The Year in Review

What Your Body Taught You (If You Were Listening)

It’s December 29th, and my social media feed is exploding with “New Year, New You” messaging. Transformation programs, weight loss challenges, and fitness boot camps all promising that 2026 will be the year you finally become the person you’re supposed to be.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here thinking about something completely different: what did your body teach you in 2025?

Not what you achieved or what you changed or what you fixed. But what you learned by actually listening to the body you’ve been living in all year.

The Reflection Nobody’s Having

Every December, we’re encouraged to review our failures, identify our shortcomings, and make resolutions to fix everything we got wrong.

We tally up the workouts we missed, the weight we didn’t lose, the goals we didn’t achieve. We mentally catalog all the ways we fell short of our ideals.

Then we create elaborate plans for January that are essentially punishment disguised as self-improvement.

This entire framework is backwards.

What if instead of reviewing what you didn’t do, you reflected on what your body taught you about actually being human? What if instead of making resolutions to override your body’s signals, you made commitments to listen to them more carefully?

I’ve been thinking about the lessons my clients’ bodies taught them this year, and they’re profound:

Your body taught you about limits. That injury that forced you to modify your routine? That was information. Your body showed you where you’d been pushing past sustainable boundaries.

Your body taught you about rhythms. Those weeks when your energy was low and everything felt harder? That was your body showing you that consistency doesn’t mean sameness. Energy fluctuates, and health means working with those fluctuations, not against them.

Your body taught you about resilience. Every time you returned to movement after time away, your body demonstrated its capacity to rebuild. You rediscovered your adaptability.

Your body taught you about aging. The exercises that got harder, the recovery that took longer, the changes in how your body responds to familiar routines. This is your body asking you to evolve your relationship with it.

Your body taught you about stress. Those physical symptoms that appeared during high-stress periods? That tension in your neck, that pain in your low back, that disrupted sleep? Your body was speaking. Did you listen, or did you just try to push through?

The Questions Resolution Culture Doesn’t Ask

Instead of “What do you want to change about yourself in 2026?” I want to ask different questions: