I stopped trying to change my body and started changing my relationship with it.
Maybe you're here because something in your own life has started asking for your attention.
You want to feel better in your body. Understand your cycle. Make healthier choices for your family. Be more present with your kids. Create more. Slow down. Or maybe you can't quite name what needs to change—you just know the way you've been doing things isn't working anymore.
I know that feeling.
For most of my life, I believed change had to be dramatic to count. I thought I needed the right plan, more discipline, more motivation, or some future version of myself who would finally get it all together.
What has actually changed my life has been much less dramatic: paying attention, making the best decision I can with what I know in the season I'm in, and then doing it again.
Some choices have been tiny. Others have taken years to understand. Plenty haven't been perfect. But each one moved me forward.
And somewhere along the way, all that imperfect forward motion started becoming something I could trust—a rhythm that was actually mine.
THIS IS WHERE I STARTED PAYING ATTENTION.
When Bode was born deaf, I spent his first year learning how to support and advocate for him as he grew up in a hearing world.
I learned to ask questions. To trust what I was noticing. To speak up when something didn't feel right. To keep going when I didn't have all the answers.
I became very good at paying attention to what he needed.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, though, I wore myself ragged.
And the strange thing was, this wasn't the first time my life had asked me to pay closer attention.
Years earlier, I'd started learning how to track my cycle. I had information. I knew how to collect the data.
What I hadn't learned was how to respond to it.
Eventually, I began to realize that the same instincts I was developing as Bode's advocate—ask questions, trust what you're seeing, speak up, respond—were the ones I needed to turn toward myself.
Advocating for Bode had become a muscle I knew how to use.
I needed to learn how to use it for myself.
For most of my life, I thought my body was something I needed to manage.
I'd been put on the pill as a young teenager to “regulate” my cycles, and I stayed on it for more than a decade. So when Levi and I started trying to have a baby, I had no idea what my body was actually doing.
My cycles could stretch 55 or 65 days. I didn't understand ovulation or know how to recognize my own patterns. I just knew pregnancy wasn't happening—and I assumed something was wrong with me.
Then a friend handed me Taking Charge of Your Fertility.
For the first time, I started learning how to chart my cycle and understand what I was seeing. I was still very new to it when I became pregnant a few months later, and then we lost that pregnancy.
After the miscarriage, I sought out acupuncture. I kept charting. My acupuncturist helped me make sense of my charts, and little by little, I started asking different questions—not just about my cycle, but about stress, food, the products I used, and how all of it might fit together.
I didn't overhaul my life.
I just started noticing more.
Looking back, I can see that there wasn't one big wellness awakening. There was a trail of breadcrumbs.
Learning to understand my cycle was one of the first.
I didn't need to have all the answers. I needed to learn how to pay attention.
Where could we be in ten years if we start now?
THE STORY I WANTED TO CHANGE
Learning ASL with Bode had started changing the way I thought about progress. I couldn't master a new language in a month. This was going to be a lifelong journey.
Instead of asking how quickly I could get somewhere, I started asking a different question:
Where could we be in ten years if we start now?
Then I found out I was pregnant with a little girl.
And suddenly, the long game meant something different.
I cried when I found out Rosie was a girl. Not because I wasn't happy, but because I was scared.
I had spent most of my life struggling with the way I thought about and saw my body. My mom took me to my first Weight Watchers meeting when I was in fourth grade. I remember counting points for Halloween candy. I remember the weigh-ins. I remember the prizes and celebration for pounds lost.
Long before I was old enough to understand what any of it meant, I had learned to think about food in terms of what it might do to my body—and to think about my body as something that needed to be smaller.
Those thoughts followed me for years.
What should I eat? What had I eaten? Would it make me gain weight? Would losing weight make me prettier? More lovable? More confident?
When I was pregnant with Bode, I hadn't thought much about passing those beliefs down to him.
But when I learned I was having a daughter, I couldn't stop thinking about it.
What would Rosie learn about her body by watching the way I treated mine?
I couldn't control every message the world would eventually give her about what a woman's body should look like.
But I could start paying attention to the messages she would hear from me.
After Rosie was born, I kept the promise I'd made to myself—but not in the way I might have earlier in my life.
At six weeks postpartum, I started small.
Sometimes that meant a Pilates class a few days a week. Sometimes it meant eight minutes.
Eight minutes counted.
I kept showing up. Slowly, those few minutes became longer workouts. I got stronger. Movement became something I did consistently—not because I'd eaten something I needed to burn off, or because I hated the body I saw in the mirror, but because I started loving what my body could do.
About a year postpartum, I began working with a functional medicine dietitian, and my relationship with food started changing, too. Instead of constantly thinking about what I shouldn't eat, I began learning how to build meals that actually supported me and helped me feel good.
Over time, my body changed. I've lost a significant amount of weight. I'm stronger and fitter than I've been in years, and I still have goals I'm working toward.
But the weight isn't the part I'm most proud of.
For the first time, I don't feel like I'm on a diet. I'm not waiting for the motivation to disappear or wondering when I'll fall off the wagon and gain everything back.
This doesn't feel like something I'm doing until I reach a finish line.
It feels like the way I live now.
And when my kids see Levi and me work out, I want them to understand why. We talk about eating protein so our bodies can be strong. We talk about how food makes us feel. We move our bodies so we can hike, explore, play, and hopefully keep doing those things together for a very long time.
I'm still unlearning plenty of things myself.
But Rosie doesn't need a mother who has perfectly healed every belief she ever had about her body.
She needs to see a mother practicing something different.
WHAT HEALTH MEANS TO ME NOW
My ideas about health didn't start with motherhood. Some of them go back much further.
When my dad's health took a devastating turn, I responded the only way I knew how at the time: I tried to become “healthy.”
I went vegan. I ran 25 or 30 miles a week. And while I genuinely loved some of what running gave me, if I'm being truthful, a lot of it was still tangled up in the same beliefs I'd carried for years.
I wanted to be skinny.
I thought running made me healthy because it made me smaller—or because it meant I could eat a certain way without gaining weight.
For a long time, I don't think I understood the difference between pursuing health and pursuing thinness.
It wasn't until I became a parent myself that I started looking at my dad's life—and his health—through a different lens.
I thought about what his health had meant for our family. What we'd lost. What I wished had been different. And yes, sometimes I felt angry.
But mostly, I started asking a much bigger question about my own life.
What am I trying to be healthy for?
Not a number on the scale.
Not smaller jeans.
Not approval.
I want strength to carry my kids. Energy to explore with them. A body that lets me hike, travel, create, play, and participate in my own life. I want to grow old with Levi. I want as many years with this family as I can get—and I want to be able to live those years.
I didn't understand what health could give me until I realized what it had taken away.
I can't control how long I get to be here. None of us can.
But I can pay attention to the life I'm building while I am.
And these are the questions I keep coming back to:
What kind of life are we protecting?
And what kind of life are we striving for?
A beautiful life is built by paying attention to the season you're in.
For a long time, I thought changing my life meant finding the right way to do it.
The perfect routine. The perfect diet. The perfect plan. The version of motherhood where I never lost my patience. The version of myself who somehow had enough time, energy, money, and motivation to do everything “right.”
I'm not interested in chasing her anymore.
Finding Rhythm isn't about getting everything right. It's about learning to pay attention.
To your body. Your family. Your home. Your work. The things that are asking something of you—and the season you're actually in.
Then you make the best decision you can with what you have and what you know right now.
Sometimes your best is the ideal choice.
Sometimes it's the second-best choice.
Sometimes it's the third or fourth.
It still counts.
Because the goal isn't to make one perfect decision that changes everything.
It's to make one thoughtful decision that moves you forward.
Then another.
And another.
Over time, those choices start adding up. You learn what works for you. You notice when something doesn't. You adjust. You begin to trust yourself a little more.
And eventually, all that imperfect forward motion starts to feel less like you're trying to become someone else—
and more like you're finding a rhythm that was yours all along.
That's Finding Rhythm.
Not a destination.
Motherhood made me start asking more questions about what I was feeding my kids and what I was putting on their skin. That curiosity eventually made its way into my own bathroom cabinet—skincare, makeup, and the products I had used for years without thinking much about what was actually in them.
So now I read labels. I learn about ingredients. I make lower-tox swaps when they make sense for us.
But I am not trying to win an award for having the cleanest house on the internet.
My kids eat things that come in packages. Convenience sometimes wins. I make exceptions. I use what I have until I'm ready to replace it. And sometimes the choice I make isn't the choice I'd make in some imaginary perfect version of our life.
That's kind of the point.
Finding Rhythm has never been about making the perfect choice. It's about making an informed choice within the life I'm actually living.
I want to know enough to choose intentionally more often than I choose automatically.
And when something stops working?
I pay attention again.
I share a lot of what I've learned here, but I think it's important to be clear about what that means.
I'm not a doctor, dietitian, hormone expert, or fitness professional.
I'm a woman who got curious about her own life and kept following the questions.
I've spent years tracking my cycle and learning to recognize my fertility signs. I've used that knowledge while trying to conceive and while trying not to conceive.
I've lived through irregular cycles, pregnancy loss, pregnancy, postpartum, and the process of learning how to work with my body instead of constantly feeling like I was fighting it.
I've spent years reading ingredient labels and making more intentional choices about the products we use in our home and on our bodies.
I've changed the way I eat with the support of a functional medicine dietitian, built a movement practice I genuinely enjoy, and experienced what happens when those changes become part of your life instead of another temporary plan.
Those experiences are mine. They're not prescriptions for yours.
When I know something because I've lived it, I'll tell you that.
When I've learned something from a book, practitioner, study, or other expert, I'll point you there.
And when something is outside my lane, I don't need to pretend otherwise.
I'm here to share what I'm learning, what I've tried, what has changed my life, and the resources that have helped me understand it along the way.
Think of me less as the person with all the answers and more as the friend who asks a lot of questions, takes very detailed notes, and tells you what she finds.
I wish I could tell you that learning all of this means I now float peacefully through my days, deeply attuned to every season and never annoyed when real life interrupts my plans.
That is not what is happening over here. 😂
I still get impatient.
I still have days when I want more time to work, even though being home with my kids was one of the reasons I built this life in the first place.
I still have goals for my body. I still make choices that don't perfectly match what I know. I still get overwhelmed, change my mind, lose my rhythm, and realize something that worked beautifully in one season doesn't fit the next one at all.
The difference is that I don't see those moments as proof that I've failed anymore.
They're information.
A reason to notice what's changed.
A chance to ask what I need now.
An invitation to choose again.
Maybe that's the part of Finding Rhythm I understand better than anything else:
You will lose it sometimes.
The practice is learning how to find your way back.
It started as curiosity — I was collecting feathers from our hunts, not sure what I’d do with them. When my mom introduced me to cyanotype printing, something clicked. I began making one-of-a-kind pillow covers and hatbands, blending art, nature, and intention. What began as a creative experiment grew into Olive & Company — a space where beauty and mindfulness meet.
For me, intentional living means slowing down enough to notice — what I bring into my home, how I treat my body, what I say yes (and no) to. It’s about making choices that feel aligned with the kind of life I want to live, not the one I feel pressured to keep up with.
It began with healing — after my miscarriage and PCOS diagnosis, I started learning how everyday products affect our hormones. As I made swaps that supported my health, I realized how much I wanted to help other women feel empowered, not overwhelmed, in making those changes too.
Some days I don’t — and that’s okay. I’ve learned balance isn’t about perfection; it’s about presence and making the best decision in that moment. I build my business during nap times and when my kids are awake, I include them in everything I need to do from working out to meal prepping.
I’m expanding beyond handmade art into digital resources and guides — creating tools that help women live more beautifully and intentionally, from cycle awareness to low-tox living. My dream is to grow this into something that supports my family’s freedom and helps other women do the same.