Many women carry a quiet sense of body shame shaped by years of diet culture, comparison, and constant self-monitoring. Over time this can create self-doubt and distance from the body, even when nothing is actually wrong.

There is something that has become almost painfully predictable in my work with women.

I sit across from someone who is intelligent, capable, deeply thoughtful - often the person everyone else leans on. And when the conversation turns toward her body, her tone changes.

It softens and sharpens at the same time.

There is kindness in the way she speaks about others, but not when she speaks about herself. And almost without exception, she is convinced that something about her body needs to change. Not dramatically or medically. But in small, persistent and subtle ways where it gets visible how much she picks herself apart.

The body should be smaller, tighter and better. But behind this is a message that the body should be more controlled, more acceptable and more attractive.

After many years of doing this work, I have noticed something that continues to stand out:

The body itself is rarely the problem.

What has been wounded is the relationship with it.

Why Most Women Grow Up Believing Their Bodies Are Wrong

Women do not suddenly wake up one day and decide to distrust their bodies. This distrust develops gradually and it often it begins with attention:

- Who receives praise.
- Who is admired.
- Who is described as “letting themselves go.”
- Who is called disciplined and looked up to.

Sometimes it appears through comments about appearance at family dinners. Sometimes through magazines, screens, and locker-room conversations. Sometimes through silence - through the quiet hierarchy of which bodies are celebrated and which are corrected.

Over time something subtle begins to shift: Instead of simply living inside the body, a girl learns to observe herself from the outside, and through that she evaluates, compares, and adjusts accordingly.

The body slowly moves from being a place you inhabit and experience life with, to something you manage and control.

Once that shift happens, it can be difficult to return to a more natural relationship with the body without conscious support.

When Body Shame Starts Earlier Than We Realize

A few years ago, my daughter came home from kindergarten and told me she felt ashamed of her belly.

She was four years old.

I still remember the sensation in my own body when she said it. That heavy drop in the chest that comes when you realize something has already taken root.

Not because there was anything "wrong" with her belly, but because she had already absorbed the idea that her body could be judged. That it could somehow be wrong.

That moment stayed with me because it shows how early this conditioning can begin.

Not through formal dieting plans or calorie tracking.

But through the simple awareness of being seen, through subtle comparison and through the quiet understanding that appearance can influence belonging.

And when belonging feels uncertain, the nervous system listens closely.

How Diet Culture Creates Disconnection From the Body

From a young age many girls learn to monitor themselves before they learn to inhabit themselves, - they learn how they look before they learn how they feel.

They become aware of their thighs, their stomach, their posture, their facial expressions, hair color, skin color and so on - often long before they have language for hunger, fullness, or emotional nuance.

Without anyone intending harm, worth becomes entangled with appearance.

Once that association forms, the body rarely feels neutral again.

In my work I often notice how women speak about their bodies almost as if the body is separate from them. The body becomes something to manage and correct rather than something to relate to.

This distance is not vanity, but it is learned and conditioned disconnection.

And when you have spent years observing yourself from the outside, it can take time to return to the experience of being inside your body again.

The Impossible Ideal and the Business of Insecurity

The cultural ideal body shifts constantly, yet it tends to remain just out of reach.

One season it is thinner. Another season it becomes curvier but still firm. Then ageless. Then “natural,” yet flawless. And now in these times, The "Ozempic"-body is what's covering the front pages. 

The ideal evolves just enough to remain difficult for most women to attain, and this pattern also supports a large industry.

When women feel slightly uncomfortable in their bodies, a market opens that promises improvement, correction, and refinement. The messaging is rarely cruel ,and it is usually encouraging and framed as empowerment. Yet the underlying message often stays similar: You are close, but not quite there.

So again and again, women continue to manage and control themselves, try and push harder.

They restrict more carefully, monitor more closely, override hunger, distrust fullness and push through fatigue because discipline begins to feel like the path to safety.

When the body eventually pushes back - as biology tends to do in the face of long-term restriction - many women assume they have failed.

“I must be the problem.”

But the difficulty rarely begins with the body itself. It begins with the story surrounding it.

What Years of Self-Monitoring Do to the Nervous System

Living in constant self-evaluation gradually reshapes the nervous system. Because, when you frequently scan your reflection, adjust your clothing, compare your shape, or negotiate every meal, the body can stop feeling like a place to rest.

Instead it begins to feel like something that must remain under observation and control. This vigilance often looks like self-awareness from the outside, but internally it tends to function more like protection.

In my sessions, when we gently slow this pattern down, many women begin to notice how much energy has gone into monitoring rather than actually living.

How many moments of joy were postponed until a future version of themselves would be achieved.

The body has become a condition for worth rather than a place where life unfolds and that shift runs so much deeper than appearance. It affects how someone moves through the world.

This pattern often overlaps with what I describe in The Unspoken Diet Trauma, where long periods of restriction and pressure reshape the body’s stress response.

Why This Was Never About Discipline

Most women who struggle with food and body image are not lacking discipline. In most cases they have practiced extraordinary discipline for years.

They have ignored hunger when the plan or app told them to. They have pushed through exhaustion, followed rules carefully, started over repeatedly when things had become too difficult and they fell "off the wagon".

Seen in this light, the behavior reflects adaptation rather than weakness.

When belonging feels conditional, discipline can become a strategy for safety. When approval feels tied to performance, self-control begins to serve as protection.

The nervous system does not cling to control because it enjoys the suffering that comes from it. But it does so because at some point control created stability.

And when understanding this, it often changes the way women see themselves.

It also helps explain why motivation can sometimes feel more like pressure than support, something I explore further in   When Motivation Feels Like Pressure.

Reclaiming a Safe Relationship With Your Body

Healing rarely begins by forcing yourself to love your body. It often begins by making it safer to be with it and be inside it.

In my work we do not start with affirmations or programs or steps. We begin with regulation and with rebuilding the sense that the body is not an enemy, a project, or something that needs constant correction.

When the nervous system feels less judged and less monitored, subtle shifts begin to happen: Hunger becomes easier to recognize, fullness becomes clearer and desire becomes less frightening.

This process does not require abandoning the wish to feel strong, energized, or confident in your body.

Instead it changes the ground beneath that wish by nourishment and care gradually replacing punishment, cooperation replaces control and safety begins to replace fear.

As this shift occurs, transformation often feels less like forcing change and more like returning to yourself.

Everything in life expands or contracts depending on whether the body feels safe - something I explore more deeply in   Everything Begins in Your Body.

You Were Never the Problem

If something in this resonates, you might pause for a moment with this possibility:

Your body was never the enemy, but your relationship with it developed inside a culture that benefits from your doubt.

In my work I do not fix women. I support them in untangling the stories they were taught to believe about themselves.

Sometimes that begins gently, through an introductory space where you start to recognize how deeply diet culture has shaped your nervous system.

Sometimes it unfolds through deeper one-to-one work, where we slowly rebuild safety in the body and repair the relational wound beneath the struggle with food.

But the core insight tends to remain the same:

There is nothing about you that needed fixing. What needed care was the relationship and relationships can change.

- Camilla Sage
Dietitian and Somatic Guide For Women
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