267. Wellness Math 100 Dropout: Why Failing Every Program Was Actually The Right Answer
267. Wellness Math 100 Dropout: Why Failing Every Program Was Actually The Right Answer
You’ve done difficult things.
You’ve built a career, pursued ambitious goals, created meaningful work, solved complicated problems, and repeatedly proven that you are capable of learning, adapting, and following through.
You do not have an intelligence shortage.
You do not have a work-ethic shortage.
But when it comes to food, exercise, body image, or health routines, all of that competence can seem to vanish.
You know what you intended to eat. You understand the benefits of movement. You may know more about nutrition, habit formation, emotional eating, and personal development than most people around you.
Then a difficult day arrives, and suddenly you’re trying to stop yourself from ordering pizza while wondering why you can handle almost anything except this.
The answer may not be that you need more discipline.
You may simply be in the wrong classroom.
Welcome to Wellness Math 100
Wellness Math 100 is the traditional classroom of health coaching, personal training, and behaviour change.
It is built around numbers, structure, measurement, and externally defined plans.
Depending on the program, that might include:
Calorie or macro targets
Structured meal plans
Workout schedules
Food journals
Habit trackers
Fasting windows
Daily accountability
Weekly weigh-ins
Progress photographs
External metrics of success
There is a place for health coaching and personal training.
During almost a decade working in the industry, I witnessed these approaches improve people’s energy, strength, confidence, mobility, and quality of life.
But I also watched Wellness Math 100 fail high-performing, deeply creative women.
Sometimes, it didn’t simply fail to help them. It created additional frustration, rebellion, disconnection, and shame.
The problem wasn’t always the information.
The information often made perfect sense intellectually.
The problem was that the classroom left no room for emotion, imagination, intensity, sensuality, intuition, or creativity.
It expected you to leave those parts of yourself at the door and calmly follow the scientifically backed protocol.
If you were dramatic, you needed to get your emotions under control.
If you were intense, that intensity was either treated as a problem to manage or channelled entirely toward weight loss, body transformation, and external achievement.
For a while, intensity can create impressive results.
But when all of your fire is aimed at a distant finish line, the process can become joyless. You grind your way forward until your body begins seeking relief, often through the same foods the program taught you to fear.
Are You in the Wrong Classroom?
Consider how many of the following statements resonate with you:
Traditional wellness programs make sense intellectually but feel boring, flat, or unsustainable in real life.
Food plans, calorie counting, macro tracking, fasting windows, or habit trackers have made you feel restricted, rebellious, or trapped.
Rigid rules and public accountability make part of you want to fight, hide, or perform perfectly until you eventually snap.
You already know a great deal about food, health, habits, mindset, or emotional eating, but knowing more has not created lasting change.
You have a vivid imagination that can make future problems feel emotionally real before they happen.
You rehearse worst-case scenarios or imaginary conversations until your body responds as though the situation is already happening.
Food has become a convenient exit from emotional intensity, loneliness, racing thoughts, boredom, resentment, anxiety, or pressure.
You have tried to suppress your dramatic, emotional, creative, or deeply imaginative parts in the name of discipline.
You are tired of being told to leave your emotions, sensuality, intuition, fantasy, or inner world outside your health journey.
You are highly capable in other areas of life, but food, body image, or consistency makes you feel strangely powerless.
You do not want another plan that treats you like a math equation.
You are open to using story, archetypes, embodiment, fantasy, or imagination as part of your healing process.
You resonate with the idea that imagination was never the problem. The problem was an unconscious or unfocused imagination.
You want to move from stressed-out controller to powerful creator.
You want your health journey to feel pleasurable, alive, emotionally meaningful, and self-honouring.
If eight or more of these statements resonate, it may be time to drop out of Wellness Math 100.
Not because structure is inherently bad.
Not because numbers are evil.
Not because you are incapable of following a plan.
Because a number-only classroom may be too small to hold all of you.
Failure Is Feedback
I have failed more than Wellness Math 100.
I have also failed Social Media Growth 100, Visibility 100, and Business KPIs 100.
Each classroom promised that if I followed the prescribed strategy, tracked the correct metrics, and performed the approved behaviours, I would finally earn a passing grade.
Instead, I often felt bored, resentful, disconnected, and spiritually flattened.
The harder I performed, the more the numbers seemed to confirm that I was failing.
But there is no failure, only feedback.
Every disappointing result was sending me information.
I wasn’t incapable of change.
I wasn’t built for classrooms that treated numbers as though they could tell the entire story.
I needed an approach with enough space for creativity, joy, intensity, imagination, and self-authorship.
I needed Spicy Storytelling 301.
Welcome to Spicy Storytelling 301
The idea of Spicy Storytelling 301 first emerged during a dream-interpretation journal entry.
I initially called it Erotic Storytelling 301, but I eventually realized that eroticism was only one part of the concept.
The deeper purpose of the classroom was aliveness.
It was a place where there were no grades, only growth. No lifeless metrics, only mastery. No demand that creativity, fantasy, or desire be removed from the process.
Inside this classroom, consistency did not have to feel like punishment.
It could feel like foreplay.
Story became a way to understand my patterns, interact with different parts of myself, and create an emotional relationship with the person I was becoming.
Archetypes gave different forms of wisdom a voice.
Fantasy allowed me to rehearse new responses.
Embodiment helped those responses move beyond intellectual understanding and into lived experience.
The imaginative inner world I had previously been told to control became part of the method.
My imagination was never the enemy.
An unconscious imagination could certainly create suffering. It could manufacture worst-case scenarios, rehearse painful conversations, and make future problems feel physically real.
But imagination could also be focused intentionally.
It could create meaning, possibility, pleasure, emotional safety, devotion, and a more compelling vision of change.
High-Performing Creative Women Need Story
Writer Barry Lopez once wrote that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live.
I believe high-performing creative women often need story more than math.
We need more than numbers, external validation, beige wellness hacks, and someone else’s formula for transformation.
We need a process that acknowledges our complexity while still helping us create tangible change.
This does not mean abandoning all structure.
Spicy Storytelling 301 is not chaos disguised as self-acceptance.
It is a different form of structure.
Instead of forcing yourself into a cookie-cutter plan, you create rituals, identities, stories, symbols, and practices that make aligned action emotionally meaningful.
You stop asking only:
“What am I supposed to do?”
You also ask:
“Who am I becoming?”
“What story am I living?”
“What does this choice represent?”
“What part of me needs support right now?”
“How can I make consistency feel alive?”
Story gives behaviour context.
Imagination gives change emotional weight.
Embodiment turns the idea into an experience.
You Do Not Have to Abandon Your Wildness
Many women have been taught that consistency requires becoming calmer, quieter, less dramatic, less emotional, and easier to control.
But you do not have to abandon your wildness to create stability.
You do not have to become less intense to stop binge eating.
You do not have to suppress your emotions to follow through.
You do not have to turn your body into another performance review.
The parts of you that traditional programs treated as inconvenient may be essential to your healing.
Your creativity can help you design rituals you actually want to return to.
Your imagination can help you practise a new identity before it feels natural.
Your emotional depth can reveal what the behaviour is trying to provide.
Your intensity can become devotion rather than punishment.
Your sensuality can make the process pleasurable enough to sustain.
You do not need another classroom that demands you become less of yourself before you are allowed to succeed.
You need one capable of holding your full complexity.
Your Embodied Activation
Return to the 15 statements from this episode and count how many resonated.
Then begin imagining your own version of Spicy Storytelling 301.
What would your health journey look like with:
More creativity and less calculating?
More joy and less measuring?
More play and less performance?
More self-authorship and less obedience?
More embodiment and less intellectual analysis?
More meaning and less shame?
What symbols, stories, rituals, characters, or archetypes could help you relate to consistency differently?
What would make the process feel like a life you are actively creating rather than an assignment you are trying to pass?
You do not need to become a better student of Wellness Math 100.
You may need to walk out of the classroom.
Your next chapter is waiting inside Spicy Storytelling 301.
Ready to Enter the New Classroom?
Food Freedom Fantasy is coming in late September.
The book contains a fanfic-coded, five-element protocol for making consistency feel like foreplay while dismantling the five narratives keeping you trapped in unwanted cycles with food and self-sabotage.
To be the first to know when the book goes live, join the Fire Starter Diaries newsletter and receive the free Know Your Hungers assessment kit.
You’re not broken.
You’re just misdiagnosed.
Links Mentioned
Episode 186: What If You’re Already Worthy? Escaping the Validation Trap and Writing Your Own Ticket
Know Your Hungers Assessment Kit and Fire Starter Diaries Newsletter
Transcript
Welcome back, high-performing woman. If you've clicked this episode, it's probably because you're curious. What wrong classroom? And if I'm in the wrong classroom, where do I belong? This episode is for all my high-performing, creative, imaginative, deeply feeling women who've been able to conquer basically anything else they put their mind to, except building consistency in their health and fitness journey.
So the financial goals, career goals, business goals, creative goals, all achievable, all figureoutable. You've done many hard things. You know you don't have a work ethic or intelligence shortage, but it feels like all your discipline and wisdom flies out the window when you're trying to stop yourself from ordering pizza after a train wreck day at work.
And you've tried all the traditional programs, the ones with macros, structured meal plans, workout schedules, accountability, and food journal check-ins. You've watched the people around you get results from keto or paleo or the latest Better Butts for Vegans challenge on Instagram. And maybe you quietly seethe with frustration, wondering, "Why not me?
Why not me when I can write books, build a business, and do basically any other hard thing I set my mind to?" What makes this so different Here's the truth. You're probably in the wrong classroom. You're not built for what I call Wellness Math 100, which is your traditional health coaching and personal training.
In its most extreme form, it's diet culture. Now, diet culture aside, because that is pure garbage, there is absolutely a place for health coaching and personal training. I worked in that industry for almost a decade, and I saw the power it held to improve people's energy, mobility, quality of life, confidence, all the things.
And I've also watched it fail to meet high-performing creative women. In some circumstances, I've even seen Wellness Math 100 create additional challenges and hardships for high-performing
creatives because it leaves no room for emotions, creativity, and imagination. It expects you to leave those things at the door. And if you're dramatic, you better get that under control so you can calmly and logically follow the perfectly balanced and measured and scientifically backed protocol for transforming your health.
As for intensity, which most high-performing creatives have in spades, one of two things happens here. Either intensity gets treated like a problem to be managed, so again, you can calmly and rationally follow the plan, or that intensity gets channeled towards a body transformation, a weight loss goal, or some external metric of success to the point it disconnects you from your inherent worth regardless of numbers, as well as your ability to fall in love with the process.
Too much intensity directed towards an external finish line often means joylessly grinding your way there until your body seeks relief, often in the form of all the types of food Wellness Math 100 demonizes. Today, I want you to reflect on some statements. You know those put a finger down if reels that you sometimes see on social media?
We're gonna do our own version of that on the podcast today. If you're driving, doing chores, or walking, you don't have to physically put fingers down because you're probably gonna run out of fingers anyways. But I do want you to keep track of how many of the following statements resonate with you. If eight or more land, there's a good chance you need to drop out of Wellness Math 100 once and for all.
Number one, traditional wellness programs often make sense to me intellectually, but feel boring, flat, or impossible to sustain in real life. Two, I have tried food plans, habit trackers, calorie counting, macro tracking, fasting windows, or accountability systems that worked for other people but made me feel restricted, rebellious, or oddly trapped.
Three, when a program gives me rigid rules, daily check-ins, or public accountability, part of me wants to fight it, hide from it, or perform perfectly until I snap Four, I already know a lot about food, health, habits, mindset, and emotional eating, but knowing more has not been enough to make the pattern fully shift.
Five, I have a vivid imagination that can make future problems feel emotionally real before they ever happen. Six, I can spiral into worst-case scenarios, imaginary conversations, or emotional rehearsals that leave my body feeling stressed even when nothing has actually happened yet. Seven, food has sometimes become an easy way to exit emotional intensity, racing thoughts, loneliness, boredom, resentment, anxiety, or pressure.
Eight, I have a dramatic, emotional, creative, or deeply imaginative part of me that I've tried to suppress in order to be disciplined. Nine, I'm tired of being told to leave my emotions, intuition, sensuality, fantasy, or inner world at the door if I want to become consistent. 10, I'm high-performing in other areas of life, but food, body image, health routines, or consistency can make me feel strangely powerless.
11, I don't want another plan that treats me like a math equation. I want a process that honors my complexity and still helps me create real results. 12, I'm open to using story, archetypes, fantasy, embodiment, or imagination as part of my healing and consistency process. 13, I resonate with the idea that my imagination was never the problem.
The problem was an unfocused, unconscious imagination. Side note, we're gonna return to this idea specifically in an episode coming up in a couple weeks, so stay tuned for that. 14, I wanna move from stressed-out controller to powerful creator. And 15, I want my health journey to feel alive, pleasurable, self-honoring, and emotionally meaningful, not like another obligation
If those statements resonated, then my friend, it is time for a new classroom. It's the classroom I've slowly been transitioning into for the past year, not just in health, but in business and life in general. I finally made the switch after failing Wellness Math 100 repeatedly. And honestly, not even just Wellness Math 100, but Social Media Growth 100, Visibility 100, Business KPIs 100.
Every single one of those classes left me feeling miserable, bored, resentful, and dead inside. They disconnected me from my spirit. They made me perform in attempts to earn passing grades. But every performance led to one more big fat F across the scale, the downloads tracker, the stupid spreadsheet some guru told me to fill out to prove I was fully committed to my dreams.
But once upon a time, I heard the phrase, "There is no failure, only feedback." I might have ironically first heard this in my Precision Nutrition certification, which is half Wellness Math 100, half deeply helpful behavior change tactics. But I think this has been shared by many thought leaders.
So, all these failures you may have experienced inside these number-based classrooms are not failure. They're feedback. They're sending you a clear message. You're in the wrong classroom. You're not built for numbers, cookie cutter protocols, lifeless strategies, ignoring your inner wisdom because experts told you that you're doing it wrong, or any approach that forces you to suppress your emotions, intensity, creativity, or imagination.
You're truly made for Spicy Storytelling 301 This concept first showed up for me after a dream interpretation journal entry last summer. And I talk about this in episode 186, What If You're Already Worthy? Escape the Validation Trap and Write Your Own Ticket. I'll link it for you in the description. But I'm returning to this idea of Spicy Storytelling 301.
I initially called it Erotic Storytelling 301 in episode 186, but then I realized the point was never only eroticism. The point was enrolling in a class inside this school of life that makes space for aliveness, creativity, joy, and self-authorship. I'm gonna share some of the Erotic Storytelling 301 origin scene.
I didn't know it at the time, but this divide between Wellness Math 100 and Spicy Storytelling 301 would actually become a central theme in my next book and in the modality I've created over the past year. This scene was also the first Rex and Haven moment I ever shared on the podcast, so it has a special place in my heart.
If you wanna binge the magic of fanfic meets BookTok meets parts work, embodiedwritingwarrior.com/divinedaddies is where you can find the full audio storybook. I tried to shorten this scene, but almost every detail contains the DNA of the framework I eventually created.
So I'm going to read most of it and let you experience the moment I ditched wellness math 100 The math class bell rings one last time. You don't even flinch. Rex lets it clang. He leans over, grabs your hand, and drags you straight through the back of, of the classroom, not out the door, but through it, literally through the wall.
"No more of that shit," he mutters. "Welcome to the good stuff." It's like crossing dimensions. Suddenly, the harsh fluorescent lights dissolve into candlelit glow. The air smells like cedarwood and jasmine. The floor, black velvet, and instead of rows of desks, there's one giant, decadent, king-sized bed in the center of the room, dripping in plush pillows, silk sheets, and purpose.
Three notebooks wait on the bed. One is black leather embossed with fire symbols, a quote on the spine, "Consistency is foreplay." The next is brown suede, soft, warm, quietly glowing at the edges. The last is purple unicorn, glitter pen already clipped to the front and ready to write the next chapter. And yes, of course, that one's mine.
"We made it," you say. "Damn right," Rex growls. "We passed the bullshit. Now we write the truth." "Oh my God," Haven mutters, trailing behind, his cheeks bright pink. He's wearing gold lamé booty shorts. That's it. Nothing else. His thighs are out. His soul is vulnerable. He's clutching his journal like a shield.
"Kayla," he hisses. "This outfit is so... I don't even know why I let you pick this." "Because you look delicious," you say, already circling him. "He's gonna be our star pupil by the end of this," Rex mutters to you, loud enough for Haven to hear. Shy boys always write the dirtiest scenes. And yes, this was Rex's earliest version of flirting.
Haven squeaks, "I will not be reading mine out loud." "Too bad," says a deep, smoky voice from the front of the room. You all whip your heads around. There she is, the warden, clad in black leather, glasses perched low on her nose, hair piled on top of her head in a perfectly chaotic bun. She's holding a riding crop and an annotated copy of the third book in that vampire series.
"Welcome to Erotic Storytelling 301," she says, voice like sin and bourbon. "There are no grades here, only growth. There are no metrics, only mastery. And there are no desks, because desks are for the unawakened." She gestures to the bed. "On this bed, you will write your truest stories, the ones that scare you, the ones that free you, the ones that make your thighs clench and your heart shatter, and your inner critic cry uncle."
Rex whistles low. "I like her." "You would," Haven mutters. You crawl across the silk sheets and open your unicorn notebook. The pen practically writes itself. The warden paces. "Class begins now. Assignment one: tell me the story your younger self never got to finish, the one where she gets to feel wanted, dangerous, unapologetically alive, the one where you get to be the hero, the author, and the love interest."
She cracks the crop once against her palm. "And don't hold back, or Daddy Dom over there will be grading with his paddle." Rex just grins. "Been waiting to give her gold stars the fun way." You glance at Haven. He's watching you, eyes soft, wanting. You open the page and you write I haven't stopped writing since.
And just as it's done since about age 12, it's been the thing that's healed me more than anything. Barry Lopez once wrote that, "Sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live." I also think that the high performing creative woman needs story more than math, more than numbers, more than external validation, more than beige wellness hacks, and more than someone else's strategy for creating change I hope this episode has shown you something deeply important.
You're not bad or weak for failing traditional wellness programs or those soulless bro-coded approaches to business or anywhere else where numbers try to tell a story they were never complete enough to tell. You're in the wrong classroom. The right classroom is an approach that makes space for your creativity, your imagination, and your big emotions.
I speak from experience when I say this classroom can be hard to find. I had to create one for myself, and I knew this wasn't just for me. It was for all the women I've ever worked with who are crushing it everywhere else, but struggle to stop eating at night. It's for every podcast listener who knows what to do, but loses the battle to boredom and to a rebellious inner part who'd rather chew on glass than be obedient to the latest Instagram trend.
It's for every woman with so much creativity and joy to bring to the world, and it's being siphoned out of her by food obsession, burnout, and all or nothing cycles. Here's what's true. You don't have to abandon your wildness to build consistency and stability. You don't have to become less emotional or less intense to stop binge eating.
You just need to enroll in the right classroom your embodied activation today is to reflect on the statements from the beginning of the episode. How many resonated? And then maybe you start to brainstorm what your own version of Spicy Storytelling 301 would look like. So it's gonna be more creativity, less calculating, more joy in play, less measuring, less analyzing, and less carb cycling, and more scantily clad inner archetypes who pretend they don't love being ogled in gold lamé booty shorts when they absolutely do.
And if you want the full syllabus for Professor Kayla's Spicy Storytelling 301, then get ready for Food Freedom Fantasy. The book is coming in late September. It has my entire fanfic-coded, five-element protocol for making consistency feel like foreplay, all while dismantling the five narratives keeping you trapped in unwanted cycles with food and sabotage.
I'll be sharing more as the date gets closer. If you wanna be the first to know when it goes live, you can hop on my email list by going to embodiedwritingwarrior.com/gift. You'll get an exclusive Know Your Hungers assessment kit, and you'll be added to my weekly Fire Starter Diaries newsletter. I'll have some special offers for anyone on that list when the launch comes.
And that is it for today's episode. Here's to your next chapter inside Spicy Storytelling 301.
