I started dieting when I was 13 years old. At the time I had no idea how much that decision would shape the next 20 years of my life.

For years I hated my body. I was constantly trying to make myself smaller and convinced myself that losing weight would eventually make me happier. There was always another diet, another goal and another version of myself I thought I needed to become.

By the time I reached 33 I was exhausted. I could not keep living in the same cycle.

Learning to accept myself was not something that happened overnight. It took therapy, a lot of self reflection and a complete change in the way I thought about my body, food and my own worth.

I tried many different things along the way. I went to therapy and retreats. I read books and spoke to women who understood my struggles. I changed what I was consuming on social media and surrounded myself with people and messages that challenged the way I had been taught to think about bodies.

I also had to sit with a lot of uncomfortable emotions.

There was sadness. There was anger. There was fear. I used meditation, dancing, singing and sometimes simply allowing myself to cry. One of the hardest parts was accepting that healing might mean gaining weight. After spending most of my life trying to lose weight, that felt terrifying.

Years of dieting had also changed my relationship with food.

Restriction eventually led to binge eating and an obsession with what I was eating. Foods like sweets, bread and pasta felt almost impossible to have around without wanting to eat large amounts of them. At the time I thought there was something wrong with me.

I did not understand that my cravings were being driven by years of restriction.

I was constantly afraid of eating too much. Afraid of gaining weight. Afraid of undoing whatever progress I thought I had made.

Then I would binge and feel overwhelming guilt afterwards.

I kept swinging between extreme restriction and overeating because I had never learned how to exist somewhere in the middle.

For a long time I genuinely believed this was just how my relationship with food was going to be forever.

Then I found a book called The F*ck It Diet.

It completely challenged the way I thought about food and dieting.

At first I hated what it was telling me. The idea of letting go of control felt ridiculous. I had spent decades believing that controlling my food and my weight was something I had to do.

The thought of deliberately allowing myself to eat and potentially gain weight was terrifying.

But eventually I decided to trust the process.

That book was not the only thing that helped me heal, but it became an important turning point. It helped me understand what years of restriction had done and gave me permission to start doing something completely different.

Real change took time.

It took around two and a half years of actively working on my relationship with food and my body before I started to feel a significant shift. Before that there had already been years of questioning my beliefs and slowly preparing myself to let go.

Even now, eight years later, I still see healing as an ongoing process.

There is always another layer to understand. Another belief to question. Another experience that teaches you something about yourself.

For a long time my body had become part of my identity and my self worth.

I had created an image of the woman I thought I needed to become in order to be attractive, successful and accepted. I believed thinness would give me those things because that was the message I had absorbed for most of my life.

Larger bodies were rarely represented as desirable, successful or powerful.

So when other parts of my life felt difficult, controlling my body became a way of trying to feel in control.

It never worked.

It only made me more disconnected from myself.

Eventually I had to consider something I had never seriously considered before.

What if my body was never actually the problem?

I started questioning the standards I had spent years trying to meet.

I began accepting my natural shape instead of constantly fighting it. I learned to appreciate what my body could do rather than judging it only by how it looked.

Strength training became a huge part of that change.

I started seeing my body as strong and capable.

I also made myself look at it.

I looked in mirrors instead of avoiding them. I watched videos of myself training from angles I once would have called unflattering. Over time I realised that many of those angles were not actually bad. They were simply unfamiliar because I had spent years trying not to look at myself that way.

The more familiar I became with my body, the less power those images had over me.

Eventually the mirror stopped being somewhere I only looked for things to criticise.

I started seeing strength.

I started seeing myself.

My own experience is a huge part of why I became a coach.

I know what it feels like to believe your body needs fixing before you are allowed to feel confident. I know what it feels like to spend years trying to shrink yourself.

I also know how powerful it can be when you stop making your body the enemy.

Before becoming a coach myself, I worked with a personal trainer for two years. That experience helped change the way I saw training and what my body was capable of. I became stronger, more confident in the gym and more connected to my body. I started to see exercise as something that could build me up rather than something I had to use to punish or shrink myself.

Seeing that change in myself inspired me to become a coach.

I have now been coaching women for four years, both in person and online. I continue to develop my knowledge through further education and ongoing learning because I never want to stop improving as a coach.

The women I work with all come to me with different goals. Some want to get stronger. Some want to build muscle or improve their fitness. Some want to feel more confident in the gym and understand what they are doing. Others simply want to feel better in themselves and more capable in their bodies.

That is why the way I coach women is about so much more than exercise.

I want women to become stronger and more confident. I want them to understand what they are doing in the gym and feel capable in their bodies.

I want women of different shapes and sizes to see that strength does not belong to one type of body.

You can care about your health without hating yourself.

You can train hard without using exercise as punishment.

You can want to become fitter and stronger without spending your life trying to make yourself smaller.

My journey taught me that self acceptance is not a finish line. It is something we practise.

It means questioning the beliefs we have inherited and deciding which ones we no longer want to carry.

It means learning to see your body as something you live in rather than something you constantly need to correct.

And for me, it meant finally building a life that was no longer centred around becoming less of myself.

Let me help you do the same.

Lyga xx