A leader. An encourager. A driver. A mother. A wife. Most of all, a daughter of the King.

WELLNESS AND FITNESS

Faithfully stewarding the body I was given

I lost fifty-seven pounds before turning fifty, and what it unleashed was freedom. Here is what happens, and you already know it. You get busy. You care for your family, your job, your career, and everybody who needs something. And your own health goes on the back burner, quietly, for years. That was my story, not a case study.

The weight I carried was never really about food. It was grief. It was stress I would not name. It was a decade of putting myself last and calling it devotion. No plan on earth works until you are willing to look at that part first.

Turning fifty was the hinge. I spent the past year doing the actual work, including countless hours of research and a lot of digging down deep into things I had been avoiding. So I listened to all the podcasts, followed all the thought leaders, and spent a great deal of time in intentional prayer about how I wanted to reshape the next decade I was blessed to be entering. Fifty-seven pounds came off. But the number is not the headline, and I will not let it be yours either.

What it unleashed was freedom. Confidence. Capacity I had forgotten I was supposed to have.

And I did it through perimenopause and menopause, which is the part I most want you to hear. Nobody hands you a manual. The strategies that carried me for twenty years simply stopped working, and for a while I thought the problem was me. It was not. It was a body doing exactly what it was designed to do, in a season nobody had described to me honestly.

I also want to say the part most wellness talk leaves out. This is biblical. Scripture calls our bodies a temple of the Holy Spirit and tells us to honor God with them. Caring for yours is not vanity and it is not self-indulgence. It is obedience, and it is stewardship of something you were given and do not actually own.

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit… You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” — 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, NIV

Strength training

Lifting, properly and consistently. In midlife this is not vanity. It is bone, metabolism, and staying capable for the next forty years. It is the single change that gave me the most back. I did CrossFit right after the twins were born, but a back injury and knees worn down by years of marathon running gave in, and the weights stopped. I have rediscovered them, and the love affair is real.

Movement

There is no magic number of steps. I aim for ten thousand at a minimum, but mostly it is just moving my body, and I have found my sweet spot is fifteen to twenty thousand. Small tricks, like ten squats every hour no matter where I am. Push-ups that are finally not on my knees — five sets of ten, because this is the year of fifty — yes, really. And working on my core so I stand tall and proud. I start the morning with flow and a ruck, twenty pounds on my back, which I affectionately call my gratitude rucks. They make the whole day run better.

Nutrition

Enough protein, actual meals, and no plan built on shame or deprivation. I am feeding a woman with a job and a family, not auditioning for anything. I am eating more fiber than ever before, and I have become a full-blown supplement research junkie. Bring on the collagen and the magnesium, you name it. And thank you, God, for progesterone. Can I get an Amen?

Sleep

The one I resisted longest and the one that changed the most. I used to treat sleep as the flexible item in the budget. It is not. Everything else fails without it.

If you are somewhere in this yourself — the sleep that broke, the weight that moved and would not move back, the mood you do not recognize, the sense that your body changed the terms without telling you — you are not imagining it and you are not failing. You need information and a plan, not more discipline. I will not hand you a diet. I will show you what I actually did.

I want to be a real, tangible example of a woman who takes care of herself. Not an edited one. Not a before-and-after. A woman who decided her body was worth stewarding and then went and did it, at fifty, in the middle of everything else.