Day 12: Ditch the Diet Rules. Find Your Food Compass.
September Rentrée Series
🍂 Welcome to the September Rentrée! Every weekday this month, you'll get one bold, bite-sized piece to spark reflection, shift your habits, and help you design a life that feels good in real life. 1 month. 20 bold truths. A life-changing September. In France, la rentrée (the return) is a national event. It's about fresh routines, new ideas, and intentional renewal. And that's exactly the energy we're bringing here!
For years, I thought my body was a problem to fix.
Food felt like a battlefield of “good” and “bad.”
I followed the rigid rules, counted the calories, and felt such a failure when I “failed.”
Exhausting.
Diet culture trains us to treat the body like an unruly project.
Follow someone else’s map. Eat from someone else’s list. Ignore the quiet signals inside you.
What if your body has been on your side all along??
Stop following the map. Start using your compass.
This shift changes everything.
Turn down the loud rules. Turn up the quiet wisdom in your body.
Your body is so smart. That focus after a nourishing meal, the nasty slump after a sugar spike, the calm after protein and fibre.
That is your ‘gut brain axis’ talking. It is a constant conversation between digestion and mind, carried by nerves, hormones, and immune signals.
Nourishment is not about discipline. It is about connection.
Listening. Trust. What makes now a good time to start listening differently?
Do this today: tune the compass
Play the addition game: Ask yourself: “What is one vibrant thing I can add to my plate today?” Think colour not calories. Think joy, not judgement.
Take a post-meal pause. Seriously, take a moment to ask yourself “How do we feel after that?” We’re not trying to fix. It’s just awareness, just data. This is how you slowly learn the language.
Feed “Future You”: Choose one small thing as a gift to the person you will be in ten years. Walnuts for brain health. Leafy greens for bones. One tiny vote for the person you want to be.
Ask yourself
If food felt easy and joyful for one day, what would change first?
When you picture your next-level self, how does loving nourishment fit that vision?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to trust your body’s signals? What is one small step that could nudge that number up?
The magic is not the perfect diet.
It is finding what actually works for YOUR body.
Food becomes energy and ease, not anxiety and shame. You stop trying to control your body and start building a relationship with it, rooted in your own data.
With love,
Noemie
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