Kristy Kelly: Good Morning, Kristy. Here’s How to Fix Yourself
I’ve become obsessed with watching yoga videos. Not because I can do them, but because I haven’t been able to bend that way since I was a toddler. The yogis are on a journey toward enlightenment, and I’m clearly on a vastly different journey of stiff joints and bad decisions.
Since giving the monster bike to my sons, I’ve been trying to find a new way to motivate myself to go outside. The new kayak is still untouched, and now it has an unused gym membership keeping it company. If buying things makes people healthy, I should be immortal by now.
We tried a walking group that I organized, one that even picked me up at my house. Three months of local election protests made walking with the group impossible. Holidays and snow finished off what little momentum we had left, and now the group chat sits silent, a digital monument to good intentions.
The problem with trying to be healthy is that once you admit you’re trying, you can’t escape it. Every Facebook ad, every Google Chrome browser window, every device in my house turns into a relentless fitness intervention. The algorithms smell vulnerability like blood in the water.
“Ride this bike to lose weight and feel great!”
“This shot will solve all your problems and you’ll never feel hungry again!”
The options are endless, as long as the solution involves altering your chemistry, rearranging your organs, or subscribing to something monthly.
Sure, the shot works. Until it doesn’t. I can’t take it anymore for a variety of reasons, and when I stopped, the weight came back almost immediately. The pill was short-term and came with the fun side effect of reminding me what a heart attack might feel like. Surgery is always on the table, too. My Alexa makes sure I don’t forget that.
“Good morning, Kristy. It’s Thursday, February 5th, 2026. Today’s weather is cold, your calendar is full, and bariatric surgery boasts high success rates, with 70 percent of patients achieving significant long-term weight loss.”
Nothing pairs quite like existential dread and a cheery robot reminding you your body is a problem to be solved before coffee.
What I’m drowning in are solutions aimed at the body but none aimed at the brain. Pills, shots, and powders target the digestive system, the bloodstream, the stomach. None of them address forty years of food scarcity, learned behavior, and survival instincts that never got the memo we’re not running out anymore.
There’s nothing in a syringe that teaches you how to trust food again. Nothing in a pill that rewires the part of your brain that still believes you need to clean your plate because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. Nothing surgical that fixes the reflex to eat like the world might end at any moment, because once upon a time, it felt like it might.
The shots taught me I lose muscle just as fast as I lose fat. The pill taught me fear. What none of it taught me was how to listen to my body, how to feed it without punishment or excess, or how to exist in it without shame.
I don’t want surgery. I want the sun to come out so I can drag my kayak to the water and finally go down the river. I want spring back so I can take my grandkids out on their bikes and keep up without pretending I’m fine. Maybe then I’ll find one that fits me, too.
Basically, what I’m saying is I need winter to end, the internet to stop diagnosing me before breakfast, and the robots in my house to mind their business so I can enjoy my life again.
Or a free personal trainer.
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