Reclaiming my body

Disclaimer: This essay discusses topics around diet and body, but it is not an invitation to comment on or judge my body. 

Somewhere around May this year, I started feeling like my life wasn’t mine anymore. I woke up every day with this low-level panic humming in the background, about my future, about whether I was doing enough, about whether I had made a huge mistake trusting certain people. What exactly do you do when something that used to bring the best out of you now brings the worst out of you? 

I had no other option but to quickly take a breather (literally).

And then one day it hit me, I realised I’d been pouring myself into something that was quietly draining me. I was so busy worrying about everyone else’s mental health, organising events, checking in, being “the reliable one,” the caretaker, that I didn’t even notice how badly I was neglecting my own. I kept telling myself I was fine. I wasn’t. My body knew it long before my brain did. I’d show up to events with a smile plastered on my face, and then go home and cry myself to sleep. 

I used to joke about how I barely ate fruit unless my housemate cut it up for me. Which is funny, considering my name literally translates to princess. When everything fell apart in May, I started searching for things that were at least within my control. I put aside my responsibilities. I took a mental health break from roles, positions, and even friendships. 

One thing became clear: I had control over my body. I have agency over my body.

That’s how the diet started. Not because I hated how I looked, but because I needed somewhere to put all that nervous energy. I needed proof that I could still commit to something just for myself. 

I usually let time do its work on my body weight; I let it fluctuate. For years, I had convinced myself that I was bad at discipline, particularly in dieting.

Which is… ridiculous, if you think about it.

Would someone without discipline survive three years of university abroad, get awards, secure grants, lead initiatives, and speak at events with important people? No. The discipline was always there. I just spent it all on other people. On organisations. On responsibilities. On being “good,” “helpful,” and “reliable.”

And then I lost about 5kg in a month or so.

It felt good, not because of the number itself, but because it came at a time when I felt like I had no control over my life. Everything else felt uncertain and unstable, and this became something solid I could hold onto. Especially during a time when it felt like everything was falling apart. A point where I realised that even if my circumstances felt out of my hands, I still had agency somewhere. I could decide how I treated my body. I could decide what I ate.

Learning how to diet, like many experiences tied to becoming a woman, came with an uncomfortable realisation. Being on a diet, unfortunately, didn’t fix my sadness. If anything, it made it easier to slip into starving myself while I was already low. I didn’t set out to do that. It just kind of… happened. When you’re sad, skipping meals can begin to feel justified, even productive. Like you’re still “in control,” even when you’re not really taking care of yourself. At the same time, I was experiencing moments of disrespect. In hindsight, I find myself questioning whether these experiences were connected. In trying to make my body smaller, did I also allow myself to become smaller in other ways? Did I hesitate more, soften my opinions, or tolerate being talked over because I was already exhausted, already running on empty? When you are under-fuelled, everything feels heavier. Even standing up for yourself can feel like a disproportionate effort. In that sense, the pattern feels familiar, a story many women have lived in one form or another.

This was particularly confronting for me because I have always understood myself as someone who takes up space. Not just physically, but socially, I am someone who speaks up, who asks questions, who is comfortable having a presence in a room. That sense of self has been fairly stable for a long time, which is why this period felt so disorienting. I started noticing small changes in my behaviour that didn’t quite align with how I knew myself. I hesitated before speaking. I second-guessed my reactions. I let moments pass that I would normally challenge or question.

At the time, I didn’t frame this as a loss of confidence or agency. It felt subtler than that. I was tired. I was emotionally stretched. And I was focused on managing my body in a way that demanded constant attention and restraint. Looking back, it seems significant that my pursuit of control over my body coincided with a reduced willingness to assert myself in other areas of my life. As I worked to become physically smaller, I may also have been signalling, to myself and to others, that it was acceptable for me to take up less space more broadly. 

When I think about my friendships with other women, it’s honestly not that strange how often dieting slips into our conversations. We’ll be hanging out, talking about completely normal things, and somehow it always circles back to cheat days, calories, macros, and then that moment of collective realisation, like, oh god… how did we even end up here? It’s almost background noise at this point. A running commentary made up of guilt, rules, small wins, and this constant sense that our bodies are a project we’re supposed to be managing, whether we want to or not.

We’re always negotiating, how much we can eat, when we’re 'allowed' to indulge, what counts as acceptable, and what feels like too much. 

Sitting there with my friends, talking through cheat days and macros, I could see how deeply ingrained all of this is. Reflecting on my own journey, I realised how much of that thinking I had absorbed without questioning it. I was chasing control, trying to funnel my anxiety and sadness into something tangible, my body, my diet, my fitness. But at the same time, I was also performing a version of womanhood that’s so familiar it almost goes unnoticed: the woman who 'cares,' who 'maintains,' who is constantly being measured, quietly judged whether she succeeds or fails.

It also reminded me of learning about makeup. It starts as something fun or optional, and then quietly becomes expected. A condition for being taken seriously in public. This is part of the cost of being a woman: that thin, blurry line between choice and pressure, empowerment and performance. So yes, I was a woman who could diet. A woman who could lose weight. A woman who appeared disciplined. But the question that stayed with me was whether I was actually practicing self-discipline, or whether I was just navigating another way of shrinking myself during a moment when life already felt too big.

"a culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” - Naomi Wolf

Nevertheless,  during that time, I put things down. Even in the middle of sadness, I kept reminding myself: I still have control. I still have some control. I started walking more, spending time alone, doing things I genuinely enjoyed, things that reminded me of who I am, not things I did because I owed anyone anything.

After a month-long break, I returned to the UK feeling… different. More grounded, more intentional, more aware of what I actually needed. I wanted control over my body again, but this time without punishment. I had learned, the hard way, that starving myself wasn’t discipline. It didn’t make me stronger, it didn’t make me better, and it certainly didn’t make me happier. By then, I had started understanding my body a little more, so I shifted my focus. What began as a calorie deficit slowly transformed into something more thoughtful: nourishment. Eating cleaner, making sure I get enough protein, fibre, and the right balance, rather than obsessing over restriction or numbers.

I started letting go of the idea that eating had to be “perfect.” Instead, I treated food like an experiment. I literally have a page in my journal listing foods I want to try, hummus, orzo, all these little things that once seemed too complicated or indulgent. And I won’t erase the truth: in those early months, I still slipped into a depressive loop. Some of the weight I lost came not from choice, but from sadness. But now, I’m trying to live differently. This time, I want care, not punishment.

Movement slowly became a bigger part of my life, too. In my two decades of living, I told myself I wasn’t athletic, that my body wasn’t “built” for fitness. But then I thought about how I started this blog six or seven years ago (AYYYY), and how I slowly allowed myself to call myself a writer. I realised something important: you can decide who you are. Identity isn’t fixed. You can practice being the person you want to be, piece by piece, choice by choice.

So that’s what I did. The gym became my indoor sanctuary, the treadmill was my first love (because running outside in this weather? No, thank you). And then came the fitness classes. I treated them as part of my mental health care, as much as part of my physical health. I started slow, with Pilates, yoga, moving into strength training like BodyPump and core classes, and cardio like Zumba and indoor cycling. At first, it was purely survival. There’s this saying that depression can’t hit a moving target, and that’s true, at least in a literal sense. But somewhere along the way, it stopped being just about surviving. It became about thriving. About feeling my body actually work, and feeling capable and strong in ways I hadn’t known before. Empowering. Liberating.

And now? Now I lift heavier. I have more muscle. I feel stronger, not just in my body, but in my mind too. I’ve developed a new awareness of myself,  of my limits, my potential, my resilience, and it’s not just mental, it’s physical too. Being fit isn’t just about how I look or how much I can lift. It’s about how I feel in my body, how I inhabit it, how I show up for myself. I’m learning, slowly, that taking care of myself is about presence as much as discipline, about listening as much as doing.

And honestly, it feels like the first time in a long while that I really, fully own myself, my body, my choices, my energy. And that’s something I never want to go back from.

I hope 2026 is kinder for all of us.