There was a time, not long ago, when Tay would have done anything to get to a HIIT class. If work kept her up till 1 a.m., so be it. She’d still haul off to a workout at 7. The people who asked “When do you sleep?” just didn’t get it. When her corporate-law job made her stress cry and a 15-hour day could come out of nowhere, that one hour of suffering at Barry’s, her studio of choice, was the hour of suffering she chose. “You could say it was toxic,” says Tay. “But it was everything to me. It wasn’t like I thought I ‘should’ work out. I genuinely need to do it to survive.” She’d started going hard on boutique fitness classes around 2015, when the workouts in vogue were the ones that wiped you out: the cardio-heavy bootcamps at Barry’s, the delirium of SoulCycle, hyperspeed power yoga in a 100-degree room. High intensity, big sweat, no thoughts. Then, last year, Tay started to think something was wrong. “To someone who doesn’t know how my body is supposed to look, I would have looked normal,” she says. “But when I watch the videos I posted back then, I see the inflammation in my body.”
