Twenty-plus powders and pills later, I’m ready to stop chasing a smaller body and start treating this one with love.
One of the worst things we do—and this feels like a very human thing—is keep telling our bodies they aren’t good enough.
The next pill. The next powder. The next diet. The next “coffee trick.”
We dress it up as improvement, but underneath it, what are we saying?
The way you work isn’t good enough for me. You aren’t fast enough. You aren’t efficient enough. I need you to make me smaller.
I call that offending your body.
Not because a body literally gets offended. But that is what the relationship started to feel like: me picking a fight with the very thing keeping me alive.
And in my head, my body was answering, “Oh yeah, bitch? Here we go again.”
The wheel I kept getting back on
I have tried more than twenty different powders and pills in the past two years.
Twenty.
What did I get? Less money. More frustration. And the same search for the next thing that would finally work.
I kept buying the promise. I kept pushing. I kept feeling like shit. Then I would find another promise and start all over again.
All that effort to fit into a size I had decided I needed to be.
It is wild how society fills our heads with ideas of what we should be instead of leaving room for what we could be.
We could be happy. How’s that for an idea?
We could be satisfied with what we have. How’s that for a change?
What I finally started to see
When I stopped chasing all those products and went back to something simpler, I began to recognize two things.
First, I struggle with binge eating. That deserves attention, and it is something I can get help with.
Second, I am beautiful without making my body the enemy.
I can’t pretend I have everything figured out. I still struggle with overeating. I’m not announcing that water magically fixed my life or that I have arrived at some perfect weight.
I am saying that I felt awful in the cycle I was in, and I don’t want to keep doing that to myself.
There is a difference between caring for yourself and endlessly trying to correct yourself.
I want more of the first.
Another promise in another package
I have my own preferences. I like some simple rituals. I have been drawn to teas, apple cider vinegar, and other things sold as natural.
But I don’t want this to become another list of things you need to buy.
That would put us right back on the same wheel.
A gummy is not a promise. Neither is a powder. And “natural” is not a guarantee that something is safe or right for a particular person.
The question I want to keep asking is: Am I caring for my body, or am I buying another promise because I’m unhappy with it?
I know what my answer has been too many times.
My body is not a punishment
I put my body through a lot with drugs and alcohol. To follow that with so many unnecessary powders and gummies—to keep pushing and pushing—feels heartbreaking to me now.
I’ve even wondered whether I might soon be writing to you beautiful folks about cancer or some other serious health news.
That is uncertainty, not a diagnosis. I cannot say that a particular product has caused me cancer, or that illness would be my body taking revenge.
What I can say is that this has brought me to a revelation: the body is a miracle.
I want to care for mine for however much time I have, from now until my due date with God and whatever adventure comes next.
And I hope that means a long time. A healthy time. A life I get to enjoy while I’m here.
Let it take time
We want everything fast. Fast food. Fast fads. Fast fashion. Fast cars.
“Speed kills,” remember that?
I’m tired of bringing that same urgency to my body. I want to stop treating every day like a deadline to become someone smaller.
So this is my invitation, to you and to myself: stop offending your body. Stop speaking to it as though everything it is doing is wrong.
Give it care. Give it time. Get help where you need help.
Positive affirmations matter to me. Not as a cure, but as a different way to speak to myself.
I am beautiful. I am worth caring for. I don’t have to hate myself into change.
We could be happy.
How’s that for an idea?
This is my personal experience, not medical advice. For evidence-based information, see NIH guidance on weight-loss supplements, help for binge eating, and the National Cancer Institute’s explanation of cancer risk.
Because Brooks 