Hey there, Katy here, and welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body. Given that this episode is dropping on New Year’s Eve, you know that we’re going to talk about the New Year, and New Year’s resolutions.

If you’re feeling like you need to “make up for” the holidays, or that you need to “get back on track” with your health or even with intuitive eating, I want you to listen to this episode with an open mind towards approaching this differently this year. 

I’m not saying that you should ignore your health, or that you shouldn’t try to improve yourself in the New Year if that’s what you want to do. That’s not what I’m saying at all. However, I will preface this by saying that you don’t have to do a darn thing differently in the New Year if you don’t want to. Just because it’s the trend and the tradition of the world around us to approach the New Year as a time to set health and wellness goals, and to have to do things differently to somehow improve your body or your life, doesn’t mean that you need to participate in this. 

In fact, if we’re being honest, the whole thing is a little delusional in the sense that statistically most people forgo their resolutions by February. So why do we still feel the need to set these lofty goals that deep down we know we most likely aren’t going to stick to? I’ll tell you why…

Because it feels good to be aspirational. And we tend to leave the holiday season feeling like we’ve done something wrong, that we’ve been “bad” and “unhealthy” and that we need to make up for it. That rhetoric has been pounded into us so many times, that we accept it as truth, and then we are basically approaching the New Year as some type of cleanse or punishment, which isn’t a winning strategy for actual improvements in our health or sustained behavior change. 

So what we are going to dig into is how to do things differently. A way to approach this from a slightly different perspective, and with some strategies that will support you in taking care of your body and your health in the New Year, while also supporting you in creating a peaceful and healthy relationship with food and your body. 

I’m really excited for this discussion, but first – you know what time it is…We’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. 

Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. 

Today’s Wellness Woo is: Coffee enemas

I keep seeing this on Instagram and as ridiculous as it sounds to me, there’s enough people out there who think this is a good idea that I want to break it down and talk about it. 

Claims that wellness culture makes:

• Detoxification: Allegedly “cleanses the liver” and remove toxins.
• Improved Energy: Claimed to boost energy and mental clarity through caffeine absorption.
• Gut Health: Marketed as a way to improve digestion and gut microbiome.
• Cancer Treatment Myths: There’s this thing called Gerson Therapy, which is an alternative medicine approach to cancer treatment where he claims that if you eat a restrictive organic food diet, do coffee enemas and take a bunch of supplements you can cure your cancer. Let me be clear on this – YOU CAN’T. THIS DOESN’T CURE CANCER. It breaks my heart and makes me really angry think of all the people who died because they believed this BS and did it instead of actual cancer treatment.

Here’s the truth: There is no scientific support for coffee enemas. Your liver and kidneys do the detoxing for you – and if those organs aren’t working you have bigger medical problems that no enema is going to solve. You need to see an actual doctor. 

Why do people feel like coffee enemas help? To put it simply – the placebo effect. When you think something is “working” you’re most likely going to feel like it does. But if we measure the biomarkers for the health claims being made, it’s not doing anything it claims to.

One of the reasons it might make someone feel more energized is because of the caffeine that is being rapidly absorbed through your colon. This can actually be dangerous, because if you think about how much coffee you’re putting into your body with an enema, and how you’d feel if you DRANK that amount of coffee, that’s a LOT of caffeine. Potentially a dangerous amount that can cause heart palpitations and bigger cardiac issues like what we’ve seen in people who basically overdosed on energy drinks.

Risks of Coffee Enemas

• Rectal Burns or Irritation: The heat and acidity of coffee can damage rectal tissue.
• Electrolyte Imbalance: Frequent enemas can disrupt hydration and electrolyte levels.
• Dependence: Repeated use may interfere with natural bowel movements, leading to reliance.
• Infections or Perforation: Improper equipment use or technique increases the risk of serious complications.
• Caffeine Overload: Absorption through the rectum may lead to jitters, palpitations, or other caffeine-related side effects.

Let me be abundantly clear here – there is no good reason for you to do a coffee enema. I’m not even going to chalk this woo up to “If you want to do it, fine, but, it’s probably not going to help” – sometimes that’s my stance on these nonsense things. But not on this one. This one is not just ridiculous, it’s dangerous – and frankly, gross. 

There you have it – shoving coffee up your butt is Wellness Woo. It’s such a strange world we live in that we even have to have this conversation.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…You don’t need to make up for the holidays this year. Do this instead.

Rather than operating out of the mindset that you need to compensate for, or punish yourself for what you ate during the holiday season, or how you didn’t get as much exercise in, or you feel like you didn’t listen to your body, or you abandoned your health goals – you don’t need to try and make up for it. 

I want you to shift gears and think about it this way instead. Let’s do an audit of 2024, from a really curious and non-judgmental place, and just notice where you’re at in your relationship with food, and with your desires and intentions for 2025. (Note that I am using the words “desires and intentions” instead of “resolutions” – and here’s why: Resolutions are goal and outcome focused, whereas intentions are process oriented. We get to make it about the process, not the outcome, and you’re going to get so much more out of it this way, trust me.) 

What I’m going to do here is walk you through an audit and a reflection on 2024 and your relationship with food, your body, exercise and your health. If you’re able to sit down and take notes right now, either on a piece of paper or your phone, that’s great. If you’re listening on the go while you’re driving, on a walk, doing the dishes, at the gym, running errands, no worries. Just listen through it right now and allow yourself to start contemplating the answers to the questions I’m about to ask you, and then come back and listen again later when you can sit down and do the full reflection and write out your answers. 

In fact, if you want a written version of these questions, shoot me a DM or an email and I can send you these prompts and questions in a PDF that you can print off or look at as you are doing your writing and journaling. But keep listening right now, because I’m going to give you a bunch of examples as we go, and I want you to hear me describe the strategy and the mindset behind all of this because it’s probably going to be different than anything you’ve done before when it comes to food and nutrition goals for the New Year.

Reflecting On This Past Year

The first thing I want you to do is pull out your calendar, and go back through 2024 and look at what was on your calendar, and what was happening in your life each month. And from the perspective of your relationship with food, list your wins from 2024.

Think back through each month and how your relationship with food and your body has changed this year. As you look through the months, reflect on what you had going on. Maybe you’ll remember how on spring break you went on that cruise and didn’t force yourself to crash diet or cut out carbs ahead of time, or how last summer you got in the pool with your kids rather than hiding on the side all covered up. Perhaps this past year was when you discovered intuitive eating, and you’ve been exploring it ever since.

Write down 5-10 wins, big or small.

• Examples:
  • Committed to no longer wasting your time, money or energy on dieting
• Decharming foods you used to be afraid to keep in the house
• Having less stress about food at the holidays
• Letting go of counting calories, macros, points, etc…and learning to listen to (and trust) your body instead

What lessons did you learn this year? Ask yourself:

• What was hard?
• Where did you struggle?
• What did you learn?
• What do you hope will go differently next year?

Write down 5-10 lessons that you learned about yourself, your body, your health or your relationship with food this year.

• Examples:
  • When I feel the need to eat in the evening, and I’m not hungry, it means I need to get curious about what I am thinking, feeling or needing outside of food.
  • My self-worth is VERY tied to my body image, and I need to keep working on dismantling this belief system around my appearance and my worthiness.
  • I’ve gotten better at saying yes to the foods I enjoy, without judgment, and now I want to work on gentle nutrition for my health.
    
    
    

Looking Ahead to Next Year & Setting Intentions

Fast forward to a year from now: Where do you want to be in your relationship with food, your body and exercise? Consider these questions:

• What do you want your eating to FEEL like?
• How do you want to view your body or your weight?
• What does exercise or movement look like?

Based on your wins, the progress you’ve made, the lessons you’ve learned and what you want to continue working towards this year, now it’s time to think about your specific intentions for 2025. Remember that we’re setting process-oriented intentions, not New Year’s resolutions that are destined to fail by February. Start off by just doing a brain dump of your intentions, and then go back through it and circle your top 3. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you’re setting those intentions:

• Based on the wins you’ve had, the progress you’ve made, the lessons you’ve learned, and the things you want to work on – what small steps do you need to take to get there? And what barriers might get in your way?
  • Example: If you’re wanting to work on gentle nutrition, one barrier might be that you aren’t exactly sure what that looks like for you and your health. You’ve been existing in diet culture for so long that your view of nutrition is skewed, and you need some guidance and ideas on what that might look like, so that you don’t slip back into the diet mentality.  
  • Example: Maybe you’re wanting to work on noticing when you’re turning to food even though you’re not hungry in the evening when you’re watching TV, and you want to figure out how to break this pattern. One barrier might be that you kind of like eating while watching TV, and it just feels like a habit, and you don’t know what you should do instead, especially without turning it into a rule that feels like restriction if you tell yourself that you can’t eat after dinner.
  • Example: Perhaps you’re wanting to work on getting more movement in, and one of your barriers is that you really don’t like movement, and you’ve never found movement that you enjoy. Maybe you don’t like sweating, or you feel self-conscious in a gym setting. 

Once you’ve identified your barriers you can start thinking about small steps to start working on your intentions. I would suggest starting with some journaling around your thoughts and feelings about that subject, and then pick one small step you’re going to take towards doing that thing to get that ball in motion, and to think about how you’re going to overcome or remove the obstacles that are in your way. 

Specific Ways You Can Lean Into Intuitive Eating in the New Year

If you’re listening to all of this and you’re thinking, gosh this all sounds great, but I really wish that I had something I could DO that feels more structured, and intentional, or where I feel like I’m “doing something” kind of like how going on a diet feels like taking action – I encourage you to find a way to specifically work on deepening your understanding of intuitive eating and how you’re applying it in your life. 

Perhaps you need to read the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch if you haven’t done so already, or you need to grab a copy of the Intuitive Eating Workbook and go through it. That’s a really nice way to add structure to the process. You could also take a course or a program to help you go deeper in healing your relationship with food. 

And you know that because I’m all about taking action, I have already thought ahead about this for you, and I’m rolling out the red carpet in the New Year to support you on this endeavor. I know that the New Year is like catnip with diet and wellness culture, so I want to support you in having a non-diet space to channel your energy and focus your attention.

Starting next Monday, the first Monday of January, I am going to be running another round of one of my most popular programs called Intuitive Eating Exploration. It’s a 5-week group program where we use the official Intuitive Eating Workbook to explore all 10 principles of intuitive eating, to practice them, and to help you see how they all fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

This program is so much fun to do in January because it’s the perfect alternative to going on a New Year’s diet, detox or healthy eating kick that is only going to fizzle and backfire. Instead, we get to lean into listening to your body’s cues to guide your eating and nutrition choices, and to support your health in meaningful ways.

Not only do we go through the workbook together, but we also have group calls where we discuss it, daily discussion prompts inside our private FB group, AND I do live trainings to expand on the principles and help you apply them into your daily life.

By the end of Intuitive Eating Exploration, you are going to have so much more clarity around how exactly intuitive eating works, and whether you’re a newbie who is just getting started and you’re trying to wrap your mind around it, or you’ve been doing this for a while and you want to fine tune your skills or deepen our understanding of the nitty gritty and the nuances of these principles, this is a great place for you to be. In fact, I’ve got several folks who have already signed up who have taken this program once or twice before, and they’re doing it again because they want to refresh and sharpen their skills, and they want to be able to reflect on what has changed and shifted and what elements of their relationship with food they need to lean into this year.

If you are interested in joining, run don’t walk because the doors close soon and I want you to have enough time to get a copy of the workbook if you don’t already have one and to get started before we kick things off on Monday. You can check out all of the details at nondietacademy.com/explore.

And even if you don’t join Intuitive Eating Exploration right now, I want to encourage you to find a structured and intentional way to lean into your intuitive eating journey this New Year. Because the world all around us is going to dive head first into diet mentality, and I want you to have a place to channel and focus your attention so that you don’t get sucked in by diet and wellness culture. Maybe for you it’s about re-reading the Intuitive Eating book, or listening to an episode of this podcast each morning, or hiring an intuitive eating dietitian or counselor to help you get more clarity on where you’re missing the mark, or what blind spots you might have. Sometimes it takes that outside perspective to help us see the forest through the trees and to see our own stuff. 

The other day I was chatting with a client about some of the struggles she’s been having and the things she’s wanting to shift with her eating, and she said, “Wow, this is actually very exciting because it’s almost like you took the pressure and weight off my shoulders of trying to eat perfectly, which I haven’t been doing, and there are times I feel bad about that and guilty, especially when I see other people making ‘healthier’ choices,” and she went on to say that the way I helped her frame health and nutrition for her situation helped her to see that she’s truly NOT harming herself by including all types of food, even the ones that she still thinks of as “unhealthy.” She’s seeing the bigger picture, and how all foods can coexist in a healthy diet, and that she needed that outside perspective to see that – because she’s got all of these thoughts, and old rules, and fears swirling in her head, alongside all of the comments and pressure from family members, friends and society to eat a certain way, and it becomes hard to know and trust that what she’s doing is healthy for her. That’s the value in having a dedicated space to work through this and to redefine how you’re approaching your health and nutrition, so that it doesn’t feel stressful or rigid, and it doesn’t have to be a thing that is all consuming in your life the way that dieting and disordered eating is. I want you to be able to have that sense of hope, confidence, clarity and peace that what you are doing is healthy, and it is right for you, and that you are figuring out how to do it in a way that works for YOU and YOUR BODY’S unique needs. That’s one of the most wonderful parts of this process – that there’s not one right/wrong way to do it, and you get to play around to see what works for you.

Wrapping Up

To put a bow on this, I want to emphasize that you don’t need to make up for how you ate during the holidays. You don’t need to cleanse or detox your body in the New Year (that’s not even a thing that’s possible – your body already does that for you, that’s what your liver and kidneys are for). And you certainly don’t need to start a diet in January – I can promise you that will backfire in the long run, even if it feels like it’s working at first.

Instead, I encourage you to do the reflecting and journaling that we covered today, and to allow yourself to go deeper to explore your relationship with food, and to make 2025 the year that you make peace with food, you learn to trust your body, and you honor your health in ways that are compassionate and sustainable. 

In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. I’ll see you in the New Year!

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