On Loving Getting Healthy (Not Just Being Healthy)

For a long time, I thought the goal was to arrive.

To reach the weight. Hit the fitness level. Achieve the flexibility. Cross the finish line of some imaginary before-and-after where the healthier version of me was waiting, patient and gleaming, ready to take over from the struggling one who had done all the hard work to get there.

I spent years treating my body like a problem to be solved. Like a renovation project. Like something that needed to be fixed before it could be loved. And I was absolutely not alone in that — the entire wellness industry is built on the premise that you are a work in progress, perpetually almost-there, one more product or plan or programme away from the version of yourself that finally deserves to rest.

What nobody told me — what I had to find out slowly, messily, through a lot of false starts and restarts — is that the arrival never comes. And more importantly: the arrival was never the point.

THE GYM THAT BROKE ME

I have been large for most of my adult life. I have also, for most of my adult life, had a complicated relationship with my own hunger — complicated in ways that weren't always named or understood at the time, but that shaped how I moved through the world and how I related to food and my body in ways I'm still gently unpicking.

I tried gyms. Lord, I tried gyms. I tried the motivational posters and the before photos and the meal plans printed out and stuck to the fridge. I tried the personal trainer who told me what I was eating wrong and the group class instructor who demonstrated everything at a pace I couldn't follow and never once looked at me to check whether I was okay.

I tried punishing myself into health. Earning my food. Burning off guilt. Treating every missed session as a moral failure and every good week as borrowed time before I inevitably fell apart again.

None of it worked. Not in any lasting way. Because none of it felt like something I was doing for myself. It all felt like something being done to me — by a culture that had decided what my body should look like and was helpfully providing me with the tools to get there, whether I enjoyed the journey or not.

I tried punishing myself into health. None of it worked. Because none of it felt like something I was doing for myself.

THE MOMENT SOMETHING SHIFTED

I can't point to a single day. It was more like a slow tide turning — a gradual accumulation of small moments that eventually added up to a different understanding.

Some of it came through yoga, and through a teacher whose name I still think about with gratitude. She never once mentioned weight. She never once talked about what our bodies should look like or what we were working towards in terms of a physical outcome. She talked about how poses felt. She talked about breath. She talked about what it meant to be in your body rather than at war with it.

Some of it came through sheer exhaustion. There is only so long you can sustain a relationship with movement that is built entirely on shame before your body simply refuses to cooperate. Mine did. Repeatedly and emphatically.

And some of it came — gradually, quietly — from starting to ask a different question. Not "what do I need to do to fix this?" but "what do I actually enjoy? What makes me feel good while I'm doing it, not just in theory afterwards?"

That question changed everything.

WHAT THE RESEARCH QUIETLY CONFIRMS

Here's the part where I offer you a little science — lightly, because this post is more heart than head, but it matters.

Researchers who study exercise behaviour have known for decades that intrinsic motivation — doing something because it feels inherently satisfying, because you enjoy it, because it gives you something real in the moment — is far more reliably connected to long-term engagement than extrinsic motivation, which is doing something for an external outcome like weight loss or appearance. ^[1]

In other words: if you hate what you're doing but you're doing it to reach a goal, the research suggests you probably won't keep doing it once the goal is reached — or before, if the goal proves elusive. But if you genuinely enjoy the movement, if it gives you something in itself, you're far more likely to keep showing up. Not because you're more disciplined. Because you actually want to. ^[2]

This is not a radical finding. It is, in fact, fairly obvious when you say it out loud. And yet the entire diet and fitness industry is structured as though the only valid motivation is an external one — the number, the size, the image. As though enjoyment is somehow too soft a reason to move your body. Too indulgent. Not serious enough.

I'd like to suggest that enjoyment is the most serious reason of all. Because it's the one that lasts.

WHAT "LOVING GETTING HEALTHY" ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

It doesn't look like enthusiasm every single day. I want to be honest about that, because I think we've also overcorrected into a kind of toxic positivity where health is supposed to feel like joy all the time, and if it doesn't, you're doing it wrong.

Some days yoga feels like coming home. Some days it feels like an obligation I'm dragging myself to, and the only thing that gets me there is knowing that I will feel better once I've started. Both of those days count equally. Both of those days are practice.

What loving getting healthy looks like, for me, is this:

It looks like choosing movement that I actually want to do, not movement that I think I should be doing. It looks like noticing what my body feels like during and after different kinds of practice, and letting that information guide my choices — rather than following a programme designed for a body and a life that isn't mine.

It looks like eating in ways that feel nourishing rather than punishing. Not a diet. Not a plan. A slow, ongoing conversation with my own hunger that has more kindness in it than it used to.

It looks like celebrating consistency rather than results. I showed up three times this week. That's the win. Not what the scales say. Not whether I've lost an inch anywhere. The showing up is the thing.

It looks like refusing to treat rest as failure. My body, with its AuDHD nervous system and its history of pushing too hard for too long, needs rest the way it needs water. Learning to honour that — rather than fighting through it and then crashing — has been one of the most quietly radical things I've ever done for my health.

Celebrating consistency rather than results. I showed up three times this week. That's the win. The showing up is the thing.

THE SCALE IS A VERY BORING STORY

I want to say something about weight, because it's the elephant in the room of every wellness conversation, and I think it deserves a direct response rather than a polite sidestep.

I lost weight on my health journey. Quite a lot of it, over time. And I want to be clear: the weight loss was not what made me healthier. The weight loss was a side effect of me finally doing things that I actually enjoyed, in ways that were sustainable, in a relationship with my body built on something other than disgust.

When weight loss is the goal, the body becomes an adversary. Every fluctuation is a crisis. Every plateau is a failure. Every social meal is a negotiation. That is not a healthy relationship with your own body. That is a war, and wars are exhausting, and most people eventually surrender — not because they lack willpower, but because you cannot sustain a war against yourself indefinitely without casualties.

When the goal shifts to how you feel — how you move, how you sleep, how your energy holds across a day, how you inhabit your own skin — the body stops being the enemy. It becomes your collaborator. And collaborations, generally, go much better than wars.

THIS IS WHAT UNDOD IS FOR

I built Undod Yoga because I needed it to exist. Because I needed a space where nobody was going to tell me what my body should look like, or imply that the practice I was doing was a stepping stone to something more serious. Where the measure of success was not a before-and-after photo but a quiet, accumulating sense of being more at home in myself.

Every class I teach is built around the question: how does this feel? Not: are you doing it right? Not: are you keeping up? Not: are you making progress towards the goal? Just — how does this feel? Because how it feels is the data. How it feels is the feedback loop that will keep you coming back, or that will tell you something needs to change.

You are allowed to enjoy getting healthy. You are allowed to let enjoyment be the reason. You are allowed to measure your progress in things that have nothing to do with your size or your weight or your shape — in how you breathe, how you sleep, how you carry yourself through a hard day, how many moments of genuine rest you manage to give yourself in a week.

The journey is not the price you pay to arrive somewhere better. The journey is the whole thing. And if the journey doesn't feel worth showing up to, that's not a failure of your discipline. It's information. It's your body telling you that you need a different door.

Come and find one here.

— India