Physical wellness has always been the hardest spoke for me. Not because I didn’t care about it, but because for most of my life, I didn’t feel like I was allowed to participate in it. When you live in a very large body, the world has a way of making you feel like physical wellness is for other people — thinner people, fitter people, people who don’t get stared at or judged or dismissed the moment they walk into a room.
In fact, for most of my life, if I had seen this Wellness Wheel, I would have just felt devastated because I felt like the physical part of this would never be something obtainable. For years, anything “physical” filled me with shame. Movement felt like a punishment. Food felt like a battlefield. Or my savior. Or my prison. My body felt like something I had failed at. And when you feel that way long enough, you start to believe you don’t deserve to be part of the conversation at all.
But here’s the truth I’ve learned, slowly and stubbornly, over the last two years: Physical wellness belongs to me too.
I used to weigh over 500 pounds. Today, I weigh just under 300. That number doesn’t define me, but it does tell a story — a story of survival, of persistence, of learning my own body instead of fighting it. A story of refusing to give up on myself even when everything felt impossible.
And no, this isn’t a “before and after.”
This is a continuum. A life in motion. What physical wellness looks like for me now is not gym memberships or marathons or fitness trackers screaming at me. Okay, actually, I do like my fitness tracker but you know what I mean. It’s not punishment or restriction or trying to force my body into someone else’s idea of health.
It’s quieter than that.
Gentler.
More honest.
It looks like:
• learning how to move my body in ways that don’t hurt
• celebrating the fact that I can move at all, when there was a time I couldn’t
• documenting my food intake without shame or obsession
• understanding what nourishes me and what derails me
• noticing how my body responds to stress, sleep, hydration, and routine
• building trust with myself, one small choice at a time
For the first time in my life, I feel like I have some control over an aspect of my life that used to baffle me. Not total control — I’m human — but enough to feel grounded instead of lost.
My First Physical Wellness Goal
Just like with emotional wellness, I started small.
Very small.
My first goal wasn’t “exercise more” or “lose weight” or “eat clean.”
It was simply: “Go to my first physical therapy session.” Just go. Not reschedule. Not cancel. Not talk myself out of it.
I was terrified — of being judged, of being dismissed, of being told something I wasn’t ready to hear. But I still went. And that one act of showing up cracked something open for me. It proved that I could do hard things without punishing myself. It proved that I could take care of my body without shame leading the way. It proved that physical wellness could be mine.
If you want to try this too, your first
physical wellness goal doesn’t need to be dramatic. It doesn’t
need to be visible. It doesn’t need to impress anyone.
It can
be something like:
• “Notice how my body feels after meals.”
• “Stretch for two minutes in the morning.”
• “Drink water before I reach for caffeine.”
• “Take one slow walk a week.”
• “Rest when I’m tired instead of pushing through.”
Physical wellness isn’t about shrinking.
It’s about inhabiting your life.
In the next post, I’ll be talking about Financial Wellness — the spoke nobody wants to talk about but everyone feels. And trust me, I have thoughts. Because wellness isn’t just about the body. It’s about the whole life that body has to live.
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