Starving for Approval

Mira was eleven the first time she heard her mother sigh at a magazine cover and say that she wished she looked like that, and although she didn't understand it in the moment, she filed it away the way children file away things adults say without meaning to teach anything at all.

By the time she turned fourteen, she understood completely, because standing in front of mirrors had become less an act of looking and more an act of grading, a private tribunal in which her thighs were found guilty of touching and her stomach was found guilty of existing when she sat down. The girls in magazines never seemed to have this problem, and neither, it appeared, did the girls in her school hallway who collected compliments the way other people collected loose change, so Mira concluded, with the flawed logic of a teenager, that the problem belonged entirely to her, and that it was hers alone to fix.

It began quietly, the way most collapses do. Skipping breakfast felt like an accomplishment before it felt like a habit, and the habit, in turn, hardened into something closer to a religion, complete with its own vocabulary of discipline and virtue: clean eating, earning it, being good today. She counted things with the obsessiveness of someone trying to solve an equation that never balanced, steps and minutes and choices, as though her worth might finally reveal itself if she just added the numbers correctly. When restriction stopped delivering the reward she expected, she swung towards its opposite, punishing gym sessions stacked two a day, a body driven well past what it was quietly begging her to stop doing, all in pursuit of a version of herself she had never once encountered outside of a filtered photograph or an advertisement lit to erase every human imperfection.

Her weight became something like a pendulum, and people, without meaning to, cheered whichever direction it happened to be swinging. When it went up, they called it getting healthy. When it went down, they said look at you, as if her body were a project finally nearing completion. Mira, who had been starving for something steadier than either extreme, mistook their attention for love, because at that age it was the closest imitation she had ever been offered.

What nobody told her, because perhaps nobody quite understood it themselves, was that a body is not a machine that can be overridden indefinitely without consequence, and that somewhere deep inside her, her ovaries had been listening the entire time, reading years of stress and scarcity the way a barometer reads pressure, until they began, quietly and without ceremony, to shut the lights off one room at a time.

By twenty six, her periods had become something closer to a rumour than a routine, a thing that used to happen the way childhood used to happen. She blamed it on work stress, because that explanation was easier to live inside than the alternative, and for a while, easier was enough.

Then, at thirty one, in a beige office that smelled faintly of antiseptic and old coffee, a doctor with tired but kind eyes said the words premature ovarian failure, and Mira asked her to repeat them, not because she had misheard, but because she needed the sentence to sound different the second time. It did not.

Early menopause, the doctor said more gently, watching Mira's face go blank in the particular way that faces go blank when a person is doing arithmetic they never wanted to do. Your hormone levels are consistent with someone twenty years older than you. I have to ask, has your weight changed a great deal over the years? Dieting, exercise, stress? Mira let out a small, broken laugh, because the question, however clinical, had just asked her entire life story back to her in a single sentence.

The doctor must have seen something in her face, some flicker of recognition, because she set down her pen and spoke more slowly, as though she wanted the explanation to land somewhere Mira could actually keep it.

Your body doesn't know the difference between a famine and a diet. When it senses that not enough energy is coming in, or that too much is being burned off through exercise without being replaced, it treats that as an emergency, not a lifestyle.

And the very first system it sacrifices in an emergency is the reproductive one, she went on, because from a purely biological standpoint, your body has no interest in supporting a pregnancy when it isn't convinced it can keep you alive first. So it quiets a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which normally sends out the signal that tells your ovaries to keep producing oestrogen, and without that signal, everything downstream goes quiet too.

She went on to explain that it wasn't only the years of restriction that had done this, but the exhausting cycle layered on top of it, the punishing workouts that never gave her body a chance to recover, each one read by her system as another piece of evidence that resources were scarce and had to be conserved rather than spent on something as costly as a menstrual cycle. And beneath all of it, she added, there had likely been another current running the entire time, the chronic stress of never feeling like her body was acceptable as it was, because that kind of constant psychological strain elevates a hormone called cortisol, and sustained high cortisol interferes with the same reproductive signals from a different direction entirely, so that the restriction and the overtraining and the self-criticism hadn't been three separate things happening to her, but three hands squeezing the same narrow passage until nothing could get through it any more.

It's rarely just one factor, the doctor said quietly. It's usually the whole pattern, sustained for years, that finally asks the body to make a choice it was never designed to make comfortably.

The grief that followed surprised her, because it wasn't grief for a body she had lost so much as grief for the years she had spent at war with the one she still had. She thought of every skipped meal that had once felt like a victory, every extra mile logged out of guilt rather than joy, and she understood, far later than she would have liked, that she had been fighting the wrong opponent for most of her life. The magazines had never been real, the comparisons had never been fair, and her body, stubborn and adaptive and endlessly forgiving despite everything, had apparently been trying to survive her the entire time.

Recovery did not arrive in a straight line, and there were still mornings when she caught herself in front of a mirror and heard the old tribunal begin its familiar proceedings, as though nobody had told the machine that the war was over. But slowly, deliberately, she learned to answer back. She began eating meals without apology attached to them. She moved because it felt good rather than because it felt like penance owed. She found a therapist who helped her, patiently and over many stubborn months, to separate her worth from her waistline.

She could not undo what had already happened inside her own body, because some doors, once closed, simply do not reopen, no matter how much a person wishes otherwise. What she could decide, however, was what happened next, and what she eventually decided was this: she would spend whatever years remained speaking plainly to younger girls who stood exactly where she had once stood, mirror in hand, tallying debts that were never real to begin with.

Your body isn't a project, she told a room full of teenagers years later, her voice steadier than it had ever managed to be at their age. It isn't something to fix or shrink or punish into acceptability. It's the only place you will ever live, so take care of it as though it's home, because it is.

Somewhere in the back row, a girl who reminded her achingly of her younger self wrote the sentence down word for word, as though she needed to keep it somewhere safe.

And perhaps that is the truest thing left to say, not just to that girl, but to every woman reading this, including the mothers among them, the ones who sigh at magazine covers without realising a daughter is standing close enough to hear. We inherit these standards long before we ever agree to them, and we pass them along the same way, quietly, almost without noticing, until a body somewhere down the line pays a price none of us meant to charge. It is worth asking, honestly and without flinching, what it has cost us to chase an image that was never real to begin with, and what it might cost the girls who are watching us chase it still.

xoxo VX Diary

If you, or someone you love, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a mother, recognises any part of this story in your own life, please do not carry it alone and do not wait for a diagnosis to take it seriously. Reach out to a doctor, a therapist, or a trusted professional who understands both the body and the mind behind it. Healing is possible, even after years of harm, and asking for help is not a failure of willpower but an act of courage. You are not alone.

Body & Hormones · Body Image · Hormones · Early Menopause · Shared Story