shame is such a common experience for us as humans but isn’t just feeling bad about your body; it’s deeper. Shame says, "I am bad." Body shame is what diet culture talks to when we get hooked by the lies.

It fuels that broken record body noise in your head, the one that plays when you look in the mirror, see a photo, or make a mistake. For many people, that noise is deafening. It's all-consuming. An undeniable truth.

Listening to Body Noise

When I finally stopped to get curious about and listen to that broken record, I learnt my body noise was actually not about my physical body, it was telling me I wasn’t safe. It was and is, a signal that something else was off. It could be that I'm dysregulated, overwhelmed, tired, scared, sad, nervous. This is what I mean when I talk about body noise as a scapegoat. Those neural pathways, etched into my mind back in Year 4, when my emotional brain was running the ship kept me on high alert, constantly scanning for danger. 

One thing I wish more people understood is this: the way you feel about your body has very little to do with how it looks.

The way you feel about your body has been shaped by your experiences. By the values about food and bodies and health and weight, that we are all exposed to. It's shaped by the behaviours we both engage in and avoid. The term body image is problematic because the image part, the way we see ourselves, is tiny compared to the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that shape it.

Redefining Body Love

Body love as a concept feels like a fairytale for many of my clients. An impossible concept that I have even been told even brings up anger, rage, confusion and frustration, and it's certainly not for me to tell you that body love 'should' be the goal of body image work. 

My own definition of body love though, is quite different to the one I see being sold online in the body-positive space.
To me, body love isn’t about thinking you’re the hottest human on earth. It doesn’t mean you love how your body looks. You can love yourself deeply and still feel sad, angry, or neutral about your reflection.

Body love is a mindset. It's in the doing, not the seeing.

For me it’s a pledge to honor my body, to respect and care for this incredible vessel—regardless of how it looks. It’s a decision to end the misery of diets, restrictions, and weight cycling because that serves no one and is independently linked to negative health outcomes.

Like any loving relationship, the one we have with ourselves is not all rainbows and butterflies. It ebbs and flows. For anyone with teens or tweens, you know that your love for them is unconditional, even in moments that make you wonder if you were cut out to be a parent. We don't love our children because of their physical bodies, it's no different when I think about body love for myself.

When we expect the ebb and flow of body noise, and go with it, we can create space for curiosity. Instead of asking, "What do I need to cut out, restrict, or control?" we can ask, "What might I need to feel more connected?"

Body love is about nourishing yourself with food, joyful movement, mindfulness, and presence. It’s about tuning into your body and asking, "What does it need today?"—and then learning how to respond. I know, wild concept right?

A New Way Forward

This body, the one you have right now is the one you’ll see out your days in. It will change in weight, shape, and size, because that’s what bodies do. How much time have you already spent agonising about the parts of you that have felt broken? How many hours of your one crazy beautiful life have you spent in a tug of war with your body. Instead, may I invite you to invest that energy into relating to your body in a whole new way, self-care over self-control.

If you’re ready to drop the body battle rope and make peace with you, there’s no better time to start than now. If you would like some support as you start exploring the wilderness, you know where to find me.

And remember beautiful human: you (and that meat suit) are so goddamn worth the effort!