Shower Power
Women's Health US|November - December 2024
How one writer improved her mental health by connecting with her body
Zoe Weiner
Shower Power

There are many details about my past that are fuzzy now, but certain memories are clear as day.

I remember the girl who called me fat in the first grade. I remember the time my mom put me on a soup-only diet after I'd gained weight at summer camp. (I was 11.) And I remember the time a guy I'd been dating broke up with me during the darkest moments of my eating disorder because he "wasn't attracted to me anymore." To this day, a picture I'd seen in a magazine of Jessica Simpson in her Daisy Dukes still haunts me. None of these memories were good for my body image.

For nearly two decades, no matter what I put my body through-which could best be described as a cycle of starving, overexercising, recovering, and repeating-I struggled to love what I saw in the mirror. At some point, I began to just accept that my body and I would never get along. Like a bad roommate, she was someone I was going to have to learn to live with.

But then the 2020 lockdown happened. I was sharing a small space with a partner, and the only me-time I got was the 10 minutes I spent in the shower. I began to cherish those moments of silence, and pretty soon, a quick latherand-rinse transformed into a multistep process with two types of exfoliation and layers of lotion.

And what began as a way for me to get some much-needed space transformed into something else.

All that time slathering and scrubbing forced me to connect to my body in a way that felt foreign to me. Exfoliating my legs gave me a chance to feel the muscles I'd built up from years as a runner. Moisturizing my stomach connected me to a part of my body I'd always done my best to avoid touching.

This story is from the November - December 2024 edition of Women's Health US.

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This story is from the November - December 2024 edition of Women's Health US.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.

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