What If Your Body Was Never the Problem?

Written by Vania Phitidis
Peaceful Eating Coach
Last updated on 17 April 2026

“You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.”
– Henri Nouwen

Most women I work with have spent years – sometimes decades – treating their body as the source of the problem. Too big. Too undisciplined. Too much. The body is what needs to change before life can really begin, before they can feel comfortable, before they deserve to take up space without apology.

I understand that. I lived that story for a long time myself.

But at some point in my own recovery, and again and again in my work with clients, a different question starts to surface. What if the body was never actually the problem? What if we have been directing enormous amounts of energy, grief and self-blame at the wrong target?

Where the story came from

We did not arrive at our hatred of our bodies by accident. We were taught it, incrementally, from a very young age – by the culture we grew up in, by the magazines that told us which bodies were acceptable and which were not, by the comments of family members who thought they were being helpful, by our peers who commented on our bodies, their bodies or other people’s bodies – and by a diet and beauty industry that has spent decades and billions of pounds ensuring that women feel not quite good enough as they are.

There is nothing neutral about this. The belief that your body is a problem is not an objective observation. It is a message that was delivered to you, usually before you had the critical faculties to question it, and it has been reinforced so consistently since then that it has come to feel like your own thought.

It is not your own thought. Or at least, it did not originate with you.

We have been so thoroughly taught to see our bodies as problems that we forgot we were ever taught anything at all.

The body as scapegoat

One of the things I notice most often in my work is how frequently the body becomes a container for pain that has nothing to do with the body itself. Anxiety, grief, loneliness, a sense of not belonging, feeling out of control in other areas of life – all of it gets redirected onto the body. If I could just sort this out, everything else would fall into place.

The body becomes the scapegoat. And in some ways this is understandable, because the body feels like something you can act on. You can diet. You can restrict. You can set rules and targets and track progress. Unlike grief, which has no timetable, or loneliness, which has no easy fix, the body offers the illusion of a manageable project. Something within your control.

But the pain underneath does not go anywhere. It waits. And the body, which was never really the source of it, keeps taking the blame.

I have sat with women who have lost significant amounts of weight and found themselves just as unhappy, just as anxious, just as disconnected from themselves as before – sometimes more so. Because the weight was never what was making them feel that way. Losing it just removed the explanation they had been relying on.

I want to be careful here, though, because some women genuinely did feel better when they were in a smaller body – and that experience deserves to be taken seriously rather than explained away. What I think was actually happening, in most cases, is that the shame temporarily lifted. They felt like they belonged. Like they had permission to be comfortable in their own skin, to take up space, to stop worrying that their body was getting in the way of things they wanted. That is a real and significant experience. The smaller body brought relief – but the relief came from the world treating them differently, and from the relentless internal self-monitoring quietening down for a while. The body itself was not the source of the good feeling. The absence of shame was. And that distinction matters enormously, because shame can be worked with directly. You do not have to shrink yourself to be free of it.

What the body has actually been doing

Here is something that tends to land differently once women start to really hear it: your body has not been failing you. It has been responding, entirely rationally, to what has been done to it and asked of it.

The cravings that feel like weakness are a physiological response to restriction. When the body has been deprived, it fights back. This is what bodies do – they seek energy, they protect against famine, they keep you alive. From the inside, a diet looks a great deal like starvation, and the body responds accordingly.

The weight that keeps returning is the body defending its set point – the weight range it has learned to maintain in order to function well. That is biology doing its job. It has nothing to do with character.

The eating that feels out of control is almost always, at its root, a response to deprivation – physical or emotional or both. The body swinging hard toward food after a period of restriction is the pendulum doing what pendulums do when you finally let go of them.

None of this is the body betraying you. It is the body doing its job, under difficult circumstances, with considerable skill.

Your body has been working hard on your behalf. It has just been working against conditions that made that job almost impossible.

What we were taught versus what is actually true

We were taught that hunger is dangerous and needs to be overridden. Hunger is information – a signal worth listening to, like any other signal the body sends.

We were taught that certain foods are bad and that eating them reflects something about our character. Food carries no moral weight. Eating a biscuit is eating a biscuit. What you choose to put in your mouth on a Tuesday afternoon tells us nothing meaningful about who you are.

We were taught that a smaller body is a healthier body, and that pursuing thinness is the same as pursuing health. The relationship between weight and health is considerably more complex than that, and the pursuit of thinness through restriction is often actively harmful to both physical and psychological wellbeing.

We were taught that our bodies are things to be controlled and managed rather than lived in. The more we try to override and control the body, the more disconnected we become from it – and the harder it becomes to hear what it is actually trying to tell us.

Living your way into a new kind of thinking

Henri Nouwen wrote that you don’t think your way into a new kind of living – you live your way into a new kind of thinking. I come back to that a lot in this work, because it is so precisely true of what happens when women start to shift their relationship with their bodies.

The change rarely starts with a shift in belief. It starts with a shift in behaviour. Buying clothes that fit the body you have now, rather than the one you are trying to get back to. Going swimming. Being in the photo. Wearing the colour. Saying yes to the thing you would previously have waited until you were smaller to do. These feel like small acts, and in one sense they are. But they are also acts of a very particular kind – ones that say, quietly and consistently, that your body is worthy of being lived in right now. Not conditionally. Not eventually. Now.

And gradually – through the accumulation of those experiences, through living as though your body matters and is more than good enough – something shifts. The belief starts to catch up with the behaviour. You do not have to feel it first. You just have to keep going, and let the feeling follow.

Where that leaves us

Unpicking a story you have lived for most of your life is not a quick process. Knowing intellectually that your body was never the problem does not instantly dissolve the feelings that have built up around it. There is grief in this work – for the years spent at war with yourself, for the experiences missed, for the energy poured into a fight that was never yours to fight in the first place.

But there is also, for most of the women I work with, something that feels like relief. A loosening of something that has been held very tightly for a very long time. The beginning of a different kind of relationship – not with a body that necessarily finally fits with the cultural ideal, but with a body that has always been doing its best and perhaps deserves a little more kindness than it has been given.

If any of this is resonating – if some part of you is wondering what it might feel like to stop treating your body as the enemy – I would love to talk.

I work 1:1 with women who are ready to ask different questions. You can book a free discovery call here.