For much of her life, Jennifer Kohnhorst hated her body. The 41-year-old mother of two remembers feeling fat much of the time, even when she wasn’t. But today, she reclaims the word matter-of-factly.

“I’m fat not like Dove beauty ad fat, I’m fat like rolls, and dimples,” she said in a story that aired last week on The Moth’s storytelling podcast. In the story, St. Paul, Minnesota, native Kohnhorst recounts taking a solo vacation to Ten Thousand Waves, a clothing-optional spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was here that, upon disrobing and examining her own five-foot-tall frame among the vast desert landscape, she learned to love her skin—rolls and dimples and all.

“I came to the conclusion that you had a couple of options: If you’re going to complain about [your body], you really have to actively change it. But if you don’t want to change it, you have to accept it. So I resigned myself to accepting it begrudgingly. This is who I am,” Kohnhorst tells TakePart by phone, nearly five years after she took the life-changing trip to Santa Fe and a year after first sharing her story on a stage in front of 1,000 people during a Moth story slam at Minnesota Public Radio’s Fitzgerald Theater.

The pivotal moment in Kohnhorst’s story comes when she notices a woman leaving the hot tub and immediately identifies with her: She, Kohnhorst is convinced, hates her body. “I’m looking at her and I have no idea why, because she is beautiful,” she says in the podcast. “But I know, I’m like, ‘There’s something she’s ashamed of, she hates, and it makes me really sad.’ ”

And then Kohnhorst stopped to think about how incredible her body really was: It had birthed two babies without drugs—one of which was over 10 pounds—and had allowed her immense pleasure, even though over her lifetime, she’d abused it with cigarettes and drugs and alcohol. And yet, amazingly, it continued to function effortlessly.

Since performing her story onstage and more recently having it featured on The Moth’s weekly iTunes podcast—which is also broadcast to public radio stations throughout the country—Kohnhorst says she’s been surprised by the way the story has resonated with other women, especially ones she always thought of as very traditionally beautiful.

“I have every reason, according to the conventional beauty standards, to feel bad about my body, but when women who, in my opinion, conform to those conventional beauty standards and still feel sh---y about their bodies, then it tells me, it’s a problem,” she says.

And while Kohnhorst herself works in advertising, as a copywriter and creative director, she says the industry’s unattainable beauty standards might be partially to blame for why some women feel so awful about their bodies. Awareness of body image starts young: 48 percent of all 13- to 17-year-old girls surveyed nationally said they wished they were as skinny as the models they saw in fashion magazines, and 47 percent said fashion magazines give them a body image to strive for, according to a 2010 study by Girl Scout Research Institute.

“We ask girls that are 15 and 16 to model clothes that are intended to be for an audience of grown women,” says Kohnhorst. She adds, “I think we’re taught, at least I was in my generation, that feeling good about your body and who you are is being stuck up and arrogant, and feeling bad is normal.”

As an antidote to feeling bad, she recommends a stripped-down solution: Bare it all. “Go and be naked with other women. Take your clothes off in the locker room and don’t put a towel around you,” she says. “Those kinds of things can just be liberating in and of themselves,” she adds, remembering the time she disrobed in a gym locker room while eight months pregnant.

Performing at The Moth proved to be a very different but similarly revealing experience. “Being vulnerable in front of a bunch of strangers,” Kohnhorst says, “contrary to what you might think, turns out to be empowering. ”