Welcome to Season 5, Episode 4, which accompanies Chapter 5, Section 4, “Whole Nourishment.” In this episode, I discuss:
🍏 the various things you can consume
🍨 how to consciously choose what you consume
🥑 how to say yes to what you bring into your body
Humans consume more than just food, including media, substances, stories, toxins, energy, color, sounds, and more. This episode invites you to be conscious and empowered about what you have control over coming into your body to help robust-ify you to handle it better when exposed to the things you can’t.
Food is especially discussed in this episode since humans have wonky relationships with it, especially in the U.S. Many people don’t know what eating healthy looks like, and many don’t have the energy or resources to secure nutritious food.
“If you are on that bandwagon of trying to encourage people to LOVE our bodies in all shapes and sizes, and I hope you are, make sure your inner beliefs match that intention. And if they don’t, work on it! Because the incongruency of that will hurt you. Those beliefs that you’re not good enough unless you’re thin hurt you, even if outwardly you’re like, “Nope, I know that that’s ridiculous, and that’s harmful, and I don’t want to fat-shame or body shame myself.” Make sure you actually aren’t!” – Dr. Jodi Aman
Listen to Prioritize Whole Nourishment
Resources for Whole Nourishment
- 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
- Effects of Marijuana on Teenage Brains from the CDC
- Energy Shield Training for Empaths
- Teen Courses for Confidence, Intuition, and Relationships
- Why Are You Afraid of Other People Judging You? Who Cares What They Think?
- Is marijuana addictive?
- Why diets don’t work TED
- If we want a better world, we’ve got to kill diet culture.
- Why diets fail; it’s not what you think.
- Embrace Letting Go of What No Longer Serves You! Podcast Ep. 4:2
Transcription of the Whole Nourishment Episode:
Hey, you’re here with Dr. Jodi, and this is Season 5 of the “Anxiety, I’m So Done With You” podcast. This podcast is a teen and young adult guide to Ditching Toxic Stress and Hardwiring Your Brain for Happiness. If you’re new here, grab a copy of my book, Anxiety, I’m So Done With You! because this series is going section by section through it, going a little bit deeper, giving more examples, and telling more stories. This season follows Chapter 5, “Self-Care is the New Health Care.” This book promises to ‘hardwire your brain for happiness.’ This season I deliver on that promise. We focus on seven essential happiness-generating habits, contexts, activities, and practices for you to incorporate into your life to stay healthy, positive, and resilient to whatever life throws your way.
There’s a myth at play if you’ve been feeling bad for a long time. You might think that happy people are lucky and that you are not; that you are different. While context matters to your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health, your context is only partially determined by privilege, genetic expression, and random luck. The rest is determined by you. In this season, I show you how to harness that “you percent,” decolonize your self-care, and let your highest potential shine through all of the gook in your life.
Thank you for listening, subscribing, and leaving me five stars on Apple Podcasts. Also, come hang out with me on YouTube and TikTok @DOCTORJODI where I give you practical tips for your brain, body, and spirit. Please spread the word about this book and series because mental health problems are skyrocketing, and I need you to help me turn the tide.
Welcome to Chapter 5, Section 4: “Prioritize Whole Nourishment”
Welcome to this episode. We are starting season five. In Season 5, we’re talking about self-care. The habits of self-care that we need to use to take care of ourselves. Happy people aren’t just lucky, they don’t just get happy, and that’s it. It’s not as if some people are happy and others are not. That’s not how it works. Happy people actually generate their own happiness. Sometimes this is well integrated. You don’t really notice what they’re doing since it is so streamlined. And they may not feel like it’s a lot of effort.
We are talking about whole nourishment, prioritizing whole nourishment, in this episode. And we’re going to talk about more than just food because you put other things into your body to nourish it in order to help it thrive and grow strong and sustain good energy in yourself. Food is a biggie, and of course, we’ll talk about food in this episode, but there’s energy that you surround yourself with. There are
- substances and chemicals that you interact with
- topics that you think about in your head or in conversations around you
- people who uplift you and who tear you down
- many things that you bring into your bodies
I’m talking about all those bodies again: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It’s necessary to nourish all of your bodies. This will be a very short episode. It’s a concise section of the book, too. This is because I only cover some things about food. There is so much I could talk about, but other people do that. They do an excellent job teaching about food, emotional eating, loving your body, and being conscious of your inputs.
Resisting Body Shaming
Fortunately, there’s a vast movement to resist body shame and to love our bodies more robustly. I’m in love with that movement that’s going on. It’s like a backlash to the decade of social media that encouraged negative self-judgment.
If you are on that bandwagon of trying to encourage people to LOVE their bodies in all shapes and sizes, and I hope you are, make sure your inner beliefs match that intention. And if they don’t, work on it! Because the incongruency of that will hurt you. Those beliefs that you’re not good enough unless you’re thin? They hurt you, even if outwardly you’re like, “Nope, I know that that’s ridiculous, harmful, and I don’t want to fat shame myself or body shame myself.” Make sure you actually aren’t.
In Western society, we have been encultured to have shabby body images and to judge ourselves for our appearance critically. We don’t even notice it because it’s integrated. As much as you want to protest that and not do it, inside, you may still be negatively self-judging. Bring that out to the surface so you can consciously override it and then put how you want to relate to yourself and how you want to think of yourself into your internal belief system.
When you think about loving your body and appreciating your body, the choices that you make about what you put into your body, food and etcetera, everything else, will be for your highest good. Say, ninety percent of what you bring into your body is nourishing, and the rest is not. When you are conscious about the 90%, and even more importantly, when you are as conscious as you can be about the 10%, your body will be robust enough to process the rest without too much detriment to you.
Processing what you take in
Of course, sometimes life hands us something that’s not nourishing for us, an experience, person, or interaction. When we consistently take mostly nourishing things into ourselves, that negativity will be easier to process. And when our body is healthy, the emotional and mental things will be easier to process. If we keep ourselves healthy mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, that will assist us in processing negativity. Try to think about it in terms of ratio. The more conscious you are about what you bring in, the more bandwidth you’ll have to handle any challenges that come your way. Everybody has challenges that come their way! Thus is the world, and this is life. We have challenges that come our way. Our environment contains toxins and complex energies in the people around us that we can’t control.
Eating Whole Food
So food. The best thing is to choose whole foods, which is something that is close to the original form (how it grew or how it is in nature). The least processed is better. Look at your food. Is it broken down and mixed with a lot of other things and chemicals that you can’t even pronounce? Or is it mostly what it is and what it is with only one or two ingredients? Read labels. Knowing what you are eating is essential.
There’s a lot of information online about whole-eating and anti-inflammatory diet plans. It is important not to approach an eating plan as a “weight loss diet.” Or trying to punish your body because they’re not “as nice as we want them to be,” or something. That is unsustainable. Instead, think about your body as a temple and imagine saying yes to everything you consciously consume. When a challenge comes in, process it consciously, you can handle it so much better from that position of empowerment. (You may not always have those opportunities to decline a challenge, but occasionally we do.)
And, if for any reason you’re choosing to eat something that’s not whole, say YES to it. Please don’t feel guilty for eating it because then you are swallowing the guilt along with it. Try to have the vast majority of what you take in be something you are consciously choosing and saying yes to because that energy and that emotion will be digested along with that food.
Listen to Prioritize Whole Nourishment on YouTube
Bring into your mind the Formula to Happiness. It applies to so many things in life, doesn’t it? You want to take in the things that bring you joy, lift you up, nourish you, or help your body grow and heal. You want to eliminate the items in your life that make you suffer, make your body decompensate, make your body have to work harder than it should, or take any toxins in if you can. Get those out. You can’t eliminate them 100%, but your effort will make a difference (you’re not trying to have anything close to perfection in any of the things I suggest.)
The formula for happiness: take in the stuff that’s nourishing and harmonizing. Get rid of the stuff, or choose not to have the stuff that breaks you down or harms you. And practice that every day. Make empowered choices every chance you can.
Harmful substances, like drugs
That includes substances. I won’t get on my soapbox about substances (drugs), but you know what they are and what they do to your body. You know this. And you may be denying them because you want to use them, but you know things that are not good for your body. When you indulge in substances, your mind knows you’re making choices against you. If you’re vaping, drinking, smoking, or whatever you’re doing, your body knows that you’re making those choices against itself.
And yes, it could come up with all kinds of excuses why that’s okay. And it also might come up with the excuse that it’s helping you feel better. But overall, it creates a relationship that you feel bad when you’re not using them. You may feel like they make you feel better, but they’ve made you feel bad in the first place. Plus, they cover up us being able to learn how to process our feelings. Some people spend years not processing their feelings, making it harder to stop using. Then they have to go back and process all of those feelings that they medicated themselves out of having.
Some research points to pot being natural and good for you, but you have to have a critical eye on who is paying for the research (is it marketing or science?) to see if it is objective or biased. These research studies show the harm of it: Effects of Marijuana on Teenage Brains from the CDC. Is marijuana addictive?
Conscious Consumption
Well, I didn’t have many notes on this episode. I just thought I’d shoot from the hip a little bit because it’s something I think about a lot. What I take in my body, what I breathe, what chemicals I use in my cleaners, in the house, how I function in the world, and the choices that I make to have as much as I can around me that nourishes my body. I have plants in the house to give me that oxygen and eat up all the carbon dioxide I exhale. I open the windows when I can when the air is good quality, and I like to have filtered water to drink.
All of these choices that I make help because I can’t control everything that I interact with. I can only control some things if I make intentional decisions of what I take in; it makes a huge difference to how I handle the rest of the world.
Food. Food is a biggie in our culture. It is often the centerpiece of everything that we do. Our body and appearance are also central to everything that we do. So this is a tricky subject for us; many of us have issues with our body and our relationship with food. This can be fixed. You can fix your relationship with food. And you can fix your relationship with your body.
Let this episode be an invitation to do so.
I will put some resources in the blog post that goes with this episode for you to start to see where to find help if this is a problem for you. And I encourage you. Consuming is something that you do every day. You’re in your body every day; food is something you do every day. If this is a problem for you, if you struggle at all, if you struggle with an eating disorder, if you struggle or feel bad about how you look, if you overeat, under-eat, emotionally eat, whatever you do, there is a way to fix that. And “fix” sounds a little bit like “good and bad” or “black and white thinking.” I don’t like that word. There is a way to CHANGE your relationship with your body and with food. (That’s better!) So I encourage you to do that.
Thank you so much for reading
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Anxiety, I Am So Done With You with me, Dr. Jodi. I appreciate you for subscribing, commenting, and leaving me five stars on Apple Podcasts. I need those five stars, people because that’s really going to get this podcast in the ears of people who need it. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode, but in the meantime, catch me on YouTube and TikTok at Doctor Jodi. Next episode is Prioritize Rest.
We’re really getting up there, aren’t we? It’ll be episode five of season five. We are almost done. But rest is a biggie. I’m kind of thinking that I just want a silent episode for 15 minutes––just silence so you can rest because your poor mind needs rest. It’s sometimes hard for people to rest because a quiet mind can be scary. I’ll give you some tips on handling that so you can rest but not have an empty mind for anxiety to hijack. So read that section, and I’ll see you there.
Thank you so much for joining me in this season. I appreciate your subscribing, commenting, and leaving me five stars on Apple Podcasts. Get ready for Chapter 5, Section 2: Prioritize Energizing Surroundings. Read or listen to that, and I will see you there. In the meantime, hang out with me on YouTube and TikTok at Doctor Jodi.
