22/06/2026
I get asked why I started The BodyBakery and I always point to my bodybuilding years. The truth goes back further.
It started in middle school. One nickname.
Becky Beef Cow.
The kind that gets said in a hallway and spreads before you know it's happening. I heard it, believed it, and eventually stopped fighting it and just carried it.
What I didn't understand then: a kid who learns her body is something to be ashamed of doesn't come out of that with a healthy relationship with food. She comes out of it with a relationship she'll spend years trying to fix without knowing what she's fixing.
Food became comfort. It didn't call me names. But it controlled me. And the price was shame I got very good at hiding behind good grades, accomplishments, people pleasing.
I never grew out of it. I just called it different things. A sweet tooth. No willpower. A bad week. I never called it what it actually was.
By my thirties I thought I'd found the answer. Bodybuilding. Structure. Control of the thing that had controlled me for so long. For a while, it felt like it was working.
What I didn't see was that I'd just swung the pendulum the other way. Broken metabolism. Constant restriction. Dieting to look a certain way rather than feel a certain way. I'd traded one unhealthy relationship with food for another that looked better in a competition suit.
The thing I needed wasn't discipline and willpower.
It was balance.
And I couldn't find it in any system I was handed.
So I built one.
The BodyBakery didn't start as a business plan. It started as the answer a little girl carrying a cruel nickname needed someone to tell her, and that a woman in her thirties finally figured out how to say.
You don't have to be at war with food. And you don't have to be at war with yourself to feel good in the skin you're in. There's a way to have both.
I know because I had to build it to believe it.
🤍 — Rebecca