Sohee Carpenter On How She Found Food Freedom And Body Neutrality
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Sohee Carpenter can remember the specific body-shaming incident at 14 years old that fractured her early relationship with health and fitness. At swim practice, a male teammate wrapped his fingers around the top of her arm, as if measuring the circumference. He then did the same to his own biceps in comparison to suggest that her arm was big. “That was enough for me to start skipping lunch,” Sohee recalls.
She entered a vicious few years of anorexia and bulimia while still maintaining intense activity levels as a teenager. “I was always outside, swimming, training, all that stuff,” says Sohee, now 33. “But all of a sudden, I’m in eighth grade also caring about calories and eating less.”
Body image and weight loss and dieting consumed her into her 20s. High school Sohee found herself admiring a fitness model with a signature blonde bob and ripped core on the cover of a fitness magazine at a local Santa Barbara supermarket. “For a long time, I was like, Why can’t I look like her?” By sophomore year of college, Sohee, too, had reduced body fat, gained visible muscles, and earned a personal training certification.
While an airbrushed pic is so 2009, misguided teens are probably forever; they both set her on a path to eventually find food freedom and body neutrality that’s relatable (and just as complicated to achieve) over a decade later.
“Even though I’m a certified strength and conditioning specialist, the majority of my content is focused on body image and eating behavior,” she says. “The workouts are usually not the part people struggle with—it’s the eating, the sleep, the everything else.” (Sohee went back to school in 2016 to get her master’s in the psychology of eating behavior; she’s also in the final year of obtaining her PhD, researching weight lifting in women.)
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CourtesyHer own winding road to recovery—over the years it involved mental health treatment, finally getting an ADHD diagnosis, surrounding herself with friends and a partner who know how to help her short-circuit intrusive thoughts, and more—has informed her empathy-first coaching style. “Healing with exercise and food is not linear. You can be doing great, and a comment at a family gathering ends up triggering you and sending you right back,” she says. “We have to keep talking about these things.”
At her company, Sohee has three coaches who work under her. Her philosophy focuses on ID’ing problematic food and fitness behavior patterns an individual has, then helping them understand—and eventually undo—them.
She assigns homework designed to break the wellness rules people have created for themselves. When a former client had a habit of avoiding carbs until dinner and overeating at night, Sohee uncovered the woman’s assumption that carbs aren’t so-called breakfast foods and instructed her to add rice or potatoes to her morning meal for a number of days. “A month later, she’s like, ‘Oh my god, I’m not bingeing anymore. This is so cool.’”
Despite having gold-standard credentials and years of academia and research under her belt, plus firsthand experience with healing, Sohee doesn’t pretend to always set a perfect example. She doesn’t brush past missteps under the rug; she calls them out and course-corrects, often turning her reflections into an Instagram Reel. “You have to be willing to admit fault,” she says. “I try to foster a growth mindset.”
Even now, with over 600,000 followers on her social, it’s sometimes lost on Sohee that she has power and reach. “I definitely have my moments where I wonder, Why am I even doing this?” she says.
Follow @SoheeFit on Instagram.
Then Sohee will remember there might be, perhaps, a mother who hears a piece of her advice that resonates and who could pass down that wisdom to her daughter. “The more people spread these messages, the more likely it is to reach someone who’s 14, or 20, or even 60 and needs to hear them.” So, now, when an unrealistic image lands on her feed, or someone makes a hurtful body comment, she thinks of the young Sohees worth fighting for…and keeps creating content.
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QiQi Hill
Whitney Simmons
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Photographed by Caleb & Gladys. Styling: Kristen Saladino. Hair: Ty Shearn. Makeup: Rebecca Alexander at See Management using Danessa Myricks Beauty. Manicure: Nori for Chanel Le Vernis.
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