Can a person train their body back to what it was, or does doing that just teach you to hate what it became?

There is no prior body waiting behind the current one like a prize. That earlier version was also chosen, also temporary, also assembled from habit and accident and the specific cultural moment you happened to inhabit. When you train toward it, you are not returning anywhere — you are standing in the present tense, making a choice, with no guarantee the goal deserves the anguish being spent on it. The useful question is not whether the body can change. It is who taught you to see this body as a problem in the first place. That lesson arrived from outside. It was accepted. It can be examined. The training worth doing is against that — not against the body that showed up.

“Existence precedes essence.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

The body is an amānah — a trust held temporarily, not a possession. The difference between discipline and war against oneself lives entirely in the niyyah: the intention sitting quiet beneath the first movement, before the shoes go on, before the mirror is consulted. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya understood that the heart's orientation transforms the act itself — the same fast that purifies one person destroys another. To rebuild strength as an expression of gratitude for what Allah has preserved is an act of worship. To rebuild it as a verdict against what Allah permitted — the years, the softening, the change — is grief wearing discipline's clothes. The work is the same. The niyyah is not.

“Actions are judged by intentions, and every person will have what they intended.”

— Hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari 1

The honest answer is that the body at twenty-three is not waiting behind the current one like a reward. It is gone — specifically, permanently — the way a particular Tuesday afternoon in October is gone. No program retrieves it. The question that sends someone to the gym at 5 a.m. to chase it is, in this sense, a small trap they set for themselves. But Camus understood something about traps: the response to absurdity is not resignation and is not delusion. It is revolt. The work of attempting return teaches, with brutal precision, exactly what this body is capable of right now. That capacity — laced up, moving, refusing to stop — is not consolation for losing the other body. It is its own answer.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Three in the morning, the bathroom mirror, the fluorescent flicker that makes the face look like a problem requiring solution. The question worth pressing — not rhetorically, but the way you'd press a bruise until it answers — is who exactly is standing there. The one who remembers the former body is not the body. It has not softened. It has not changed. It never entered time at all. Advaita Vedanta is not offering comfort here; it is offering precision. The Self — the witness behind the one who stands and calculates — is Brahman, undivided, unaged, undiminished. That Self has no before-photo. When the inquiry is taken seriously, the mirror problem does not get solved. It gets seen through.

“I am not the body, not the mind. I am the witness of all.”

— Adi Shankaracharya, Vivekachudamani

Strip the program, the shoes, the before-photo pinned to the refrigerator, and what remains is a question that was never really about training: it is about whether someone will look at you again the way they once did, and whether you will look at yourself that way. Diogenes of Sinope had no mirror in the barrel because the barrel had no use for one. The Cynics were not indifferent to the body — they lived harder in their bodies than most — but they refused to hand the body's meaning over to any audience, internal or external. What is left when the audience is removed is a body breathing in a room, unremarkable and sufficient, which cannot be seen clearly while it is being measured against a memory.

“I am a citizen of the world.”

— Diogenes of Sinope, as recorded in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers