What Does My Body Need From Me?

For a long time, so much of what I understood about food and movement was about taking something away.

Eat less. Take up less space. Burn more. Be smaller. Control your hunger. Control your body.

Even when those exact words weren't being said, the message was still pretty fucking clear.

I started eating disorder recovery in 2020, and one of the things I've learned is that recovery isn't a straight line. There wasn't some magical moment when everything I had learned about food and bodies disappeared. I still live in the same world. I still hear the same messages. I've just spent a lot of time learning to question them instead of automatically believing them.

Weightlifting became part of that process for me, but I want to be careful about how I say that because weightlifting didn't cure my eating disorder. Recovery is a hell of a lot more complicated than finding a sport you love.

What weightlifting did was make me curious about my body in a way I hadn't been before.

I Started Asking Different Questions

When I started taking weightlifting seriously, I wanted to know what my body could do. Could I learn this lift? Could I put another kilo on the bar? Could I get stronger? Could I do something today that I couldn't do six months ago?

Those questions felt really different from the ones I had spent so much of my life asking.

Instead of looking at my body and immediately thinking about what needed to change about it, I started paying attention to what it was capable of doing. And once I started asking my body to do hard things, I also had to start paying attention to what I was giving it.

Did I have enough energy to train? Had I eaten before I got there? How was I recovering? How was I sleeping? What happened during training when I hadn't eaten enough, and what happened when I actually gave my body what it needed?

I knew food mattered. This wasn't some groundbreaking discovery that athletes need to eat. I understood nutrition, and as my education around nutrition grew, I understood even more of the why behind it.

But knowing something intellectually and applying it to your own body are two very different things.

For me, that has been a huge part of this shift. Instead of always thinking about what I needed to take away from my body, I started thinking about what my body needed from me.

Food Became Something Different

I don't want to reduce food to fuel because I think we can accidentally create another set of rules when we do that. Food can fuel us, but it's also enjoyment, culture, connection, convenience, celebration, comfort, and sometimes just the thing that sounds really fucking good.

What started changing for me was that food became part of how I cared for the body I was asking so much from.

If I'm training, I need energy. If I want to recover, my body needs food. If I want to come back and train again, what I eat matters. Not because I need to eat perfectly or follow some exact plan, but because my body is doing work and I need to support it.

That sounds incredibly obvious when I write it down.

Living it has been different.

There is a difference between knowing your body needs food and actually learning to trust that need. There is a difference between understanding hunger and allowing yourself to respond to it. There is a difference between knowing rest and recovery matter and actually giving yourself permission to take them.

I'm still learning those differences.

My needs aren't exactly the same every day either. Training changes. Hunger changes. Life changes. Sometimes I plan ahead, and sometimes I'm standing in my kitchen trying to figure out what the hell I can eat because I'm tired and don't want to cook. Sometimes what I need is practical, not perfect.

That's real life, and I think I've become a lot more interested in working with real life than trying to force myself into another set of rules.

Knowing More Didn't Mean I Had It All Figured Out

Becoming more educated about nutrition has been interesting because having knowledge doesn't automatically undo your own history with food.

I can understand nutrition. I can understand why someone needs enough energy to train and recover. I can look at another person and recognize that taking more food away from them probably isn't the answer.

Applying that same curiosity and compassion to myself hasn't always been as easy.

I think that's important for me to say because there's a temptation, especially when you become a coach, to feel like you're supposed to have everything figured out. I don't.

I'm still in recovery. I'm still an athlete. I'm still a person living in a body in a world that has a hell of a lot to say about what that body is supposed to look like.

The difference is that I have more questions now.

Instead of automatically asking what I should cut out, I can ask whether I've eaten enough. Instead of assuming my body needs to be controlled, I can get curious about what it's telling me. Instead of seeing rest as something that gets in the way of progress, I can recognize that sometimes rest is exactly what allows me to keep doing the things I care about.

I don't always get it right. Sometimes I still don't know what my body is asking for, and sometimes listening to it is a hell of a lot harder than writing about listening to it.

But I'm listening differently.

I'm More Interested in Curiosity Than Control

I think that's what weightlifting gave me that I didn't expect.

Curiosity.

Not a cure. Not a perfect relationship with food. Not some before-and-after story where everything that came before disappeared.

Just another way to relate to my body.

I can be curious about what happens when I nourish myself before training. I can notice how recovery feels. I can pay attention to hunger without immediately treating it like a problem. I can wonder what my body is capable of instead of constantly wondering how I can make it smaller.

And I can still have complicated days because recovery doesn't disappear just because I know better.

Maybe that's why the question “What does my body need from me?” has become so important to me.

It doesn't assume my body is the problem.

It doesn't start with taking something away.

It asks me to listen.

For most of my life, there was always someone willing to tell me what my body should be, what I should eat, how I should move, and how much space I should take up.

I'm much more interested now in finding out what happens when I stop assuming all of those outside voices know my body better than I do.

I've got one more piece of this conversation I want to get into. Because the more I think about food, movement, coaching, and all the rules we've been taught about our bodies, the more I keep coming back to one question: What would happen if we actually trusted people with their own bodies?