Originally published on Substack, 26 May 2026
There are moments in life where we reach many crossroads.
At the time, we do not know whether we are making the right decision. We can only choose a direction and live with the consequences.
In 2012, at the very last minute, I cancelled my weight loss surgery. For years afterwards, I questioned whether I had made the right choice. There were many times when I thought I had got it wrong, especially when I struggled, regained weight, or felt unable to take control.
Then, at the end of 2019, just before Covid reached our shores, I found myself paralysed from the waist down and needing emergency spinal surgery. Two weeks later, while I was still recovering and barely mobile, my 40-year-old brother, my only sibling, had died.
I was halfway through my weight loss journey, grieving, recovering, and spiralling into depression.
That was another crossroads.
I could have gone deeper into survival mode. I could have regained everything I had lost. I could have told myself that life had broken me. And part of me did feel broken.
But I also realised something.
Life is fragile. The body is fragile. Movement can be taken from you. People can be taken from you. And as a single mother, with both my parents gone and now my brother gone too, I understood that I had to take ownership of the life and body I still had.
So I chose action.
But even then, I still had more to learn. I was still chasing success through becoming lighter/smaller. I was still dieting hard and measuring progress by how much less of me there was.
My third decision came when perimenopause hit and everything felt so much harder. I felt stuck. My weight was slowly increasing again. I was scared of ‘exercise’, so feeling all out of options I thought my best bet was resistance training.
And that decision, changed everything.
For the first time, I did not feel like I was fighting my body. I felt like I was coming home to it.
I started to respect it. Nourish it. Listen to it. Strengthen it. I stopped seeing my body as something to shrink and started seeing it as something to care for. That is when the real transformation happened.
Because when you sit quietly with your body, move it, feel it working, and begin to understand what it has carried you through, something reconnects. Your brain and body stop feeling like separate things. And you start to realise that this was never just about weight loss.
Today marks the day that maybe a fourth decision in my life could take me in directions unknown to me fully just yet.
Last year I decided I wanted become a personal trainer before I turn 49.
Today I launched. Within an hour, I had my first online 1:1 sign up and tomorrow I turn 49.
As part of this launch I have created Bearbell, an app which is a free community and support platform focused on sustainable health, movement, nutrition, education, and wellbeing, with pathways available for those who would like more individualised coaching and support.
Honestly, the scope and long-term vision I have for Bearbell is huge, especially for one woman building it alongside parenting, working, coaching, learning, and still continuing her own journey too.
But nothing meaningful I’ve ever done in my life has come easily, and I’ve never really been someone who does things by halves.
Looking back, some of those other big decisions in my life once felt impossible at the time, yet they became the moments that completely changed the direction of my future.
Maybe retraining as a personal trainer and building Bearbell is now the fourth major transformational chapter of my life.
