We fuss endlessly over feeding the body and quietly let everything else at the table go hungry.
You already know how to feed your body. You have firm opinions about protein and olive oil and whether oat milk counts as a personality. What we rarely say out loud is that the body is only one of the things in you that gets hungry. Your mind is fed or starved every day by whatever you put in front of it. Your heart has an appetite of its own. So does your relationship with money, whether you like to admit it or not.
I make my living inside books, so I am biased, and I am also right about this. A themed issue about nourishment is the perfect excuse to feed every hungry part of you this season, not only the part that eats kale. Here is a small shelf, one book for each of the appetites we tend to forget we have.
Start with the body, since that is where this whole issue lives. For food, the one I would put in your hands is Kimberley Wilson’s Unprocessed. Wilson is a chartered psychologist, and her argument is that the modern diet is quietly wrecking our mental health and not only our waistlines. It is the rare food book that takes “food for thought” completely literally, tracing the line from what sits on your fork to what happens in your head. Read it and you will never look at an ultra-processed snack with the same innocence again.
For the mind, read Jim Kwik’s Limitless. Kwik grew up being called “the boy with the broken brain” after a childhood head injury, and he built an entire career out of teaching people to learn faster and remember more. The book is part manual and part pep talk, and it will convince you that the way you read and remember is trainable, like a muscle you have been politely ignoring for years. Your brain will thank you, assuming you have been feeding it well enough to notice.
For the hunger nobody at the dinner party likes to admit to, read Maria Nemeth’s The Energy of Money. This is not a budgeting book, so you can relax. Nemeth is a clinical psychologist, and she treats money as a form of energy that moves through your life the way food moves through your body. One of her lines lodged in me and never left. How you do money is how you do life. If your relationship with money runs on scarcity and quiet 2 a.m. panic, this is the book that starts to loosen the grip.
For the soul, pick up Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, all nine hundred glorious pages of it. It follows an escaped convict who disappears into the backstreets of Bombay, and somewhere in the beautiful chaos it becomes one of the great modern novels about love and how to actually be a person. It is enormous and occasionally overwrought, and I have never once regretted the days I gave it. A book like this reaches a part of you that no self-help title ever will.
For the spirit, read literally anything by poet goddess, Rupi Kaur. Her poems are short and quietly devastating, the kind you can take in on a single breath and then sit with for an hour. Milk and Honey is where most people start. Keep her by the bed and read one poem before sleep, the way some people take a supplement. It does considerably more for the spirit than most things that come in a bottle.
Here is the truth I will die on. You can eat perfectly and still be starving if the body is the only part of you that you ever remember to feed. This season, feed the rest of you. Pick the hunger you have been ignoring the longest, and start there.
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This piece first appeared in RetreatBoss Magazine, where I am Editor-in-Chief.
