You have not failed fitness.
Fitness, as you were taught it, has been failing you.
For years, the story has been:
- “You just need more discipline.”
- “If you really cared, you’d work out 5–6 days a week.”
- “If you can’t stick to that, what’s the point?”
Meanwhile, your real life is… real. You have cycles, seasons, work, caregiving, perimenopause, mental health, chronic pain, ADHD, or some spicy combo of all of the above. Every time life gets lifey, your “perfect program” blows up — and you decide you are the problem.
Here’s the part nobody told you:
You are not broken. You were trying to follow a system that was never designed for your body, your life, or your values.
Intuitive movement is a different system.
It’s a non-diet, body-neutral, weight-inclusive approach to movement that focuses on how you feel, how you function, and how you relate to your body — not on shrinking it.
Weight-neutral and Health at Every Size®–style approaches have shown improvements in blood pressure, blood lipids, intuitive eating, and psychological well-being without making weight loss the main goal. And a huge body of research keeps finding that cardiorespiratory fitness is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than BMI, with “fat but fit” people often having similar mortality risk as “normal weight but fit” people.
So if you’ve been waiting to “fix your body” before you’re allowed to feel like an athlete?
Yeah. We’re not doing that anymore.
If you want to dig deeper into why there’s no one-size-fits-all blueprint for “optimal health,” I break that down here.
This is where my 10 Principles of Intuitive Movement come in — the backbone of how I coach women and non-binary folks inside my 1:1 Intuitive Fitness Coaching — coaching and non-diet personal training, once a week, no drill-sergeant energy.
Table of Contents
- What Is Intuitive Movement (a.k.a. Intuitive Exercise) — And How Is It Different from Just Skipping the Gym?
- Why You’ve Struggled With Exercise So Long (It’s Not a Willpower Defect)
- The 10 Principles of Intuitive Movement
- How to Actually Use These Principles Without Overwhelming Yourself
- From “I’m Broken” to Entering Your Elite Everyday Athlete Era
What Is Intuitive Movement (a.k.a. Intuitive Exercise) — And How Is It Different from Just Skipping the Gym?
Let’s clear this up right away:
Intuitive movement is not “I only exercise when I feel 100% motivated and the vibes are immaculate.”
Intuitive movement (sometimes called intuitive exercise) is a framework for making movement decisions that are:
- Responsive to your body’s signals
- Realistic for your season of life
- Rooted in your values, not other people’s aesthetics
Non-diet, weight-neutral interventions that combine body acceptance, intuitive eating, and flexible physical activity have been shown to improve disordered eating patterns, self-esteem, and even some cardiometabolic markers — without worsening blood pressure, blood glucose, or cholesterol, and without requiring weight loss.
That’s the lane we’re in.
Intuitive movement is not about doing less because you’re lazy. It’s about doing what actually supports your body, your brain, and your life — instead of what diet culture thinks looks impressive from the outside.
Intuitive movement says:
- You don’t have to earn food or rest.
- Your worth does not live in your step count.
- You’re allowed to want strength, stamina, and capability without turning your body into a lifelong DIY project.
And because reading about this is one thing and actually living it is another, this is exactly what we untangle inside 1:1 Intuitive Fitness Coaching — one hour a week of intuitive movement coaching + training where we build your movement life around your body and your reality, not around shame.
Why You’ve Struggled With Exercise So Long (It’s Not a Willpower Defect)
Let’s talk about the “old” model you’ve probably been swimming in. If you’ve ever Googled “motivation to exercise” and still ended up stuck on the couch, this is why:
- Workouts as punishment for what you ate
- Fitness as a full-time job: 5–6 days/week, 60–90 minutes, no breaks
- Zero room for pain, fatigue, hormones, mental health, disability, or caregiving
- If you can’t keep up? Clearly you’re lazy or unmotivated 🙃
Here’s what the research actually says:
- A systematic review found that a more positive emotional (affective) response during moderate-intensity exercise predicts higher future physical activity. When movement consistently feels miserable, your brain learns, “Avoid this.”
In other words:
- If your workouts feel like penance, of course you don’t stick with them.
- If the only version of “health” you’ve seen is “be smaller at any cost,” of course your nervous system is like, “Hard pass.”
It’s not that you’re undisciplined. It’s that you were asked to suffer for an outcome that doesn’t even reliably predict health — and your body wisely opted out.
If this is hitting way too close to home, my $25 workshop, Why You Hate Fitness (and How to Find What Fits for You), is a great place to go deeper. We unpack exactly why exercise has felt like punishment — and start mapping out what a kinder, more sustainable version could look like for you.
The 10 Principles of Intuitive Movement
These 10 principles aren’t a new grading rubric for your worth — they’re a compass you can turn toward whenever you feel lost with movement.
1. Make Peace With Rest
Rest isn’t a reward for suffering — it’s a non-negotiable part of being a human and an athlete. Making peace with rest means unhooking your worth from productivity and letting recovery be part of the plan, not proof that you “fell off.”
2. Reject Healthism
Healthism is the idea that health is a moral obligation and that “healthy-looking” people are better people. Rejecting healthism means you stop using movement as a morality test and start using it as one tool among many for caring for you in the body you actually have.
3. Respect Your Body
You don’t have to love your body to respect it. Respect looks like honoring your body’s current capacity, limitations, and needs — instead of punishing it for not matching an imaginary “before” or “after.”
4. Embrace Embodiment
Instead of using exercise to escape your body, you use it to be in your body. Embodiment means slowly rebuilding trust with your internal cues (hunger, fatigue, pain, pleasure) and your sense of how you move through space — at a pace that feels emotionally and physically safe.
5. F^ck the Fitness Police
The fitness police are every voice — on Instagram, at the doctor’s office, in your own head — insisting that certain workouts “don’t count.” This principle gives you explicit permission to question, ignore, and dismantle those voices so your movement is guided by your values, not by surveillance.
6. Start Where You Are
No more waiting for the perfect schedule, the healed injury, the “new you.” Starting where you are means designing movement around your actual life, energy, and limitations today — not the fantasy version of you who magically has more time and less trauma.
7. Find Your Fun
You are far more likely to keep moving when you don’t hate what you’re doing. This principle is about exploring movement that feels playful, meaningful, or satisfying — from strength training to dancing in your kitchen to walking your dog without knee pain.
8. Intuitive Eating
Movement can’t be fully intuitive if your relationship with food is still trapped in restriction, guilt, or compensation. Integrating intuitive eating means nourishing your body consistently enough that you have energy to move, recover, and live your life.
(If you’re still untangling diet rules and trying to figure out how food and movement fit together, I break that down in From Food Freedom to Movement Freedom: Why Intuitive Eating is Just the First Step.)
9. Body Neutrality
Body neutrality shifts the focus from “how I look” to “how I function,” making room for complicated feelings while still choosing to care for your body. It’s where body image and fitness finally get to work together in a body-neutral fitness framework instead of fighting each other.
10. Gentle Fitness
Gentle fitness isn’t “giving up” — it’s grown-up training. It’s strength, mobility, cardio, and recovery woven together in a way that supports your nervous system, hormones, and real life instead of grinding you into dust.
Inside my Intuitive Movement workbook, each of these gets its own deeper prompts and practices — but even at this overview level, you can probably feel: this is an entirely different way of relating to movement.
And if you want support bringing these principles off the page and into your actual week, that’s exactly what we do inside 1:1 Intuitive Fitness Coaching — one hour, once a week, where we tailor both your mindset and your movement to your body and your life.
How to Actually Use These Principles Without Overwhelming Yourself
Please don’t turn this into “10 new ways to be perfect.”
When you treat movement like exercise as self-care instead of a character test, these principles get a lot easier to live out.
Think of it like this:
1. Pick One Principle to Start With
Most folks begin with Make Peace With Rest, Start Where You Are, or Find Your Fun — because they change the emotional tone of everything else.
2. Name Your Current Season
What’s true right now?
- Energy levels
- Hormones / cycle
- Work demands
- Pain, injuries, or chronic conditions
- Mental health capacity
Ask yourself: If I honored this season, what would this principle look like in practice?
3. Choose One Tiny Experiment
Not a full-body rebrand. One experiment.
- Swap one “should” workout for a 15–20 minute “fun or neutral” movement choice.
- Shorten a planned workout instead of canceling movement altogether.
- Add one intentional rest block and see what happens to your mood and recovery.
4. Collect Data, Not Self-Judgment
After an experiment, ask:
- How did my body feel?
- What changed in my pain, energy, or mood?
- What got in the way?
That’s athlete energy: not “Was I good or bad?” but “What did I learn, and how do I adjust?”
If you want some guided help doing this, the Why You Hate Fitness (and How to Find What Fits for You) workshop walks you through exactly why your old plans kept blowing up — and helps you sketch what a more intuitive, sustainable version could look like for you.
From “I’m Broken” to Entering Your Elite Everyday Athlete Era
Right now, you might feel like:
- The person who “just can’t stick with it”
- The one who buys the program and never finishes
- The friend who wants to feel strong but secretly believes it’s not for them
Here’s the reframe…
Elite Everyday Athlete energy looks like:
- Adjusting for cycles, seasons, and symptoms instead of ghosting movement completely
- Letting rest be part of the training plan (not a moral failure)
- Measuring progress in self-trust, capacity, and resilience — not just streaks or aesthetics
- Using these 10 principles as a compass, not a grading rubric
This isn’t about being a pro athlete. It’s about bringing athlete-level self-trust, adaptability, and resilience into the body and life you have right now.
This isn’t a 30-day glow-up. It’s a relationship.
And you do not have to DIY it.
If you’re ready for structured support that respects both your nervous system and your goals, you can work with me in 1:1 Intuitive Fitness Coaching — one hour a week of online intuitive movement coaching + personal training, designed for women and non-binary folks who want to feel strong, capable, and at home in their bodies without selling their soul to toxic fitness culture.
If you’re not quite there yet, start with the $25 Why You Hate Fitness (and How to Find What Fits for You) workshop. Let it show you, in black and white, that you were never the problem — and give you a first glimpse of what your Elite Everyday Athlete era could look like.
You don’t need to become a different person to be consistent with movement.
You just need a different system — and a set of principles that finally treat you like a human, not a machine.
