My story

Welcome! I'm Ariane - a holistic health enthusiast with a BA in Behavioral Science and MA in Global Health. I spend my days researching integral health and sustainability, coaching and teaching yoga. However, while I live in alignment with my intuition today, it certainly hasn't always felt that way.

My parents were dieting for as long as I can remember. Soon enough, I began to pinch my belly fat, step on the scale, count calories and over-exercise as well. (Alongside sucking in my cheeks to look skinnier, as you can see in the second photo to the right).

It didn’t help that I was a late bloomer. Teased in highschool for having a flat chest, I was called everything from straight-up ugly to “not girlfriend material”. These humiliating experiences confirmed my perception that my body was the problem.

Feeling like an old soul, I desired nothing more than to be taken seriously. Yet at the age of 16 (images to the right), I still had people tell me that I looked like ten.

I was deeply unfulfilled with my life situation and drowning in existential qualms. However, still not of legal age, I couldn’t undertake any major changes.

Depressed and even suicidal at times, I doubled down on controlling the one thing I thought I could: my body and the way it looked.

Despair and misplaced willpower

Even though I was skinny, I still felt inadequate. After all, the goalpost moved every time I hit the "magic number" on the scale, while my weight yo-yoed. My hunt for the "dream physique" left me deprived and fatigued. Not only was this counterproductive for my aesthetic goals, but it sabotaged the very life I wanted to live.

On top of over-exercising, I compensated for my sense of powerlessness by optimizing my diet (or so I thought). This introduced me to the world of detox, including raw food, juice cleansing and water fasting. As soon as I hit eighteen, I booked a flight to Costa Rica to do a 21-day water fast. It was finally time to get my life in order and become my best self...

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As you can tell, not eating for 21 days only made me smaller and weaker. Aside from not healing any of the things I had hoped, this wasn't the transformation I had envisioned...

Indeed, reality turned out very different from my Pinterest board of vibrant women traveling the tropics. I experienced hair loss, bloating, painful digestion and was still binging... except this time on fruit and cucumber noodles. Though things looked different on the outside, my internal struggles were all the same.

Here I was, in paradise, having done seemingly everything in my power to change my body and life for the better - so why was I still miserable?

Hitting rock bottom

Having exhausted my options of extreme measures, I started to question my approach: Might the sustainable middle path be the answer after all? Yet old habits die hard. Upon returning home, I started binging on regular foods again, eating as much as a jar of peanut butter, loaf of bread and five bananas in one sitting. In an effort to relieve myself of the incapacitating discomfort and disgust that resulted, I began to purge.

This battle against my appetite continued until the morning of my first half-marathon. Leaning over the bathroom sink with a finger down my throat, it dawned on me: Here I am, about to run 21 km - and I won’t even keep my breakfast.

I swore to never purge again and kept my promise. Nevertheless, the fight against my body continued... for years.

Though I didn't purge anymore, I still tried to keep up with restriction. Eventually, I accepted that dieting was a dead end: I had to gain weight - and the only way out was through.

Ashamed of my physical changes, I left my family and friends to recover in isolation. While traveling, I hired my first (and last) online coach to help me in my relationship with food. Unfortunately, her approach to intuitive eating merely scratched the surface. Turns out that "just" eating when hungry and stopping when full wasn't that simple... The underlying causes to my struggles remained unaddressed.

Over the next year, I gained around 10 kg. The water retention made me feel puffy, while my old clothes wouldn’t fit. In an effort to hide my body, I spent the subsequent summer living in an old, oversized sweatshirt (third image above).

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Stability and relapse

My weight eventually stabilized, yet I still felt deeply at odds with life. Soon, I added another maladaptive coping strategy to the mix.

Mistaking accomplishment for fulfillment, I got into the hustle of toxic productivity. Not only was I juggling two master's programs, a part-time job, side hustle and strict workout routine, I was also trying to "fix" myself to maintain a toxic relationship.

In a desperate attempt to self-soothe, I leaned on old behaviors - and before I knew it, the binge restrict-cycle was back in full swing.

While others perceived me as a healthy and fit high achiever, I was grinding myself to the ground. Burnout was only a matter of time. Yet so was my healing...

Read on