Many young women have experienced the fangs of diet culture sometime in their life, especially women who grew up in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. When we reflect on that time, our society's obsession with dieting and thinness led to many people developing unhealthy relationships with our bodies. This type of culture leaves a lasting impact that still reverberates to this very day. 

ZOZOFIT user Emily Zahua also went through this experience and began dieting at the age of nine while living with her grandparents. 

“I got some really unhealthy ideas about how to go about having diet and fitness in my life,” she said. 

After she moved out of her grandparents’ house, life drastically changed, swinging in the opposite direction. She remembers eating fast food five to six nights a week. 

“I went from being a normal sized kid to being a 250-pound 16-year-old, which is pretty rough when you’re going through that in high school.” 

She developed an eating disorder and limited herself to eating only 10 grams of fat and a bag of frozen vegetables per day. 

“It was bad to the point where it affected my menstrual cycle because I wasn’t eating anything. It was pretty dramatic. I dropped a lot of weight at that point, but it obviously didn’t stay off.” 

For Emily, cultivating a healthy relationship with food and fitness was of the utmost importance. After spending most of her childhood and early adulthood on what she described as “a roller coaster of diets and fads,” she knew she needed to make a change. 

So, she started a new, healthy full-body wellness journey around her 40th birthday. At the time she began this journey, she weighed almost 275 pounds. 

Creating a Mindful Health Journey 

“This fitness journey is a completely different approach than how I used to do it,” she said. “Before was 'I hate my body. I have to do this because I’m punishing myself for bad behaviors.' But this time, I have a different set of ideas and different methods that I’ve been following.”

Part of the different set of ideas and methods has to do with Emily learning that she is neurodivergent. This means her brain works in a different way and traditional motivational methods may not have the same impact on a neurodivergent person as they would someone who is neurotypical. 

To start her new journey, she began with becoming more gracious to herself and embracing the novelty of a health journey and seeing what she could do. 

Using ZOZOFIT to Improve Overall Health

ZOZOFIT fits into her journey because it allows her to track what her body is doing in what she describes as a “passive” way.

“I don’t have to sit there with a tape measure and then not trust what I’m seeing. I can put the suit on and know that the information I’m seeing is accurate, which helps me relax and not be so hard on myself.” 

Developing a healthy mindset is huge for any fitness journey. Many ZOZOFIT users have found the app helpful because it takes away the stigma that we usually associate with using the scale or weight as a measure for health. With 3D body scanning technology, ZOZOFIT allows users to see accurate body measurements and their body fat percentage — and by using ColorMetric and side-by-side scan comparison, users don’t have to focus on the numbers at all. 

“[ZOZOFIT] gives me a different way of looking at my [transformation] because before it used to be taking a bunch of photos and everything is really subjective… You’re starting to look at things in a very negative spiral kind of way.” 

Often, in photographs, it’s easy to focus on how your skin looks, the impact of the lighting, and even the clothes you’re wearing. 

“With ZOZOFIT, it depersonalizes the process and makes it just so that you can see the data.” 

ZOZOFIT for Strength Training 

Now, Emily has moved toward strength training and has continued to see the benefit of ZOZOFIT over other, more traditional methods of fitness tracking. 

Since muscle mass weighs more than fat, she began to gain weight. 

“But I was able to use ZOZOFIT to see where everything came on. It came in my legs and my arms from where I was actually doing all the activity, so it was nice to see that comparison. I don’t have to beat myself up because I gained weight. I just gained muscle in all the right places.”