ABOUT
I didn't find my way to this work because I had it figured out. I found it because I spent years completely lost in my own body, and had to find my way back.
If you've ever started over so many times that starting itself began to feel like failure; if you've built a life that looks capable from the outside while quietly disappearing inside it; then you already know the thing I spent years trying to understand:
Being disconnected from your body isn't a discipline problem. It's not a willpower problem. It's not even really a fitness problem.
It's a relationship. And like any relationship that's broken down, it takes time, honesty, and the right kind of support to repair.
I know this because I lived the disconnection first.
MY STORY
I grew up loving movement for the joy of it: dance, competitive sport, hiking, swimming, running, riding bikes, … using my body as a place to play and belong. I studied fine arts, music, and dance. I was curious about everything, drawn to people, to nature, to expression in every form.
That changed. From my teenage years into my late twenties, I started a war with my own body I didn't know how to stop. An eating disorder that turned it into something to control, manage, and punish. A long, quiet war that nobody around me would have seen, because from the outside, I looked fine.
After that came a career that asked for exactly the same thing: show up, perform, keep going, don't stop. Journalism, cinema, events, film production. Long shifts, high stakes, no space to stop. A world where people run on empty and call it dedication. Where taking care of yourself isn't just deprioritised, it doesn't even come up. I was good at that world. And I learned, slowly and deliberately, how to protect myself inside it, how to stay aware of what it was costing me even while I was still in it. But I always knew it wasn't mine. Not long-term.
Then COVID arrived and made the question unavoidable: what do I actually want my life to look like?
The answer had been there for years. I started studying movement, the body, nutrition, everything I could find, and began teaching on the side while still working in production. Gradually, then fully. Since that shift, I have been building – studying, training, coaching, learning from every woman I work with – trying to understand what returning to yourself actually requires, and how to guide someone else through it.
What I didn't know then, what took years and a long, non-linear journey to understand, is that none of the methods were ever the problem. The problem was that I had completely lost access to myself. I couldn't hear what my body needed because I'd spent so long overriding it.
The way back wasn't a better programme. It wasn't more discipline or a stricter plan. It was learning, slowly and imperfectly, to listen. To trust. To stop treating my body as something to be fixed and start treating it as somewhere to live.
That shift changed everything. Not just how I move and eat, but how I show up, how I connect, how I take up space. How I let myself have my own life.
It's the shift I now help other women make.
WHAT I BRING TO THIS WORK
I'm Ana Malato, movement and wellness coach, based in Lisbon, working with women across the world.
I've trained and coached in personal training, strength and endurance, CrossFit, Pilates, yoga, functional movement, holistic nutrition through IIN and Precision Nutrition, somatic and body-based work through SMBR, health coaching, and mindfulness. My foundation is in fine arts, performance, and communication, and all of it feeds into how I coach. I speak Portuguese, English, French, and a little Spanish.
But what I actually bring isn't a list of modalities.
It's a belief, grounded in everything I've lived and learned, that movement is one of the most powerful things a woman can do for herself. Not movement as punishment. Not movement to earn something or erase something. Movement as expression. As power. As play. As the thing that reminds you what your body can do rather than how it looks doing it. As a practice that reminds you that You Are Alive.
I have felt what it is to find a barbell and realise the gym is a playground. I have felt the wind on my skin during a run and understood, for a moment, exactly what freedom feels like. I have danced in my kitchen to a song that made everything make sense again. I have closed my eyes on a bike and felt nothing but the road and my own breath. These are not different things. They are all the same thing: a body that is present, alive, and finally on its own side.
That's what I help you find. Not a specific practice, not a method, not the right programme. The feeling underneath all of it. The one that was always yours.
WHAT I BELIEVE
That your body is not a problem to be solved. It is a place to live.
That movement should feel like something, not like punishment, obligation, or penance for eating. And that sometimes it should feel hard, powerful, and completely alive. Both things are true.
That food is not a moral system. Eating well is an act of care, not control.
That the women who struggle most with their bodies are often the ones who feel everything most deeply, and who have simply never been given the right kind of support.
That consistency doesn't come from discipline. It comes from building a practice that is genuinely yours, one that fits your body, your nervous system, your actual life.
That you don't need to love your body to start. You just need to be willing to stop being at war with it. The rest follows.
That strength and softness are not opposites. That a woman who deadlifts and a woman who rests on Sunday are the same woman, fully expressed.
That nobody should have to figure this out alone.
That you don't need a dramatic entry point to deserve support. No crisis, no diagnosis, no rock bottom. A quiet sense that something has been off for a long time is enough. That counts. You count.
A FEW THINGS THAT ARE JUST TRUE ABOUT ME
I have a background in fine arts and I still think creativity is one of the most underrated tools for healing, which is why self-expression is woven into everything I do.
I speak three languages (and a half): portuguese, english, french (and a bit of spanish). But the displacement I understand most deeply didn't come from geography. It came from moving to Lisbon alone at sixteen, leaving my parents and siblings behind, arriving in a city with family nearby and still feeling completely alone. Struggling with anorexia, skipping social things to go train, needing people desperately and not knowing how to let them in. Feeling too strange, too intense, too much, and also not enough. I know what it is to be in a room full of people and feel like you arrived from a different planet. And I know what it takes to find your way back to belonging, starting with yourself.
I trained in CrossFit for years, which surprises people who expect a wellness coach to be soft-edged and quiet. I contain multitudes. (And so do you.)
I came from a world of long shifts and high production – events, cinema, tv – which means I understand the culture that creates burnout from the inside. I'm not coaching you from a place of never having lived that life. I left it. I know what it cost. And I know what it took to build something different.
I believe in real food, real movement, and real conversations, and I have very little patience for anything that requires you to perform wellness rather than actually feel it.
I built this work from the inside out. Which means I will never ask you to do something I haven't done myself.
You were never the problem.
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If you're not ready to talk yet, that's okay too. I write about bodies, movement, food, and the quieter questions underneath all of it. Come find me on Substack and we'll start there.
