My dear friend Sharon Maxwell returns (she might hold the Full Plate record!?) to talk about embracing pleasure with food, bringing fat joy into the new year, and returning to our body’s wisdom during January… amidst the diet culture of it all.
Something that stuck with me during our conversation:
Sharon names so beautifully how healing rarely arrives in grand, cinematic moments.
Instead, it comes in the small stuff:
Tasting your food and realizing you’re actually enjoying it.
Letting yourself savor instead of rush.
Catching a tiny flicker of joy on a hard day and letting it count.
Having a really hard thought about your body, and still choosing to be kind to yourself.
Psychology calls these “glimmers”—small moments of safety or pleasure that help regulate the nervous system, especially for folks living with depression, anxiety, or long histories of body shame. They’re not flashy, and maybe that’s precisely why they’re so life-giving.
This episode isn’t a how-to guide for fixing your relationship with food. It’s an invitation to soften and to notice what’s already working.
It’s a reminder that healing often happens sideways and far from how we imagined it “should” look—through connection and community, not through “willpower.”
We get into so much, including:
Pleasure as a healing practice
What it means to trust food again
Blueberries…and what they represent for Sharon
Eating mindfully without morality
The reparative power of experiencing food joy in community
Learning to send compassion to body parts that have received the most shame
Diet culture, religion, and control
Navigating the New Year pressure cooker around weight-loss
Moving from resolution to values
If you’re entering this year feeling tender, tired, triggered, or even quietly hopeful…and if January already feels loud…I think this conversation will feel like sitting with someone who gets it. No solutions and no convincing. Just a reminder that you are allowed to live your life in this body, exactly as it is.
And that, honestly, feels like a pretty good place to begin.
The episode is live now. Listen right here!
If this piece stirred something in you—a thought, a question, a quiet hmm—I’d love to hear it. The comments are where our collective wisdom lives, and your voice genuinely shapes this space.
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