For as long as I can remember, I believed my body was the problem.

Not in a dramatic, self-aware way. Just in the quiet, unspoken way that lives underneath everything. The kind you don’t even question anymore. I believed my body needed managing, correcting, watching. I believed food was dangerous. Or at least unreliable. Something that had to be controlled if I wanted to feel okay in myself.

I had been on some kind of diet since primary school. That might sound extreme, but at the time it didn’t feel unusual. It felt normal. It felt like what you did if you wanted to be accepted, admired, or left alone. I learned early to scan my body in the mirror, especially my stomach, and make a call on how the day was going to go. Was I allowed to feel good today or not. I didn’t think of that as self-hatred. It was just routine. Automatic. Like brushing your teeth.

Food took up an enormous amount of mental space. What I’d eaten. What I shouldn’t have eaten. What I’d make up for tomorrow. Whether today was an “on” day or an “off” day. Whether I was being good or already failing. It felt like a personal flaw that this was so hard for me, because other people seemed to manage it just fine. Or at least that’s what it looked like from the outside.

I grew up being body shamed early. Not in one single catastrophic moment, but in ways that seeped in slowly and quietly. Nicknames. Comments. Comparisons. Watching my brother’s body praised while mine was scrutinised. Being taught, without anyone ever sitting me down and explaining it, that my body was something to fix. Something to hide. Something to be embarrassed about.

What stayed with me most wasn’t even the comments themselves, but the feeling they created. The sense that my body was wrong before I’d even had a chance to inhabit it. I don’t remember a time of not being angry or frustrated at my body. Of feeling like I was taking up slightly too much space, and that this was something I should always be apologising for or trying to correct.

As I got older, that belief hardened. I watched the women around me pick themselves apart in mirrors and conversations. I learned how normalised it was to hate your body, how easily it was passed down like a family heirloom. Dieters were praised. Self-control was celebrated. Hunger was something to override. Pleasure was something you earned or punished yourself for afterward.

So I restricted. And when restriction inevitably collapsed, I binged. And when that scared me, I restricted harder. This went on for years. Decades, really. Different diets. Different rules. Different versions of the same cycle. Each time believing this one would finally fix me.

The most fucked up part was that at the peak of my restriction, disordered eating, bingeing, and exercising furiously, I got so much praise. People telling me how good I looked. Colleagues bringing cake and biscuits into work almost every day and me saying no. Sometimes getting angry that they’d even brought it in. Everytime I said no, someone would comment “oh Megan, you’re so good!”
It took an enormous amount of mental energy to say no, on top of all the food noise already in my head. That internal tension would eventually snap, leading to bigger binges, harder workouts, and longer stretches of punishment. All while my inner critic spoke to me in a shaming, disgusted tone.
”What’s wrong with you. You have no willpower!”

I knew I had a problem. I knew my relationship with food was out of control. But I couldn’t stop. And if I’m honest, for a long time I didn’t truly want to. I wanted the ‘perfect body’ more. I believed that if I just restricted enough, trained enough, suffered enough, I could finally get there.

I was obsessed with fitspo in the early days of Instagram. All of it fed the self-hatred. Until one morning, on yet another diet, living on 1200 calories a day and flogging myself at the gym, the night binges were out of control. I got up at 4am, drove into the city, and went for a long run along the Yarra before work. I was running as hard as I could, trying to burn off the binge from the night before, trying to outrun the shame. And somewhere along that path, early in the dark, I started crying and said out loud, I fucking hate myself.

That was the moment I knew something was seriously wrong.

I booked in with a GP for a mental health care plan and a referral to a psychologist. Therapy wasn’t new to me, but working with my relationship with food was. I read the books. I showed up. I wanted so badly for someone to tell me what I was doing wrong so I could finally do it right. Some things helped a little. I understood myself better. I could explain my behaviour. But nothing touched the way I felt about my body. That stayed intact. Hostile. Shame-loaded. Exhausting.

Underneath everything was a belief I didn’t yet have language for. That if I could just get my body and food under control, I would finally feel safe in myself. Settled. Calm. At home.

The shift didn’t come from finding the perfect way to eat. It came much later, and much more quietly, when I finally saw how much violence there had been in the way I spoke to myself. How inherited that voice was. How young it was. And how long my body had been trying to protect me from something I hadn’t yet been able to face.

I had my first plant medicine journey that softened something in me I didn’t even know the extent of how armoured it was. I went into the journey thinking I was there to work on the relationship I had with my mother. And instead, what came up was the full weight of how relentlessly I had turned against myself. How every cruel thought about my body was layered on top of something much older and much more tender.

When I came home, I stood in front of the mirror one morning and did something I had never done before. I didn’t scan for what was wrong. I didn’t bargain or assess or promise myself I’d do better. I didn’t call myself disgusting. I just stood there and cried. And I said out loud, quietly, like you would to a child who had been hurt for a long time, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for every mean thing I’ve ever said to you. I love you.

That wasn’t the end of my healing. Not even close. But it was the end of the war.

Once the self-hatred lifted, even slightly, everything else became possible to look at. The compulsions. The pain. The urgency around food. The way hunger had always felt unbearable in my body, not just uncomfortable but genuinely threatening. The way eating had been my most reliable form of relief for as long as I could remember.

What I understand now is this. My body was never failing me. And food was never the problem. Food was a solution my nervous system found early on, when it didn’t have many other options. It wasn’t about greed or lack of discipline or addiction. It was about survival. About regulation. About finding moments of ease in a system that had learned to stay braced.

If food feels loud in your life, if you feel like you’re constantly negotiating with your body or trying to outsmart yourself, I want you to hear this clearly. There is nothing wrong with you. And there is likely nothing wrong with your body either. Often, what’s missing isn’t control. It’s safety.

In the pieces that follow, I want to talk about what happens when we stop treating food like the enemy and start listening to what the body has been trying to say all along. Not from theory. Not from perfection. But from lived experience, clinical work, and a long, messy, deeply human journey back to myself.

This is not a story about food. And it was never really about my body.