Fitness as Therapy: How Lifting Weights Helped Lacey Taylor Manage Anxiety and Depression

Some storms don’t make noise, they just settle into your bones. That’s what anxiety felt like for Lacey Taylor: a quiet, constant weight she carried through every sleepless night and overstretched day. She was not lifting weights to get fit. She was lifting to stay afloat.

As a single mother of three, her days blurred together, rushing, carrying, managing, barely breathing. The anxiety lived in her shoulders. The depression sat in her legs like lead. She didn’t have a plan. She barely had time. What she had was a resistance band and a body that didn’t feel like home, but it was a place to start.

Starting Small, Feeling Seen

Over time, those quiet moments became her anchor. Not a fix. Not a cure. But a space where she could show up without pretending. She was not chasing six-pack abs. She was trying to feel okay enough to get through the day.

That’s the part of fitness most people don’t talk about, and that’s exactly why Lacey became a postpartum fitness coach. Because she knew other women were struggling too. Not just with baby weight, but with guilt. Isolation. Rage. Numbness. The messy, unseen parts of motherhood that don’t get airtime in the highlight reels.

She didn’t want to build a brand that told women to fix themselves. She wanted to give them somewhere to land.

Coaching That Meets You Where You Are

Her coaching doesn’t revolve around hustle or performance. It meets women where they are, in oversized pajamas, between daycare pickups, surviving on caffeine and leftovers. She helps them carve out space to reconnect with themselves, not by changing who they are, but by remembering who they have always been under the noise.

There is no pressure to do more than what’s possible. Some days, it’s five minutes of movement. Other days, it’s just talking about how hard everything feels. And that’s enough.

Lacey’s lived experience shapes everything she does. She understands what it means to parent alone, to be stretched so thin you don’t recognize yourself. She knows how it feels when your body doesn’t feel like home. And she knows that self-care is not always bubble baths and spa days, it’s showing up for yourself in the smallest, most honest ways.

Rising Through the Rough Days

Of course, building a business while raising three kids has not been smooth. There were days when everything felt too heavy, when one of the kids got sick, when sleep was a luxury, when it felt like she was running on fumes. But she kept showing up. Not because it was easy, but because she believed in creating a space where women could exhale, where they didn’t have to have it all together to belong.

Her definition of strength has nothing to do with lifting the heaviest weight in the room. It’s about being able to cry and keep going. To be vulnerable and still rise. To choose yourself even when the world makes you feel invisible.

Movement as a Way Back to Yourself

Now, Lacey coaches women all over who want something real. Not a promise of fast results, but a reminder that their body is not broken. That movement can be healing. That fitness can be more than performance, it can be a way back to yourself.

She doesn’t sell quick fixes. She teaches women how to trust their bodies again. How to rest when they need to. How to listen when something feels off. And most of all, how to move with care, not to shrink, but to reclaim space.