I’ve had an inner critic in my mind since childhood, cautioning me about what I eat, long before I understood where that voice came from.

I inherited genes from my family that predisposes me to gain weight easily. While growing up, I watched the women on one side of my family struggle to maintain ahealthy weight in ways that left me anxious from an early age. My mother was tall, thin and lovely. She had aspirations of becoming a model, and she, too, found herself struggling through her thirties and forties to hold onto to her thin figure. She went on various diets, stopped eating after a certain time of evening, and just didn’t seem to feel as confident in her looks. I remember feeling confused and a bit sad becauseI thought she was so beautiful. In my eyes, she just never lost her charm or beauty.

I was successful in maintaining a healthy body in my late twenties and for a while after my first two children. My body was healthy, but I never seemed satisfied with how I looked and always felt guilty eating things I knew I shouldn’t. But after having my third child at 36, and moving through perimenopause shortly after, I found it harder and harder to maintain a healthy weight, even with restrictions. I struggled to find both an exercise plan and an eating style that actually worked for me.

When my son graduated from high school, I posed for a photo with him and my husband, and when I saw it afterward I was appalled by my belly protruding in the image. There is nothing wrong with that, but it was just the shock of it. I’m sad that that is the first thing I remember when I think back to his special day. It sent me into a desperate dive into a new eating practice called intermittent fasting. I didn’t go into fasting lightly and read a couple of books about it before starting.  believed in it, and it certainly worked over time. It felt like freedom when I ate after years of self denial and restraint.

After a couple of years, though, I began to feel that it was like another cage. Instead of food restrictions, I restricted the time I could eat. Restrictions. I fell off the wagon and gained back ten pounds.

The recent regaining of those ten pounds, more than the diet itself, is what finally made me start asking a different set of questions. What is it that I really want for my body? What do I need from my body? The answer, truly, is a body that allows me to be the person I want to be, and lets me move through life without health risks. So instead of seeing my body as lacking, as not the ideal, I needed to honor it. Honoring my body means making intentional decisions about what I put inside it. It means making movement and exercise a priority for mobility and flexibility as much as aesthetics.

I am still working to tweak my daily habits and better understand why I go for the foods I do at certain times (worry, fear, boredom). I have discovered books like FiberFueled and The Forever Strong Playbook. I’m learning about strength training, as well as supplements that can and will help me build and maintain muscle.

But most days start with some yoga, to gain flexibility and relieve pain in my lower back and other joints. I’ve also started doing exercise “snacks” throughout the day; a minute or two of jumping jacks, sit ups, and a series of movements with the kettlebell. My non-negotiables are two walks, one at the beginning of the day and one in the evening after dinner. Movement after eating doesn’t just spark better metabolism, it also lets my mind wander and rest after a full day.

When I do eat or grocery shop, I try to find the bestmeals and products that are healthy at the best price possible. I’m grateful to live in an area where there are many grocery stores to choose from and access to a great variety of produce is easy to come by. I’m also fortunate to receive regular gifts from my farmer father of organic, grass fed beef throughout the year. When I put together a salad that has over ten different plants in it and take that first bite, even after a short fast, it feels like love. It feels like

someone put a lot of thought and care into what was selected just for me, and it tastes better than the gluten free muffin from Trader Joe’s. Well, it’s really close.

If you are reading this and recognizing something of your own struggle in mine, here is what I’d offer you, not as an answer, but as a place to begin. Sit with your hopes and dreams for the not so distant future, and then think about your body’s role in those goals. What do you want from it? How do you want to feel in it during those days, those years? From there, consider what you’re doing now that supports your body and what might need to change. Try, as best as you can, not to judge the choices you’ve made up to this point. Instead, consider the changes you might want to make, and begin with the one that feels least restrictive and most likely to stick. Even small steps move you forward in ways you can’t fully see yet, and all you need is to start, and to try to keep that momentum going.

So this week, I want to offer you a way to sit with your own version of this question. Find a photo from a recent meal or moment of self-care. Write into what you were actually trying to give yourself in that moment, apart from how it looked. Then harvest three or four words and ask what they reveal about what that meal or moment fed in you. Is there an underlying need or want? A fear or hope?