From the time she was young, Sofie was taught that food was bad and her body was wrong.

Sofie Hagen’s relationship to food became complicated when she was just five years old. A nurse told her mother that she was overweight and would have to go on a diet because it was “dangerous” to her health. 

The nurse had done no medical tests, but she was so persuasive that Sofie’s mother immediately started trying to find ways to help her daughter lose weight. Sofie was introduced to a regime of dieting and portion control. But all this did was make her even more fixated on food and determined to find new ways to get it. It also gave her the message from very early on that there was something wrong with her body. This was extremely painful, and she started to eat more as a way of numbing the pain.

As a teenager, Sofie’s attempts to lose weight only intensified. She tried countless new diets, consumed only diet shakes, and did every form of exercise she could think of – from swimming to pilates to karate. She would periodically lose weight but always put it on again when she could no longer comply with the unrealistic demands of whatever diet she was on. 

This made her hate herself and her body even more intensely. She saw herself as a weak person without any willpower. She dissociated from her body and resorted to bulimia in an effort to lose weight. 

The outside world only reinforced her negative beliefs. Her mother was complicit in trying to force her to diet, giving her the message that her body needed to be changed. Her PE teacher would humiliate her in class, taunting her and forcing her to shower naked in front of her classmates. 

Sofie became so convinced that she was unattractive that even when boyfriends tried to tell her that they liked her body, she was unable to believe them. 

She dreamed of the “thin Sofie” who lived inside her, who would come out one day when she lost enough weight. Thin Sofie would be attractive and happy and successful. Thin Sofie would be fit and graceful and wear beautiful clothes. 

The desire to be thin took up much of Sofie’s childhood and all of her teens. But that was all about to change.