At some point, we started talking about our bodies like they were cars.
Fuel them. Optimise them. Track their output. Monitor the dashboard. Push through the warning lights because the destination matters more than the vehicle. If something breaks, fix it and get back on the road. Schedule maintenance quarterly. Upgrade when the newer model arrives.
Fitness culture sealed the deal. Your body is a machine and exercise is the mechanic. Input calories, output performance. Track the miles, the reps, the zones. Wear a device that quantifies your steps, your heart rate, your sleep quality, your blood oxygen, your readiness score — a number, generated by an algorithm, telling you whether your own body is ready for use today. Like getting a green light from your own arm to exist fully.
We talk about "gains" like we're reviewing a quarterly portfolio. We "push through" pain like it's a market correction. We "fuel" for "performance" like we're at a pit stop. The whole framework assumes your body is a thing you operate, not a thing you are.
And this framework has consequences. When your body is a machine, rest is downtime — wasteful unless it improves tomorrow's output. Movement that doesn't "count" — the dancing in the kitchen, the stretching that's just stretching, the walk that goes nowhere at a pace that burns nothing notable — gets filed under "not a workout." If it doesn't show up on the tracker, it didn't happen. If it can't be optimised, why bother?
But here's what bodies actually are, in case we've forgotten: they're animals.
Biological, instinctive, wildly complex animals that evolved to climb things, swim in cold water, carry heavy objects short distances, run away from threats at high speed, lie in the sun, and occasionally dance around a fire for no productive reason whatsoever. Your body doesn't want to be optimised. It wants to be used, enjoyed, listened to, and occasionally fed something that tastes good regardless of its macronutrient profile.
Watch a child move. Not a child in a sports programme — a child left to their own devices in a park. They run until they're tired. They stop. They roll in the grass. They hang upside down from things. They spin until they're dizzy and then fall over laughing. There's no programme, no coach, no heart-rate zone. Their body tells them what it wants and they do that thing until it tells them something different.
At no point does the child consult a wearable.
We were all that child once. Every one of us moved for the sheer animal pleasure of moving, before someone handed us a programme and told us the pleasure wasn't the point. The point was the metric. The output. The gain.
What if the pleasure was actually the point?
What if the best movement practice isn't the one that burns the most calories or generates the best Strava time, but the one you actually enjoy? The one that makes your body feel like something you inhabit rather than something you operate? The swim where you stop counting laps and just feel the water. The walk where you meander. The yoga class where you modify every pose because your body today isn't the same as your body yesterday and that's not failure — that's biology.
I stopped tracking my movement about a year ago. Took the watch off. Deleted the apps. Stopped knowing how many steps I'd done or what zone I'd been in or whether today's effort was better or worse than last Tuesday's.
It was terrifying at first. Like driving without a speedometer. How would I know if I'd done enough? What if I was slowing down and didn't realise? What if I — and this was the real fear — stopped being disciplined and everything fell apart?
What actually happened: I started moving more. Not because I was tracking it but because, freed from the obligation to optimise, I started choosing movement that felt good instead of movement that scored well. I walk more, but slowly. I swim, but I don't count. I stretch in the morning because my body asks for it, not because an app reminded me.
The machine metaphor is useful for selling things — watches, programmes, protein powder, the whole infrastructure of fitness-as-industry. But it's a terrible metaphor for living.
You are not a machine. You're an animal that has temporarily forgotten how to move like one. The fix isn't a new programme. It's permission to move the way your body is actually asking to.
It's probably asking right now.
Listen.