When Bodies Change without Permission

Learning to Listen, Love, and Live Inside Them Anyway

My hair gave me the first sign—falling out in clumps, handfuls scattered across the sink and floor like a quiet alarm.

Then came the heaviness. That old familiar feeling of slogging through wet concrete returned. Every movement felt like a great effort. I had gentle conversations to convince myself to put on shoes and go for a walk, when all I wanted was to stay still.

Food intolerances, a sluggish metabolism, and an endless list of etceteras.

Here we are again, I thought.

I’ve already been down this road—testing this and that, trying one approach after another, one supplement after another. Each time I hoped for resolution, only to end up with another version of “We don’t really know.”

That’s the hardest part—not the hair loss, or even the fatigue, but the uncertainty. The not-knowing why. My lab results don’t fit into neat boxes. It’s not autoimmune; that much is clear. Nothing points to a tidy diagnosis. It’s simply that my levels have tanked. And so far, no health professional (functional or otherwise) can tell me the reason.

Living in limbo like that can cause me to spiral—slipping into frustration, shame, and resentment. The old beliefs still surface: Why can’t your body just work? Why can’t you keep up?

But a deeper truth has grown louder as I’ve given it space over the last several years—through the slow, painstaking work of practicing trust, choosing care, and learning to offer my body the love I once withheld.

It reminds me: Your body is not your enemy. She is whole. She is carrying you, even now.

What We Believe About Bodies

The messages we receive about bodies start early. They don’t just come from our home environment—they come from every angle.

We learn some bodies are “good,” while others are “bad.” Good bodies look a certain way, move a certain way, and digest food in a certain way. Through comments about our bodies or the bodies of others, people praise or humiliate us; over time, we learn to objectify ourselves through the same lenses.

For women especially, these messages are relentless—woven into media, culture, and even casual conversation—teaching us that our value is tied to how our bodies are perceived.

How we appear to others becomes more important than listening to our internal cues.

For many of us, there have been moments when being in our bodies did not feel safe. Sometimes life came too fast, too much, or too soon. In her brilliance, the body quieted her own needs to survive, holding fast to love, belonging, and connection at any cost. So it made sense to slip away, to mute the signals, and to take control wherever we could, as a way of finding protection.

The wellness industry reinforces the lesson, framing “optimal health” as the ultimate achievement. Today, that message often shows up as bio-hacking, constant tracking, or cutting out entire food groups. We start to believe a new diet will be the thing that finally makes us whole—if only we eat like our ancestors once did, or follow the patterns of a certain people group.

Before long, even the kitchen feels like a battleground. “Acceptable” choices shrink until they’re nearly impossible to sustain, and instead of simply nourishing ourselves with the food available to us, we’re left policing every bite, chasing an elusive ideal.

The unspoken promise is always the same: if you control enough variables, you can master your body. Which means when our bodies don’t comply, we’re left with the crushing sense that we’ve failed, interpreting our less-than-ideal health as a personal flaw, or maybe even a moral one.

But the truth is far more complicated—because humans are far more complex than one-size-fits-all answers. The solution can’t be an all-organic diet. That may be possible for a privileged few, but most of the world cannot afford it, which means it cannot be the answer.

Maybe an apple, a potato, or even (God-forbid) a simple bowl of cereal is better than the stress we pile on ourselves in the pursuit of eating a pristine diet. Sometimes nourishment looks less like perfection and more like choosing the food that’s in front of us, and receiving it with gratitude instead of shame.

The answer isn’t found in more saunas, plunges into ice baths, or even stacks of affirmations or prayers. Do those things help? Of course. But they aren’t the whole story.

We keep trying to address an internal ache with external fixes—this supplement, this new modality, this mindset that promises it will finally fix us. We slap these solutions on like Band-Aids, running from one to the next, overwhelming our systems with the constant message that we’re broken.

Before we know it, the fix-it mentality itself becomes the very threat our bodies are trying to protect us from. She begins bracing, tightening, and doing her best to shield us from the relentless demand to improve. What looks like resistance is often just her way of saying, “I can’t take any more.”

As Hillary McBride says, “We heal when we can be with what we feel.”

Which means the real work isn’t about finding the answer, but learning to walk with our bodies, step by step—recognizing them as sources of wisdom, communicators of experience, and carriers of our stories. It means growing the capacity to stay with what we feel, because an overly stressed system cannot hold the fullness of being human.

This urge to “fix” or rise above the body is ancient. For generations, we’ve inherited stories that cast the body as something to escape or control. Some of us even learned to call her “flesh,” and to see her wisdom as untrustworthy, her signals as dangerous. We were told not to lean in but to silence, ignore, and ultimately, overcome.

Those echoes still linger, showing up in wellness culture as the whisper that our bodies are problems to solve instead of homes in which we belong.

But I’m learning that the full expression of being human happens in and through the body. She holds the truth of our experience—what shapes us, what we’ve endured, and what brings us joy. The body keeps the record of our stories, carrying both wounds and wonders in muscle and marrow.

I’ve already spent too much of my life living by those old messages. And while I can’t control all the mysteries of my hormones or lab results, I can choose how I respond.

I can choose love.

Choosing Love

Self-compassion is not weakness; it’s the way we begin to heal the places that hurt the most.-Aundi Kolber

Some new, delicious pounds adorn my frame these days—though truthfully, they tend to come and go in sweeping fluctuations. Once, that alone would have been enough to wreck my whole day, sending me into restriction, punishment, and endless exercise until I’d beaten my body into submission.

Deep-seated messages taught me that smaller equaled better—more valuable, more wanted. I could find evidence of it everywhere I looked. Taking up less space made me more acceptable. Whether the approval came from home or from society, the message was the same.

I don’t believe these patterns started with me. Yes, I grew up in environments that reinforced them, but they run deeper than that. (They always do.) Ancestral trauma, cultural expectations, and biological susceptibility all played a part—as did my own felt sense of having no real choice or control, shaped by a range of traumatic experiences.

In response, I used my body as a tool to create a false sense of safety even as I tortured her and silenced her cues.

And still, she carried me. She absorbed the criticism, the control, the overuse—and somehow held everything together the best she could. Her unconditional love for me is unmatched.

Now, though, I can see the evidence of healing. My labs tell the story of a body that is finally being given the safety she needs to restore and rebuild. A body that is being met with presence, awareness, and care.

This is a body recovering from years of overfunctioning. A body healing from under-eating and disordered eating—sometimes even at the encouragement of wellness trends and doctors.

This is a body that is changing, as all bodies do, carrying me from one season of life into the next. A body that has held, grown, and nurtured six human lives. A body that learned what she needed to do to survive, to keep me tethered to love, belonging, and connection—even when those strategies weren’t always healthy.

This body is not separate from me—she is me. I am not just a brain walking this earth in a meat suit.

And so, I’m learning to live here. In the mystery. To give my body the care she requests. To hold the tension between grief for what is changing and love for what remains.

Bodies change. Mine has, over and over. And every time, I have a choice: resist the change, or learn to love her, anyway.

I want to choose love.

Love looks like gentler mornings, more rest, slower workouts that support instead of deplete, nourishing foods—and yes, sometimes even the medicine I never wanted to take.

Love looks like listening instead of demanding. Because listening and love will always bring more life than forcing and fixing ever did.

Love says: Even here, you are still good. You are still whole. You are still worthy of care.

Maybe that’s the invitation—for me, and you. When our bodies change, as they inevitably will, our work isn’t to fix them. It’s learning how to walk with them, how to fully inhabit them.

Love also looks like seeing the alarms—hair falling, energy fading, metabolism slowing—not as betrayals, but as reminders. Reminders that this body is alive, still speaking, and still carrying me.

Our bodies are not problems to fix. Our bodies are our home.

“To say that you are your body is not to reduce you, but to remind you that your personhood is inextricable from your physicality.”― Hillary L. McBride

P.S. Rebuilding trust with your body takes time—and you don’t have to do it alone. Join us for the free Soul Care 75 challenge starting soon, or hop on the waitlist for the high-touch SC75 Membership (limited spots, launching September 22, 2025).