You Don’t Need To Run 3 Miles To Deserve Thanksgiving Dinner

Every year, as the holidays roll in, the same thing happens: the Turkey Trot becomes America’s favorite pre-meal ritual. Everywhere you look, there is this quiet message being pushed into our brains that in order to enjoy a holiday meal, we need to run for it.

As a nurse practitioner who specializes in women’s wellness and metabolic health, I have seen this mindset play out again and again. After sitting across from hundreds of clients, I can’t help but wonder where all this shame, guilt, and fear around food comes from? When did eating a plate of food turn into something we believe has to be earned? And I think that mindset is the root of so much orthorexia in our culture.

Our generation grew up hearing things like “burn off the pie” or “earn your carbs,” and it shows. We learned to tie movement to morality and food to shame. Before we even realized it, exercise became a punishment and not a way to treat our body well.

The Quiet Rise of Orthorexia in Wellness Culture

If you’re a millennial, I want you to think back to the early days of Instagram. I’m talking about the Kayla Itsines Bikini Body era, when fitness influencers were suddenly everywhere. One day we were posting pictures of our friends, our pets, our families. Then suddenly our feeds were full of fitness influencers showing “perfect” bodies, flawless meal prep, and daily routines that were, honestly, pretty disordered once you look back at them.

What started as “healthy inspiration” quickly became a subliminal message that if you wanted to be fit, you had to grind yourself into the ground and eat impossibly clean. And we are still seeing that messaging today. Three months ago everyone was wearing weighted vests to walk around their neighborhood. For what?

Most people know about eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia, but far fewer people know the term orthorexia.

Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with “clean” or “perfect” eating.
It often hides behind wellness language, but its roots are fear, shame, and rigidity.

It shows up as:

• Feeling shame around your food choices.

• Skipping meals because something didn’t feel “healthy enough”

• Exercising to “make up for” what you ate

• Believing your body will fall apart if you don’t follow every rule perfectly

Orthorexia is one of the most common patterns I see in my practice. It grows from this idea that our bodies can’t be trusted unless we micromanage every bite or burn off every indulgence. And it’s not just the fitness girlies online, it shows up in women from every walk of life. This didn’t happen randomly. It comes from generations of messaging that told us eating less makes you disciplined and eating more makes you “bad,” and that our value is a based on how skinny we are.

None of that feels like wellness, its feels like captivity. Movement should be equivalent to brushing your teeth, you do it because that’s how to you keep your teeth healthy. Movement supports longevity, nervous system health, hormones, bone density, metabolism, and mental health. Movement is how we live well and live longer, not how we atone for a holiday meal.

Why More Is Not More for Your Hormones

I am going to hold your hand when I tell you this…

A simple walk after a meal does more for your blood sugar, hormones, and metabolism than most people realize. Not a workout. Not a sprint. I am talking about a basic, slow, 10 to 15 minute walk. The kind where you are not even breaking a sweat. Your muscles use glucose more efficiently when you move right after eating, which helps lower blood sugar naturally.

As a nurse practitioner and someone who lives with type 1 diabetes, I genuinely believe that if more people walked after meals, we would dramatically reduce prediabetes in this country.

I digress, let’s talk about hormones. Specifically cortisol. When you move your body from a place of fear or punishment, your cortisol rises. Cortisol is not the enemy. We need it. But chronically elevated levels make it harder to lose weight, harder to build muscle, and easier to store fat around your midsection. It also impacts your thyroid, your sleep, your hunger cues, and your mood. So the thing you think is “fixing” the problem can actually create more stress inside your body.

This is why so many women come into my office and say, “I’m doing everything right. I am doing HIIT (or insert a workout where your heart rate is stays above 140bpm) almost daily.” High intensity interval training (HIIT) is a massive stressor on the body. There are only a handful of people who benefit from doing true HIIT regularly, and most of them are men. Women are simply not built for that level of chronic, repetitive hormonal stress.

And then the moment I ask, “Show me your heart rate data from this morning,” they proudly show me an Apple Watch screenshot with their heart rate sitting well above 150 for the entire workout.

I ask, “How did you feel afterward?” They say, with pride, “Dead. Exhausted. Sweaty. It’s awesome.”

And there it is. Punishment equals success.

Pushing harder is not always helping you. Sometimes more is not more. When your nervous system feels safe, movement becomes supportive instead of stressful. You recover better. Your hormones regulate more efficiently. And you don’t feel so ravenous that you could eat the paint off the walls because you are so hungry 3 hours post workout.

This is why chasing a six pack or trying to “earn” your food is not only mentally exhausting. It can actually disrupt your metabolism and your hormones. Especially for women.

A simple walk after a meal can do more for your blood sugar and inflammation than a punishing workout ever will. Walking tells your body that you are safe. It keeps cortisol stable. It helps digestion, mood, and sleep. And it is sustainable.

And I can say this with confidence, one day of eating whatever your family makes for the holidays does not change your health. When we zoom way out, wellness is built on what we do most of the time, not what we do on Thanksgiving Day.

The belief that we have to go to extremes to “be healthy” is exactly why so many people end up saying “screw it” around the holidays and wait until the new year to start. We tie movement and nourishment to punishment, extreme diet plans, and all-or-nothing workouts. That mindset is why most New Year’s resolutions don’t make it past the first 90 days. It’s too extreme. It’s not realistic. And it’s not sustainable.

I tell my clients all the time that consistency wins. A consistent, even imperfect, wellness routine will always outperform the intense workout you can only manage on certain days. Wellness is built in the middle ground, not the extremes.

What Your Body Really Needs This Holiday

I really do believe there is a shift happening. We are finally moving away from the obsession with calorie burn, extreme workouts, and disordered eating. I see younger generations wanting to build muscle, strength train, and actually nourish their bodies. When I was in high school, women strength training wasn’t really a thing. And I was an athlete! Thank God they aren’t growing up in the era of size-zero Abercrombie ads like we did. Yes, they have their own pressures and challenges, but they’re also being handed a healthier narrative than the one we were fed.

If you take anything from this please remember that you are worthy. Your body is not something you punish because you had a piece of pie. Your body can feel the shame even if you never say it out loud. If you sit there thinking “I shouldn’t have eaten that, I’ll make up for it tomorrow,” your nervous system hears that.

So let yourself enjoy the holiday food. Let yourself be present at the table. We forget how lucky we are to be healthy enough to show up at a table with people we love. To be in a home where we feel safe. To enjoy food without fear or shame. That is the real gift of this season. Not how much you burn. Not how “clean” you eat. But the simple fact that your body brought you here, and you get to enjoy this moment fully.