I told you there was a third part to the book. This is it — and it’s the part I almost didn’t write.
(This one follows on from What It Actually Took to Get the Words Right — the part of the book I said needed room of its own.)
Part One gives you the foundation. Part Two walks you through the five phases. But Part Three, The Messier Seasons, is where I stopped writing about what to do, and started writing about what it actually feels like when none of it goes to plan.
Three chapters live here. Here’s the truth in each of them.
When the body you built disappears
Chapter 12 is called Training Through Setbacks, and it opens with my own first postpartum experience.
I was a personal trainer. I understood how the body worked. I knew recovery takes time. None of that prepared me for standing in the gym, six weeks postpartum, and realising I couldn’t do a single sit-up. Not a hard one — any sit-up. Muscles I’d trusted completely, that had carried me through years of training, simply weren’t responding anymore. The body I was in didn’t feel like mine.
That disconnect — between what you ask your body to do and what it actually does — is what this chapter is really about. Not a recovery timeline. What it feels like when something you built disappears, and what happens to your sense of yourself when it does.
What to adjust, and what to actually act on
Chapter 13, Red Flags, exists because most of what you’ll feel during training isn’t dangerous. Soreness, fatigue, a leak that responds to modification, heaviness that settles with support — most of the time, that’s just your body telling you what it needs, and the answer is an adjustment, not an alarm.
But sometimes your body is asking for something different. Not a lighter weight. Actual support — a proper conversation, a real assessment. Women’s symptoms get dismissed more often than they should be, by healthcare providers, by partners, by the sheer cultural pressure to keep going and be fine. This chapter exists so you know the difference, and so you never feel you need to justify asking for help.
The story I don’t tell often
Chapter 14 is Nutrition, and it’s where I finally wrote down something I’ve kept mostly private.
When my husband and I started trying for a baby, I went off the pill and waited for my cycle to return. It didn’t. Months passed — one negative test after another. I was training hard, HIIT four times a week, running three times a week, eating carefully to maintain the body my modelling work expected. Low calorie, controlled, disciplined. From the outside, it probably looked like the picture of health. From the inside, my body had simply stopped doing something it needed to do.
Eventually I saw a doctor. The diagnosis was PMOS — formerly known as PCOS — alongside a hormonal imbalance. The advice that came with it was the one thing I wasn’t prepared to hear: eat more, exercise less. For a woman whose entire professional identity had been built around restraint and effort, that felt almost impossible. It went against everything I’d been taught to believe about health.
I followed the advice anyway. It took a full year — eating more, training less, slowly learning that nourishing my body wasn’t the same as losing control of it. And then I got pregnant.
That year changed how I understand nutrition, permanently. Not as a system for managing weight. Not a measure of discipline. The fundamental resource my body needed to function — the thing I’d been quietly withholding from it for years while convincing myself I was being healthy.
Why this part exists
None of these three chapters follow a clean plan. They’re not “do this, then this.” They’re the parts of the book that just tell the truth about what it’s like when your body doesn’t cooperate, when something needs more than a workout modification, when the thing that actually helps is the opposite of what you’ve been taught to do.
I almost left Part Three out. It felt too honest, too far from the clean, actionable content most fitness books stick to. But it’s the part I’m proudest of — because it’s the part that would have helped me most, back when I needed it and had nobody telling me any of this.
Strength Through the Messy & Beyond launches on 19 August 2026.
Daniëlle van der Leest
Women’s Strength & Wellbeing Coach | Founder of ActiveWomen | Mum of 3
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