Oops. I accidentally didn’t exercise for ten years. Here’s my story of how I got back into it and eventually found love and joy in moving my body.
This is officially the mid-way point of my ten-part series on the most profound changes I’ve made in my life for health and happiness, and it’s all about MOVEMENT.
(It’s kind of ironic that I’m writing it today because I’m off a lot of movement due to a yoga injury. Yes, you read that right.)
To recap, I’ve written about water (“How to Change Your Life), personal care (“Be a sexy, smelly animal”), fasting (“Fasting: Punishment or Reward”), and sleep (“Giving myself a fighting chance”).
Movement is such a huge topic that I don’t even know where to begin. So let me start waffling and see if my stories and experience can unearth some gems.
When I was a kid, I stumbled into roller skating, a fact that I find fortuitous on many levels. Skating wasn’t just a way to move my body and expend energy; it was a sport I was genuinely good at that gave me a lot of confidence during the years of my life when many kids struggled.
But I never thought of it as a sport. Or exercise. Or even acknowledged what it gave me. I just skated because I had to.
Of course, I grew up, and skating wasn’t cool anymore. Rinks closed down, underage drinking and parties replaced full days of skating, and intuition, in general, fell by the wayside.
I didn’t move much at all for several years after that. From my senior years of high school until I turned 20, any movement I did was purely accidental. Like, I accidentally moved a lot when working in kitchens, washing dishes and doing food prep. I also moved during cross-country running, which was mandatory at my school. But there was nothing intentional about any of it.
Until I turned 20. I was living in the Daintree, far away from my family and anything I had ever known. I had piled on a lot of weight due to a combination of being overwhelmed, being out of my element working as a chef in the early days and having access to any food I wanted in a commercial kitchen.
And I felt like shit. I was a young woman and barely had energy for anything.
That’s when I discovered running. Every day, I would strap on my sneakers and slowly jog down the long dirt road I lived on, stopping once I reached the peak of a hill on the way to our closest beach.
From humble beginnings, I gradually increased my stamina until I was effortlessly running 5km a day or 8km on a long run. And I would have kept running forever if it weren’t for a knee injury that probably changed the trajectory of my life.
After the injury, I knew that I needed to move. But I couldn’t run, and I definitely couldn’t skate. So I turned to the only other exercise available in the heart of the Daintree rainforest—yoga at the local peace temple.
I found yoga particularly frustrating. It didn’t give me the endorphin rush and euphoria of running, but it gave me something. It frustrated and perplexed me. It vexed me. I couldn’t do the simplest things- like touching my toes, but I could pull out advanced hip poses or climb onto someone’s back for a partnered downward-facing dog. It made no sense at all. I didn’t get what yoga was about, but I loved how it made me feel.
Then I moved to Cairns. I was 22 at the time, and Cairns afforded me a smorgasbord of exercise options that I took full advantage of. Over the next six years, I trained like an athlete. I ran (on and off and with a recurring knee injury), I rode, I skated, I swam, I hiked, I lifted weights and I tried just about everything going. I couldn’t get enough.
Cairns Lauren. Man, this feels like it happened in another life. Possibly 2007.
I trained seven days a week, 365 days a year, instead of spending time with my then-fiancee. I pushed my heart rate during every session and added incidental workouts every chance I got. One day, fatigued beyond belief, I almost fell off a spin bike with my first bout of vertigo. My body was begging me to slow down.
Looking back, I can see obvious problems with that approach to exercise. I was addicted and completely out of tune with my body, only ever pushing myself to more, more and more. Exercise gave me that sense of stress and activation that I now recognise as a pattern from childhood.
But exercise also gave me something else. Something good. It gave me space from my anxiety, the anxiety I didn’t even know I had. I just knew that I needed to move, and move I did.
After leaving Cairns in 2008, at age 28 and with a failed engagement behind me, I moved back to the Gold Coast to start my life again. I still exercised here and there, but my time was usually otherwise engaged with work, the start of my relationship with Dreamboat, travel and eventually Instagram.
When Instagram took off, and I quit my job to become ‘Australia’s First Professional Instagrammer’, I only exercised when an itinerary demanded it—like skiing on a winter trip to Canada or hiking trails in a national park.
Occasionally an itinerary necessitated movement, like this trip to Bali with the Four Seasons. The hike up this volcano nearly killed me.
This went on for a long time. All of my thirties. And it wasn’t until I was postpartum with my second baby, in the aftermath of a failed business and a global pandemic, that I realised I hadn’t truly moved my body for a decade.
I knew, as most people in their forties know, that I would probably never start if I didn’t start again soon. And I did not want a life of pain, anxiety and low energy. I also wanted to be a mother with the energy to keep up with my young family.
But how can you go from zero, after a ten-year break, with two small children and no energy or zest for life?
Well. It started with an intention. An intention to just start. Twice a week, for half an hour a session. ANY movement. I needed some drops in the bucket.
Starting imperfectly with half an hour of personal training once a week. 2023.
Early on, I recognised some old patterns starting to emerge. If I was sick, I’d either try to force myself to exercise or add any missed workouts to my next week’s tally.
On a good day, I would try to push beyond my limits, risking injury and setbacks.
I wasn’t exercising kindly; I wasn’t loving myself through movement.
Until I had a breakthrough in December 2023 around self-love and personal values, I realised that for me to be the best version of myself in the world, I needed life force. I needed energy, life force, stamina, and strength—not to look a certain way, but to FEEL a certain way.
I took stock of all the excuses I had for not exercising:
Not enough time (at the top of the list with a bullet)
No motivation to start
No exercise I enjoyed doing
Not enough money to hire a trainer consistently
And then I thought of solutions.
Not enough time?
What if I could find a gym with a crèche and use my parenting time to train?
No motivation to start?
What if I could find a gym that offered group fitness classes and let the experts guide me into motivation?
No exercise I enjoyed doing?
Wait a minute. Didn’t I used to love RPM (group spin classes)? Does anyone offer Les Mills programs on the Gold Coast?
Not enough money?
How much is gym membership these days anyway?
On the spot, I googled local gyms with crèche and Les Mills and found a gym about 15 minutes away. Better yet, membership was $15.95 a week. After a short trial, I joined on the spot, aiming to increase my movement to five times a week.
It was hard at the start. I didn’t want to, but I was connected to the WHY—why I was moving—what this habit would do for me.
Back at the gym after a very long hiatus, early 2024.
And before too long I was happily training five days a week, sometimes up to 6 or 7.
My gym has an excellent crèche run by long-time women who love kids. It offers a million classes a week at different times. It also has excellent yoga teachers and a generous yoga timetable.
Once my energy started to increase, it became a habit.
From painstakingly organising the kids in the morning and waking up ahead of time to ‘get it all done’, I now effortlessly bundle them into the car and get on the road in time for the crèche to open.
But I also train a lot during my ‘non-kid’ times, after doing so much work around my story that ‘there’s not enough time’.
Right now, I’m on a very light exercise regime after pulling a muscle in the back of my leg during the best yoga class of my life. My body was doing things in that class that I didn’t think it was capable of. Yes, I injured myself, but injuries heal, and there’s no greater feeling than stretching the body to its limit and leaning into discomfort. (If balanced with kindness, rest and instinct.)
And the injury has been one of the greatest blessings of this year for what it has taught me about slowing down to speed up. Loving myself means resting when I need to. Loving myself means loving my body even when it’s not at its strongest.
From forcing myself to do a 30-minute walk a year ago to training up to ten hours a week and wishing I could do more, it has been an amazing journey.
I love what this body can do. I love this body.
Energy creates energy. It’s so easy to forget that.
Energy creates energy.
And the excuses that prevented me from starting again were just that—excuses. If you’re truly invested in the WHY, there is a solution for every excuse.
Moving again this year started as a means to an end. I wanted the energy, strength and life force it would afford me.
But by loving MYSELF through the journey, I have learned to love the journey. Being in touch with my body allows me to recognise how much movement helps me regulate emotions, move the energy of heavy emotions, regulate my nervous system, be IN my body, and, as a result, access my intuition and higher self at a much greater level.
My body is a vessel for my soul. I have been gifted this body to live in for one human life, a life that can end at any time. I didn’t want to continue to waste that life living in a body that didn’t feel like home.
Movement has helped me to come HOME.
Home at last. 2024.
And my GOD, it feels good in this body. I have so much love for my strong limbs, for my beating heart and for my mindfulness and connection.
I’m sure I have people reading this email who already move. I’ve no doubt I’ve also got people here who might have accidentally stopped moving for a decade or even a lifetime.
Regardless of which camp you fit in, or anywhere in between, I want to leave you with some questions to ponder:
- How can you LOVE yourself through movement?
- How can you use movement to find safety IN your body?
- How can you bring gratitude into your training, for what you CAN do?
- If you need to start again, what excuses need solutions?
- What’s the best training for heightened energy days? (This is such a juicy one to dig into. Sometimes, I need yoga to ground my energy. Sometimes I need interval training to burn it up.)
- What’s the best training for low-energy days, if any at all?
- How do you treat yourself through injury? How do you talk to yourself?
- What type of movement gives you a bubbling joy you can’t contain? Can you find a way to do more of it? (For me, it’s still skating, and I have joined a Roller Fit class that makes me stupidly smile every time I go.)
My favourite ways to move are yoga, Pilates (frustrating but necessary), RPM (spin class), Body Pump, Roller Skating and walking.
Next year, I will start lifting heavier weights with the help of a personal trainer – I don’t love it, but I love what it will do for me, so it’s on my wish list.
What about you?
Love you.
Lauren X
P.S. Last week marked the one-year anniversary of creating my Awareness Journal and starting my daily practice. It undoubtedly helped me move the needle in this area of my life as I got clearer on who I was and who I wanted to be. In order to BE someone else, you need to start living and feeling like that person now. Imagine if I had waited to feel fit and strong before I started exercising. I would have never even started.
P.P.S. Not once have I linked my movement to my weight or appearance, even for one minute. Movement is about feeling and energy. Weight loss can be a side-effect, but I’ve been on the slippery slope of using exercise to lose weight, which never ends well. Move because you love yourself.
Ask yourself, if I LOVED this body, how would I treat it? Then do that.
I was thin, but in 2008, I hated this body. I was obsessed with my belly and love handles, and even the slightest slip in my diet caused me to pile on weight. Hate carries an energy. The subconscious belief of ‘I hate my body’ creates a reality where the body hates you right back. 
For all of my influencer career, I hated my body, too. No matter if it was big or small. 2016.
Here, my body is big, but I had just unlocked something inside of myself and reached a place of deep acceptance and love for it. This photo was taken 12 months ago, and the weight fell off me in the subsequent months. Not from excessive exercise or restrictive dieting but from love. What would love do? November 2023.
**Originally published to my email database on the 18th of October, 2024**
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