12/05/2025
The day I courageously asked my body what it needed was the day that changed everything.
The first time I did this, my body told me: "I want to be loved, just as I am."
So simple but such a gut punch at the same time.
Of course I loved my body!! That was the entire foundation of my personal and professional life: feeding it nourishing foods, tending to its mental health, taking it for the occasional walk 😜
Or was it?
Because at some sub-atomic level, I realized I wasn't always loving my body the way it needed to be loved.
Too much work, too much stress, too much fast food & too little sleep (especially in my 20s) 🙈
In truth, it is easy to love a body when it is performing well. When it's healthy and well. When it's in optimal health, and not waving the white flag of distress with its symptoms.
The conflict happens when the body is unwell. When it's sick, stressed, and overwhelmed. When it's not performing as it "should" and meeting the arbitrary deadlines we've set out for it. Like a remnant of the Industrial Revolution: the body is the machine and a commodity.
With this simple but elegant message from my body, I suddenly realized that I saw this behaviour, at some perhaps unspoken or perhaps subconscious level, as a moral failure.
I felt like when my body was sick or needed "too much" from me, it was unreliable.
It was a liability when it wasn't able to perform at this unrealistic level I had arbitrarily set out for it... instead of a direct reflection of how I had been treating it, day in and day out.
