How I Got Here: The Story Behind Undod Yoga

Before there was a yoga mat, there was a hospital room and a piece of paper with a diagnosis on it that I was far too young to actually understand.

I want to tell you this story properly, because it's the real reason Undod Yoga exists. Not a brand story. Not a tidy founder narrative with the rough edges sanded off. The actual thing.

A DIAGNOSIS I WAS TOO YOUNG TO UNDERSTAND

I was twenty years old, almost seven months into my first pregnancy, when a doctor told me I had gestational diabetes. What nobody told me until much later was that the signs had actually been there since around month three — I had it long before anyone said the words to me.

The gap wasn't an accident. I was on state-funded healthcare, and somewhere in those first months my original OB-GYN stopped accepting Medicaid. I was shuffled along, the way you are when your coverage decides who gets to keep treating you, and the actual education — what this diagnosis meant, what to do about it, why it mattered — fell through that crack. I didn't get a conversation. I got a label, attached very late, with almost none of the information that should have come with it.

At twenty, I didn't know enough to ask the right questions, and nobody around me was offering the answers unprompted. I left that diagnosis with a vague, heavy sense that something was wrong with me, and almost no usable information about what to actually do.

THE SECOND TIME, WITH INSULIN AND A WARNING I COULDN'T HOLD

By my second pregnancy I was twenty-two, and gestational diabetes again, this time treated with insulin. This pregnancy was also high-risk for other reasons, which meant I was already carrying more than enough fear for one body to hold.

Somewhere in there, a provider mentioned — almost in passing, without much explanation of what it actually meant for my life — that within five to ten years I would likely develop type 2 diabetes. This wasn't an idle warning. Women who experience gestational diabetes do carry a substantially increased lifetime risk of going on to develop type 2 diabetes, sometimes appearing many years after the pregnancy itself. ^[1] It's a real, well-documented pattern, and the kind of information that deserves an actual conversation, ideally with someone checking that you've understood it and have support to do something with it.

I got the warning. I did not get the conversation. At twenty-two, managing a high-risk pregnancy was already more than I had the resources to process, and a five-to-ten-year forecast about my own body's future landed on top of that like one more thing I had no idea what to do with. I tucked it away, the way you do with information you can't use yet, and kept going.

THE QUIET WAR THAT NOBODY SAW

Here is the part of the story that took me the longest to be able to say out loud: those diagnoses didn't create my disordered relationship with food and my body. They just turned the volume up on something that had been quietly running underneath my life for years already — long stretches of restriction, followed by periods where the restriction broke entirely, followed by more shame, followed by more restriction. A cycle with no obvious edges, because from the outside it didn't look like what people picture when they hear the words "eating disorder."

There is nothing atypical about the suffering. The myth that disordered eating doesn't happen in larger bodies is one of the most dangerous, persistent myths in healthcare.

That's close to verbatim what eating disorder researchers have been saying for years about what's now recognised as atypical anorexia and other disordered eating patterns in higher-weight people. The diagnostic criteria were historically built around low body weight, which meant that for decades, people whose bodies didn't look underweight were routinely overlooked, even when their psychological symptoms — the fear, the rigid rules, the body image distortion — were every bit as severe. ^[2] Healthcare providers, trained to see weight loss in a larger body as good news regardless of how it happened, would praise the very behaviours that were quietly making people sicker. ^[3]

I share this not for sympathy but because I think it matters for anyone reading this who recognises themselves in it: if you have ever doubted that what you were going through "counted," because your body didn't match the picture — it counted. It still counts. You don't have to earn the right to take your relationship with food seriously.

THE YEARS BELOW THE LINE

Fast forward a few years, and I was a parent trying to keep a household running on almost nothing. For the first four years of my children's lives, we lived below the poverty line. My kids got the most nutritious food we could manage, if and when we could actually afford it. There wasn't room, in those years, for anything beyond getting everyone fed and through the day.

That kind of sustained scarcity doesn't just affect what's on the table. It teaches your whole nervous system that resources are unreliable, that food is something to be managed and rationed rather than trusted, and that your own needs come dead last on a very long list. I didn't have language for that at the time either. I just knew how to keep going.

WHAT HOLDING EVERYTHING ACTUALLY COST

Eventually there was a divorce, and then a better financial situation with my next husband. My kids started eating well and consistently, which should have been the part where things got easier.

In a lot of ways they did. But underneath that improvement, I was carrying more than I had any framework for. Stress left over from the divorce. Undiagnosed complex PTSD. Undiagnosed neurodivergence, with no name yet and no idea that it explained anything. I was homeschooling my children while also helping my ex build a small software business with a friend — and somewhere in that arrangement I became the lead QA and project manager for the actual software being developed. Structuring other people's chaos into something workable all day, and then going home to do it again.

Somewhere in managing all of that, my own health, wellness, and nutrition simply stopped being on the list. Not from neglect, exactly. There just wasn't a slot left for it once everything else had taken its share.

THE CYCLE I COULDN'T BREAK

I tried to fix it the way everyone tells you to: I tried personal trainers. I tried kickboxing. I tried martial arts. When none of that stuck, I tried just forcing myself to move, on willpower alone, the way you do when you've run out of better ideas.

What I didn't understand yet was that I was living with fibromyalgia and chronic pain from psoriatic arthritis, both still unnamed. So every programme I started ran into the same wall: I couldn't keep up, not because I lacked discipline, but because my body was managing a level of pain and fatigue that none of those programmes had been built to accommodate. Each attempt ended the same way — shame, a quiet sense of having failed again, and another long pause before I tried something new.

This isn't a rare pattern. Dropout from exercise programmes is a well-studied problem in fibromyalgia specifically, and pain, fatigue, and the unpredictability of symptom flares are consistently named as the biggest barriers — not motivation, not laziness. ^[4] People with inflammatory arthritis conditions like psoriatic arthritis report the same thing: exercise genuinely helps over time, but pain and fatigue make it brutally hard to get consistent enough access to that benefit to ever feel it. ^[5] Nobody had ever explained any of that to me. I just thought I was the problem, every single time.

FINDING DR KAREN WELLS, AND THE PIECE I'D BEEN MISSING

After the divorce, I went into fitness and health training to get properly certified — and that's when I found Dr Karen Wells, a British yoga instructor whose online courses quietly rearranged everything I thought I understood about movement.

What I discovered wasn't that yoga didn't work for me. It was that nobody had ever taught me to break it down small enough to actually meet the body I was in on any given day.

It wasn't that yoga didn't work for me. It was that nobody had ever taught me to break it down small enough to meet the body I actually had.

That distinction changed everything. Hatha yoga, full sequences, holding poses for a set count — none of that had ever accounted for a body with fibromyalgia and psoriatic arthritis having a genuinely different range from one day to the next. But yoga broken into smaller, adaptable pieces — balance first, then slow and gentle strength, building only as much as that particular day could hold — that, I could actually do. And keep doing.

THE WORDS I FINALLY GOT

The complex PTSD and the neurodivergence I'd been carrying nameless through all of this eventually did get names. I am AuDHD — autistic and ADHD, in the same nervous system, at the same time — and I have complex PTSD from years of just managing, with no diagnosis and no framework for any of it.

Getting those words didn't undo any of the years. But it did something almost as important: it took the blame off the table. The exhaustion, the inconsistency, the way ordinary chaos could flatten me when other people seemed to shrug it off — none of that had ever been a character flaw. It had a shape, a cause, and other people who understood it.

BUILDING THE THING I NEEDED

Undod Yoga exists because I went looking for a class that combined everything I'd learned the hard way — that yoga could be genuinely trauma-aware, genuinely weight-inclusive, genuinely built for a body managing chronic pain and a nervous system like mine — and it mostly didn't exist. Not in the form I needed. So eventually I stopped looking for it and started building it instead.

Every piece of how I teach now is a direct answer to something that hurt me along the way: the gestational diabetes diagnosis that arrived without education, the years where there was no room left for my own body, the programmes that demanded a consistency my fibromyalgia and psoriatic arthritis simply couldn't promise. No performance for an audience. Modifications offered without commentary, because nobody should have to justify the body they showed up in on any given day. And always, the question underneath every pose: what does this actually feel like, from inside you — not how does it look, and not what it "should" look like according to a sequence built for someone else's body.

Now, whenever I have a setback — and I still have them — I reground and start again with balance and slow, gentle strength building. Nothing dramatic. Just the smallest true step back into my own body.

I am not telling you this story so that you'll feel sorry for where I started. I'm telling you because I think you might recognise some part of it — the diagnosis that arrived without an explanation, the years with no room left for yourself, the shame of a body that wouldn't cooperate with someone else's programme. If any of that is familiar, I built this practice for you too.

You don't have to have it figured out before you arrive. I didn't either. That was always the whole point.

— India