Spring Is Here and Your Body Knows It. Time to Stop Pretending You Don't.

Hi. I'm Tery. And I'm going to be the person on this site who tells you things you need to hear -- not things carefully engineered to make you feel validated long enough to close the tab and go order a pizza.

Welcome to Health & Fitness with Tery Van Yves.

Tuck and roll, bitches. This is gonna be a wild ride.

Okay so. Spring.

It's here. The days are longer. The coats are going back in the closet. And at some point in the last two weeks you caught yourself in a mirror -- different lighting than you've had since October, truly unforgiving lighting, the kind that has absolutely no business being in your bathroom -- and you thought: oh. OH. Yep. There it is. Hi body. Been a while. Sorry about the soup season.

Spring doesn't do subtlety. It doesn't ease you in. It just SHOWS UP, throws the curtains open, and starts asking questions you weren't ready for.

And listen, I know what's coming next because I have watched this cycle play out for years and have personally participated in it more times than I am prepared to confess to in writing. The panic. The googling. "How to get a beach body in six weeks." The downloading of no fewer than three apps you will absolutely abandon by Thursday. The purchasing of supplements with ingredient lists that look like a chemistry final you didn't study for. The eating of nothing but virtue and sadness for eleven days followed by a complete and total psychological collapse back into whatever you were doing before, except now you also feel like a failure on top of it, which is really just a bonus layer of awful that you did not need.

We are NOT doing that this year. I will not allow it. Not on this website. I don't have the bandwidth to watch it happen again.

Let me tell you something the entire wellness industry has built its business model around hoping you never fully absorb:

There is no quick fix. Not one. Zero. None. I have tried more of them than I will list in a public forum because I do have some remaining dignity and also a lawyer. The cleanses. The elimination protocols. The thirty-day challenges that cost as much as a car payment and tasted like ambition and a broken dream. Some of them had a kernel of something real buried in there. Most of them were very expensive, very photogenic noise, designed to reach into your wallet at the exact moment you were desperate enough to stop asking inconvenient questions.

What works? Okay, here it is. The big secret. You ready?

Boring. Consistent. Sustainable.

Changes you can still be making in a year, in five years, in ten years. That's it. That's the whole game. The entire wellness industry would like to gift-wrap that information and charge you $89 a month for it, but I'm just going to hand it to you right here for free because I'm that kind of person.

No, but listen -- boring does NOT have to mean joyless and sustainable does NOT mean deprivation. That is a lie someone sold me in my twenties and I bought it with both hands and a credit card and I am still annoyed about it. The idea that getting healthy requires being miserable is one of the most effective pieces of marketing ever produced and it has set so many people back so many years and I will be arguing against it on this website until further notice.

Here's the thing about spring specifically -- and I genuinely mean this, it's not just a cute seasonal hook I'm using to make this post feel timely -- your biology is on your side right now and most people have no idea.

The light changes. Your serotonin responds. That lifted feeling you get when the sun is actually out is not imaginary or a delusion -- it's your brain chemistry doing exactly what it's supposed to do after months of doing its sad little winter thing. Fresh produce starts coming back. Your body stops aggressively defending its warm sad couch position and starts looking for reasons to move. You are coming out of a biological hibernation pattern and your system is genuinely ready to shift.

You are working WITH your biology in spring. Not against it. That is a competitive advantage most people sleep directly through because they are sitting around waiting until they "feel ready."

Spoiler: you are not going to feel ready. Ready is a feeling that arrives approximately three weeks after you start. So here is what you do: you start. Then ready shows up. That is the actual order of operations and the fact that nobody tells you this makes me want to flip a table. A small table. I'm not unreasonable.

OKAY. Food. Let's talk about food.

"Clean eating" has been so thoroughly hijacked by every person with a ring light and a strong opinion that it now means approximately nothing and I want to fix that.

Here is what it means in this space: eating food that is as close to its whole unprocessed form as possible. Vegetables. Fruits. Whole grains. Legumes. Lean proteins if that's in your life. Foods where the ingredient list looks like a list of INGREDIENTS and not like the results of a lab experiment that got slightly out of hand. That is the definition. Anyone making it more complicated than that is either selling something or has been on the internet too long. Possibly both.

It does NOT mean eating only raw food like some kind of suspicious woodland creature. It does NOT mean eliminating entire food groups because someone on TikTok had a vibe about carbs in 2019 and never updated their information. It does NOT mean spending your entire paycheck at a specialty grocery store that smells like patchouli and moral superiority. It does not mean being insufferable at restaurants -- I cannot stress this enough, nobody wants to eat with that person, do not be that person. And it does NOT mean perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good, perfect is why most people crater by week three and then spend the next four months feeling terrible about themselves, and perfect is frankly overrated as a concept. You are trying to eat clean MORE than you do right now. That is the bar. Clear it and then raise it. That's how this works.

Now. I need to tell you about something that broke my brain in the best possible way because I spent years convinced I was just fundamentally broken -- that I lacked willpower or discipline or whatever character flaw the wellness industry had decided was responsible for my failure that particular week -- and it turns out I wasn't broken at all. I just didn't understand calorie density and nobody had explained it to me properly.

Here is the concept: different foods pack wildly different amounts of calories into the same physical volume. Which means you can eat the EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF FOOD -- same plate, same portion size, same level of fullness -- and be either nourished and energized OR somehow still over your calorie needs for the day, depending entirely on what you chose. Vegetables and whole foods: low calorie density. Processed foods, refined carbs, oils: extremely high. When you build your meals around the low density stuff, you get generous, satisfying, legitimately filling portions without the caloric load that has been quietly working against you this whole time. You are not hungry. You are not deprived. You are FULL. This concept rearranged my entire relationship with food and I am still a little emotional about it.

And the person who explains this better than anyone I have found -- more clearly, more practically, and with recipes so good you will genuinely question your life choices up to this point -- is someone you need to go meet immediately.

Her name is Ami. She goes by Broccoli Mum. She's based in England. She is a self-described "crazy messy mum of two" and she is also quietly one of the most genuinely useful voices in the healthy eating space on the entire internet, which, when you consider how much garbage is in that space, is truly saying something. She lost 60 pounds -- not by starving herself, not by eliminating joy from her diet, not by any of the nonsense I just spent three paragraphs telling you doesn't work -- but by understanding this exact calorie density concept and applying it to whole food plant-based eating. She now has over 650,000 followers who will enthusiastically and unprompted tell you she changed the way they think about food forever. She has ebooks. She has meal plans. She has recipes that use ingredients from a completely normal grocery store and that taste like something you actually WANT to eat -- not like punishment cleverly disguised as a meal.

Go read our full piece on Broccoli Mum right here and then go follow her. I don't care if you're fully plant-based, plant-curious, or just someone who has been meaning to eat better since approximately 2018 -- her framework is one of the most useful things I have come across in years of coming across things. And I have come across SO many things. So many. This one is worth your time.

So here's where we're headed in this space. Food first -- always food first, you cannot out-exercise a bad diet and I say that as someone who has personally and extensively tested this hypothesis and can confirm the results are not in your favor. Then movement. Then supplements, with full receipts on what the actual science says versus what the marketing says, because I promise you those are two very different documents and someone needs to show you both. Then the wellness trends that are genuinely worth something and the ones that are worth your most withering skepticism, which at this point in my life is EXTREMELY withering.

I will never recommend something I don't believe in. I will tell you when the evidence is mixed. I will absolutely call out anything that smells like BS because that is my core personality trait and also, frankly, my gift to you.

Spring is here. Your body knows it. You know it.

Let's go.

Tery Van Yves has tried more wellness trends than they are willing to admit publicly. Some worked. Most didn't. All of them are now your cautionary tale on this website. You're welcome.

Have something you want Tery to dig into? Drop us a note.