Listening to Inner Wisdom is Real Self-Care
This holiday season don't be bamboozled into believing you need a product or diet or lifestyle enhancement in order to care for yourself.
Did you make it through Thanksgiving?
Maybe there were some diet-y comments that didn’t help you enjoy your dinner, tough discussions about politics, or guilty feelings if you weren’t among the “turkey trotters.” The holidays from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day can be challenging, especially if you’re not feeling so Ho-Ho-Ho-ish.
My colleague Mallary Tenore Tarpley wrote about Turkey Trots and the diet culture surrounding them in an excellent article for the Dallas Morning News. There’s an annual Thanksgiving road race in my extended family’s neighborhood. It’s fun and colorful, and tens of thousands of runners enter it every year. Since I am not a runner, I typically walk the five-mile course along with the other throngs of walkers, enjoying the local bands, flamboyant costumes, and antics of very early day drinkers.
This year, my partner and I decided that going for a long walk in the cold pouring rain was not our idea of fun. We cheered some family members and friends along the sidelines in warm coats under an umbrella. Pasha was coming down with a cold, and I didn’t want to get one, so we listened to our bodies and did what felt right at the moment.
Sometimes, doing less and honoring the body’s need for rest and comfort is the healthy choice.
Listening to the wisdom inside us to choose how to care for the body is the subject of my next book. It’s a revision and update of my first multi-award-winning book, Nourish: How to Heal Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Self, with an emphasis on the exploding and profitable “self-care” industry via social media. I wrote Nourish before we experienced a pandemic. A lot has changed around how we engage with media and advertising since 2018, and I’ve learned much about how our nervous systems respond to all this information and communication since my Somatic Experiencing training. I’ve also examined some of my biases and privilege more deeply and want to reflect that in my next book.
Since I’ll be writing this book for young adults, I’ve been playing around with video commentary. I’m not very good at it (yet!) and I’m intentionally not working too hard to “curate” my little bits of content. I typically post my videos after one take and don’t do a lot of advance planning. While the videos may ramble about and not be the most effective form of content for our increasingly short attention spans, they are “mom rants” (as my daughters have called them) from the heart. I consider this practice. I won’t be able to create compelling videos that impact anyone’s life if I don’t just start doing it. Here’s my latest short video about what I believe self-care really is.
If you like this little video and want to support the development of my content, you can subscribe for free to my new YouTube Channel or find me on Instagram. I know young people are on TikTok, but I’m not ready yet and keep hoping the platform will be banned or shut down. My assistant Julianna keeps telling me how toxic it is. I guess this is all the more reason to create a helpful resource for young people struggling with food, body, and self-image in this selfie-oriented world.
Back to writing…
Other Nourishing Nuggets:
Don’t miss my holiday post, “Aunt Tess’s Fruitcake and Other Holiday Challenges,” if you need some guidance on navigating food and body concerns this season.
Cristina Castagnini interviewed me recently for her Behind the Bite Podcast. We talked about raising kids without stress or struggles over food, my own recovery and how it informs my work today, and much more. This was a particularly great conversation. I hope you’ll enjoy it and share it with your parent friends who are in the trenches feeding young people and needing some compassion.
The colleague and former client who wrote the “turkey trot” article mentioned above is releasing a groundbreaking new book about her eating disorder recovery journey. Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalist and professor who writes about the “middle place” between “sickness” and “full recovery.” Her book Slip, published by Simon and Shuster, can be preordered now on Barnes & Noble and Amazon and will be available in August 2025.
If you are or know a college student who would like to be part of a support group for college students struggling with food and body issues, please respond to this post and let me know at heidi@anourishingword.com. I plan on keeping this group small, centered around reading and/or exploring social media critically together, and very affordable.
I’m committed to creating more value for Nourishing Words subscribers in 2025, and I thank you for continuing to read and share my posts. This newsletter is part of my regular writing practice, which keeps me creating books that assist in healing.
I’ve published Nourishing Words every other week for the last year, and I appreciate you and your support so much. Please don’t hesitate to let me know how I can make this newsletter even more helpful to you in the new year.
I plan to take the next few weeks off to focus on family and to slow down a bit over the holidays. I wish you moments of magic, peace, and joy this holiday season—and the self-compassion to appreciate the more challenging moments, too.
With love in this shared life journey,
Heidi
P.S. If you’ve been considering a paid subscription to this newsletter (as little as $4.17/month), it’s never been a better time to upgrade. As I offer more unique content for paid subscribers over the next year, you’ll be invested at this price, which is probably cheaper than an afternoon latte.
