A New Understanding

By Alisha (current client)

I've Spent My Whole Life Treating My Body Like a Problem to Solve

A few months ago, I found myself in a familiar place: sitting in the dark after everyone else had gone to bed, scrolling through articles about perimenopause while trying to determine which combination of hormones, supplements, exercise programs, sleep protocols, mindfulness practices, protein intake recommendations, and personal failures had resulted in me becoming a stranger to myself.

This wasn't exactly new behavior.

For most of my adult life, whenever my body has done something unexpected, inconvenient, or painful, I have responded by trying either ignoring it or trying to understand it. And by "understand," I mean aggressively researching it, analyzing it, and attempting to solve it like a particularly difficult puzzle. Over the years, I have listened to the podcasts, joined the gyms, downloaded the apps, worked with trainers, gone to therapy, tracked my habits, had my thyroid tested, started hormone replacement therapy, and developed enough theories about myself to fill a small library.

And yet, somehow, despite all this effort, I remained deeply confused.

Part of the problem, I think, is that being a woman in your forties is a bewildering experience. Your body changes. Your responsibilities multiply. You become a mother, perhaps. You become a caretaker, an employee, a partner, a household manager, and a person attempting to maintain some vague connection to the version of yourself who once had hobbies and slept through the night. You wake up one day and realize that your body, which has done so many extraordinary things for you, now feels unfamiliar.

And because we live in a culture that insists every problem has a solution and every woman should be a self-improvement project, the natural response is to assume that if we just work harder, learn more, and optimize ourselves correctly, we'll eventually arrive at a place where we feel okay again.

This strategy has not worked particularly well for me.

I have spent years in a complicated relationship with my body. I have blamed her for things that were never entirely her fault. I have been angry at her for changing. I have treated her as though she were the physical manifestation of my grief, stress, fear, and uncertainty rather than the thing carrying me through all of those experiences.

Which is unfortunate, because the truth is that I also love my body.

I love that this body dances with reckless joy. I love that this body has ridden bicycles with no hands and climbed mountains and completed triathlons. I love that this body has had extraordinary sex, built a family, and carried and delivered a fierce and beautiful daughter. I love that this body still gets up every day and walks into a middle school classroom, despite what I can only imagine are increasingly strong objections.

My body is not too large.

My body is not lazy.

My body is, in fact, kind of a badass.

So why, after all these years together, do I still struggle to love her?

This is the question that eventually led me to Kim.

Not because I needed another expert to tell me what to eat or how to exercise. I've had plenty of advice. What I needed was another human being who understood that women's bodies do not exist in a vacuum. They exist inside of marriages and careers and pregnancies and grief and hormones and stress and aging and impossible cultural expectations.

And, if I'm being honest, it didn't hurt that Kim has incredible arms.

This may sound superficial, but I mean it sincerely. There is something profoundly reassuring about being guided by a woman who has spent decades inhabiting a female body through motherhood, menopause, strength training, and all the complicated negotiations that come with those experiences. Her body doesn't communicate perfection. It communicates “relationship”.

What struck me most when I started working with Kim was that she didn't seem particularly interested in fixing me.

Instead, she wanted to understand me.

She asked questions about patterns, emotions, history, stress, hunger, fear, and the stories I tell myself about my body. She seemed to believe something that I have spent most of my life struggling to accept: that no amount of dieting, exercise, optimization, or self-discipline can create lasting health if the relationship you're building with your body is based on fear or punishment.

I don't know exactly where this process will lead.

But after spending much of my life treating my body like a problem to solve, I am beginning to wonder whether she has been asking me a very different question all along: “What if your body was never the problem?”