COMING HOME TO MY BODY

How I learned to love my body after a lifetime of hating it

I used to treat my body like I hated it. And honestly, I did.

It started early, and for reasons that had nothing to do with how I looked. I had rheumatic fever as a child, and for a long stretch of my childhood I wasn't allowed to play, do sport, or use my body the way the kids around me could. While they were running around, I was on the sidelines, watching a body I already didn't feel connected to be treated as something fragile, something to be careful with rather than something to live in.

As I got older, the reasons multiplied. I was an awkward, skinny kid who looked like a boy, someone who hit puberty two years before most of my friends. I hated the sharp angles of my gangly frame, my nose, my too-short hair. As a teenager I hated that I looked like a boy with breasts. I hated being hairy all over. I hated being short.

As an adult, a sedentary job and some genuinely bad habits caught up with me. I put on weight, my back gave me trouble, and I kept hating the body I was living in.

One fine day, prompted by some deeply unflattering photos, I decided enough was enough. I needed to change what I didn't like. What followed was a long stretch of diets, restriction, weight loss pills, gyms, trainers and fitness programs, one after another.

It worked, for a while. The weight would go, then it would come back. I cycled through different versions of myself, none of which felt like relief. It took me years to understand what I was actually doing wrong.

I was trying to fix a body I hated, using methods that came from that same hatred.

I restricted what I ate without any real regard for what my body needed, and it left me weaker, heavier and more depressed than before, not better in the ways I was hoping for. I trained too hard and too often, ignoring the fact that my body simply wasn't capable of that pace yet, and injury or exhaustion would eventually force me to stop. I kept quitting on myself and blaming a body that refused to be perfect, without ever asking whether I'd given it what it actually needed. And underneath all of it, I never really had faith that any of this would work, so in a strange way I was setting myself up to fail before I'd even started.

In my early thirties, I took a longer, harder look at myself, and for the second time, decided enough was enough. This time I tried something different.

It's been a slow journey over the fifteen years since. But I've finally come to like, even love, my body. Every lump, every curve, every dent, every blemish.

Here's what actually shifted things for me.

I started moving in ways that suited my body rather than punished it, and that's kept changing over the years as my body has changed. I still push myself sometimes, but I've learned to recognise when and how, and what my body can actually hold on a given day. I've learned to notice and celebrate the small wins, a stronger chaturanga, sitting a little longer in meditation, rather than chasing a finish line that never arrives.

Yoga is where I learned to listen. To rest when I was tired instead of pushing through it. To take an injury seriously instead of working around it out of stubbornness.

I learned to eat in a way that actually nourished me, paying attention rather than either restricting or ignoring what I was doing to myself.

I stopped shaming myself for where I was. And more than anything, I stopped quitting on myself.

These days, I feel more at home in my body than I ever did in my twenties. Not because it looks a certain way, but because I've stopped being at war with it. I'm stronger, steadier, and mostly at peace with this very imperfect, very human body.

This is part of why yoga therapy matters so much to me. It's not about fixing the body or forcing it into a shape it isn't ready for. It's about learning to listen to it, and slowly, to trust it again.