A Warning and an Invitation: if you are here for a quick fix, read on no more.
I mean that kindly. There are plenty of places on the internet that will sell you one. This is not that place.
But if you are exhausted by quick fixes. If you have tried them, lost count of how many, and arrived here with a particular kind of tired that goes deeper than fatigue, the tired that comes from fighting something for decades and not winning, then you are exactly where you need to be.
This is a story about the body. About what happens when you stop treating yours as an opponent. And about the strange, quiet miracle of learning to live inside your own skin with something approaching respect.
What we grew up watching
I want to start with our mothers, because that is where most of our body stories start.
It was the eighties or around about then. Mom's doing what women in the eighties did: dieting, restricting, criticising herself out loud in the way that was so normalised we barely noticed it. We noticed it. Children always do.
What we absorbed, without anyone meaning to teach us, was that a woman's body is a problem to be solved. The goal was perpetual dissatisfaction decorated with occasional success. That it was normal to always be either on a diet or about to start one.
Add to that the puppy fat years. A home where nutrition was, through no fault of anyone, not especially informed. The particular cruelty of being a teenager in a body that doesn't yet know what it wants to be.
And you have our joint origin story. The one that most of us, if we are honest, share some version of.
Two decades of war
I spent more than twenty years fighting my body.
I say fighting because that is exactly what it felt like. Sheer force of will directed at something I wanted to change, convinced that if I hated it enough, punished it enough, disciplined it enough, it would eventually surrender and become the version I wanted.
It didn't. Bodies don't work that way. What mine did instead was hold on tighter, stress higher, and make the whole project feel increasingly impossible.
And then I stopped.
I stopped forcing. I started listening. And slowly, carefully, we found our way back to each other.
What changed
I want to be careful here about how I tell this part, because it didn't happen in a moment. It happened the way most real change happens: incrementally, over time, with setbacks and restarts and long stretches where I wasn't sure anything was shifting at all.
But the shift, when it came, was directional. I turned towards my body instead of against it. I started asking what she needed instead of telling her what it was going to do.
Once I slowed down and responded with love, the inflammation faded. Once I decided to feed and fuel her with only the best I could offer, she responded with glowing skin and a calmer emotional landscape. Once I moved her in ways that felt safe and heard rather than punishing, she got strong. Capable. Grateful.
It is not hard, in hindsight, to understand why.
The science of slowing down
Here is something I wish someone had explained to me years earlier.
When the body is in a chronic stress state, certain kinds of exercise feed that state rather than countering it. Running, for instance, can be extraordinary medicine for a calm nervous system. But for a body already flooded with cortisol, it can send a signal that makes everything harder: 'we are running because we are under threat. Hold on to the reserves. Do not let go of the fat. We might need it to survive.'
This is not a failure of discipline. It is biology. The body doing exactly what it is designed to do.
When you turn down the stress response, something interesting happens. The body begins to understand that the movement is for training, strengthening and conditioning, not for escape. That running is a gift, not a threat. And it starts to behave accordingly.
It lets go. Not all at once. But it lets go.
What my dream body actually looks like
I am not a size zero. I would not want to be.
I carry an extra few kilograms when I am menstruating. I have days where I feel bloated and uncomfortable and not at all like the version of myself I would choose. I am building a body for longevity, for strength, for grace. Not for an aesthetic that will shift with the season's trends.
But here is what I do have, and what I would trade for nothing:
I live in my body with pride and intimacy. We respect each other. We work together. Some days we make the right choices, some days we don't, and when we have an off day, we no longer punish ourselves for it. We simply move on to the next choice.
That shift alone -- from punishment to continuity -- changed everything.
For the part of you that is tired of fighting
I know it is hard to imagine, when you have been at war with something for as long as you can remember, that peace is actually available. It can feel like giving up. Like lowering the bar. Like deciding not to care.
It is none of those things.
It is the hardest and the most worthwhile work you will do. And it begins not with a new plan or a new protocol but with a single question, asked with genuine curiosity:
What does she actually need today?
And then, the radical act of listening for the answer.
Join Fai for yoga or meditation in Melbourne; she offers one-on-ones to help other women come home to themselves.
