A couple weeks ago, I posted on Facebook about the danger of trying to chase that Instagram body. Lots of people chimed in, but one of them had first hand experience with it. It’s my friend, and fellow personal trainer, Dr. Nattha Wannisorn, when she went from being pretty average, to stage-ready shredded. But super unhealthy. I asked her if she would share her story, and fortunately she agreed. So here is her story:
It was just weeks before my bikini photoshoot when I caught a glimpse of my thigh in the mirror on my way home from the gym.
I saw my pudgy thighs and lower belly.
After three months of intense dieting, exercising, and doping myself with 4 – 5 different fat burners, I went from 32% to under 18% of body fat. My abs had started to show. I posted some photos and exercise videos on social media and was getting some accolades.

et, when I looked in the mirror, my imperfections jumped out at me. Just as I got leaner, I became better at tearing apart my own body in my own eyes.
The wave of disgust, disappointment, astonishment, anger, and embarrassment washed over me.
I felt trapped.
No matter how lean I got, my leanness wasn’t going to make myself lovable if I hated myself because I hated my body. But I couldn’t shake the hatred. I was in a deep and dark place that I had no idea how to get out of.
What was I going to tell everyone? I had just gotten a personal training certification. The photoshoot would certainly become the marketing material that would get me many clients. Like me, these were women who were body-shamed into having unreasonable expectations of their physique. They felt as if all their life problems would dissipate as soon as they banish their belly and thigh fat.
After all, people don’t pay for personal training to grind at the gym. They pay for a better version of themselves—the version I was selling with my water-cut, spray-tanned, and artificially-flexed bikini photoshoot.
I felt like a fraud, but I had to keep it together because people would find out that I was actually falling apart inside.
Everything else in my life was also falling apart. My science experiments hadn’t been working for over a year. I had been spending 12 hours in the lab almost every day throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure it out. After 3 – 4 years of being a proud cancer researcher, I hit the dreaded brick wall. I wasn’t making progress. I was a failure. I felt like I was totally incompetent and didn’t deserve to be where I was.
The real crisis hit after I attended an amazing fitness conference one weekend, where everyone was happy. Other attendees seemed to be making a difference in their clients’ lives, and they had enough money to pay for some fun. I was no less intelligent or capable, but it was painful to realize that maybe the PhD I had worked so hard for was the wrong decision. Not only did I limited myself to a graduate student stipend for the foreseeable future, but I also failed to make a difference in anyone’s lives. I was invisible.
I contemplated quitting graduate school, but it’s either I walked away empty-handed or took another year to finish my experiments, write, and defend my master’s thesis. I couldn’t make myself abandon a 6-year PhD in favor of a 5-year master’s, especially when my project appeared to be sufficiently close to a PhD-worthy breakthrough.
For my entire life, my coping mechanism in these situations was to work harder. So, I put my “everything is fine, and I am perfect” face on so that I wouldn’t have to face the real problem. I continued to put the hours in the lab. I took more health coaching certifications. I started my blog and tried to do my business on the side. I worked out harder and became orthorexic with all my health regimens. I became the fitness pro who shamed my clients for not being able to follow through with their recommended diet and exercise program because they were “not motivated enough.”
Now that I know, it’s a perfect storm for a bout of disordered eating. It’s when your life feels out of control. Being a picture-perfect fitness pro is a way to gain the illusion of control. And whenever you can’t follow it perfectly, you feel like your entire world is falling apart… because it’s truly the last shred of your life that still hasn’t fallen apart. I lost relationships and alienated friends in order to be able to continue dieting and exercising.
Bodybuilding and obtaining abs felt like a way to redeem myself after a lifetime of being a fat kid. I grew up a chunky child who was always picked on for being fat. While I was studious, I never had the energy to play with my friends, and I sucked at all the games. So, I had no friends because I was fat. To make matters worse, I’m Asian, so my parents, grandparents, and extended family would constantly criticize my body. I was always too fat and never good enough. My legs and thighs were too big, and I would never be able to find a husband, they said. They bought me diet books that taught me about all the different food groups and how to count calories (in the name of math and science lessons) when I was 10.
By the time I encountered bodybuilding at 24, I had already tried 6 other diets and was an extreme cardio queen. I considered a triathlon once. My weight had fluctuated 30 lbs on my 5’4″ frame.
In Thailand, I would be considered 30 lbs too fat. In the US and Canada, I would be considered average-sized. Yet inside I was the bullied fat kid, despite being a PhD student doing cancer research.
My body had told me over and over that I wasn’t doing the right things for my health. My cycles were irregular because I was too lean, too stressed out, and working out too hard. I had a hard time staying awake after a Starbucks Venti, probably because I was overdoing all kinds of stimulants. I was depressed and had a hard time getting out of bed every morning.
But I didn’t hear the messages my body was sending me until I woke up one morning with extreme itches all over my body. It became the worst eczema breakout of my life. Most of my upper body was covered in debilitatingly itchy rashes. I became allergic to my winter jacket and boots, which I had worn for years. The itches made my mental turmoil even worse.
I tried to persist and continue with what I was doing, but it was no longer possible. I ended up taking sick leave for a semester to heal and figure out my life.
My first and hardest step was to accept myself and finally believe that I was worth it, even though it felt like my life had already crumbled. Being a Buddhist helped because I learned the concept of impermanence, but I would have to practice letting go. Not only would it be impossibly unhealthy for me to maintain a bikini body, but the bikini body was not the solution to any of my life problems. It was only a way to numb one type of pain with another.
Internet forums and being around other bodybuilders confirmed my experience that the leaner you get, the better your eyes become at finding the last remaining stretch marks and pudgy parts of your body. To be that lean, you would have to be in a caloric deficit, which can make you obsessed with food and mess up your brain in many ways. Sensibly, many bodybuilders struggle with body dysmorphia and disordered eating [R]. It becomes much harder to maintain your progress than to always be bulking or cutting once you develop that kind of obsession. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment confirmed this. When grown men were restricted to 1570 calories/day for 6 months and required to work hard physical labor, they became obsessed with food. They became irritable, fatigued, and depressed [R].
I had to gain some of my body fat back and hang between 22 – 25% body fat to rebalance my hormones and maintain healthy menstrual cycles. Many women think it is convenient to miss periods from training and dieting hard. However, missing periods is bad for you because the healthy circulating hormones do many essential things in your body. Once you start to skip cycles (oligomenorrhea), your estrogen levels can decline, causing bone density loss because estrogen helps maintain bone mass. Estrogen also helps improve mood and reduce cravings, which explains why being too lean can make you moody and crave more unhealthy foods.
Because I knew that getting myself into the health mess was my fault in the first place, I refused medications. I refused steroids to control my eczema, hormonal birth control pills to regulate my period, and antidepressants to improve my mood. In conventional medicine, these were incurable chronic conditions that could be controlled with medications. I knew that I was fully responsible for these symptoms, and my body was doing its best to survive by warning me with these symptoms. To suppress the symptoms would be unscientific. Also, the gruesome images in the online topical steroid addiction forums were motivating enough to keep me off the steroids during the hardest moments.
To heal my body, I had to have enough nutrients and calories, so I couldn’t be the kind of caloric deficit that I put myself through for months. After a few months, I did an elimination diet to figure out the food allergies caused by my excessive stress levels, which effectively cleared up the eczema. With stress management, some natural remedies, spiritual soul searching, and eating more food, I was able to reverse most of the symptoms and return to graduate school much healthier.
I continued to strength train. I dabbled in some powerlifting-style training before I sustained some injuries and discovered that I have scoliosis. However, now I continue to lift out of self-love and pride in what my body can do. I intuitively eat mostly unprocessed and natural foods as much as I want out of self-love and respect.
Since this new transformation, my energy around men has also shifted. I don’t feel like I am trying as hard. I am 100% comfortable in my skin, with no makeup. Men would tell me they dislike how other women are so ashamed of their bodies, even though the men don’t even notice the flaws. I’ve also observed the same degree of body shame and disordered eating among men, especially the athletic ones. I’ve found that being accepting of my body also makes it easier for both parties to be comfortable since I’m also not shaming them either.
There couldn’t be a better antidote to my lifetime of fat-shaming and bullying than when I visited a Caribbean island as a single woman at my heaviest – 175 lbs. Caribbean men prefer bigger women with thick legs and well-endowed bottoms, which is my body type. Also, being Asian on an island that was 95% black made me exotic and highly desirable. On the small island, I was constantly getting catcalled. The divemasters, bus drivers, and tour guides also hit on me. This confirmed to me that beauty standards vary throughout the world, and from person to person. However, the constant male attention made me feel unsafe, so I didn’t enjoy the experience and ended up cutting the trip short. Later that year, I visited Thailand and was called fat again.
If you are trying to make your body one way over the other to attract certain kinds of men, you are making a mistake because different men prefer different body types. But even physical appearance isn’t the only factor that influences their choice of life partners. It is far better to find your healthy sweet spot and find someone who likes you as you are.
My family members still body shame me and constantly ask about my weight. I have been through the 3 stages of dealing with this.
Phase 1: Reality – was when whatever they said was my reality. I truly believed every word they said, including that I was ugly, fat, and would not find love.
Phase 2: Anger – when I realized how dangerous those words were, I became angry. At this point, I tried to shut them down.
Phase 3: Humor – when I learned to love myself and become 100% comfortable in my skin. I realized that the people who criticize my body have no control over my body and what I do for my health. They also don’t understand that I am heavy because I have more muscles. Here, I make fun of the body-shaming comments in my head and don’t let it get to me.
I am by no means condoning obesity or an unhealthy lifestyle—quite the contrary. Many obese people feel like they are not good enough. They carry a lot of shame and trauma about their appearance, and seeming inability to stay on the wagon. Also, the way many fitness professionals market themselves and work with their clients makes it worse. I have been both the client and the trainer. I believe that the real long-term solution requires unpacking this psychological burden before helping the clients find a new healthy equilibrium. Often, it is in the client’s best interest to refer them to an appropriate mental health professional.
I wouldn’t say that bodybuilding, lifting, or dieting cause health problems or disordered eating. Many bodybuilders and strength athletes can participate in their sports healthily. Personally, I may have a tendency for disordered eating when I am under a lot of stress, but I am not everyone. However, I am deeply concerned when I notice a similar pattern in other people.
Disclaimer: my decision to avoid medications was a very personal decision. For my case, the cause of my health issues was obvious, and I wanted to try the natural route first. I am not advocating against medication in general, as there are times and places for them. Eczema, irregular periods, and depression are complex conditions with multiple contributing factors, and there is no one cure that works for all cases of these conditions.
The lessons I learned from this experience include:
- It is important to slow down, listen, and face the real problems rather than avoiding it.
- Unless you are genetically made to have a bikini magazine model body, it will take a tremendous amount of effort and health sacrifice to get there. If you desire it, it is important to dig deeper as to why. Many women feel like they need to lose a certain amount of weight or belly fat in order to feel loved. We have to keep in mind that over multiple billion-dollar industries have profited from making people feel not good enough for centuries. I urge you to stop following those social media accounts and stop consuming that type of media. It is unnecessary, nor is it healthy to look like underwear models all the time. Healthy women carry some body fat, stretch marks, and dimples. Nobody is perfect.
- If you hate yourself or your body, no amount of dieting, exercising, or even plastic surgery will make you love yourself.
Bio
Nattha Wannissorn, PhD is a scientist, storyteller, educator, copywriter, health coach, positive body image advocate, and, currently, Wellness Medical Writer. She is also a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, Registered Holistic Nutritionist, and Fitness Coach with over 5 years of client experience, both online and offline. Nattha believes the best way to advocate for natural health is to demonstrate scientific literacy and communicate with integrity through education-based marketing. As former Chief Content Officer of the popular health website SelfHacked and genetic analyzer SelfDecide, she helped improve the health of over 13,000 customers. She has co-authored research in prestigious journals, including Cell and Cell Host & Microbes. She is now the CEO and lead scientific editor at wellnessmedicalwriter.com.