The Live FAB Life Podcast Episode 320: Stop Outsourcing Your Wellness

So many women secretly carry the shame of feeling "lazy."

This episode breaks down how Human Design helps reframe what laziness really is (hint: it’s not what you think).

We explore:

How we came to form our beliefs around laziness, productivity, work ethic
What's really at the root of these beliefs
What it looks like through the lens of Human Design
And how to find sustainable energy that has nothing to do with pushing harder

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

Connect with Naomi:

“Because every time you override your cues – what your body is telling you and you keep pushing beyond your capacity, contrary to popular belief - it’s not you being strong — it’s you being disconnected. And every time you honor the rhythms of your energy? It’s not lazy. It’s wisdom in action.”

— Naomi Nakamura

Read the Transcript:

Hello, my friend. Welcome – I’m happy to be back here with you again!

Let's start off with the three things. This is a ritual that I do every night before bed, and now we do it at the start of each episode! I’m enjoying your emails and DM’s sharing your three things with me!

This week, three things that were fun and that are joyful...

One - is there anything better than climbing into a bed that has washed laundered sheets? In the last episode, I mentioned doing eight or nine loads of laundry a week, well that’s because I have a king size bed and a twin size washer and dryer. The fitted sheet is one load, the flat sheet is another load, the duvet cover another load… It’s a weekly chore but, I love climbing into a freshly made bed with clean sheets! For me, it’s usually on Sunday nights and it’s a great way to start my week!

Secondly, remember Lisa Haukom from The Golden Brand.co who joined me in Episode 316? She’s the founder of the Self-Portrait Challenge I shared about in Episode 317. Last week, I got to do a photo shoot with her! I’ve had photo photos before, but this one was different because it was in my home, something I’ve never got to do, but Lisa was also in her home! Yes, it was a remote photo shoot! I had never heard such a thing was possible before Lisa, so my 1 / 3 Profile Lines demanded that I learn more and experience it for myself!

There’s something to be said about having photos done in your own home. It’s intimate and deeply personal – and casual. At least that’s how my home is and that’s the vibe I wanted. I can’t wait to share some of the images with you when they’re ready!

And thirdly, I’m sitting at my desk right now looking at a bunch of flowers that picked up last week at the grocery store when I was there last week. They're probably won't last much longer, but a few of the peonies have fully bloomed, and this doesn’t always happen with peonies, but there’s one I'm looking at right now, I’ll post a photo of it to my Instagram – it’s so pretty and it makes me so happy just to see it.

Okay, three kind things – I’ve been going on Relaxed Girl Walks, and I think such a kind gesture when runners acknowledge. A nod between runners is an unspoken greeting – a recognition if you will – when you pass another runner, but I’ve just been out walking, not running. So, I appreciate the nods I’ve gotten from runners this past week because can be snobby (speaking as a former runner), so I take the nod as an act of kindness!

Another appreciated act of kindness are those who held doors open for me. It’s appreciated and I’ve tried to pay it forward and reciprocate to someone else when the opportunity presents itself.

And then, thirdly, this is important. I appreciate that when I’m at a crowded intersection, and the car in front of me scoots as far forward as they can, so that I can tuck in and not be stuck in the middle of the intersection when the crossing light turns green. We all know what it's like when you're just at the edge and the car in front of you doesn’t scoot up even though there’s room to do so. I’m always like, “Dude, move up!” I think it's a very kind thing to pay attention and be aware of the situation, and so I appreciate people who have done that for me this week because not everyone does.

As for, “What I did well or what I liked about myself”, I redid my entire website. It’s by far the most complex template that I've used. I spent about four days troubleshooting the set-up before I could even get started because there was a problem with some coding.

When I was finally about to get started, it took me another four full days to redesign the whole thing. It feels like I used up all my brain cells doing so, but it's done. Give it a peek and check it out – www.livefablife.com

Secondly, this comes to mind because I was in the City this weekend, the one break I took from my website bubble, I love that I still feel the wonder and the excitement and the romanticism of San Francisco.

This summer will be 27 years of living in the Bay Area, and my heart still skips a beat every time I’m driving in the City, and the Golden Gate Bridge first comes into view. That first glimpse never gets old.

And then, thirdly, something I did well and liked about myself was that I asked for help and gave myself a break. My home desperately needed a deep clean and I just didn’t have the time, energy or inclination. So, I outsourced my house cleaning in preservation of my wellness. For me, this is progress.

But today, we’re not here to talk about outsourcing house cleaning, we’re here to talk about outsourcing your wellness.

If you’ve read all the wellness books, if you’ve bought all the supplements, if you’ve followed all the plans, and if you’ve tracked all your macros, but, things still aren’t clicking in the way that you want them to, have you considered that maybe it's not you? That maybe, just maybe you've been outsourcing your wellness to people who are never meant to hold it.

You've heard me say, “Stop outsourcing your wellness” a lot, but what does that mean? What does “outsourcing your wellness” actually mean?

Does it mean ghosting your trainer or swearing off TikTok experts forever? I'm not on TikTok, but every if I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, “Oh, I saw this on TikTok…”

Outsourcing your wellness doesn't not necessarily mean you have to swear those things off, and today, we’re going to break down what wellness outsourcing actually looks like, and more importantly, what you can do--what reclaiming your wellness looks like, feels like, sounds like. So, if you've been following every—and I'm using air quotes here— “rule”, and you still feel lost. You still feel confused, and you still feel like something's off, listen up.

25 years ago, I was a major couch potato. My exercise routine consisted of walking from my front door to my car, and then from the car to the office, and then back--from the office to the car, from the car to my house, and then whatever effort it took to go between my kitchen, my sofa, my bathroom, and my bed, all in my tiny Bay Area apartment. That was typically the amount of movement that I got on any given day.

But then in my late 20s, I had what I'm going to call an “awakening”, and decided I needed to make a life change. So, I joined Gold's Gym and started working with a personal trainer, and that trainer was the person who encouraged me to start eating “healthier” --I use the word “healthier” with an asterisk because now know that healthier means different things for each person.

But back then, I didn't know what I didn't know. I was a novice at this wellness life I was shifting to, so, I relied heavily on my personal trainer, on books, and I relied on a whole lot of magazines. I’m an avid magazine reader and Shape, Self, Fitness, Health, all those magazines were in regular rotation at my house, because back then, the content on the internet wasn't like today's content on the internet, and social media was MySpace.

So, I looked to magazines, books and my trainer for information, guidance and support. I outsourced my wellness.

And that looked like constantly texting my trainer to ask, “Should I eat this? Should I eat that?”

It looked a memorizing calories and macros for all the foods I ate.

It looked like pages ripped out of Shape magazine that were placed in page protectors that I carried around at the gym to guide me through step of my workouts that weren’t with my trainer.

In hindsight, I realize now that how my body was already giving me clear signals of what it needed and what it didn't, but I didn't know how to recognize those signals.

Outsourcing your wellness looks like constantly asking yourself and everyone else what you should and shouldn’t be doing? -- What you should eat, what workout should you do, what supplements should you be taking.

It's one thing to crowdsource for ideas, but it's another thing to ignore your intuition and bypass your instincts to abide by a plan that's based on someone else's needs, or the need to have every decision you make validated by someone else.

Outsourcing your wellness looks like following a plan, or maybe many plans, to the letter, and still feel like you're failing and not doing enough.

Like, following Whole30 to a “t” but then eating a corn on the cob on Day 21, considering that a failure, believing that none of it counted, and feeling that you have to start all over again. I’m raising my hand because that’s my #truestory.

Outsourcing your wellness looks like overriding your own hunger signals, your own preferences and/or your own energy for the sake of sticking to the plan that’s likely someone else’s plan.

Outsourcing your wellness looks like feeling anxious when you don't have a protocol to follow.

Now, there's nothing wrong with leaning on external sources for guidance, but if you’re ignoring your body and the clear messages that it's sending you, in favor of following someone else's plan, someone else's blueprint, that’s actually not helpful at all because you’re overriding your energy-- and outsourcing your wellness.

Let’s be honest -- most wellness plans reward obedience, not awareness. Wellness culture in general, praises discipline.

I literally see it every day while scrolling through on Instagram, not from accounts I follow but from what the algorithm feeds me – “Stick to the plan.” “Do this if you want…” “Follow me for….”

I’m going to give those creators the benefit of the doubt that those are posts made with the best intentions, because these are things that worked for them, but those posts also imply that you don't know what's best for you--that the experts know what's best for you.

But what this really does is teach perfectionism. It conditions you to become people-pleasers, and it instills a fear that you might “get it wrong.”

All of these things continually feed the disconnection between you and your body, your energy, your intuition, your emotions, your instincts because following someone else's plan or protocol that has no consideration for your own bio-individuality, your own body, your environment that you live in, your current situation, your genetics, your health history--trains you to trust someone else's voice more than your own.

It's teaching performative wellness instead of how to practice and live with what's best suited for you in your current moment of life. This isn’t empowerment, it’s outsourcing your wellness.

Because when you peel back the layers to get to the root cause--that's the buzzword nowadays--the root cause of whatever it is that you're struggling with, the root cause is not hormonal imbalance, it’s not your sleep issues, it’s not whatever diagnosis you’re looking for that’ll be the root cause of all your problems.

Peel back the layers far enough and what's really the root the root cause is actually a lack of self-confidence, a lack of self-trust, not trusting yourself to make decisions -- and this is why you're outsourcing your wellness. You don't trust your ability to recognize what your body is saying, let alone hear and decode signals that it's sending. You don’t have confidence in yourself to trust your instincts and instead you end up following someone else's plan.

I’m going to be a broken record saying but, #sorrynotsorry – your instincts are as unique to you as your bio-individuality. It’s assumed that instincts function the same for everyone but that’s not true.

Your instincts don’t function the same as my do.

Learning how to trust your instincts and listening to your body are skills that most of us have to learn because we've never been taught how to do these things.

And you can start to learn how to do so by asking yourself questions like, “How does this feel?” instead of, “What's the rule to follow here?”

You teach yourself body awareness by tracking the things that actually matter—what you eat, how you feel (your mood and energy) and how your body functions, so that you can find correlations and see how they’re all connected to each other.

It's not just tracking calories or macros; in some ways it’s a lot more but also a lot less.

And then concurrently, you use your Human Design as a tool for reflection, not a rigid identity box that you confine yourself to.

You develop self-trust by following your Human Design Strategy and Authority. Your Authority is the unique way your instinct function. Your Authority is your guiding light for making aligned decisions.

And above all, you learn how to listen to your body by getting curious, not by controlling it.

This is what my masterclass, “Food, Mood, Design teaches -- a simple method to track what you eat with how you feel and how your body functions through the lens of your Human Design that includes your unique digestion style and your emotional patterns.

It teaches you how to track to collect data so that you can connect the dots and correlate to decode your cues instead of bypassing or judging them. Because clarity doesn't come from control, it comes from connection.

So, my friend, you don't need to ditch every coach or every expert on social media or even any plan, you just need to stop handing them the steering wheel. You get to lead; you’re in the driver's seat now, and the tools that you use should help you come back to yourself, not take you further away.

And you can start by enrolling in “Food, Mood, Design: Decode Your Body’s Signals.” so you can start rebuilding trust with your body, with your digestion, with your energy and the cues that it sends you. Now, if you're unfamiliar with your Human Design Strategy and Authority, or you want a deeper understanding of them, you can listen to my past podcast episodes on those topics.

I also have a guide called, “Designed to Thrive: The Gentle Guide to Human Design” that explains Strategy and Authority in addition to other fundamental parts of Human Design.

And by the time this episode drops, I should have a new Instagram series or two a couple of new series on Human Design Strategies and Authorities, so you’ll want to be sure to check those out too.

And if you have a friend who's also tired of outsourcing their wellness share this episode to them too.

Before I close, a scheduling update -- I have an episode coming to you next week, then I’m going to take about four weeks off for, I’d like to say for a summer break, but there’s two other projects I’m starting because I can’t help myself.

But I promise that next week’s episode is a fun one – it’s with a guest who I LOVE learning from, and I can’t wait to share it with you!

Before I love you and leave you, I’d love for you to take away from this episode an awareness and observations of the ways that you might perhaps be outsourcing your wellness, and then how you can take it back and put yourself in your driver's seat again.

On that note, I’ll close here and thank you so much for your time, your energy and attention, and I’ll see you right back here again next time. Bye for now!