Have you ever wondered why almost all the health and wellness information you see out there is so white, cis able-bodied and het? I know I have. And as a queer black registered dietitian, I gotta tell you, I'm not into it. I believe health and happiness should be accessible to everyone. That is precisely why I wrote Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation and why I host Body Liberation for All.

The road to health and happiness has a couple of extra steps for chronically stressed people, like queer folks and folks of color. But don't worry, my guests and I have got you covered. If you're ready to live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of your life, you are in the right place.

This episode we discuss

🌈Setting intentions that are personally meaningful

🌈Evaluating our relationship with productivity and wellbeing

🌈Auditing your life for joy

Episode Resources

www.daliakinsey.com

Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation

Episode edited and produced by Unapologetic Amplified

New Year Intention Setting Download

Body Liberation for All Theme

They might try to put you in a box, tell them that you don't accept when the world is tripping out tell them that you love yourself. Hey, Hey, smile on them. Live your life just like you like it

It’s your party negativity is not invited. For my queer folks, for my trans, people of color, let your voice be heard. Look in the mirror and say that it's time to put me first. You were born to win. Head up high with confidence.  This show is for everyone. So, I thank you for tuning in. Let's go.

This transcript was generated with the help of AI. Becoming a supporting member helps us improve accessibility and pay equitable wages for things like human transcription.

Hello, welcome to our first solo episode of the year. As promised, I will be doing solo episodes this year so that you and I have more time together to dig a little deeper with some of my core themes, which includes the belief that stress is one of the greatest threats to our health of our time, and that marginalized people are the most vulnerable to chronic stress because homophobia, racism, ableism, all of the things, transphobia, these are chronic stressors that can have a really negative impact on our health.

Stress is one of the greatest threats to health of our time

My focus is always going to be things that can positively impact your health but not exacerbate your stress at the same time. I love to have guests on the show, so we're definitely not getting rid of that element. I do have some special guests in mind for the show this year, so those will still be coming, but you and I are going to be spending a lot more time together on the show from now going forward.

In line with the understanding that chronic stress is the enemy to our health, most wellness outlets are really not concerned about your liberation and are not open to massive paradigm shifts, like considering the possibility that toxic capitalism undermines your wellbeing, and we have to reevaluate our relationship with productivity and striving to be better in order to really be well and to reevaluate what wellbeing looks like to us.

You'll notice that frequently wellbeing is just a reframe for ready to be super productive in the work place. It’s not really about what is meaningful to the individual and certainly not inclusive of other cultures or other world views outside of this belief that you are here to be productive - you must always be doing in order to be a valid expression of humanity.

If you want for your wellness to be liberatory, a really important thing to do is to question where your assumptions come from and whether or not these assumptions are still serving you. When everywhere you look, everyone is saying the same thing, it isn't natural for you to think to question things that seem like a given.

A perfect example of that is New Year's resolutions and all of the mindset that comes with and the thoughts that are at the foundation of the belief that we need to be fixed.

I'm here to challenge that and posit that you do not need to be fixed. Anything that we imagine to be an indicator of a flaw when we're looking at our own bodies oftentimes is a sign that something is wrong, and our socialization prevents us from seeing that.

So what do I mean by that. I had a conversation with someone about this recently, but it comes up all the time with friends, family, and clients. The person I was speaking to said ‘I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, but I still feel so unwell. I feel so tired, so run down’ . Everything that they were being told by the coaches, they were going to, the physicians, they were going to kept focusing on what else they could be doing to make themself feel more, well for them to recapture the energy level that they had before, which is what this person was missing. The question was what should you be doing to get back to where you were before? But my question was, is there a possibility that you are doing more than enough and that your feelings of burn out, tiredness and exhaustion are not indicators that you're not doing enough, but actually a warning that you're doing way too much. Could it be in this case that your feelings of fatigue, your feelings of malaise, are linked to the fact that you do not feel you have permission to slow down, you don't feel it is safe to slow down?

And I don't know the details of your life. Maybe it isn't. This is what I want us to focus on this year instead of the typical New Year's resolutions that encourage you to strive, that operate off the assumption that something is wrong with you, that you're deeply flawed. What I want us to look at is the possibility that we are doing too much and in the new year doing less could increase our wellbeing.

What if the secret to bringing more wellness into your life this year is doing less not more?

How are you going to evaluate this before you start setting intentions? Before you think about goals? First, do an audit of your life. This doesn't have to be very time consuming. You really wanna tap into what your body is telling you as you're going through these questions.

This isn't meant to pick every part of your life apart. It's meant to get at what immediately comes to mind, because these are the things that are most pressing or bugging you that you haven't given yourself permission to change. As you're doing your life audit one of the questions that I want you to ask yourself is what do you feel right now in your life in general? What are a few words that capture how you're feeling?

I know for me, when I did the exercise at the start of the month, there was overwhelm, grief, gratitude, and inspired. In some areas of my life I've really been feeling aligned, like I am living my mission through my business. I'm living my mission in so many areas, but the overwhelm is coming from still juggling a nine to five, and my business, which is far more meaningful to me, far more inspiring and the grief comes from the managing loss and a lot of shifts and a lot of changes at the end of 2022.

I lost my last grandparent. That was a trigger for a lot of reevaluation. Looking at all of the wonderful things she did with her life, all of the caretaking, all the ways in which you can see the through line in her life is that of love, caretaking, selflessness, and also of great understanding of how to nurture and take care of herself even though she was raised in a time when no one was being encouraged to do that, not in a mainstream way anyway, at a time that everyone assigned female at birth was being told you're here to serve. I didn't ever see any messaging even in the early eighties and nineties, that that could also mean you should take care of yourself.

I now offer inclusive wellness solutions for individuals and organizations. If you like myself, believe that health and happiness should be accessible to everyone, and you're looking for someone to help you make your programs more inclusive, or you're looking for an inclusive wellness specialist to come in with solutions tailored to your team's needs, then visit daliakinsey.com.

The link is in the show notes to learn more about how we can work together.

Another excellent question to ask yourself is what are you doing now on a regular basis that every time you do it, you're filled with dread? Every time you see it on your calendar, you feel like, ugh, this again. Now, what does that do for you? Why is it still on your list? For me, it’s the 9-5. Monday rolls around and all of the energy that I had to work all day on Saturday, doing things that are meaningful to me, that light me up, that energy, has disappeared.

So why am I still doing that? What is it doing for me? Well, it's giving me a feeling of stability so I don't have to be super thirsty as the business grows and I can continue making decisions that are aligned instead of accidentally recreating all of the toxicity and all of the negative overworking patterns that came from