I can tell you from working with others that the more you focus on what your body can do, the better you are likely to adjust to whatever medical interventions you have experienced that have changed how your body looks or how it moves. It is okay to grieve whatever changes have been made to your physicality and it is okay for that grief to resurface from time to time. Maybe there are things that your body can’t do anymore, but you can adapt to what it can do. If part of your body had to be removed to save your life, we can work together to craft a new version of your life. This is where my years of experience as a life coach also can be helpful since you are more than just a physical being.

Fast forward another twenty years and between Hashimoto’s disease and other medical conditions, my body has taken on a much different size and shape. What I have learned in my new body is that what matters most isn’t the shape or size of my body, but whether I have the strength, energy, and mobility to do what I want to do.

Rather than thinking about how you look, if you focus on how you feel, you can enjoy conditioning your body from the first session because movement is a type of nourishment that cannot be achieved in any other way and when we are nourished, we naturally feel better.

People who are going to judge others based on how they look often have such ridiculous standards that most people couldn’t live up to those standards anyway. I experienced this years ago, I was working with a body-builder in a private yoga session. I was helping him modify a particularly challenging stretch that I had easily showed him. At that point, I had not yet been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, but my clothing size had gone from a size 4 to a size 6 (my BMI was 21.6) which is still very small in the scheme of things.

When the client had trouble with the pose, instead of focusing on himself, he lashed out at me and said, “How can you be a yoga teacher when you’re so fat?!”

It was such a bizarre thing to say that I laughed out loud. At the end of the session, I showed this client some photos in Light on Yoga so he could see that an older guy who didn’t have the same physique as he had could still do some remarkable things that many people are never able to achieve.

The way to be happy in life is to stick as closely as you can to what is true, and when it comes to feeling good physically and emotionally, the truth is that daily movement is much more important than what your body looks like. If you have trouble accepting this idea, think about the people you feel closest to in your life and ask yourself how many of them look like they stepped out of a fashion magazine? Do you care what they look like or do you care how you feel in their presence? If you care more about how you feel around them, could it be true that that is also how they relate to you?

— Brené Brown

For some reason, when it comes to life maintenance chores, most people seem to be more accepting of the amount of time required than when it comes to body maintenance. This is especially interesting given that body maintenance can be achieved with lots of variety and can even be fun.

Can you imagine a way that it would be possible for you to reframe body maintenance in a way that it is less of a chore and more of a joyful engagement with life?

If you still have trouble doing something for yourself, you could try taking the broad view that taking good care of yourself benefits others because by nourishing your health, you will have more to share with others.

Maybe you can practice leaving out the negative mind chatter about what you could’ve, should’ve, and would’ve done in the past to support your health if you had more time, energy, money, etc. and just be kind to yourself for making this choice now. Now is the only moment in which you can make a change.

What else can you eliminate that will support your health goals?

If you are having a hard time deciding whether to enlist support for your exercise program, try imagining yourself looking back a year from now and contemplate what you want to be looking back on.

— Ray Bourque