She tracked her sleep score every morning before her feet touched the floor, checked her step count before lunch, logged every meal into an app that assigned each one a color, and reviewed her recovery metrics before deciding whether her workout that evening should be hard or easy. None of this felt excessive to her at the time. It felt responsible, the way checking a bank balance feels responsible. It was only after a full year of this that she noticed something odd. She had never once, in that entire year, asked whether she actually felt well. She had only asked whether the numbers said she should.
We live inside a culture that has learned to talk about the body almost entirely in the language of optimization. Sleep is not simply rest now. It is a score to improve. Movement is not simply movement. It is data to review against yesterday’s data. Food is not simply nourishment shared at a table. It is inputs to be tracked against a target. None of the tools themselves are the problem, and there is real wisdom in paying attention to how we are cared for physically. The problem is what happens underneath the tracking, when we start relating to our own bodies the way we relate to a machine we are trying to run more efficiently, rather than something we have been given to steward with care.
Paul asks the church in Corinth a question worth sitting with.
19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 New International Version
This is not primarily a verse about diet or exercise, though it has often gotten reduced to that in the way it gets quoted. It is a statement about ownership. Our bodies are not projects we run to maximize output. They are dwelling places, entrusted to us rather than possessed by us, which changes what caring for one actually means.
What Optimization Quietly Assumes
Optimization language assumes a body is fundamentally a system to be improved, and improvement is measured by better numbers, faster times, lower scores on a stress test, higher totals on a step count. This is not entirely wrong. Our bodies do respond to care, and paying attention to sleep, movement, and food genuinely serves us. But optimization as a total posture toward the body assumes something scripture does not assume, which is that a body’s worth is tied to its performance. A body that sleeps eight efficient hours and posts strong recovery numbers is treated as a body succeeding. A body that sleeps poorly through illness, grief, or a newborn’s unpredictable nights is treated, even if only quietly, as a body failing.
This connects to something already said about time itself, that it is not ours to spend carelessly, entrusted to us rather than owned outright. The body works the same way, and the same trap that turns a planner into a means of proving our worth can turn a fitness tracker into the exact same thing, a small daily verdict on whether we measured up. A steward manages what has been entrusted to him. A steward does not need the thing entrusted to him to perform impressively in order to still be caring for it faithfully.
What the Body Actually Asks Of Us
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Psalm 139:14 New International Version
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
This verse describes something the body simply is, prior to any performance at all. The wonder Psalm 139 describes was true of David before he ever ran anywhere or slept well or ate wisely. It was true in his weakest seasons and his strongest ones equally. This is worth remembering the next time a sleep score comes back low or a step count falls short of a goal, because the verse does not attach any condition to the wonder it describes. The body is fearfully made regardless of what today’s numbers say about it.
Caring for a body well, then, looks less like chasing better metrics and more like genuine attentiveness, the kind a person offers something they respect rather than something they are trying to extract more performance from. This might mean noticing real fatigue and actually resting instead of pushing through it because a streak needs protecting. It might mean eating a meal because it nourishes and satisfies rather than because it fits neatly into a tracked target for the day. It might mean moving the body because movement itself feels good and connects us to how we were made, rather than because a watch on our wrist is waiting to register the minutes.
Where This Gets Practical
This does not mean tools like trackers or schedules are inherently wrong to use, any more than a planner is inherently wrong to keep, a point I already made. The difference lies in what we are actually asking the tool to tell us. A tracker used to notice patterns and support genuine care can serve a person well. The same tracker used as a daily verdict on whether we are succeeding as a person quietly turns the body into exactly the kind of project apostle Paul’s language in Corinthians pushes back against, something we own and manage for output rather than something entrusted to us for stewardship.
A practical shift here might be as simple as checking in honestly before checking a number. Before looking at the sleep score, we can ask ourselves how we actually feel this morning, and let that answer carry real weight even if the number disagrees with it. Before deciding a workout was wasted because the app did not register enough intensity, we can ask whether our body genuinely needed that gentler movement today, regardless of what gets logged. Small as these shifts sound, they retrain something significant over time, returning our attention to the body itself rather than to the report generated about it.
There is also something worth saying about seasons where the body simply cannot perform the way it once did, illness, aging, a new limitation that will not resolve. In these seasons especially, an optimization mindset toward the body becomes not just unhelpful but genuinely painful, since there is often no metric left to improve. Stewardship, though, still has something to offer here, because stewardship was never about maximizing performance in the first place. It was always about faithful care regardless of output, which means a body that can do less still deserves the same attentive, respectful care a stronger one received, not a diminished version of it.
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Conclusion
She still uses her sleep tracker most mornings, though she checks in with herself honestly before she looks at the number now, and lets her own sense of how she feels carry at least as much weight as the score does. Some mornings the two agree, and some mornings they do not, and she has stopped treating the disagreement as a problem to solve. Her body was fearfully and wonderfully made long before any app existed to measure it, and it remains exactly that on the mornings the numbers look disappointing, entrusted to her still, worth caring for still, whatever the report says.
