ActiveWomenSG

I didn’t set out to write a book.

I set out to help women feel stronger. And after nearly a decade of doing that — one session at a time, in living rooms and condos and gyms across Singapore — I realized the same stories kept coming back to me.

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I also lived it myself.

My first pregnancy was in 2018 — after years of trying, navigating Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), also referred to PMOS, and finding a new relationship with food and exercise after years of modelling. Learning to fuel my body instead of shrink it. Learning that strong meant something completely different from what I’d been taught.

Then I got pregnant and a whole new set of questions arrived. Is this move safe? Is that feeling normal? Even as a coach — someone who had studied this, who trained other pregnant women — I still had the doubt. I still didn’t know what to expect from my own delivery. My first was unknown territory in every sense.

My second pregnancy felt calmer. I knew more, trusted my body more. But my delivery was chaos. What started calmly turned into an emergency — my baby was sunny side up and high, not moving. Vacuum delivery. Nothing like what I had prepared for.

My third baby arrived in 2025 — induced, calm, straightforward. Completely different again.

Three pregnancies. Three deliveries — one unknown, one traumatic, one easy. And every single time, postpartum surprised me. My core, which had always been one of my strengths, felt like it belonged to someone else. Pelvic floor issues I had never experienced in my life — suddenly just there, without warning, without anyone having told me this was coming.

The lesson wasn’t that I needed to prepare better. It was that no amount of preparation fully closes the gap between what you’re told and what you actually experience. That gap is exactly what this book tries to fill.

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Then there were the women I coached. The same stories, year after year.

The mum who cut her session short again. Not because she didn’t want to be there, but because the school called, or the meeting ran over, or she felt guilty spending the money on herself when the kids had activities to pay for. The mum who showed up anyway — tired, stretched thin, already halfway through her to-do list — and still gave everything she had for forty-five minutes.

I remember my first clients. Mums trying to find their way back to themselves in the middle of lives that never seemed to slow down. Putting everyone else first and wondering why they kept ending up last.

Then there were the women who came to me after their deliveries — shocked. Blindsided. Why did nobody tell me it would be like this? The physical recovery nobody prepared them for. The immediate mum guilt — wanting to be present with their baby and also desperately wanting an hour to feel like themselves again. Both things true at once, and no space to say it out loud without feeling like they were failing at something.

And the hundreds — genuinely hundreds — of women I’ve worked with who were eating less and less and couldn’t understand why nothing was changing. Afraid of carbs. Afraid of protein. Watching the scale instead of noticing what their body could actually do. Me trying to explain, session after session: it’s not about eating less. It’s not about the number. Hoping they’d feel the difference. Hoping strength training would give them something the scale never could.

Pregnant women afraid of their weight going up — when weight gain is literally the point. Women after delivery not knowing what they’re allowed to do, what’s safe, what’s normal.

And just recently, a woman came to me six weeks postpartum. She’d had a serious haemorrhage — a frightening delivery, real recovery ahead of her. She told me her doctor had cleared her to run again.

She still felt heaviness when she chased her toddler around the garden.

Six weeks. Cleared to run.

This is what women are navigating. Conflicting advice, gaps in information, and a fitness industry that was largely not built around them — not around their hormones, their recoveries, their actual lives.

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So I wrote the book I kept wishing I could hand to every single one of them.

Not a plan that demands perfection. Not a guide that assumes you have an hour, a gym, and a full night’s sleep. A book that meets you where you actually are — in the mess, in the middle of it all — and gives you something that actually works there.

Strength Through the Messy & Beyond covers pre-conception, pregnancy, postpartum, motherhood, and perimenopause. Not as separate problems to fix — but as connected phases of a life in motion.

If any of this sounds familiar — it was written for you.

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Pre-order on Amazon | Add to Goodreads

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Daniëlle van der Leest is a Women’s Strength & Wellbeing Coach, Founder of ActiveWomen, and mum of three.

“Find out more about the book at activewomensg.com/book”