S2 E016 | Five Intuitive Eating Holiday Season Hot Takes with Naomi Katz

Melanie [she/her] (00:00)
Hey Naomi, welcome to the show. I’m so, so excited for our conversation today.

Naomi Katz (00:05)
Thanks, Melanie. I am also really excited about having this conversation.

Melanie [she/her] (00:09)
Yes, you are my very first guest on the show and I couldn’t think of a better person. As I said in my intro, and I, you don’t just have a wealth of knowledge, you don’t just have the skills. I worked with you and we’re obviously gonna probably talk about that a bit today. But yeah, I worked with you and you kind of helped me start this intuitive eating journey. So I think there’s no better person to have this conversation with and talk about food, essentially.

Naomi Katz (00:35)
Totally, I’m so excited about this. It feels like this like full circle moment. I just, it’s so exciting to me to be in this position having this like podcast conversation. It’s like high level intuitive eating, anti-diet podcast conversation with someone who I’ve got, who I had the joy of working with for a while too. Like that just feels like this amazing moment. And so I’m really grateful that we get to have this moment.

Melanie [she/her] (01:02)
Yeah, I hadn’t really thought about it in the sense of the full cycle, but that’s very true because, yeah, when I first started, when I applied for Nourish and Bloom, I was like, all right, I’ll see what’s up. I don’t really know. I don’t know a huge amount about this, but it feels like this is the right next step for me. And I couldn’t have been more right. So that’s good. So we are going to talk about food, which I think is a very timely and relevant topic, especially for this time of year.

year, but especially this year, and we’re going to talk about holiday hot takes that are actually true all year. Because thanks to diet culture and the diet industry, our relationship with food can be a little bit complicated. And I think that’s even more evident during the holidays and during celebrations. And I know that when I started working with you, it was kind of this time, what, two years ago, and I was so nervous going into that first holiday season.

and traveling and being around various types of food and I learned so much in that space of time because I was kind of very open to the fact that I was gonna just throw myself into this if I had to and continue to just learn more about likes and dislikes and yeah obviously I continue to learn after the holiday season because food isn’t just for the holidays and our relationship with it isn’t but yeah I know that this can be a little bit daunting.

whether you’re at the beginning of your intuitive eating journey or somewhere else.

Naomi Katz (02:32)
Yeah, totally. But I also love that you frame this as hot takes for the holiday season and also the rest of the year, because I think something that happens once you start to get out of diet culture mentality and stuff like that is you kind of get to this point where your attitudes about food, your feelings about food can be more or less the same all year round. It’s not like…

the holiday season and then the not holiday season and your like cheat weekends and your like vacation, the way you eat on vacation and all of that. And it’s like, yeah, you might eat in different ways about all of that, but you kind of feel the same about it all year.

Melanie [she/her] (03:16)
I couldn’t agree more. And I think for me personally, each holiday season after this has been very interesting because I’m like, actually, I don’t really care about this food. this year going into the holiday, I’m like, I ain’t gonna buy that because like I bought it last year or the year before or I ate it and it really, I don’t want a whole packet of those cookies. I want just one, but I can’t do that. So just not gonna bother because it’s just a waste or however I personally feel about it.

I think it’s really interesting. It’s funny you mentioned cheat days. Greyson said to me the other day he was watching some video on YouTube. He’s like, what’s a cheat day? And I was like… And I explained to him like what a cheat day is in with a context. He was like, what’s the point of that? Why don’t you just eat what you want all the time? My ten- my ten-year-old gets it. So.

Naomi Katz (03:48)
Yeah.

Beautiful. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, you know, I think it’s really interesting. think a lot of times when I, the way I frame intuitive eating, me personally, mean, everybody, all coaches, all intuitive eating practitioners frame things differently, but me personally, I’ve always been really big on, it’s really not about the food itself, like what you are or not eating. It’s about how you feel about your food choices. It’s about,

how the narratives you’re attaching to the food and all of that stuff. so like, again, it’s like, yeah, you might eat different food during the holiday. You might eat different food on vacation, but you feel like you have the same tools to navigate it all year round. like, when food narratives and feelings come up,

you can navigate it the same way all year. You can make those choices autonomously and without guilt and without shame all year, even if the actual choices you’re making are different.

Melanie [she/her] (05:07)
Yeah. Yeah, which is a very good segue into your first hot take. So your first hot take is it’s okay to feel activated around all the food.

Naomi Katz (05:12)
Hahaha!

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So something we see, I think a lot on social media, especially around this time of year from anti-diet practitioners and stuff like that is we see a lot of like, just eat the blank, just eat the candy, just eat the pie and make it, making it seem like that’s a simple thing. And that like, like eating it is somehow going to…

Melanie [she/her] (05:23)
Let’s talk about this.

Naomi Katz (05:50)
be fine if you just do it. And it’s like, that’s not really true. Like, people have feelings about food. And I think especially if we’re earlier in our recovery from dieting, diet culture, disordered eating, et cetera, especially if we’re in a place where like we kind of have to still do a lot of mental work to get to food neutrality and to release the guilt and the food narratives and stuff like that.

And so like “just” anything is really like, I don’t know, it’s very trivializing. It feels really patronizing. Like that’s really not the thing. And that’s okay because intuitive eating doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings about food anymore. It just means you handle them differently. You don’t let them spiral you out. You don’t let them control what choices you make and things like that. And so around the holidays or…

I mean, anytime really, because these kinds of activations can happen in all kinds of contexts. It’s okay to have those feelings. It’s okay if you’re really excited about the food that you’re gonna eat for the holiday or on vacation or whatever. It’s fine for food to feel exciting sometimes. It’s also fine if we are feeling really nervous about…

the fact that there’s going to be foods that we’re not usually exposed to. It’s going to be fine if those old narratives start popping up, especially for foods that we don’t eat on the regular, because we haven’t had a chance to unpack those narratives because it hasn’t come up. And so, surprise, here’s a thing that you didn’t know you were going to have to deal with. And it’s just like, that’s OK. That doesn’t mean you’re doing

Melanie [she/her] (07:32)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah.

Naomi Katz (07:41)
anything wrong in your intuitive eating journey. It doesn’t mean like, now you’re back in diet culture. Like it doesn’t mean any of those things. It just means that now you have to use your tools for a totally normal experience of being a human who lives in the world of diet culture.

Melanie [she/her] (08:00)
Yeah. And I can, I can confirm I have felt all of those feelings at different times, probably just in this past year. because yeah, it’s, there’s things that are unexpected, whether it’s just every day going out for dinner, it can be situational. Yeah. Like all of those, all of those experiences.

I’ve certainly, certainly had, as probably have all of us. Okay, so your next hot take, I love this hot take by the way, “it’s normal to eat past fullness.”

Naomi Katz (08:37)
Yep, always. It’s always normal to eat past fullness, but especially when we’re in situations with foods that we don’t normally have access to, like a holiday where like, yeah, I probably don’t have like stuffing and pumpkin pie available to me all day, every day of the year. And like, sure, I could make it anytime I wanted, but.

Maybe it’s my grandmother’s recipe. Maybe it’s my mom’s recipe. Maybe it’s something that, maybe it’s a seasonal candy that only comes every, at certain times of year, things like that. And so eating past fullness can actually be a mindful choice. And what I mean by that is maybe you’re eating

You’re tuned into your hunger, you’re tuned into your fullness. You notice that you’re coming up on fullness or maybe you’ve even hit fullness, but you are just not quite done with that thing that you only get to have access to once a year. And so you choose to eat a little more of it, even though you might end up a little uncomfortable afterwards. Because you know that that discomfort is not forever.

it will pass and it will be fine. And whatever the emotional, mental, social benefit of eating to that point outweighs that little bit of physical discomfort for a little while. That’s… I’m gonna have a mic, but I’m gonna just not drop it.

Melanie [she/her] (10:16)
like you need a mic, a mic to drop at that point. yeah let’s not do that. No. Let’s not break. No mics are broken during this conversation. The reason I love this one so much is because I remember going through this with you and I was like wait what? Like just fullness in general as a principle blew my mind.

Naomi Katz (10:27)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm

Melanie [she/her] (10:44)
extensively during my work. And I actually have a number of occasions been eating something and I literally say out loud, I’m gonna eat past fullness because I’m really enjoying this. And it just, feels really like, I get a strange look from my husband, but it feels really good to be able to be like, it’s okay, this is normal. Like it’s, it’s fine. It feels really like audacious. How dare I?

Naomi Katz (10:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love that you say it out loud.

Yeah, no, I love that you say it out loud. I might even start encouraging people to do that. That’s fantastic. And yeah, and I think what it all comes down to, again, it’s the same thing. It’s not about what the choice you make is, it’s about the context for the choice, right? Because ultimately, what we’re really talking about in intuitive eating always is autonomy. How are we making this not autopilot, not driven by somebody else’s rules, but

Melanie [she/her] (11:14)
Yeah.

Ha ha.

Naomi Katz (11:41)
like truly my choices that I am aware of making and like, and removing all the guilt and shame from those choices. So like, yeah, you get to choose to eat however much you want to eat. And feeling a little overly full isn’t a punishment for that. It doesn’t mean you did something wrong. It just is you, you made a choice and that’s fine. You get to do that because you’re the boss of you.

Melanie [she/her] (12:10)
Yeah, absolutely. Because when I think about it, there’s so many occasions where I was always trying to hit a certain like marker. Most of those didn’t exist. I mean, they don’t exist, but it was never my choice. It was like, I’m not going to eat this. I’m going to eat this. There was always the kind of the spectrum, I guess, of that was all it was never mine. It was never my choice. It was a choice influenced by outside.

The food police as it were. Yeah, it was always an outside voice. Okay.

Naomi Katz (12:41)
Right, right.

Yeah. And I think that, I mean, and I’ve talked a little bit about this on social media before, like, I feel like eating past fullness is just a normal part of the human experience. Like, no, like you probably don’t want to do it all the time because it’s uncomfortable, you know, like, and certainly we want to make sure that we’re like mindful of like making the choice as opposed to just doing it on autopilot. Sometimes we’re going to do that too, because

life is life and distractions are distractions and all of that stuff. And so like, we like, we kind of just have to stop being so scared of eating past fullness. Like, it’s just it is part of the human experience. And if we are trying so hard to avoid it, that we deny ourselves things like our once a year or like mom’s stuffing or something like that, like, that’s that’s restriction. That’s just that’s a restriction mindset that

is gonna come back around at some point. Like that’s gonna hold us back from our true intuitive eating life at some point.

Melanie [she/her] (13:53)
Yeah. Okay. So your third hot take, which I really like this. I think there’s so much to explore here is “remember the ‘gentle’ in gentle nutrition.” So can you just explain a bit for anybody who is not familiar with intuitive eating, what gentle nutrition kind of is or means

Naomi Katz (13:54)
Ha ha ha ha!

yeah, absolutely.

gentle nutrition is the 10th principle of intuitive eating. That is the last principle. And while this is not true for everybody, the vast majority of times, it is also gonna be the last thing. So like in intuitive eating, the principles don’t necessarily have to go in order. They’re not steps. But gentle nutrition, like most of the time we…

also actually practice last because nutrition is just so tied up in diet culture and it’s really, really hard to start addressing nutrition without all of those narratives and food police thoughts and like diet culture-y takes on nutrition, like just getting in our heads and making it really hard to navigate. But ultimately what it is is

It’s sort of this place where you are able to, you have this very firm foundation and all the other principles. You’re really able to look past the outside rules and stuff like that that usually come with nutrition stuff. And we’re able to kind of basically integrate the external and the internal. So we’re able to take like what is actually out there like scientifically about

the nutrients in food and integrate that with our internal experiences in our bodies when we eat certain foods. So like, it doesn’t matter if somebody tells me that X number of servings of vegetables are healthy for me, like, because those nutrients are good for me. That doesn’t matter if I don’t feel good when I eat broccoli.

You know, like, or if I hate Swiss chard or kale, or if I don’t have access to fresh vegetables. You know, all of these things, it’s, know, meat can be great for you, but maybe I, for religious or ethical reasons, don’t eat meat. Like, these are…

Melanie [she/her] (16:06)
Right?

Naomi Katz (16:31)
Gentle Nutrition is about finding a way to navigate the science with your actual life, your preferences, your needs, your access, your beliefs, and all of that stuff.

Melanie [she/her] (16:46)
Yeah. It’s so interesting to me for a couple of reasons. So one of the things I actually was thinking about this just recently, as I laid in bed trying to get to sleep as I do getting annoyed about diet culture in the diet industry. I was thinking about how there’s like hard and fast rules that we’ve heard over the years about nutrition. And there’s so many of them and they vary so much. And most of them are incredibly hypocritical and they, they usually like

they’re just wildly lacking in any kind of fundamental science because a lot of the time what we see, and I know you’re maintenance phase fan as well, you hear that people end up getting really sick from doing these things. And one of the things I was thinking about, and you’ll remember this going back to like my personal training days, was the focus on protein and like this like…

glorification of this this macronutrient and I thought to myself it’s so interesting how like

So far from reality, kind of felt, because I was completely wrapped up in this as well. And I thought, but what about vegetarians? And I was like, what about vegans? Because they’re like, protein choice is so different. And I just started to think about how wild it was that I was so focused on this particular food group and was so

I couldn’t perceive that there was any other option than you had to get pure protein and it had to be pure protein. And I was like, but vegetarians have existed long before these like steak diets or long before these things existed. And like, hey, are we really going to tell someone who has a moral or religious feeling about or a religious reason for not eating a certain food? No, that doesn’t matter. This is what you should be doing. They do do it and no, they shouldn’t.

Naomi Katz (18:40)
Right.

And yes, within diet culture, we are absolutely going to do that. We are going to tell people that their beliefs, their lived experiences, their lives don’t matter as much as this elitist view of food and what everybody, quote unquote, should be eating. Yeah.

Melanie [she/her] (19:04)
Yeah. And also I think it’s really interesting at this time of year, because like this time of year, not necessarily being the time to perfect our nutrition, but at this time of year, we see so much within diet culture doubling down on their messaging.

Naomi Katz (19:15)
Right.

Melanie [she/her] (19:24)
we, I mean, we, and I, I don’t know if it’s gonna be different. I don’t want to say it’s going to be different this year. I know for me personally, everything I’m seeing is far more focused on medications and things like that versus diets themselves, but I’m sure they’re still gonna be floating. I can just visualize them floating around Facebook groups. And there’s so much of that narrative at this time of year, like this or that and all those kinds of things around the holidays. And I think it is.

It’s just very interesting that at this time of year when there’s so much other stuff going on and there’s so many other things we can be experiencing, that this is the focus and this is what they choose to kind of focus on.

Naomi Katz (20:00)
Yeah.

Absolutely, which kind of brings us to the point of this hot take, which is to remember the gentle and gentle nutrition. Because I think a lot of times it’s really easy to like, we’ve gotten to gentle nutrition, so let’s focus on the nutrition. And it’s like, yeah, that’s great. Nobody’s telling you not to pay attention to nutrition. But let’s also remember the gentle part. Like, yeah, during the holidays,

probably not the time to try and lock down your nutrition. It’s going to be really, really stressful and really hard. And you’re probably going to end up denying yourself a lot of things that a lot of pleasure, a lot of social and emotional and mental connection and stuff like that. Ditto for, well, I’ll give you a great example from my personal life right now. I live in Asheville, North Carolina. We got hit super hard by Hurricane Helene about three and a half weeks ago.

we were without power in my house. We actually got really lucky because we were only without power for about six days. That’s lucky. and like, what was I going to try it? Like I ate a lot of like, just pre-prepared boxed convenience foods for that whole time. Honestly, even after that, we, took like three and a half, it took like two and a half weeks for us to get

Melanie [she/her] (21:12)
Yeah.

Naomi Katz (21:30)
running water back. There was a lot of stuff that like, I probably wasn’t drinking as much water as I should. There were like, wasn’t eating the fruits and vegetables I normally would, like all of that stuff. But that was actually a healthier choice for me than a lot of other things. And nutrition was really just like not the top of my mind. Lacking in my nutrition at this time was just not top of mind. It was not the important thing for me to focus on.

nor would it have been a good thing for me to be beating myself up and feeling super guilty about not locking down my nutrition during that time. And that’s where the gentleness comes in. Sometimes nutrition is not the most important thing in what you’re doing. And certainly not like the textbook, like this is what nutrition looks like type of nutrition.

Sometimes just getting yourself through the days is much more important. Sometimes pleasure and emotional connection is more important. What we’re really talking about is nourishment as opposed to just nutrition. And not that nourishment doesn’t encompass nutrition, but it also encompasses much bigger concepts that are not just the math part of food, which is really what nutrition is. And we don’t need to beat ourselves up

when we’re not prioritizing the math, when we’re prioritizing the other parts of food. Like that’s also part of being a human being and it’s just as important as the nutrition.

Melanie [she/her] (23:12)
Yeah, thank you for sharing. I appreciate that. Yeah, I always think about that when I have.

Naomi Katz (23:14)
Yeah, of course.

Melanie [she/her] (23:22)
moments where I feel like I can’t make a decision, but what I’m really saying to myself is I don’t like the decisions. Like, I feel like either decision is wrapped up in some kind of food rule, and I’m like, okay, this is actually what’s going on. I can make a decision, and it’s fine, and it doesn’t affect any other decisions that I might need to make. Yeah.

Naomi Katz (23:29)
Mm-hmm.

Melanie [she/her] (23:49)
I still bump up against that sometimes, but it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s very specific. okay. So your fourth hot take is “it’s also okay to say no to food.”

Naomi Katz (23:51)
Totally.

Yep. So again, we’re like, we’re coming back around to the autonomy of it all always, right? Like intuitive eating does not actually mean that we have to eat all of the things, even if we don’t actually want to. Like, I think, I mean, this is a big misconception about intuitive eating that it’s like, you just eat all the things all the time, but like, that’s not really what it is. Again, we’re really just,

trying to tune in to ourselves more. What do we like? What do we not like? What do we want? What do we not want? What do we prioritize? And getting to a point where we can make autonomous choices based on all of those things. And that includes saying no to stuff that we actually don’t feel like eating. Maybe that’s a dessert. Maybe it’s not a dessert.

And that is true even at the holidays. Like just because your mom makes a pumpkin pie every year and in the past you’ve always eaten it because you only get it once a year. If you don’t actually like it, you don’t have to eat it. If you’re full, you don’t have to eat it. you, you know, if there’s other desserts you would rather eat instead. That’s fine. You don’t have to eat like,

you get to say no to food, even if it’s a dessert. Like, even if it feels like, I would have said no to this while I was dieting. Like, that’s fine. It’s not what you’re doing, it’s why you’re doing it. Are you saying no to it because you think that it’s bad to eat it? Okay, well, like, let’s look at that. Are you saying no to it because, like, of all the other reasons that you might say no to something? That’s your choice, you get to do that.

Melanie [she/her] (25:55)
Yeah. Again, like, this was such a big, a big part of my intuitive eating practice, like, as we were going through the principles, because, and I’ve talked about this a bit before, and I don’t know which episode, another episode, where the complicated nature of, I used to eat this thing when I was dieting. So I associate it with dieting.

So I shouldn’t eat it, but actually I kind of like it. wait. And that felt so complicated as well to unravel of, there are foods that I used to eat that I kind of somehow associate with dieting, but actually I also enjoy them. I remember having a big moment with couscous at one point. I decided I don’t like it. It’s not my preferred thing, but I was like, I need to try it because I don’t actually know. And I think that’s what’s, I feel like also there’s so much stigma.

and stereotyping that we probably ourselves feel around it. You for myself and a larger body, it’s like me saying no to dessert versus me saying no to a vegetable. There’s so much else goes on up there of like what people might think about me. Yeah. And it’s, that can feel very complicated at times as well.

Naomi Katz (27:01)
totally.

Definitely. Yeah, I should be very clear that none of this stuff is without nuance or a simple, again, none of this is “just eat the candy” advice. This is all really deeply nuanced and absolutely is not an easy thing to wrap your head around at first. You know from experience because we’ve worked through some of this stuff together, is that like,

you, it requires working through. It’s not something you’re just like, well, I heard a podcast once and now I’m fine.

Melanie [she/her] (27:43)
If only!

Naomi Katz (27:45)
Yeah, and of course, there’s a lot of difference navigating the stuff in a smaller body versus a larger body because of the outside influences that impact how the narratives we carry and also the way we’re treated in society. so like, yeah, that’s, it’s varied. There’s a lot of variation in how this stuff plays out in people’s individual actual lives. Yeah, but yes,

it’s still like a simple fact that you are allowed to make an autonomous decision about what foods you do or do not eat. Everything else is like a lot of bullshit layering that like, not bullshit that like, it doesn’t exist, but bullshit that it shouldn’t exist, you know? That like, it’s a reality that we have to navigate, but it sucks and it’s bullshit that we have to.

Melanie [she/her] (28:32)
Noise. It’s noisy.

Yeah, absolutely. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just make our own choices? Okay, so our fifth and final hot take is “Eyes on Your Own Plate.”

Naomi Katz (28:44)
I know. Yes.

Yeah, so I think that’s a phrase that is not new to most people. Like I think a lot of us have heard the phrase eyes on your own plate, but I think that usually we hear that in terms of other people making comments on our food choices, but it applies to us also. Like we need to keep our eyes on our own plate and off of other people’s plates because

the less we focus on what other people are eating, the less we’re gonna be tempted to compare, the less we’re gonna be tempted to judge. And when I say compare and judge, I mean ourselves. Like, the more, like we don’t wanna compare ourselves to other people. We don’t wanna judge ourselves for the ways that our food looks different from other people because both of those things are really harmful to our relationships with food. And so like, yeah, people should

keep their comments to themselves, but also we need to just focus on ourselves. It doesn’t matter what anybody else in the room is doing. It doesn’t matter what anybody else at the table is eating. That’s their business. What I’m eating is my business. And if I expect them to respect that, then I should also respect myself that way.

Melanie [she/her] (30:11)
Yeah, can, I can very much… I especially think of times when I’ve been in social situations, I don’t know, I’m thinking of like work, Christmas meals or outings. I feel like there’s a lot of like, what are you having? What shall I have? Like there’s a lot of this and like on these outfits it feels like a very innocent conversation as someone who was probably always restricting in those times. I’m like…

But what should I have? What looks best? What looks aesthetically like the right choice for me? You know, it was very much about that. yeah, now, you know, doing that work, it’s a case of…

You eat what you want to eat, I eat what I want to eat. I feel like that’s been definitely a big improvement within like my family as a whole, like having these kinds of… When we go on holiday, where everyone’s eating, it’s like, fine, like we can ask, but like, why are we asking? Like again, it’s about more than the food.

Naomi Katz (31:04)
Mm-hmm. Right, right.

Absolutely. again, there’s also layers to it. This is a lot easier for some people to put into practice than others. Body size being a huge determiner of how easy or not easy this is gonna be to put into practice. But yeah, the other thing, we can’t, a fundamental truth is that we can’t control the actions of others. And so like,

Like we want to tell people, keep your eyes on your own plate. And we can tell people that. But the thing that we have the most control over is our own behaviors. And so if we don’t put ourselves in a position where we’re comparing what we’re eating to other people and like we’re encouraging that behavior almost, we’re like subjecting ourselves to it through our own actions, that’s going to be a lot easier to control than other people doing.

Melanie [she/her] (31:56)
Mm.

Yeah, absolutely. they were so good. I’m so excited for everybody to hear these, these hot takes. And, you know, as we said at the beginning, these are applicable. yeah. Definitely during the holidays, but yeah. Wonderful. Wow. I am so, glad that we got to sit down and do this and have this conversation. I’m so happy. Please, please, please tell everybody.

Naomi Katz (32:10)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Me too.

Melanie [she/her] (32:36)
a little bit about what you’re working on at the moment, where people can find you, all that good stuff.

Naomi Katz (32:43)
Yeah, so I can always be found on Instagram at Happy Shapes Naomi and on my website, which is happyshapes.co, which I overpronounce because there is no at the end. is .co, not .com. So that’s, mean, that’s where people can find me most.

Melanie [she/her] (32:57)
you

Naomi Katz (33:06)
The big thing that I have going on right now is I have spots available for one-to-one intuitive eating and anti-diet coaching, which is something that I offer in six, nine and 12 month packages. It’s like a pretty high touch coaching experience basically. it’s weekly zoom calls, access to me through a messaging app, in between calls.

and two actually hard copy workbooks that we work through together. And that’s the big thing that I am taking clients for right now. I also do offer one-off pay what you can calls for people who either can’t afford or aren’t interested in a longer term coaching experience.

have like a sticking point that they just want to get eyes on and talk through a little bit. And again, that’s a pay what you can option because I like to make things as accessible as possible. And those are called mindset reset calls. Both of those things are on my website. You’ll find them on the work with me tab. And then the last thing is I do have a wait list open for my group coaching program, Nourish and Bloom, which is what you did with me.

Melanie [she/her] (34:28)
That is true.

Naomi Katz (34:29)
it’s a kind of long-term group coaching. So it is 40 weeks, which I know sounds really long, but that’s because there’s a lot to work through and I’m a big, and that has, weekly written content, monthly group calls and, journal prompts and an online space for everybody to sort of talk through things together.

Melanie [she/her] (34:35)
You

It goes by really quickly.

Naomi Katz (34:58)
And that I actually was planning on opening enrollment for that at the beginning of October, but the hurricane had other plans for me. So I’m not entirely certain when I’m going to open that again, but the wait list is up on my website. Again, that’s happyshapes.co for anybody who might be interested. Yeah. Thank you.

Melanie [she/her] (35:19)
Wonderful. I will definitely link to all of those in the show notes. And I know at the beginning of this episode of the intro, I did mention the fact that obviously, and you’ve mentioned the fact that you live in Asheville in North Carolina and were hit pretty badly by Helene. So I know you wanted to just mention a little bit about that and talk a little bit about some of the ways in which folks can either support or like some of the support that’s happening kind of on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina right now.

Naomi Katz (35:47)
Yeah, my God, seeing the way this community has come together through this has been really amazing. To give some context, I live in the mountains. I’m like six hours from any coast. Hurricanes here are like, we do not expect hurricanes here. It is the last thing you expect to have to deal with. And so this has been.

Melanie [she/her] (36:04)
Yeah.

Naomi Katz (36:14)
really impactful for our businesses, our infrastructure, like individuals here. And there’s an organization here called Beloved Asheville, who is doing just amazing on the ground work to get people food, water, housing, heating, clothing, just like all the fundamentals. They do this kind of work year round. They’re really like an incredible organization, but they have been.

just nonstop focused on hurricane relief stuff right now. And it’s been pretty amazing to see. And so if anybody is interested in supporting this amazing organization and also the folks recovering and trying to rebuild from this, the website is belovedashville.com. And again, they’re just a really great organization doing really great work right now.

Melanie [she/her] (37:06)
Yeah, thank you. will make sure everything that you mentioned is linked. I’ll make sure Beloved Asheville is linked in the show notes as well. I know I’ve been following along and seeing, having been to Asheville, I kind of like, I remember there was so much infrastructure of small businesses and especially like in the downtown area. So yeah, and obviously, you know, it didn’t just affect businesses, it affected people as well. So yes. And as I know,

Naomi Katz (37:32)
Yeah.

Melanie [she/her] (37:34)
the cameras go it’s still very much something that’s being rebuilt so yeah.

Naomi Katz (37:39)
Yeah, that’s really what it is. The news cycle is only so long. We’re coming up on an election. It’s kind of a big deal. There’s a lot of stuff pulling focus, and I understand that. But it’s going to be a pretty long-term recovery here. so long-term support through organizations like Beloved are going to be really, really crucial. And so yeah, thank you for giving me the opportunity to promote that a little bit.

Melanie [she/her] (38:05)
Absolutely. Okay. Thank you so much for listening, guys. I will make sure I said everything’s linked, and I’ll see you next time.

Naomi Katz (38:14)
Thank you so much, Melanie. This has been great.