The Body I Have Had to Learn to Trust

This is not a weight loss story. It is a relationship story ~ between me and a body that has been through more than most people know.

Where it began

When I was ten years old, I started having problems with my foot. At that age, you do not fully understand what is happening in your body. You just know something is not right, and the adults around you are trying to fix it.

A procedure was carried out that was, at the time, the right decision. It was necessary. In many ways, it was life-saving. But it altered the mechanics of my foot permanently ~ and the consequences of that alteration have followed me ever since.

For years, I managed it. I built a life around it. I lost fifty kilograms in my thirties. I became a personal trainer. I became a posture correction specialist. I spent fourteen years working in early childhood education, ran a franchise operation in Malta for thirteen years, and eventually built The V.A.L.L.Y.™ Rhythm ~ a consultancy built on one foundational belief: that the body is not something to battle. It is something to understand.

And still, my foot kept asking me to pay attention.

The year of trying to heal

Over the past year, a pressure point developed on the sole of my foot ~ a direct consequence of the way that childhood procedure had reshaped the structure beneath the skin. I tried everything I could to heal it without surgery. I changed my footwear. I rested. I treated it. I waited.

It would settle, then return. Settle, then return.

I know that pattern. I have worked with women for years who know it too ~ the feeling of making progress, then watching it slip away, without understanding why. It is one of the most exhausting patterns a person can live inside.

Eventually, I had to accept that the pressure point would keep returning until the source of it was addressed. The source was structural. And the only realistic solution was surgery.

The decision

Surgery is never my first answer. For myself or for the women I work with, I believe the body has far more capacity to heal than we typically allow it. I look for the least invasive route first, always.

This time, there was no other route.

I made the decision. I went in. And I came out the other side of a procedure that has required significant recovery ~ more than I had fully anticipated. There are days when the healing feels slow, and the discomfort is real. There are days when I have had to practise, quite deliberately, the belief that my body is working in my favour even when it does not feel that way.

The morning after surgery, the scale showed three kilos more than the night before.

I smiled.

What the body was doing

When the body experiences trauma ~ whether surgical, emotional or physical ~ she responds in the most intelligent way she knows how. She slows down. She conserves. She protects. She shifts energy away from performance and towards healing.

Sometimes that means inflammation. Sometimes it means fluid retention. Sometimes it means the scale goes up before everything settles back down again.

That is not failure. That is physiology.

My job in those early days was not to fight my body. It was not to restrict food, panic over the scale or try to undo what had happened overnight. My job was to support her. To nourish her. To rest when she asked. To move gently when she was ready.

And to trust the wisdom that was keeping her alive long before I ever owned a scale.

What I have been sitting with

There is something quietly significant about being the person who teaches others to trust their bodies ~ and then being asked, by your own body, to practise that trust in a moment of real vulnerability.

I will be honest: I have had to work at it. Recovery is not always peaceful. There are moments of impatience, frustration, and the particular exhaustion that comes from being unable to move through the world in the way you normally would. I have had to choose, more than once, not to let the scale or the slowness of healing mean something it does not mean.

I have also experienced something I did not fully expect: a kind of softening. A willingness to be cared for. To allow Juan to be there. To let my mother bring food. To let the hyperbaric oxygen chamber do its work each morning without rushing the process.

That, too, is rhythm. Not the rhythm of training or eating or moving ~ but the rhythm of allowing the body to do what she does when we stop getting in her way.

What I want you to take from this

If you are in a season where your body feels like it is working against you ~ where the scale is moving in the wrong direction, where your energy is low, where nothing seems to be responding the way you want it to ~ I want to offer you a different question.

Not: what is wrong with me?

But: what might she be protecting me from?

The body does not malfunction. She responds. She responds to stress, to disruption, to grief, to overload, to the accumulated weight of a life being lived at full capacity. She responds to surgery. She responds to change. She responds to the things we have not yet been willing to fully feel.

Understanding what she is responding to ~ and why ~ is the beginning of real change. Not the change that lasts a season. The change that holds.

The scale recorded a number.

My body was writing a story.

They were never the same thing.

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Claire

Transformational Health Consultant  ·  Founder, The V.A.L.L.Y.™ Rhythm