If you’ve ever eaten to quiet your mind, numb a feeling, or prove you’re “fine,” this conversation goes straight to the root. I’m Sylvia Worsham, and I’m joined by Isabel Chiara, author of Nourish, to talk about what happens when food becomes comfort, protection, and a stand-in for the safety we didn’t feel growing up. Isabel shares her story from a rigid immigrant household and the way disconnection from the body can turn into emotional eating, shame, and a constant search for relief.
We zoom out from dieting advice and into the real drivers: subconscious belief systems, worthiness wounds, and the “not enough” story that many high achievers carry. We dig into boundaries, the power of self-talk, and why your mind tends to believe the words you repeat most often. Isabel explains her “nourish beyond food” approach, where nourishment includes acceptance, love, supportive relationships, and the daily choices that help you feel whole, not just full.
You’ll also hear practical ideas Isabel uses in her Nourish App, plus my own reflections on surrender, faith, and finding joy in the journey when life feels like a wilderness.
If you care about holistic wellness, mindset, spiritual growth, and living your purpose with more peace, this one will meet you where you are and call you forward.
Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs encouragement, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
If you wish to connect, or download Isabel Chiara’s app or purchase her books, please visit her website at isabel-chiara.com
To download a free chapter of host Sylvia Worsham’s bestselling book, In Faith, I Thrive: Finding Joy Through God’s Masterplan, purchase any of her products, or book a call with her, visit her website at www.sylviaworsham.com
Transcript:
If you’ve ever struggled with fear, doubt, or worry, and wondering what your true purpose was all about, then this podcast is for you. In this show, your host, Sylvia Warsham, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, Sylvia Warsham.
I’ve still got a lot of fire left.
Hey, live bringers, it’s Sylvia Worsham. Welcome to Release Out Reveal Purpose. And today is Isabel Chiara. She is the author of the new book Nourish. And she is here to talk about something beyond food. We know that food nourishes us emotionally, spiritually, mentally. In moments of change, it is an opportunity for us to shift the way we see things. And it sounds like Isabel has an amazing story of transformation to share with us. So without further ado, Isabel, thank you so much for joining us on Released Out Reveal Purpose.
Thank you. Thanks, Sylvia. I think that I lead a life of transformation, constant transformation. So uh I did grew up in a family business and it was in the restaurant business. So we it was a very hectic type kind of a lifestyle. My parents were immigrants, they’re from Italy, and so the communication was very do things this way, one way, very rigid, very strict. And I am the type of person that’s kind of thinks out of the box, but I always thought there was something wrong with that because of the reaction I would get from my family first, and then probably out in the real world. What happens kind of in the family, you kind of duplicate it when you get out in the real world. Early age, I started defining myself. I had to figure out ways to kind of support myself, to make myself feel okay. One of the things that I actually did was like really get out come out of my body. So that’s an interesting little concept in itself because I spent most of my life being out of my body because I thought that was the way for me. I found a spiritual path along the way. And I thought like being really spiritual was me not being connected to my body, which turned out not to be the best thing for me. And one of the ways to soothe myself was to emotionally choose food to comfort me and allow me to be my own. I was able to basically be able to handle anything because I could always go to food. And that was my parent and my guardian and my nourishment, right, at the time. And so now that I look back on it, so many years later, it put me on a real path. The fact that somebody ate emotionally or somebody needed food to support them. I think that that was probably one of the most constructive things that I could have probably done for myself at an earlier age when I realized I don’t want to think about whatever somebody just said to me. I don’t want to think about how they’re speaking to me. I don’t want to think about any of that. I feel shitty or I feel really, really bad. And I need to feel comfortable and comforted. So that was my go-to. And I thought, wow, I’m stronger. You know, I had those kind of feelings. Like every time I could be more of myself by because I didn’t experience or I didn’t even look at any of the emotions that were being created for myself. I’m talking about like negative more negative emotion. I started gaining weight. So food wasn’t really a choice. And the fact that I was leaving my body, I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing. I just was doing it automatically. And I thought I at that point, I thought, oh, so I could tolerate anything in life. Another thing that happens at that point too is your boundaries are so misconstrued. I would avoid so many things and situations, especially with my parents, other people. I didn’t even know what they were, to tell you the truth. Now that’s one of the most important things that I get to speak. If somebody says something or if something doesn’t feel right to me, I get to tell another person that for myself. I never even knew I had that permission to do that or say anything with anybody else. So anyway, I went down the road of other paths for myself. I went down the healer path where I started studying a lot of healing modalities, Reiki and many other healing modalities. I think I have exhausted all of them. And also all along, and I thought those were going to be my solutions to my eating uncontrollably. And I felt like that kind of took me more away from my body also. Um, but I have to say that it was a good avenue for me because it’s a more of an accepting environment and an accepting community. I did have that other level of acceptance for myself. I think that’s the thing when we lose ourselves when we’re younger, uh, we’re losing ourselves to everybody else around us, especially if our boundaries are misconstrued. Essentially, I was on a search my whole life for an answer. And so I wrote a first book called Eat Your Words. It’s a story of a woman who has a similar life as mine and all her antidotes and how she kept choosing, you know, food. She went down the food path. So it’s funny and it’s anecdotal, but there wasn’t a solution. And I didn’t want to speak about any of this with anybody because I felt actually humiliation and shame around the fact that I was choosing food to help myself feel better. And it felt kind of addictive to me too. I didn’t quit this path. It’s really important. My whole goal was to really feel whole in my life. And so after I wrote this first book and I wouldn’t speak about it, I came up with this concept of nourish. Uh, and it’s nourish beyond food and it feeds the path of personal power and joy. Because that’s really the path that I was on my whole life. I just didn’t call it that because I was trying to find an antidote for something. So for me, um, if you’re on this nourish path, you are always in a point of self-acceptance for yourself because you’re feeding yourself everything else in your life, and you’re not feeding yourself just food. I mean, that’s part of it. It’s a little part of it. So I never, I don’t even look at my life anymore as in terms of food. I look at my life in terms of a wholeness, and I’m on this path of nourish where I own and accept the things that I do and the way that I am in a whole nother way that feels so loving and accepting to myself. And who can argue with something like that? Like who doesn’t want to be happy within themselves and feel satiated with themselves? All of the things that we attribute to food, all of those emotions. And we allow ourselves to everything I do now, that’s as nourishing to me. I own it, right? And I use this concept and I use this word, it fills us up with a sense of just we’re so full. We’re full of ourselves. We end up resonating with so many other people around us in another way that there’s such a deep connection with other people around us because we have a deeper connection with ourselves because we are feeling nourished within ourselves. And it’s amazing, an amazing turn that my life has taken. And people see it and people know it when they are around you.
They do. They’ll they’ll feel it when you’ve started to shift from the person they knew you to be when you were young. Right. I found that to be true and relatable in my own life, but I did want to unpack what you just discussed because I think you hit on a couple of topics that I think we need to expand a
little further on. One of the ones that you discussed, you came from immigrant parents. We come from that environment, and I can speak to it with a lot of authority because both my parents came from Mexico. And when they came to this country, it’s the idea of success and the idea of achieving, and the idea of if you don’t reach a certain threshold, you’re just not enough. Because that’s the mentality they carry. And unfortunately, as a certified life coach, I can speak with some authority here. We know that the subconscious mind is going to number one have no filter. And so those messages get brought in deeply within us and they form belief systems around our worthiness. Right. And we attach them to patterns of behaving. In your case, they manifested with food. You were, in essence, avoiding pain through food. And we all have our ways of avoiding pain and avoiding looking inward and understanding where these belief systems are coming from and actually releasing them. Because what you’re talking about is when you nourish yourself, when you get to know yourself and you get to accept yourself, and you go through that journey of releasing those fears, gaining I my first mastermind is called freedom from fear. And there’s a reason for that because you’re you’re gaining freedom from the belief systems that are not you. This is not the person God created you to be. Right. What created, what created that person were the layers of the modeling you received, of the experiences you had, good, bad, ugly, they’re all mixed in because the mind doesn’t put them in compartments, it just box them together. And then how we react to those thoughts is what forms the habits with us, the habits lead to the results that we’re living. So our mind is always giving us information. And I love the topic of your book of self-acceptance, self-love, because from that space is where we can actually authentically step into the wholeness that our soul is calling us to. Right. Right. Because there’s an alignment piece between the mind, the body, and the soul.
And that wholeness that you’re talking about is like you, I think we’re driven because we are trying to uncover who we really are the whole time, right? So we knew that what they were telling us wasn’t like real. They were raising us. We’re trying to always uncome out. I always felt like we’re always coming out from underneath, whatever that story is. It’s not how I really am. This is not the real me. I’m waiting for the real me to show up. But we have all of these limitations and patterns that we follow all the time. And we’re questioning with ourselves.
I agree with you. The wholeness piece, I explained it a little bit in my book, In Faith, I Thrive, Finding Joy Through God’s Master Plan. It follows a certain growth journey. In my case, I needed to gain freedom from those fear-based belief systems first. I needed to understand what was at the root cause of the thoughts that would dominate my mind. I was ruminating on these thoughts, promote feelings, and then feelings is what our mind uses to either react or act. And then from that space is where patterns form. And I found, and I don’t know about you, because my father was such a high achiever, I just achieved my way through life. And it felt empty as heck. And I’m sure there came a point for you that you said enough. What was that point for you?
I also had a high achiever, mother and father, duo team. Everything I did, I would discount it and say, no big deal. And so I realized that I needed to start changing. I think that first the first way to shift is to start by changing the words that we were saying to ourselves. I didn’t do enough. I’m speeding more of my work up and of things I was trying, things I was learning, so I could feel more than enough. If you have the belief of you’re not enough on those on the bottom level, on the ground level, you are never gonna feel good enough for anything. It doesn’t matter because you’re it’s kind of like you created this big box of oh, I’m not, you know, I’m not good enough. So that no matter you throw everything in it and it’s still gonna pop out like not good enough. It doesn’t matter how much you stuff it. We just have to be conscious of what the words are.
Absolutely. No, and actually scripture backs you up.
Yeah.
In fact, this morning it was really interesting when you were speaking the power of the word. This is what the verse of the day was. The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruits. Speaking of food and right and eating. I find that so interesting because that is important for us to remember is how are we speaking to ourselves? What are we saying? Our mind has no filter, it takes it as truth.
Right.
Yeah, subconscious mind is always listening. That’s why it’s important for us to surround ourselves with good food, according to your your book, right?
You can look at everything that you’re entering into your body as a matter of fact, in the back of the book, I call it the vitamin chart, but it’s not really vitamins, it’s really all the good things that you could give yourself, like acceptance, love. It’s nourishing yourself with all of these goodies for yourself. Yes. And it’s basically good stories, good emotions, great, you know, kind of supportive, cheerleading stuff. I was cheerleading for everybody else, which I’m sure you do too. You can see their potential, but we’re not cheerleading for ourselves. So we have we get to be our own cheerleader. Cheerleader, of course.
Because here’s the thing that most people forget, Isabel, and I want to reiterate it on the podcast. We can’t love others fully until we love ourselves first. And scripture backs that up too. God’s two commandments is love me first, and then love others as you love yourselves. So the loving ourselves comes first before we can fully love someone else. And we need people. We’re not meant to do this alone. We’re never alone because he’s always with us. But but we also need flesh and blood. Have around us when the dark chapters come, when our mind wants to bring us back to the old ways of behaving.
Any tips from your book that you want to share to push past that mind’s deception?
Well, the first thing is really align yourself with the fact that you’re on a nourish path and accept wherever you’re at. Even I like to go back to all of these beliefs that I created. I actually created an app. It’s called the Nourish App. And your clients can go on it and listen to it for free for a few weeks. And it brings you through a lot of times when we formed the beliefs with ourselves in our life, where we decided that this is where we’re at in our life. You know, one’s called the relationship healing pyramid, one’s um eating at the dinner table and neutralizing food. And it looks at when we created these beliefs that created the behaviors. So we first created the beliefs and then we created these behaviors that were driven to us. So just the fact that we’re owning wherever we’re at, and we get to choose the words that are loving to ourselves. So if we start to notice that first, is my first with anybody, right? Because we see we kind of know what our potential is, but then we kind of are sitting in the situation thinking we’re not there, right? But we are because whatever we have is already inside of us. We’re just exposing it. If you had a baby, we would be sweet to the baby. You know what I mean? So it’s just we have we get to talk to ourselves like that. And what happens is that starts to shift. And we start to think like that about ourselves too. And as we think about ourselves, we become this beautiful flower that’s blooming all the time. And that path moves so much quicker than the path of us limiting ourselves and verbatim ourselves and criticizing ourselves. The path to nourishment is so unfolding. You’ve described it beautifully.
We bloom when we turn inward for our answers. We bloom when we turn reflective of what makes me unique? What am I here to do? What is my divine purpose? Because we all are born with a purpose. That’s why the soul starts speaking to us, and there’s a disalignment that we start to feel. At least I felt it, the life I was leading versus the life something else was pulling at me. But there came a moment that highlighted the two. What was that moment for you?
When I wrote the book and realized that I didn’t settle anything with myself still. I can’t continue on. What am I gonna if I’m gonna write another book? It doesn’t matter. I need to feel fulfilled inside. And what happens is also that we start to become like more intuitive, more connected with like the world around us, and our faces like lights up and we’re just happy. And you know, it’s the things that don’t look good in life. We never know why they are occurring at this point in our life. It could be the thing that we’re going through that’s gonna bring us to a greater sense of our life, you know, and it could bring us on our path in a different way, and I just think nothing’s finite, right?
Even we aren’t.
There’s no journey to, and I think that’s the biggest thing.
Oh, that’s interesting.
You’re right. That’s the the trap we all fall into. That’s the trap that the enemy wants us to fall into. And I speak to it with a lot of understanding because I fell trapped to it multiple times, and the Lord very gently and very lovingly reminded me, Sylvia, there is no journey to. You always have joy in the journey. It doesn’t matter what you’re facing, you always have joy in the journey. There’s gifts I give you every day, but you’re missing them because you’re too distracted. He keeps you distracted. Right. And remember that our minds have a negative uh bias. So we’re constantly focused on what’s going wrong on our life. What we need to work on and be consistent and conscious of is to look for the good of what’s happening in our life, even in dark chapters. Because right now I’m in the midst of a wilderness and it’s heartbreaking at times. And there have been times I can’t even catch my breath. And then the Lord comes in and says, Look outside, look at the birds, look at look at the sun, look at look right in front of you, look at the gifts I’ve already given you. Quit focusing on what you don’t have. That’s the world’s view. That’s not you, that’s not why you’re here. Right. You’re here to fulfill your mission on earth. That’s what and keep your eyes on me, keep your keep focused on your mission, keep going. Even when the world tells you you’re a failure, you’re this, you’re that, because you’re operating under a different lens. You know, people are sure. Yeah, more and more and more. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve I’m turning 52 in a week. And I’ve gotten to a point in my life, I’m just like, enough. I’m done. You’re doing good.
You’re at 52, you’re doing good.
I’m like, I’m not that I’m content because I always strive to be the best version of myself because that’s what I owe the Lord after He gave me
a second chance. My turning point came when six doctors walked in my hospital room. And that is not something that I wish on anybody. Because in those years, I was someone that and and still struggle with this because this is a constant struggle of wanting to control my circumstances. And there was no control in this circumstance. The choices were surrender to God or die, one or the other. Which would you like? You know, and because the doctors in the room weren’t confident I was going to survive the night. I do think your book is going to help a ton of people understand that self-acceptance and self-love is really key because it’s from that space that you can authentically surrender to those promptings of your heart to step into the role you were meant to step into along.
I also consider the whole concept of big a movement, you know, because if we all move in that direction, how many more, how many people will be happier and resonate and more self-acceptance of themselves in life? You know, if people start to think like this. No, it’s a way of thinking.
It’s important for them to think. And I think you said it best, and I want to leave that as your word of encouragement for the listeners who release that reveal
purpose. If we wanted to purchase your book or any of the products and things that you offer, where do we find you, Isabel?
Well, you my my books are on Amazon, and it’s I’ll just hold it up again. It’s Nourish by Isabel Kiara, C-H I A R A. And Isabel has one let one L. And also uh my website’s Isabel-Kiara.com. And um, there’s a lot of interviews on there. All my books are on it, and my app, my app’s on Apple. It’s a very healing for people.
Um, I have to I’m gonna look forward to taking a look at it myself and purchasing your book to support you because as a fellow author, we need to support each other.
I had no idea that uh I look forward to reading your book too.
And I appreciate your support and I appreciate you being a guest on Released Out Reveal Purpose. And for the listeners, uh, remember Matthew 5.14 to always be the light. Be the light like Isabel’s been the light and step into your purpose unapologetically. You were created to be a light in this world, to guide others in the unique gifts that the Lord has given you from the moment you were born. You were fearfully and wonderfully made. And you carry code and authority within you that when you stop and pause and reflect and look inward, instead of getting distracted with what the world tells you to be distracted with, once you step into that with so much power and authority, you are going to be in full alignment to that amazing light that you carry within you. Have a wonderful week.
Bye.
Thank you, thank you so much, and bless you for the things you do too.
Love y’all. Bye now.
Bye bye.
So that’s it for today’s episode of Release Doubt Reveal Purpose. Head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on iTunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a twenty-five thousand dollar private VIP day with Sylvia Worsham herself. Be sure to head on over to sylviaworsham.com and pick up a free copy of Sylvia’s gift and join us on the next episode.