Growing up the oldest of five sisters, comparison was the air we breathed. I never liked my body — especially my stomach, which was never flat like theirs.
Rugby changed that. I stumbled into it during my freshman year of college, fell completely in love and won two national titles. My body didn’t transform the way I expected — my stomach stayed the same — but what it could do was extraordinary. I learned to stop needing my body to look perfect and started loving what it could accomplish.
Then rugby ended. Grad school started. My training hours and intensity disappeared, and my body slowly changed — pants tightened, and I could feel my stomach in ways I couldn’t before. I told myself what I thought I’d learned: my body doesn’t need to look perfect for me to love it.
But I couldn’t. Because this time, it wasn’t just about looks. My body also couldn’t lift what it used to; I couldn’t run as far or as fast. The thing I’d built my self-worth around — capability, not appearance — had slipped away too. I hadn’t solved my body image problem. I’d just replaced one measuring stick with another.
The numbers suggest I’m not the only one struggling to be OK with my body.
69-84% of women experience body dissatisfaction specifically with their weight. Men experience dissatisfaction with their bodies — wishing they were more muscular than they are. It starts terrifyingly early. By age 13, 53% of American girls are unhappy with their bodies, which increases to 78% by age 17. We live in a world that obsesses over our bodies — and it is hard to escape.
So instead of escaping, we lean in. We diet. We train. We do everything we can to get that perfect look or feel. Almost half the 9- to 11-year-olds in America are dieting — 46% of them. Where do you think they get these ideas? Eighty-two percent of their families are ”sometimes” or “very often” on diets.
After my pants stopped fitting, I decided I needed to diet too. But I quickly felt like I was drowning in all the conflicting information from social media nutritionists on different fad diets. I was so stressed. Through the stress, I was consumed by one thought: something had to change before I could even stand myself again.
The dieting was unsustainable, and honestly, it only made me hate myself more. I was fixated on what my body looked like and felt like. I was stuck in a transactional relationship with my body; I could love it when it gave me something to love. (And I spent a lot of time without finding anything to love.)
Psychologists call what I was doing “contingent self-worth” — tying your value as a person to performance in a specific domain. University of Michigan researcher Jennifer Crocker spent decades studying this pattern, finding that when the domain collapses, so does the self. You can’t sustain self-esteem attached to a certain condition when the condition changes.
I felt that.
While I was playing rugby, I thought I had cracked the body image code: I was a national champion athlete who had, by every measure, earned the right to love her body. I had the medals. I had the capability. I was free from worrying about what I looked like.
But it wasn’t enough. Because I had just swapped one contingency for another — appearance for performance. Same trap, different bar.
If that trap can close around a Division I rugby player training enough hours to be a part-time job, it can close around anyone.
Here’s the harder truth: your body will change. Injury, age, illness, time — no athlete escapes it, and neither does anyone else. Research shows that people who tie their self-worth to appearance or physical capability experience greater swings in self-esteem and are significantly more vulnerable to depression when the body inevitably shifts. The pursuit of a worthy body doesn’t build confidence; it builds fragility.
If your dignity rises and falls with changes, it will fall.
Your body is just the medium through which you think, connect, grow and change. The fact that your body is and allows for your existence deserves appreciation.
I spent years earning my body’s worth on the field. But the moment I couldn’t perform at that level, I had nothing to stand on — because I had built the foundation on something that could be taken away.
Worth has to rest on something more stable than muscle mass.
The alternative isn’t abandoning health goals or efforts to improve. It’s decoupling your value from your output. You have worth not because of what your body can do or how it looks. Your body is just the medium through which you think, connect, grow and change. The fact that your body is and allows for your existence deserves appreciation.
So stop trying to love yourself as you are. Your circumstances will shift — I promise you that. Learn to love yourself because you are.