How to get your sparkle back ✨
including a full recap on my 5-day fasting cleanse after two weeks across too many different time zones
Hi, friends!
I’m bursting with gratitude to be settled back into my writing perch—that is, my fifth-floor West Village walkup. The city and specifically my neighborhood, has been absolutely buzzing against the backdrop of this weekend’s dreamy weather. If you missed my Local’s Guide to West Village, it feels like as good a time as any to bring it back as she’s peaking in all her (early) summer glory!
Last Sunday, I sent the letter from my hotel room in Perth as we were headed to the airport for our 34-hour journey back to New York. Since then, I managed to get my stuffed-to-the-brim suitcase, an extremely overweight duffle (a 2008 Celine I scored at No Standing NYC earlier this year!), and the inevitable overflow bag that always accumulates by the end of a trip alllllll 10,000+ miles back to home base…including the hardest leg of all: the trip up my five flights of stairs.
Amidst this journey back, we actually left the airport during our six-hour layover in Singapore for a meeting to make the most of our time back in the city, albeit briefly. We were lucky enough to have a day room at Capella Singapore on Sentosa Island for a quick shower and breakfast, and I fell in love with the property so much during that short stint that I’m eager to get back to Singapore to stay properly.
On the note of being here, there, and everywhere: it’s the greatest gift in the world to get to travel the way I do, but it doesn’t come without a cost. I write frequently about my relationship to my body, health, and fitness here, so it should come as no surprise that, naturally, I’m going to share that another stint away has completely thrown off my routine. And if you know me, you know that my routine is everything—it’s the scaffolding that makes me feel like myself.
So, I took extreme measures upon my return and spent the last five days doing Prolon. If you haven’t heard of it, Prolon is a five-day fasting mimicking diet—meaning your body thinks it’s fasting, but you’re actually “eating.” You eat—soups, olives, nut bars, herbal teas—just not very much, and nothing outside the provided kit. The program was developed by longevity researcher Dr. Valter Longo at USC, and the science behind it is genuinely fascinating: by keeping your calories and macros within a specific range, your body enters a fasting state and triggers cellular renewal (autophagy, for the STEM girlies!!!) without you actually having to white-knuckle your way through five days of nothing but water and willpower. I’m going to delve further into my experience and why it feels so resonant for me to reset more below the paywall…where I keep all of my body image/weight-related musings!
But now onto the focus of today’s letter: getting your sparkle back.
There’s a specific kind of dullness that sets in when you’ve been quiet for too long. Not a dramatic burnout—more like a slow dimming. In my case, my relationship to how I’m showing up online takes up more of my brain space than I’d like to admit. The longer I wait to post, to write, to reach out, to show up—the more the return starts to feel like a statement. As if when I finally do post something (specifically on Instagram), I feel the pressure that it has to be perfectly curated, or even worse, profound. And so then I wait a little longer. And then longer still. And somewhere in that waiting, I feel like I lose a little of my shine.
In practical application, it looks like this: I have weeks of Japan, Korea, and Australia content sitting in my camera roll—cherry blossoms, bullet trains, some of the most extraordinary food of my life, a ryokan stay that will forever be imprinted on my brain, diving with whalesharks in the Ningaloo Reef, a hike to a waterfall and swimming hole I’ll never forget—and I’ve posted about it all collectively maybe…twice? Not because it wasn’t worth sharing. But because at some point, the gap between what I experienced and how to bring it to life starts to feel too wide to bridge. So I just…don’t. And the longer I don’t, the harder it feels to start.
But here’s the thing about your sparkle: it doesn’t actually go anywhere. It just gets buried under the weight of waiting—for the right moment, the right circumstances, the right version of yourself to show up. We tell ourselves we’ll start when things settle down, when we feel more ready, when the timing is better. But the timing is never better. The right moment is a myth. The sparkle is already there. You just have to decide to unleash it!!!
So that’s what I’m doing. This summer, I’m committing to showing up—here on Substack including Notes, on Instagram (@curatedbykayla), on Threads—with more intention and less perfectionism. I’m going to share Japan. And Korea. And Western Australia. And that Tasmanian coastline that genuinely made me want to extend our trip back in December and skip Christmas at home altogether. Not because I owe anyone anything, but because I love this community and I’ve been depriving myself of the joy of sharing these experiences with you. That joy? That’s part of my sparkle. And I want it back!
I want to challenge you to do the same. Whatever your version of getting your sparkle back looks like right now—the creative project you’ve been circling, the friendship you’ve been meaning to tend to, the habit you keep saying you’ll restart on Monday—consider this your permission slip. You don’t need a fresh start date. You don’t need a dramatic declaration. You just need to decide.
If you’re not sure where to start, here’s how I’m approaching getting my sparkle back…
Stop waiting to feel like yourself again before you act like yourself. The feeling follows the action—not the other way around. Don’t wait until you’re sparkly to do the sparkly things. You do the sparkly things (even if it’s just wearing your brightest lipstick to take yourself for a walk while playing the album you loved in high school), and the feeling catches up to your actions.
Name the thing you’ve been avoiding. And be honest with yourself about it—not mean, just specific. “I haven’t been able to motivate myself to go to the gym in three weeks” is more useful than “I’m so f*cking lazy.”
Start smaller than feels significant. One walk. One phone call (the one you’ve been putting off). One homecooked, healthy meal. There is no sense in waiting to do it perfectly when you can start small.
Romanticize the re-entry. New flowers for your apartment. A fresh hardcover from the local bookstore. Your favorite order from your favorite café. Make coming back to yourself feel like something worth celebrating, not a chore.
Tell someone. Accountability doesn’t have to be formal—it just has to be real. I’m grateful that this community means I have thousands of accountability partners!! Now decide, who are you going to tell: “By the way, I’m soooooo back” and be have them hold you to it? Perhaps even be your fellow sparkle partner in crime!
Give yourself a one-week window, not the expectation to write a whole new chapter. A lofty declarationn that, “I’m going to completely overhaul my life this summer” is how even the best intentions die. “I’m going to get outside every day this week” is how small wins happen.
Wear the thing. You know the one—the dress that feels a little frivolous for a regular Wednesday, the earrings that are maybe “too much” for just running errands, the perfume you’ve been saving for a special occasion. Here’s the secret: getting dressed with intention is one of the fastest ways to feel like yourself again. The occasion is TODAY.
Do ONE thing today that future you will thank you for. Not a list. Not a plan to turn around your entire life. Just one thing: Book the appointment. Send the text. Lace up the shoes.
Remember that your baseline is higher than you think. Weeks of travel or just the generally gorgeous chaos that comes with surviving on this planet can’t undo everything. You’re not starting from zero! Trust the foundation you’ve built brick by brick.
And now for the other focal point of my week: my five-day Prolon reset. As described above, it’s a fasting mimicking program. While I’d be lying if I said part of it wasn’t motivated by the scale, equally, I was chasing the feeling of wringing my gut out like a sponge. Prolon is the most literal version of getting your sparkle back from the inside out—which is exactly why it felt right to share it here, today, in this letter.
More on my actual experience—the hunger levels, the energy dips, and what I thought of the provided food—below the paywall, where I keep all my body-related musings, especially when talking about a topic as sensitive as weight!!!!
I’ll be honest: I went into Prolon fully expecting to slog through it. I anticipated brain fog, zero energy, and a general sense of misery that would make five days feel like five weeks. But to my great surprise, quite the opposite happened.
