Be Good to Your Body

Chapter One

How Did We Get Here?

I wish you and I were sitting together, sipping adrenal mocktails by a cozy fire at a little bungalow in the mountains somewhere far away, because if you picked up this book, I think we’d have a lot to talk about. We’d probably find a thing or two (or twelve) in common.

But since we can’t do that, we’ll just have to discuss things through these pages. And as much as I’d love to hear about your own journey with health and wellness, for now I’ll just share some of my story here, because I bet some of it will resonate with you. Before I dig in, let me cover why we’re even here together.

It’s time to have a conversation about how we’re treating our bodies. The women of the modern world we live in have become experts in restricting, treating, and manipulating our bodies in pursuit of a cultural standard of health or beauty. Sometimes both. I don’t know how old you are, but I’m in my thirties—which means I’m part of the generation who grew up wearing Bath & Body Works body spray while consuming mostly low-fat and low-calorie everything. We saw the endless ads for Jenny Craig, SlimFast, and WeightWatchers, geared toward women everywhere. Even some of our eighty-something-year-old grandmas commented on how they’d put on weight. Apparently, body fixation doesn’t even end at eighty!

Then . . . whiplash! . . . we were hit with the body-positivity movement, where we were told that no matter what size or shape our bodies are, we should just love them.

We live in a time when convenience food (hot dogs, anyone?) and food-like products (hello, margarine and Kraft Mac & Cheese) are seemingly more available and affordable than real, nutrient-dense food. Many of us wouldn’t know how to source food or what to do if it weren’t for the grocery store and DoorDash.

And the challenge goes beyond just the food we eat. For example, we were conditioned to believe that birth control was the solution to countless symptoms known to trouble the female body and the key to achieving our wildest dreams, all without being well educated on potential downsides or side effects.

We’ve lived a good part of our adult lives being bombarded by conflicting health advice about diet culture (many of us restricting or meticulously counting calories in our teen and young adult years), body positivity (love your body at any size), intuitive eating (stop thinking about different foods as “good” or “bad”), biohacking (wearable fitness gadgets, apps, cold plunging, and more), and popular healing diets advertised all over Instagram (follow Whole30 or Paleo). Many of those ideas hold some good, but in our information age, it can be not only overwhelming but also difficult to discern where to start or what to focus on.

And that’s why we’re here: to unlearn all the ways we’ve complicated healthy living and reclaim what it really means to be good to our bodies, biblically and holistically, because many of us were once sold this big lie:

HEALTH = cutting calories + waking up at 5:00 a.m. to work out + masking symptoms + taking a thousand vitamins + being extremely lean

And then we began to realize that perhaps that was not at all good for our hormones, fertility, or bodies. So the world sold us the idea that self-love and body positivity were the solution to all that we’d been conditioned to believe.

But is that actually a solution? Or is it just daring us to swing to the opposite extreme, where “loving yourself” can lead to carelessness, lack of moderation, and even neglect of essential aspects to a healthy body, such as intentional exercise, fresh air, adequate rest, hydration, and quality nutrition?

What if the real solution to these extremes of diet culture and body positivity has been there all along, nestled in the pages of the Bible—the Word of the One who created our bodies to begin with and the only book that reveals how we were designed and what our bodies have truly needed to thrive since the beginning of time? What if we trusted that God is smarter than we are? Smarter than our cool slogans and graphics and movements and diets and fancy studies? What if He’s given us the guidelines for what it means to be healthy, care for our natural beauty, and be good to our bodies?

What if we’ve been so wrapped up with the latest health hacks that we’ve missed what it means to actually be healthy? We’ve been flooded with new information and studies and gurus and diets and wellness gadgets and trends for so long. No wonder we’re confused and tired. Trying to keep up with the world’s ever-changing idea of healthy living is exhausting.

But maybe it’s not as complicated as we’ve made it. In fact, maybe it’s really simple.

Your Body Is a God-Given Gift, Not a Project to Fix

I don’t know about you, but there have been several times in my life when I viewed fitness or wellness as a way to “fix” my body. Can you relate?

At one point, my pursuit of health and wellness was driven by a desire to look a certain way. In college, I embarked on a fitness journey, striving to achieve six-pack abs and a slimmer waist. I was obsessed with the scale and got into a vicious cycle of overexercising and undereating, all in the pursuit of what I thought would make me more attractive. And admittedly, I was seeking control during a time when much felt new and unfamiliar. Counting calories, completing workouts, and logging miles felt like something I could control.

Now in my thirties, I wish I could go back to myself at nineteen or twenty and tell her to cool it on overexercising, obsessive calorie counting, and relying on copious amounts of caffeine for energy. I wish I could tell her to instead support her body with gentle movement, adequate rest, and real nourishment. I would tell her to replenish her body with the good things God created rather than trying to restrict the “bad things” the fitness world deems unhealthy (like carbs and calories), because all those habits were going to destroy her hormonal health and thyroid before she knew it.

Sigh. My mom tried to tell me, but I didn’t want to listen.

Anyway, a handful of years later, I had toned it down a bit on the excessive exercise and calorie counting but still thought I was the picture of health because I drank green juice, worked out almost daily, and managed to stay fairly lean. That’s what the world around me said was healthy, anyway. But if I was so healthy, why did I have such heavy periods and horrible PMS? Why was my skin being taken over by cystic acne when I was well over a decade removed from puberty? And why was my “young and healthy” body unable to carry a baby to term, resulting in recurring miscarriages?

I wanted answers. I needed solutions. I was young and healthy . . . right? Why was this happening to me?

I started digging, determined to find root causes. I looked for anything I could find that might help improve my situation and heal the symptoms I was experiencing. I found lots of supplements and naturopaths and Whole30 and chiropractic care and Paleo and a million and one other things. I joined a dozen healthy-living Facebook groups and researched like a madwoman everything I could find on hormones and fertility and gut health.

See, this time around, I wasn’t so concerned with form as I was with function. I didn’t mind so much if I wasn’t my thinnest or fittest; I just wanted my body to work how it was supposed to. I wanted my skin to be like that of an adult and not a teenage girl. I wanted to wake up with natural energy. And more than anything, I wanted my body to do what it was designed to do: bring forth life.

I was on a mission to fix my body.

Inherently, seeking answers and root causes rather than just slapping a Band-Aid on symptoms is a good thing. But somewhere along the way, I stopped viewing my body as a God-given gift and instead began to see it as a project to fix.

I started with good intentions—I wanted to take better care of my health, steward my body, and support my fertility naturally—but even the best of intentions can begin to spiral into obsession.

And for me, that looked like restrictive “healing” diets, a thousand supplements, and trying to remove every last toxin from my life in an effort to fix whatever was wrong with me.

I made some progress and saw improvement in some ways, but as I researched more and more, I also began to feel confused by all the health advice and insight I was hearing. So much of the information I consumed was conflicting, from different schools of thought on things like dairy to the absence of a real definition of what makes a product “clean.”

Eventually, I began to get burned-out trying to get healthy all on my own and taking advice from the world. I stepped back for a bit and realized I had been listening to so many voices but had failed to consider the voice of the One who created my body in the first place. I had read a slew of studies and books on health and naturally healing the body, but I never really thought to consider how the Bible—the book that details how our bodies were designed and what was initially made for them to thrive from the beginning of time—might have some of the answers I was looking for.