There’s a version of summer I used to chase. She woke up early before her kids to run. She ate salads because they photographed well and felt virtuous. She stood in front of the mirror cataloging what still needed to change before she could feel confident in a post-C-section bikini. She was disciplined, and she was exhausted. She was so busy earning her summer body that she barely had the energy to enjoy summer itself.

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s lived inside that version of summer.

For years, the cultural script around summer bodies has been remarkably consistent: restrict, sweat, shrink, reveal. It’s a framework built on the idea that your body is a project with a deadline, and that deadline is Memorial Day. But somewhere between my second postpartum recovery and my 10th year as a nutrition consultant, I started questioning the whole premise. Not just the methods, but the goal itself.

What if the “dream body” was never about how you looked in July? What if it were about how you felt walking through your life on an ordinary Tuesday?

I haven’t thought about it the same way since.

The Slow Unraveling

The truth is, I stumbled into this perspective the hard way. After my first son was born (March 2020), I did what so many women do: I tried to get my body “back.” I doubled down on my Peloton bike, convinced that pushing harder was the fastest path forward. It didn’t work. I was inflamed and puffy, my hormones were (unsurprisingly) a mess, and I was white-knuckling my way through days that were supposed to feel joyful. Most evenings, I was running on fumes by the time I needed to make dinner. And my household could feel it.

Somewhere between my two pregnancies, I hit a wall. The restriction wasn’t making me leaner. To be honest, it was making me both miserable and overly consumed by food noise. Around the same time, a friend recommended I read Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education. Her book rearranged something deep within me, challenging everything I thought I knew about what a strong body required.

Like a ripple effect, I discovered women like Dr. Stacy Sims and Dr. Shannon Ritchey who drove home what I couldn’t yet articulate: that women deserve a different approach. I started eating more—not less. I shifted from cardio to strength training. I let go of the timeline I’d been white-knuckling. And, to no surprise, my sleep improved. My mood stabilized. I stopped thinking about food every waking minute. I was happier in every sense of the word—as a wife, a mom, and a woman I finally recognized in the mirror.

The Body I Built

Over the course of 15 months, I gained a substantial amount of muscle and lost body fat. But the real transformation was subtler. I stopped bracing and started trusting. I had the energy to chase my boys around the yard and still feel like myself by bedtime. I ate ice cream with my kids and didn’t think about it for the rest of the night.

Redefining the Dream

I realize “dream body” is a loaded phrase with its own set of baggage, but hear me out: The dream body isn’t a size. It’s not a before-and-after. It’s the physical experience of feeling clear and steady, genuinely well in a way you can’t measure on a scale. It’s wearing what you want without a mental negotiation in the mirror first. It’s having enough energy to be present with your kids at the park instead of performing wellness from the sidelines. It’s eating dinner with your partner and tasting the food instead of calculating it. It’s having the patience for bedtime stories instead of counting down the minutes until your child is asleep.

This isn’t about lowering the bar. If anything, it’s raising it. Because looking a certain way is a fairly shallow goal when you think about it. Feeling alive in your own skin? That’s the deeper ask. And it requires a completely different set of tools than the ones many of us were handed.

What Happy Women Have in Common

Through my years of coaching women, I’ve noticed that the ones who feel their best aren’t following the most disciplined plans. They’re the ones who’ve figured out what genuinely supports them—and they do those things with enough consistency that it stops feeling like a grind.

A few patterns tend to emerge.

They eat enough.

This is the one that surprises people the most, and the one I end up coaching around more than anything else. So many women are chronically undereating, skipping breakfast, and surviving on coffee until noon—then wondering why they’re face-down in the pantry by 3 pm. Your body reads restriction as stress. It responds by raising cortisol and disrupting your hormones, which tanks your metabolism and spikes cravings. Eating enough protein and fiber—enough food in general—is one of the most radical acts of self-care available to you. A car doesn’t go any faster on less fuel.

They move because of how it makes them feel.

Not for punishment. Not to earn brunch. Movement that supports your nervous system (strength training, walking, even dancing in the kitchen) looks very different from movement designed to deplete you. The question I always ask my clients: Do you feel better after your workout than you did before? More energized and resilient? If the answer is consistently no, something needs to shift.

They protect their sleep.

I can write you the most beautiful meal plan in the world, but if you’re running on five hours of broken sleep, your blood sugar will be erratic, your cravings will spike, and your body will hold onto stress like a sponge. Sleep isn’t a luxury. It’s the foundation everything else sits on.

They tend to their nervous system.

This is the piece most wellness advice skips entirely. You can eat all the right things and still feel terrible if your nervous system is perpetually activated. Genuinely slowing down, spending time outside without your phone, creating pockets of unscheduled space in your day… these aren’t indulgences. They’re metabolic tools. A regulated nervous system digests food better and sleeps more soundly. For this very reason, I’ll prescribe three deep breaths before a meal over a digestive enzyme any day.

Your Summer Invitation

I think summer gets a bad reputation in the wellness world because we’ve turned it into an audit. But what if we treated it as something else entirely?

Summer, at its best, is an invitation to live more. To eat outside. To swim in cold water and feel the shock of being completely present in your body. To stay up a little later because the light lingers and the conversation is good. To let your kids have a milkshake and not mentally subtract those calories from your own day. To cook something simple and eat it slowly, barefoot, on the porch while the sprinkler runs in the background.

None of that requires a flat stomach or a 6 am boot camp. It requires presence. And presence is a lot easier to access when your body feels nourished and rested.

I want to leave you with a different set of questions this summer. 

Not, how do I look? But, how do I feel when I wake up?

Not, what should I cut out? But, what could I add that would sustain me?

Not, am I doing enough? But, do I have enough energy to be here—fully here—for the life I’m building?

It might already be closer than you think. In the strength to carry your toddler without wincing. In the steadiness to make it through a long afternoon without crashing. In the ease of sitting in your own skin without reaching for your phone to scroll or compare.

That’s the body worth dreaming about. The one that lets you show up for your life with clarity, energy, and a deep, steady sense of enough.

This summer, I hope you find her. I have a feeling she’s already here.