I spent 20 years trying to make myself smaller. Here’s what that cost me — and what finally changed.

Introduction

For most of my life, I believed that being healthy meant being smaller.

Not stronger. Not more energised. Not more capable. Just… smaller.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, that message was everywhere — woven into every magazine cover, every television advert, every conversation between the women in my family. Diet culture wasn’t something you had to seek out. It came to you, quietly and persistently, until you stopped questioning it altogether.

Low-fat products filled the supermarket shelves. Slimming shakes were marketed as the answer to all of life’s problems. Aerobics workouts played on the television almost daily, and the women doing them were lean, toned, and seemingly effortless. The message was simple: if you weren’t shrinking, you weren’t succeeding.

As a young girl, I absorbed all of it.

I believed fitness had to be intense to count. I believed that cardio was the key to being “good.” And like so many women of my generation, I became genuinely afraid of lifting weights. I didn’t want to become bulky. I didn’t want to lose my femininity. So I stayed away.

What followed was more than 20 years of yo-yo dieting, overtraining, burnout, and deep frustration. More than two decades of chasing a version of myself I could never quite reach — because the target kept moving, and the methods I was using were working against me the entire time.

But eventually, everything changed.

This is that story.

Growing Up in Diet Culture

The fitness world I grew up around looks almost unrecognisable compared to today.

There was no conversation about strength. No talk of muscle, metabolism, or building capacity. The message was narrowed down to a few simple ideas:

I remember doing aerobics workouts with my mum and older sisters, following along to Jane Fonda and Cindy Crawford fitness videos in the living room. At the time, it felt exciting and even empowering — women were moving, becoming interested in their bodies, taking up space in the fitness world. But underneath the leg warmers and upbeat music was a constant, unspoken pressure: to be smaller, to take up less space, to shrink.

Even in gyms during the 90s, the divide was stark. Men lifted weights on one side of the room; women were guided toward endless cardio machines or what were called “toning” exercises. I remember seeing machines called toning beds — devices that vibrated or moved your body for you — and thinking even then that the machine seemed to be getting more of a workout than the person using it.

It was absurd, and yet none of us questioned it. That was just how it worked.

Without realising it, I had already started forming a set of beliefs about fitness, bodies, and worth that would take me decades to fully unlearn.

Movement Was Always Part of Who I Was

Despite all of that, I genuinely loved moving.

Even with the unhealthy mindset forming around me, movement itself always felt natural, joyful, and expressive. I trained in dance and performing arts after school, and that love of movement carried me forward. When I later discovered group fitness classes, something clicked. The music, the energy in the room, the feeling of everyone moving together — it gave me confidence and made me feel alive in a way that few things did.

After having my second child, I joined Weight Watchers and eventually reached what I thought was my goal weight. At the time, I genuinely believed I had finally cracked it. I was smaller, and smaller meant success.

But looking back now, I can see how narrow that picture was. Yes, I was lighter. But I wasn’t necessarily healthier. I wasn’t stronger. I wasn’t more energetic or more resilient. I had simply become skilled at restricting and burning — two things that, as I would later discover, are very different from actually building a body that serves you well.

The Reality Behind the Fitness Professional Exterior

Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough in the fitness world: you can know all the theory, teach it to others every single week, and still be completely trapped in the very cycle you’re supposed to be helping people escape.

That was me.

I was running multiple fitness classes out in the community, delivering workshops with different organisations, building a career I was genuinely proud of — and privately struggling in a way I felt I absolutely could not let anyone see.

The weight was creeping up slowly, despite the fact that I was working out regularly and not overeating. I was feeling burnt out and exhausted in a deep, persistent way that rest didn’t seem to fix. I often felt cold, even when I shouldn’t have. My body was clearly telling me something wasn’t right, but at the time I didn’t have the framework to understand what.

What I did have was shame.

The idea that a fitness instructor — someone whose job it was to help others get healthy — was quietly struggling with her own weight felt like a failure I couldn’t afford to admit. So I hid it. I started avoiding certain areas at certain times of day, taking different routes, timing my errands carefully — all because I was terrified of bumping into one of my clients and having them look at me and wonder why their instructor looked the way I did.

I lived in black leggings and long tops that covered what I was most self-conscious about. I became expert at presenting confidence on the outside while feeling something very different underneath.

Looking back now, I can see how sad and unnecessary that was. But at the time, the shame felt completely real and completely valid. That’s what diet culture does — it turns a perfectly normal human body into something to be managed and concealed.

When Life Forced a Different Approach

Eventually, something had to give.

The combination of running a demanding class schedule, trying to retain and grow my client base, delivering workshops, managing a young family, and carrying all of that internal pressure finally caught up with me. I was burnt out — properly, deeply burnt out — and my body was no longer willing to keep pretending otherwise.

Then, after having my last two children in quick succession, everything shifted again. Time became something I simply didn’t have. The long cardio sessions that had been my fallback weren’t feasible any more. I couldn’t spend hours at a gym. I needed something I could do at home, around my family, in less time — and that actually worked.

It was during this period that I remembered something: a while back, during my instructor days, I had picked up a set of kettlebells from Argos on a whim and started teaching myself swings by following YouTube instructors. I hadn’t pursued it seriously at the time, but I remembered enjoying it. There was something about the movement that felt different — functional, satisfying, almost playful.

So I went back to it. I started researching properly — the exercises, the science, the benefits. I worked with an online coach to develop my technique and fill in the gaps in my knowledge. And I started training at home, consistently, with my kettlebells and a set of dumbbells.

What happened next genuinely surprised me.

Why Strength Training Changed Everything — Including the Science I’d Been Missing

I want to be honest: I expected strength training to be something I tolerated because it was practical. What I didn’t expect was for it to be the thing that finally made sense of everything I had been doing wrong.

Working with weights and focusing on compound movements — squats, deadlifts, presses, hinges — did something that years of cardio-focused training never had. It built muscle. And building muscle, I came to understand, is one of the most powerful things a woman can do for her long-term health and metabolism.

Muscle is metabolically active tissue. More of it means your body burns more energy at rest. It means better blood sugar regulation, better hormonal balance, better bone density, better functional capacity as you age. None of this was part of the conversation I had grown up with — because the conversation I grew up with was only ever about being smaller, not about being stronger or more capable.

The compound movements were also, critically, time-efficient. A well-designed full body session with a kettlebell or a pair of dumbbells could deliver more genuine benefit in thirty or forty minutes than the hour-long cardio classes I had been teaching and taking for years. For a busy mother with a business to run, that mattered enormously.

And alongside the training, I had to change the way I was eating and start genuinely paying attention to gut health — not restricting, not cutting, but actually nourishing. More whole foods, more protein to support muscle, more attention to what my body actually needed to function well.

The results weren’t overnight. But they were real, and they were sustainable in a way that nothing I had done before ever had been.

What My Week Actually Looks Like Now

I know how easy it is to read about someone’s transformation and think “that sounds wonderful, but what does it actually look like in practice?” So here’s the honest answer.

My current week is built around a mixture of full body kettlebell and dumbbell workouts, with compound movements at the centre. I mix things up with dance, boxing-inspired sessions, and regular walks to keep my cardio ticking over in a way that supports rather than depletes me.

It’s varied enough to stay interesting. It’s structured enough to be consistent. And it fits around my family and my life — which is non-negotiable.

No punishing early mornings. No hours on a treadmill. No guilt when life gets in the way and I need to adapt. Just consistent, purposeful movement that I actually enjoy and that my body genuinely responds to.

This approach also became the foundation for something bigger — a fitness system I developed specifically for busy women who are tired of programmes that don’t fit their real lives.

What Actually Worked — and Why It Was Never Really About the Weight

The biggest transformation I went through wasn’t physical.

It was mental — and it was foundational to everything that followed.

I had to do the slow, uncomfortable work of unlearning a set of beliefs I had been carrying since childhood:

None of these things are true. But they had been so deeply embedded that I had never questioned them — I had simply operated from them, and built years of frustration and exhaustion on top of them.

When I finally stopped trying to punish my body into compliance, and started approaching it with something closer to respect and curiosity, things began to change. I started seeing results that were actually sustainable — not because I had found a better diet or a more brutal workout programme, but because I had addressed the underlying mindset that had been sabotaging me for decades.

I stopped obsessing over the number on the scales. I started paying attention to how I felt — my energy levels, my strength, my mood, my sleep. And those markers told a far more accurate story about my health than any number ever had.

But What If You Do Want to Lose Weight?

I want to address this directly, because I know some of you will be reading this and thinking: “This all sounds wonderful, but I do actually want to lose weight. Is that wrong?”

No. It isn’t wrong. Wanting to feel better in your body is completely valid.

But here’s what I’ve learned: chasing weight loss as the primary goal, through restriction and excessive cardio, is one of the least effective ways to actually achieve lasting change. It triggers stress responses in the body, disrupts hormones, and creates a cycle that becomes increasingly hard to break.

When you shift the focus to building strength, supporting your metabolism, and nourishing your body properly — the weight often follows naturally, as a side effect of actually being healthier. And more importantly, it stays off, because the habits sustaining it are ones you can live with long term.

The goal isn’t to stop caring about how you look. It’s to stop making that the only thing you care about — because your body deserves more than that, and so do you.

What I Want Other Women to Know

If there is one thing I wish I could go back and tell my younger self, it’s this:

You do not need to destroy yourself to transform yourself.

The fitness and diet industry has spent decades profiting from our insecurities, convincing us that health requires suffering. That if something doesn’t hurt, it isn’t working. That restriction is discipline, and exhaustion is evidence of effort.

It isn’t. None of it is.

You don’t need endless cardio. You don’t need extreme calorie restriction. You don’t need to hide yourself in black leggings and hope nobody notices. You don’t need to earn your rest. You don’t need to shrink to be worthy of taking up space.

What you actually need is far simpler, and far kinder:

5 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self

1. Start lifting weights sooner. The fear of “getting bulky” is one of the most persistent myths in women’s fitness, and it held me back for years. Strength training builds the kind of body that serves you well for decades. Don’t wait.

2. Stop chasing “smaller.” Smaller is not a health goal. Strength, energy, resilience, and consistency are health goals. Redefining what success looks like changes everything.

3. Focus on nourishment, not punishment. Food is not a reward to be earned or a temptation to be resisted. It is fuel. The shift from “what can I cut out?” to “what can I add in?” is one that will serve you for life.

4. Prioritise consistency over intensity. Three moderate sessions a week, done consistently for years, will produce far better long-term results than bursts of extreme training followed by burnout. Boring, sustainable habits win every time.

5. Be kinder to yourself — far sooner. Your body is not your enemy. It has carried you through everything. Treat it accordingly.

Final Thoughts

For more than twenty years, I believed that health meant shrinking myself. I spent those years in a cycle of restriction, overtraining, burnout, and shame — convinced that if I just pushed harder, I would finally arrive somewhere worth being.

What I know now is that the destination I was chasing didn’t actually exist. It was a moving target, designed to keep me dissatisfied. True health — the kind that lasts — is built on strength, nourishment, rest, consistency, and a genuine respect for the body you live in.

My struggles didn’t just change my own life. They gave me the tools to build something for other women who are stuck in the same cycle I was. Because if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that you deserve a programme that actually fits your real life — not one that burns you out trying to keep up with it.

Ready to Try a Different Approach?

If this story resonated with you, I’d love to invite you to join the Fuzion Online Gym — a community built specifically for busy women who are done with extreme approaches and ready for something that actually works.

Inside, you’ll find:

Fuzion launches on 1st July 2026 — but you can join right now, and early joiners get an exclusive discount.

Join the Fuzion community today →

Did this resonate with you? Leave a comment below: What’s one fitness or diet belief you’ve had to unlearn?

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