Thanksgiving morning in Tulsa. You are up before the house, the oven is on, and you are counting chairs.
Here is what you are not counting. While you slept, your body repaired itself. While you drive carpool, it digests, balances your blood sugar and makes hormones you never think about. Your heart beat about 100,000 times yesterday. You took roughly 20,000 breaths. You worked, thought, ate and moved through a whole day, and none of it happened by itself.
Nobody thanked it. It happened anyway.
We make gratitude lists every November. The kids. Our people. This house. We almost never put our own body on that list, and it is the only thing on it that never took a day off.
I work in functional nutrition, which sounds complicated but means one thing: nothing in the body works alone. Digestion is not separate from your mood. Sleep is not separate from your cravings. Stress is not separate from your waistline. When a woman comes to me tired, bloated and frustrated, I look at the whole picture, because the body is one system, talking to itself all day long.
Most of us treat that system like a problem to fix. I ate too much at dinner, so I will run it off tomorrow. Care becomes the sentence handed down after the crime.
But eating too much often starts in the same place. Spend all day ignoring your body and you stop hearing what it needs.
So change the question. What does my body need today? How much will satisfy me? What is right for me, not the woman next to me?
That is the control you have been chasing. It was never willpower. It was listening.
You get to feed this body well because you deserve to feel good in it. You get to move it because you can, and because strong and capable feel better than sore and punished.
You get to rest because this is the only home you will ever live in.
None of that is a diet. It is a thank you note.
So what does gratitude look like on a Tuesday? Eat enough. Pay attention to your energy, digestion, mood and sleep. Those are messages, not character flaws. Take care of things before something feels wrong.
When the table goes around this year, add one more thing.
The body that got you here. The one showing up every day, quietly, without ever being asked.
Say thank you. Then feed it well.