The Slow, Brave, Boring Work of Getting Better
How to remodel your health while you’re still living your real life
I was sick over the past few days. Not even an “I have a high temperature” sick, but more of a feeling that I knew something was coming, and I watched it slowly creep in. And then I tried my best to sit with it.
Something I say all the time in different variations when I first start with a client:
“You didn’t break a leg and show up at the ER.
This didn’t start last week. So it’s not going to resolve in a week either.”
So that’s what first came to mind when my throat started to feel sore, and my head started to cloud.
I thought…oh, mabye my body wasn’t so into me going on an 8 hour drive, staying out until 2am at a birthday party and hitting the sauna/cold-plunge the next day at a Russian bathhouse. (Which is totally not my style of a weekend…but everyone has that cousin, right? 😜 And sometimes you just have no choice but to go along for the ride.)
Even though this was a shorter-term strain for my body to recover from, my point is that I knew that what I did was the last thing my body needed at the time. But, on the flipside, I also knew what had led to my sickness and respected that I’d need to recover from the bottom up and with no quick fixes.
When feeling bad happens on a bigger scale, the same is true.
Most of the stuff women come to me with…fatigue, gut issues, hormone chaos, sleep that feels broken, weight that will not budge…has been building silently for years. Sometimes decades. Not because they did anything “wrong.”
We all go through this to some extent. You deal with it on some level all the time.
Because you’ve lived through stress. You’ve had jobs, losses, moves, caretaking. You’ve absorbed industrial food, blue light at midnight, birth control, antibiotics, under-eating, over-doing. Your body has been adapting and compensating for a long time.
So when someone tells me, “I did X for three weeks and nothing changed, something must be wrong with me,” my whole nervous system wants to hug them and say…
No. Your body is not failing you.
The timeline expectations might be.
Working on your health deserves to be a slow process.
There’s a myth we’ve been sold.
Most health messaging sounds like this:
“Reset your hormones in 7 days”.
“Fix your gut in 21 days”.
“Drop 10 pounds this month”.
And honestly, all that does is make it seem like health is a short project. That you can “finish”.
If you just try hard enough.
But if something has been simmering under the surface for 5, 10, 20+ years, your body actually shouldn’t flip the switch overnight.
Why?
Because fast change is not always safe change.
Your body’s job is not to match a timeline on Instagram.
Its job is to keep you alive with the tools it has, at the pace it can handle.
It would be much easier to sell you a “21-day total reset.”
It just wouldn’t be honest.
Growth vs. capacity
There are two ways we can look at this.
Fast growth is a common approach with the idea that “I need to feel better NOW”. And I totalllly get that. Feeling bad sucks.
But, then there’s the idea of building capacity.
This is about slowly giving the body what it’s been missing so that it can actually hold the changes.
Most women I see don’t just need a “result.” They need more capacity.
Capacity to tolerate stress without crashing.
Capacity to eat a normal meal without bloating for 12 hours.
Capacity to go through a cycle without feeling like someone swapped out their brain and body 🫠.
You can’t build up capacity in a 2-week protocol.
You build it layer by layer.
Part of it is a mindset thing. Instead of “How fast can this change?” I find it incredibly helpful to instead be asking, “How deeply can this stick?”
Here’s something I see all the time in practice.
It’s almost a pattern.
Symptoms crept in slowly, adaption happens around them (“I’m just a tired person” / “I just have a sensitive stomach”), and then, one day, it finally just becomes too loud to ignore.
And then, all of a sudden, there’s a sense of urgency.
The…“I need this gone yesterday”.
And I get it.
When you finally admit something isn’t working, of course you want it gone immediately. Especially if your personality is anything like mine.
When I get the inspo to tackle something, I want to get started immediately. The dropping everything and “let’s buy all the supplies for this new project right now” kind of immediately.
But… healing is more like remodeling a house while you’re still living in it.
Because there’s no option of moving to another cute apartment you found for rent on Zillow down the street while the repairs happen.
And you can’t bulldoze the kitchen when you still need to make food.
You have to move one thing at a time. You have to keep the essentials running.
And, this means that yes, you should expect dust, noise, and a little chaos along the way.
Your body is the same.
It’s making changes while still parenting, working, thinking, digesting, paying bills, dealing with life.
It just needs a little time.
(For the record: I’m writing this while still recovering from the weekend I absolutely knew my body didn’t want. So this is as much a note to myself as it is to you.)
What I’m always thinking when the work kicks off
Since wellness is not an overnight thing, I usually start the process by thinking, “What’s the lowest-hanging fruit that will move the needle without overwhelming your life?”
Or, “Where is your body clearly asking for support (sleep, light, protein, gut, nervous system)?”
It’s more about… what can we do consistently over 3–6 months, not just this week?
I want your system to understand: “Oh… this is safe, this is predictable, I can trust this.”
Because once your body trusts you, it lets go of survival mode.
THAT is when hormones shift.
THAT is when digestion un-clenches.
THAT is when energy starts to feel a tiny bit less like dragging a boulder uphill.
Here’s what healing actually looks like (most of the time).
Commonly, the reality of the situation is that, like I mentioned, things move a little slow. But, the word “slow” is such a relative term. Because for the body, the pace is obviously “just right”.
In weeks 1–4, people tend to notice small things. Such as, maybe feeling slightly less bloated or crashing less in the afternoon. Even falling asleep easier.
Then in months 2–3, the feedback is more along the line of “this still takes effort…but I don’t have to think quite as hard about it”.
Then things typically turn a big corner at this point.
By months 4–6, the comparison to six months ago is very clearly a different baseline. There’s a new normal. Not just physically and physiologically, but also mentally. There’s a new knowing.
And honestly, by six months, the body typically has it down so well that when signals ever feel off, it picks up on it right away and just understands how to respond.
And it’s all far from linear.
There will be weeks that feel amazing and then weeks that feel like regression. But, that doesn’t mean nothing is working.
It means:
Your body is still responding to life (stress, sleep, kids, travel).
Old patterns are easy to slip back into.
Oh, and, you’re human.
No one’s body follows this like a perfect chart. It’s more scribbles than straight lines, and that’s normal.
The win is not “I never have symptoms again.”
The win is “I understand my body better, and I know what to do when things start to feel off.”
My favorite mindset change around this
As I mentioned, I’ve always been a pretty impatient person when I get excited about something. But even still, I’ve realized something that I’ve really come to enjoy thinking about.
A slower healing process gives you time to build skills and not just follow the rules.
The slowness of it all allows you the chance to tune in on a chaotic day.
Notice blood sugar swings in real time.
Fine-tune or even discover how to shift your light and sleep routine without it feeling extreme.
The coolest part is that going slow gives you a chance to rewire your identity from “I’m just broken/tired/anxious” to “I’m someone who can change things.”
It gives your nervous system a chance to catch up so that health doesn’t feel like another stressful job you’re failing at.
And honestly? If we could all flip everything in 10 days, we’d probably flip right back.
Going slow basically gives you roots.
So, if you feel behind…
And you’re reading this thinking, “I’ve been working on this for months and I’m still not where I want to be…”
You are not behind.
You are doing the brave, boring work of remodeling systems that took years to get here.
You didn’t walk into an ER with a broken bone.
You’re in a body that has been carrying you through so much, for so long.
And you’re allowed to take the slow path.
xx,
Dinah