For most of my life, my body was something I was trying to fix. It has taken me the better part of forty years to realize she was never the problem.
The girl in the studio mirror
I started studying modern dance when I was fourteen years old. Even as a teenager, I had a naturally curved hourglass shape. Hips, thighs, the whole ancestral inheritance. Around family, my shape was celebrated. It was the ideal. But the moment I stepped into a dance studio, the message flipped. I was too much. Too curvy. Too soft in the wrong places. As the only Black girl in most of the rooms I was in, I was always being quietly, and sometimes even silently, told that my body was wrong to keep doing the thing I loved most.
I don't think anyone meant to confuse or break something in me. But something became confused and broken anyway. The disconnect between what my home world said about my body and what the world I wanted to belong to said about it lasted through most of my twenties.
My twenties: all out war
In my twenties, I went to war with my body. Long cardio sessions, sometimes with a pre-workout of diet pills washed down with coffee to give me an extra push of stamina. Obsessive daily weigh-ins. A relentless, exhausting attempt to shrink myself into the shape I felt I was supposed to be. My size was my value.
I want to state this plainly, because I think a lot of women my age have lived some version of it and never told anyone the extent of it. Disordered eating. Body dysmorphia. Pills I should not have been taking so irresponsibly. I was working out for punishment and calling it discipline. From the outside, I looked like a person who had it together.
I did not.
My thirties: the pendulum swings
In my thirties, I met my now-husband. For the first time in my adult life, I was in a relationship where I felt seen as I was. I didn't feel the need to "look perfect" anymore. I was finally able to stop chasing perfection. I softened.
The trouble was that my hormones shifted right alongside that softening, and I began gaining weight.
I didn't know what to do with that, because my whole identity had been built on staying a certain size. I'm sure that my years of disordered eating didn't help the hormonal ebbs and flows my body was also under. When my body started changing, I treated her like a stranger, because she was. The old tricks didn't work. And the new ones didn't work either. I felt like I was wearing a costume, and the worse I felt physically, the more my mental state and confidence began to fall apart.
Even though I worked in the fitness industry, from my early thirties well into my forties, my weight was my number one enemy. Every morning, I put on a brave face and never let how much I couldn't stand the way I looked and felt about myself ever show to my clients and the people who came to take my yoga classes.
What no one was catching
Here is the part I wish someone had told me sooner: my body was not broken. My information was broken.
About five years ago, I finally connected with the right medical professionals and got the right diagnoses. Insulin resistance and thyroid issues. Real, physical, measurable things that no amount of "eat less and move more" was ever going to fix.
Because here's the thing: I already did eat less and move more.
Once I got on the proper medication, my body started doing what it had been trying to do all along. I started losing weight without dramatically changing my lifestyle. My energy came back. My hair stopped coming out in handfuls in the shower. My hips stopped aching all the time.
I say all of this out loud because I know how many women in their forties and fifties are being told, in ways subtle and not, that their weight is a willpower problem.
Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's hormonal. Sometimes it's a condition that hasn't been tested for yet. Sometimes it's a thyroid issue that nobody bothered to check.
If you are exhausted and achy and gaining weight for no reason and nothing is working, please don't give up. Find a doctor who is willing to listen and not gaslight you. Find a doctor who is willing to actually look and help you find and solve the issue.
Less gives more
Midlife has a way of rearranging itself in ways we don't choose. I lost my dad. I lost my grandmother and my grandfather, all in the span of about five weeks. My husband and I had been disillusioned with city life for a while, and all that loss gave us the shove we needed to leave Chicago and move back to my hometown. Closer to family, closer to nature, closer to a simpler life. We sold our condo and stayed with my brother and his family for a stretch while we waited for our condo to sell and to find a home here in Fort Wayne.
During that time, I still had my yoga practice, but it wasn't in a studio. I didn't have mirrors. I didn't have a packed hot room. I didn't need to wear my cute Fabletics leggings and roll out my expensive Lululemon mat.
What I did have was my cheap folding travel mat. And more often than not, I did my practice in the camisole and shorts I had slept in.
In that season of loss and grief and in-between, I realized I had been getting yoga wrong for a very long time. My yoga wasn't about standing in a hot room in a matching outfit in front of a wall of mirrors.
My yoga was about being stripped down to the purest, most sacred form of myself. Laid bare.
It was the philosophy. The yamas. The niyamas. The koshas. The lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. The chanting of Om. The breath work. The stillness. All of the things I had never really been able to fully focus on while mat-to-mat in a packed 105-degree room with a rocking playlist blaring in the background.
I want to be careful here, because CorePower was my whole life for nearly fifteen years. I built a life and a career there. Many of the women reading this, I met you because of that place. Some of the people I love most in the world came to me through those hot rooms, and even if it has been years since we've talked or seen each other, you are permanently a part of my story. I will never regret that season of my life. I needed it to become who I am now.
But I also needed to be broken down. I needed to lose the mirrors. I needed the silence. I needed to go as far away as possible to be able to return to myself.
What healing actually looked like
Somatic work is where I began to move the needle. Not just the grief of my recent losses. The older ones too. The teenage dancer being told she was too curvy. The twenty-something popping pills. The thirty-something who felt betrayed by her own hormones. All of that had been living in my body for decades, and no amount of vinyasa flow was going to reach it.
Therapy helped too. So did becoming a certified Yoga Lifestyle Coach, which gave me a framework (specifically the yamas and niyamas, the koshas, the yogic understanding that the body is only one of many layers of a person) for what I had already been quietly learning on my own.
I moved home. I took a job at the library branch I grew up going to regularly as a child and a teenager. Working there gives me a completely different kind of steadiness, and sense of community, than the fitness industry did. I love being of service to the needs of the public at large. Serving families, the elderly, chatting with the kids and teenagers who come in after school every day to do their homework, play Uno or chess, or just hang out and talk about who their latest crush is. It's a different kind of engagement, and it brings me a different kind of joy.
I also kept teaching, but I do it on my own terms. Since moving back home almost six years ago, I have yet to teach in a studio. I only teach and coach virtually, from home, in one-on-one settings with women I feel I can have a true and valuable energetic exchange with.
What I choose now
My body is no longer a project.
These days, I move to stay flexible, strong, and functional. That is the entire goal. I want to be able to garden without my back going out. I want to be able to sit on the floor to play with a niece or a nephew and get back up without ceremony. I want to be able to walk the trails with my husband without pain in my joints.
I no longer pound my joints to death on a treadmill. I don't punish myself on the Stair Master. I don't track every calorie or every step with my sole intention being to reach some impossible number on the scale. That approach hurt me for twenty-plus years. I finally believed the evidence of that way of living and thinking.
Exercise today is a way for me to honor my body. Adopting that way of moving changed everything for me, and if you're still committed to the old ways of punishment (even just a little), I invite you to try letting a little bit of this way of thinking about moving your body into your life.
What works best for me is listening to my body and doing what feels good for me that day. I explore a mix of yoga, Barre Intensity classes, breath work, somatic release practices, walking through nature, and gentle strength work with small props like the Pilates bar/stick, the magic circle, resistance bands, and my own bodyweight.
Sometimes I do 60 to 75 minutes, but I've found the sweet spot for me is 30 to 45 minute home practices. These kinds of practices are practical and short enough for me to actually do them daily and consistently. And because they happen in my home studio, not having to travel eliminates stress, excessive expense, and most importantly, excuses. They also respect where my body is right now, not where she was at twenty-five.
None of this is a prescription. If pounding out miles is what makes you feel alive, run your heart out. This isn't about which movement is right. It's about which movement is right for you, right now, in the body you're actually living in. And of course that looks different for everyone.
A soft closing
If any part of my story felt familiar (the girl in the studio mirror, the twenties war, the thirties softening, the forties confusion, the quiet knowing that something in your body is off, or that the way you're being told to move through change is simply not working for you) I want you to know that you are not alone.
You never were.
I am finally comfortable sharing all of this because I want my blog, this little corner of the internet, to be a safe and healing space where women like us can gather without being sold to. If anything here ever resonates with you deeply and you'd like to learn more about working with me virtually, my door is always open. But first and foremost, I'm here because I know and I remember what it felt like to be in the middle of it.
I want to hold space, and to be the kind of company I would have wanted on my side back then.
The philosophy I had for most of my life was hurting me, not helping me.
I finally learned that the goal is consistency, not perfection.
♥
