I'm BACK from the UK! Woohoo! 🔥✈️ The topic today really hits home for me as I battle jet lag and recover from a pretty intense and stressful vacation. More on that later. Here's what I want to focus on today. Our culture has a very specific idea about what a "strong" person looks like: productive, tough, pushing past limits, not taking things personally. And most of us have absorbed that idea without questioning it. But think about what that marginalizes. Sensitivity. Tenderness. The need for rest. Care for yourself and others. Taking things personally because things actually ARE personal. These aren't weaknesses. They're human capacities. And in many ways, they are the things that build real, whole, sustainable lives and relationships. When your body asks you to slow down and you feel guilty, that guilt isn't coming from inside you. It's coming from a culture that equates your worth with your output and treats rest as something you have to earn. This week's reflection: 🙏 What does rest actually look like for you? Not what you think it should look like, but what your body genuinely craves when it's been running on empty. Maybe it's climbing a mountain. Maybe it's hours in the kitchen. Maybe it's sitting still doing absolutely nothing. Now ask yourself: is there any shame attached to that? Do you feel like you need to justify it? Where did you learn that your version of rest wasn't productive enough to count? For me, my body needs water, so I soaked in an epsom salt bath and read my book for 2 hours last night so that my body could recover. Caring for yourself is not a nonessential activity. It's one of the most intelligent things your body can ask for. 💛 xo, Amanda

Gentle nutrition is the tenth and final principle of intuitive eating — and the fact that it comes last is really important. Before we can think about nourishment, we need to do all the other work first. Making peace with food, letting go of rules, learning to trust our hunger again. You can’t skip to nutrition and expect it to feel any different from a diet — it just becomes another set of rules. But when you’ve done that groundwork? Gentle nutrition feels completely different. It’s about making food choices that honour both your health and your tastebuds. In practice that looks like eating a variety of foods across all food groups — carbohydrates, protein, fats, fruit and veg, and dairy with flexibility not perfection. You don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. One meal, one day, one week doesn’t define your health. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. 🤍

Hello Lovelies! I’m on holiday with my family in the UK. I’m currently sitting at the airport waiting for our flight to the Isle of Man. I’ll be posting the UnShaming Reflections once I land in a few hours once I land. Xo, Amanda

Here's something that might change how you think about your body: your body dreams. Not just at night when you're asleep. During the day, too. Your body expresses deep experiences that interfere with your normal routine, your usual identity, the way you think you're "supposed" to show up. That headache that pulls you out of your day? It's not just a nuisance. It might be your body saying, "Close your eyes and ears. Be still. Stop orienting to everyone else's needs." We've been taught to see these interruptions as problems. But what if they're actually revolutionary? What if your body's symptoms are challenging a status quo that was never truly serving you? This week's reflection: 🔥 Think of a physical symptom that disrupts your "normal" life. Not just bothers you, but actually forces you to stop, slow down, or change your plans. What would happen if, instead of fighting it, you asked: "What part of me is trying to come through here? What is my body insisting on that my usual self keeps overriding?" Your body isn't betraying you. It might be the most honest part of you there is. xo, Amanda

When something shows up in your body, what's your first move? For most of us, it's "How do I make this stop?" Headache? Take a pill. Tight shoulders? Push through. Fatigue? More coffee. Stomach pain? Something must be wrong. We've been trained to treat every body signal as a problem to eliminate. But in unshaming, we learn something radical: symptoms are messengers. And the message is different for every person. A stomachache in one woman might be saying, "I need to complain more. I'm swallowing too much." In another, it might be saying, "There's a burning boundary in here that I'm not expressing." The symptom isn't the problem. Getting rid of it without hearing what it has to say, that's where we lose something important. This week's reflection: 🤔 Think about a physical symptom that keeps returning for you. The headache, the tight jaw, the knot in your stomach, the fatigue. Instead of asking "How do I get rid of this?", try asking: "If this symptom could speak, what would it say? What might it be asking for that I haven't been willing to give?" Your body's intelligence is personal. It's not generic advice. It's medicine made specifically for you. xo, Amanda