Nutrition coach and Founder of Total Body Transformation, Simone Lovell has spent twenty-six years watching women confuse discipline with wellness. She thinks it's time we stopped.
I expected to talk to Simone Lovell about protein on the latest podcast episode of Evalina Beauty's Life is Beauty Full. Instead, within the first few minutes of our conversation, she was telling me about her mother.
"I watched her go from diet to diet, starve herself, binge eat, starve herself, binge eat," Simone said. "She would weigh herself every single day. There was this tape measure that lived on the bathroom sink. She would measure her waist and her thighs every single day. Even as a little girl, I could see how she tied that number on the scale to her self-worth."
It's an image that's hard to shake: a little girl, quietly watching the woman she loves most decide whether it will be a good day or a bad day, based on a number.
Long before Simone understood hormones or metabolism, she understood something more elemental — what it looks like when a woman slowly disconnects from her own body. She watched health become something else entirely: a pursuit of worthiness.
"I remember seeing this as a little girl and thinking to myself, I have to end up a different way."
The sentence stayed with me. In one form or another, a lot of us inherited some version of that story.
The Tape Measure on the Sink
I see glimpses of it already in my own teenage daughter — a girl with a healthy, strong body who still, in certain moments, quietly wonders if she's enough. It's a reminder of how early these beliefs take root.
Maybe for you it wasn't a scale and a tape measure. Maybe it was a magazine cover promising the perfect beach body, or the particular tone of approval reserved for a woman who skipped dessert. However it arrived, a lot of us absorbed the same quiet lesson: that our bodies were projects to improve, not homes to live in. That appearance and worth were the same currency.
Wellness, in the meantime, has become its own full-time job. We count macros, track sleep scores, close rings, debate supplements, scroll an endless feed of advice — and somehow still feel behind. There has never been more information available to women about their bodies, and there has rarely been more anxiety attached to having one.
"I have to end up a different way."
That's what struck me about Simone. After twenty-six years of coaching women, she isn't selling another protocol. She's arguing for something much less marketable: a healthier relationship with yourself.
Twenty-Six Years, Same Issue
Her own path here wasn't a straight line. Simone became a personal trainer at eighteen and built a career teaching other women how to get fit. Then, after the birth of her daughter, her own body stopped cooperating with everything she thought she knew. She gained sixty-five pounds. She developed eczema head to toe and migraines that could flatten a day, and she ran on coffee to get through it.
The hardest part wasn't the symptoms. It was coaching other women while privately feeling like she was failing at her own advice.
"I was telling my clients what to do, but I couldn't do it myself," she admitted.
She didn't quit. She got curious instead — immersing herself in the science of hormones, nutrition, detoxification, and metabolism, trying to understand why the rules that had once worked for her had simply stopped working.
"This doesn't need to be hard. It doesn't need to be confusing," she says now. "It can genuinely feel effortless when you do it strategically."
Everything she teaches today still traces back to that girl in the bathroom, watching her mother. Whether she's talking about protein, meal timing, or GLP-1s, the real question underneath is always the same: what if a woman's body stopped being a problem to solve?
Permission to Eat
If there's one idea Simone kept circling back to, it's this: women don't need more discipline. They need better support.
"I've been a coach for twenty-six years, and I see the same issue over and over: women under-eating and over-exercising."
Not overeating. Under-eating.
"I'm giving you permission to eat," she said. "We have to be eating the right food, at the right time, for the right reasons — but I'm giving you permission to eat more food."
Rather than asking women to shrink their lives around another restrictive plan, Simone starts by feeding them. Stable blood sugar, enough protein, enough fuel across the day — that's the foundation everything else sits on. Energy comes back. Cravings quiet down. The healthy choice starts to feel less like willpower and more like rhythm.
When I asked what a woman should do if she's simply overwhelmed, Simone didn't offer a protocol. She offered a starting point.
"Start with your food first."
Begin with breakfast. Build one habit. Repeat it until it's just who you are.
Not About the Cottage Cheese
That same philosophy runs through Simone's new cookbook, The Queen of Cottage Cheese.
"This book is not about cottage cheese," she said. "It's so much more than cottage cheese."
Rather than cutting out the foods women already love, she teaches them to build those foods up — more protein, more fibre, better ingredients. The subject isn't really cottage cheese. It's taking the fear out of food and replacing deprivation with possibility.
Ozempic Didn't Invent GLP-1
Eventually, the conversation turned to GLP-1 medications — the drugs that have quietly rewritten the cultural conversation about weight over the past few years.
"There's no judgment, there's no shame," Simone said. "If you're on a GLP-1, there's likely a very good reason you're on one. I'm just here to offer a different perspective."
Ozempic, she pointed out, didn't invent GLP-1. It's a hormone the body already produces. The medication mimics a system that already exists inside us — a system that, as women move through midlife, gets harder to access as hormones shift, stress accumulates, and blood sugar becomes harder to regulate.
"I've turned all of my research toward how to boost GLP-1 naturally in the body. There are some tweaks we can make that are so exciting."
Protein, fibre, strength training, gut health, balanced blood sugar — all of it supports the body's own GLP-1 response. Simone isn't arguing for one path over the other. She's making the case that understanding your own body is the first step, long before deciding it's working against you. For women who've spent years believing their bodies had failed them, that reframing lands like relief.
Get Conscious of Your Subconscious Beliefs
Near the end of our conversation, I told Simone how my own reasons for exercising have changed. In my twenties, it was almost entirely about how I looked. These days, I think about the woman I want to be in my seventies — the one who still hikes, still travels, still gets on the floor to play with grandchildren she doesn't have yet. I want vitality. I want independence. I want strength that has nothing to do with a mirror.
Simone offered one last thought, and it had nothing to do with macros.
"Get conscious of your subconscious beliefs."
Maybe real change doesn't start with another diet, another challenge, another promise to finally get it right this time.
Maybe it starts with questioning the story you've been carrying since you were young enough to watch, and old enough to remember.
Health was never really about living longer. It's about living with more energy, more freedom, and more compassion for the body that has carried you this far.
Not becoming someone else.
Becoming more fully yourself.