I would be lying if I told you that my body has always done what I wanted it to. In fact, there have been more than a few times when my body has completely changed my plans — sometimes all of them. One of the most dramatic times was when I was unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer in my early 30s. In the moment, it felt like betrayal.

“There have been more than a few times when my body has completely changed my plans — sometimes all of them.”

Suddenly things looked and felt different to me. My energy was different. What I could ask of my body felt different. My calendar definitely looked different. With so many doctor appointments, scheduling changes, treatments, I felt like there was so much I didn’t plan for, decisions I didn’t expect to make. Plans that felt so far away suddenly came front and center, needing my attention now.

More than anything, the way I thought about my time had changed.

My cancer experience may be an extreme example. Many changes in our bodies don’t exactly have a clear dividing point between before and after. Yet there are many experiences that do — and we’re able to reflect and pinpoint those experiences.

Sometimes our bodies shift into something wonderful. You’re pregnant, and suddenly the body you knew your entire life is doing something literally miraculous one cell at a time. Then the baby arrives; technically you’re no longer pregnant, but you also haven’t slept in 10 months, were in labor for several hours, and life feels overwhelming. That 7 a.m. workout routine that used to feel amazing may still exist in your head, but it belonged to the person who had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep — night after night.

Or sometimes it’s perimenopause. A traumatic injury or experience. Grief. A new diagnosis. Or even a demanding season of work or caregiving for someone you love. Maybe it’s simply getting older, and realizing that the things your body tolerated when you were 25 don’t feel the same at age 45. 

What’s most interesting is how often our bodies change, while our expectations of them don’t change. 

“What’s most interesting is how often our bodies change, while our expectations of them don’t change.”

We still expect the same energy, productivity, and recovery. We expect the same workout schedule, the same capacity to do things, even the same hustle. And when your body can’t — or won’t — keep up, the first instinct we have is to figure out how to get it back on board.

As a functional medicine doctor opening my private practice, helping my patients understand why something has changed is part of the conversation. But there’s another question to ask: What if something other than your body needs to change in order to meet your new needs?

“I used to be able to do this.”

There’s some version of this statement that I hear from patients all the time. I used to be able to stay up until 1 a.m. and wake up feeling fine the next day. I used to work out this hard seven days a week. I used to be able to handle this much stress and more. I used to have way more energy than I do now.

I totally understand the frustration. We tend to use our previous capacity as a benchmark for something our current body is failing to meet.

“We tend to use our previous capacity as a benchmark for something our current body is failing to meet.”

Your 45-year-old body isn’t the same as your 25-year-old body in its capacity, or in its context. So much can change in two decades, from hormones, muscle mass, sleep, and metabolic health to injuries, medications, trauma, and diagnoses.

We shouldn’t expect less from ourselves as we age. It’s quite the opposite, actually. I want women to get stronger in midlife and maintain their resilience and capacity for as long as they can. What may have worked beautifully in one season of life doesn’t get a lifetime contract. As women, we’re more dynamic than that.

Your body has amazing capacity, not a flaw of character

Our bodies are so incredibly adaptive and resilient. With each moment in time, they’re responding to so many different things, like how we nourish ourselves, the relationships we keep, physiological stress, our environment, and everything else we’re asking them to do. But our ability to adapt isn’t infinite.

“Our ability to adapt isn’t infinite.”

Human beings do well functioning under less-than-optimal circumstances, but over time, it can still take a toll. Today, many of us expect to be able to sleep five hours a night, run on caffeine, work through lunch, train hard, take care of loved ones, and be just fine.

It’s at this place that wellness tools can be counterproductive. We start looking for ways to optimize our bodies, just to continue tolerating the exact same life that’s exhausting you in the first place. Another supplement or injection for energy. A recovery tracker. The latest wearable to support “X.” Something else to bring cortisol down. Another to help with sleep.

And while supplements, testing, technology, tools, and targeted therapies are recommended in my private practice when appropriate, it’s still important to ask ourselves: Are we using these things to support and optimize our health, or are we using these things to make an unsustainable season more tolerable? Or is it both?

You can support your body while also reflecting and changing what you’re asking it to carry. 

“You can support your body while also reflecting and changing what you’re asking it to carry.”

Maybe the morning routine needs to evolve. The workout structure could use a dynamic change to focus on new goals. You can ask for help. Protect your sleep in new ways this season and see how that feels. Eat enough. Reconsider that schedule of to-dos. Have the difficult conversation. Allow peace, breathing, space, and recovery to take much longer than you wanted it to.

Sometimes the life around your body needs the attention, too.

Let’s not assume that every symptom you experience is your body asking you to slow down

I’d type this with a huge asterisk next to everything I said above — because while it’s so important to listen to your body, we don’t want it to become another way we dismiss something that needs medical attention.

I’m saying this from personal experience. Before my breast cancer diagnosis in my early 30s, I explained away my own exhaustion as the consequence of my burning-the-candle-at-both-ends lifestyle. I was busy. I was working hard. Of course, it’s okay to feel tired from this. Except, in my case, there was much more going on in my body.

Constant exhaustion isn’t automatically a lifestyle. A significant change in your menstrual cycle isn’t automatically perimenopause. Pain isn’t automatically part of aging. Brain fog is not automatically stress.  If something new, significant, worsening, ongoing, or just simply feels unlike you, it’s important to know why and talk to your healthcare practitioner.

“If something new, significant, worsening, ongoing, or just simply feels unlike you, it’s important to know why and talk to your healthcare practitioner.”

This can look like advocacy at your doctor’s office; getting a better understanding of the effects of lifestyle and environment on your health; getting your labs done to learn more; looking at your personal and family history; understanding context, medications, or supplements. Maybe it is functional medicine testing to help you understand things at a deeper level. 

Lab results carry important information about your physiology. However it can’t tell me that your baby has been waking every three hours at night, your mom was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, you’ve skipped lunch for three weeks because things got busy at work, and you’re forcing the workout because it’s the one part of your day that you feel you should still control.

Testing gives data. The person in front of me gives the context. The physician-patient relationship and experience molds it together. All of this matters more than you may know.

When your body changes before your identity can catch up

In our lives, we build identities around what we are capable of: Being the productive one. The athlete. The caretaker. The friend who shows up no matter what. The supermom who handles everything. Or the one who doesn’t need any help.

And then as life happens, things change. You need more rest. Energy is less predictable. You need more hands. Your training regimen isn’t the same. You simply need more. Suddenly changing your routine doesn’t feel as helpful, because it feels like changing who you are. 

“Suddenly changing your routine doesn’t feel as helpful, because it feels like changing who you are.”

I experienced some of this during my cancer treatment. I was used to being the doctor, the person helping someone else understand their body. Then I became a patient. I had to let go, let other people take care of me except that some days (most days, really) my body needed more support than what my mind had planned.

Cancer didn’t teach me that my body was fragile. If anything it gave me incredible respect and gratitude for how resilient it can be. But resilience isn’t the same thing as just pretending nothing happened. Resilience looks like adapting and evolving. 

You don’t have to wait

Cancer didn’t ask for permission when it changed my life. And you don’t always get a warning sign before things change. You also don’t have to wait for something critical to happen before you decide to change the way you’re living.

In medicine we often talk about prevention in terms of screening tests, lab work, assessing risk factors, and looking at lifestyle. All of those things are important. There’s also another kind of prevention worth talking about: Paying attention to the healthy, vibrant, abundant life that you’re living while you still have the opportunity to cultivate it. 

You don’t have to wait until you’re utterly exhausted to protect your sleep each night.

“You don’t have to wait until you’re utterly exhausted to protect your sleep each night.”

You don’t have to wait until your body hurts to rethink your rigorous training regimen.

You don’t have to wait until you’re burned out to create a boundary between you and your work.

And you certainly don’t need a diagnosis to ask whether the life you’re living is supporting the health you hope to have five, ten, or even twenty years from now. 

Your healthspan deserves the attention right now.

You don’t need to go back to who you were

I get this one completely. In fact, I’ll never forget sitting at one of my last oncology appointments towards the end of my active cancer treatment where she said: “You can go back to living your life before cancer.” I really do understand the sentiment and why we want to “get back.”

Maybe it’s the pre-baby body. The pre-diagnosis energy. The old workout routine. The person you were before disease, perimenopause, motherhood, aging, or life experienced changed something. Changed everything. 

So many things matter to your body and it’s not about romanticizing feeling depleted or uncomfortable as some kind of inevitable part of moving through this thing called life. Recovery matters. Treatment matters. Building strength matters. Feeling well and healing absolutely matter. 

“Recovery matters. Treatment matters. Building strength matters. Feeling well and healing absolutely matter.”

There are all these experiences that change who we are. After cancer, I wasn’t going to become the woman who never had cancer. It simply wasn’t possible. Even though a decade ago I was frozen in the doctor’s office chair when my oncologist talked to me about going back to that life before cancer, I knew deep down it wouldn’t be the same.

A new mother isn’t the same woman she was before becoming a mother for the first time. A woman experiencing menopause isn’t returning to the same hormonal environment that her body was firing on when she was 30. But different doesn’t automatically mean worse. 

Instead of always asking: How do I get back to the person I was before?, maybe we can also ask: What does the person I am now need in this moment, this season, in this part of my life journey?

“Maybe we can also ask: What does the person I am now need in this moment, this season, in this part of my life journey?“

The answer isn’t always to do less, even though for many of us, we are living in the doing-too-much season and we know it. Sometimes adapting means time and space to reflect, learn from your experience, change your habits, upgrade your routines and workouts, or ask more of yourself in a completely different or new way. 

What may matter most is responding to the body and life that you have rather than constantly trying to recreate the one you used to have.

Letting your life change, grow, evolve, with you

There is something truly beautiful about how many different lifetimes we can live in just one body. The one that carries you through your 20s won’t be the exact same one you inhabit in your 40s, 60s, or even 80s. It’ll be one with the richness that only life experience can offer, as unique as your thumbprint. Along the way, it may carry you through motherhood, illness, caregiving, healing, several different careers, many relationships, wild adventures, heartbreak, love, strength you didn’t even know you had, and life chapters that are yet unwritten. 

This is not a loss.

“There is so much freedom in realizing that you aren’t required to live the exact way you always have.”

There is so much freedom in realizing that you aren’t required to live the exact way you always have. You can change your routines, priorities, careers, choices. You can become stronger in new ways. You can decide something matters much more, or less, than it used to. You can discover and learn new things about yourself that may surprise you and delight you.

Maybe the life that fits your body isn’t something you figure out once and for all. It’s something you get to keep intentionally creating and learning from as you go.

Dr. Jaclyn Tolentino is a board-certified family medicine physician specializing in functional medicine, women’s health, hormone optimization, metabolic health, and longevity. She has been featured in Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Women’s Health. As both a physician and a breast cancer survivor, she is passionate about delivering thoughtful, personalized care that empowers patients to better understand their health. Follow her on Instagram for updates and insights.