Navigating Food and Body Image: Real Stories of Holiday Joy and Self-Compassion with Heather Carey

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the emotional complexities surrounding food during the holiday season? Join host Heather Carey in this heartfelt episode of Real Food Stories, where she dives deep into navigating food during Thanksgiving and the emotional rollercoaster that often accompanies it. As we gather around the table with family, our relationships with food can become tangled in guilt and anxiety. Heather passionately encourages listeners to embrace the holidays without guilt, reminding us that indulgence is not only acceptable but can be a joyful part of our culinary experiences when approached with intention.

Reflecting on her own personal food journeys, Heather shares her experiences of holiday gatherings, especially the unique challenges posed by COVID-19. She discusses the significance of self-compassion in the aftermath of holiday eating, urging listeners to let go of guilt and instead focus on creating a nurturing relationship with food. As the new year approaches, it’s the perfect time to shift our focus from weight loss myths to cultivating healthier habits that enhance our well-being and foster a positive relationship with food.

In this enlightening episode, Heather outlines five essential truths about healthy cooking that will empower you to embrace your kitchen with confidence and navigating food. From finding motivation to start slowly, setting up your kitchen for success, accepting mistakes, and improving through practice, these insights are designed to make cooking a delightful part of your healthy lifestyle choices. Cooking should never feel like a chore; it should be an enjoyable expression of love for yourself and your family.

As a culinary nutritionist, Heather provides practical advice on how to ease into the kitchen, develop your cooking techniques, and transform food into a source of joy rather than stress. She emphasizes the importance of mindful eating practices and understanding food beliefs that shape our choices, especially for women in midlife navigating menopause health. With her expert nutrition advice, Heather provides listeners with the tools they need to overcome food confusion, navigating food and embrace sustainable eating habits that honor their bodies.

Join Heather on this journey of culinary wellness and discover how to celebrate food and culture without compromise. Whether you’re looking to improve your heart health and diet, explore Mediterranean diet insights, or simply want to enjoy family food traditions without the weight of guilt, this episode is packed with inspiration and actionable tips. Tune in and let’s navigate food together, fostering a community of support and understanding for women everywhere. Your relationship with food is about to become a beautiful story of abundance and joy!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back and if you’re just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you and I’m very glad you are here with me. I am your host Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Okay, so I am curious, how was Thanksgiving? Last week, I spoke in length about this holiday and all the holidays coming our way. I told you my story about going all out during this season only to feel so incredibly regretful come January with no solutions except some radical diet or detox that I would ultimately go on and fail at. So how do you feel today? Now, I want to be clear on this. There is nothing wrong with going all out during the holidays. If that was your plan and you did it with intention, it’s just one day after all. The regret and shame comes from putting demands on ourselves that you will not eat the whole day or you… end up overeating and drinking at the meal that night. I hope that you enjoyed yourself. And if you feel that you did overdo it, if you can just tell yourself that it is only a day, give yourself some forgiveness and let it go. It is just one day. My Thanksgiving got a little blown up this year because my husband ended up having COVID. And another one of my kids was sick and didn’t even make it home. And so this in turn canceled out the other 10 people who were supposed to come to my house. I was really actually looking forward to the holiday. My kids are in their 20s. All my nieces and nephews are now in their 20s too. And it was just going to be a fun time. But I’m learning through the age of COVID, there really is no guarantee of anything or any holidays. This is… probably what we need to expect from here on in. But how did you do? Were you able to practice compassion with yourself? Were you mindful of what you ate? Do you feel like you need to get on a quick diet right now because you feel like you blew it? Are you looking at 2023 to change things around? I know that a new year brings a sort of buzz to it, doesn’t it? It’s like a clean slate. But rather than always focusing on our bodies, which many, many of us do, or those punishing before and after pictures you see from diets, could this coming New Year’s possibly have to do with something different? Our failed resolutions and goals don’t always have to do with our weight. I know women are profoundly attached to the number on the scale. That number can make or break an entire day. If the number is down, you’ll have a good day. If the number is up, it can totally kill your mood. All you have to do is start strolling around social media and just start noticing. There’s the before and after pictures of overweight women, and then the picture of themselves in a bikini. I know. I know that you want that too. But I’ve said this before, those before and after pictures are totally meaningless and do not prove a diet’s worth. So let’s get real here. A few pictures proves nothing. You might lose a quick 20 pounds, but how do you feel? Has anyone followed up with those people in those pictures anyway? Is it safe to say that life is short? I know the saying is so cliche, but in the time we have, We all have the right and the freedom to be as happy as possible, even in the struggle of our relationship with our bodies. Being a woman in midlife makes this extra challenging. I know that our hormones feel like they control everything. Sometimes mystery weight gain, our moods, our energy, our libido. Right now, rather than look at what is not working for us and is out of our control, let’s try to focus on what we can. Would finally letting go of the obsession with weight work for you? Who are you proving anything to? Would finally disconnecting your worth in this world to a number feel like freedom? I want you to consider that once we can relax and let go, that you might see changes of acceptance and in turn, changes physically that you weren’t actually expecting. I am here with you. I understand this struggle and it is something that I have to practice daily as well. And right now, keeping the focus on my happiness and joy, which is something I have to stay on top of every day, is truly my priority. I don’t want to look back on my life with regrets, and I guarantee that I will not be at the end of my life thanking myself for keeping the number on the scale in a certain range. So I love the promise of a new year. It’s a chance to dream and think about what. I would like to accomplish for the next 365 days. It fills me with hope. It allows me to get creative with ideas. It doesn’t have to do with how we can lose weight quick and get those holiday pounds off as soon as possible. Rather than focus solely on the scale this year, I want you to consider that when it comes to losing weight, there are a number of habits and behaviors that go into losing weight. And if we can wrap our brains around this and off of those numbers and choose to cultivate a different kind of mindset about how to lose weight, how to think about our bodies and to go into the new year, that will benefit you a great deal. Taking a break from the scale and the numbers can feel like a relief and so freeing. But this is not to dismiss our goals of staying healthy and eating well. So here’s something different to think about. I want you to consider that when it comes to weight, there are lots of other goals or activities that sit around this weight loss goal. There’s much more that goes into weight loss than just following a diet. We need to really educate ourselves on food. how to eat that food, what to eat, and to tune in to what’s a scam versus what is a credible source of information. We need a mindset shift to get ourselves prepared to commit to healthy eating and weight loss. We need to be mindful and pay close attention to what we are eating when you how, and why. We need to cultivate compassion. You might want to start a journaling practice and meditate a little more. Other goal that sits around weight loss is getting to know your kitchen a little bit better and getting comfortable with cooking. Today, I thought we would have a little fun and focus on our kitchens. Now, if cooking and fun do not hold hands with each other in your mind, Do not worry. You need only to sit back and take a listen and maybe get inspired. Because the bottom line is that cooking healthy food is essential to being a healthier person. It’s essential to losing weight and it’s essential just to feeling overall good. I’m going to tell you straight up that I could never have lost weight and kept it off without the help of my kitchen. Never. Believe me, I tried. In the way past, there were diets with shakes and packaged products. But seriously, how long can you survive on that type of food? I guess for as long as you’re on the diet. But you need to learn how to eat real food. And most importantly, you need to know how to prepare real food. I’ve always been interested in cooking. I didn’t have much fear around experimenting. But I know firsthand that cooking can be very tied to our feelings of worth and being good enough, and it can carry a lot of fear. I’ll give you a clear example from my life. After I went to cooking school, I had to face a lot of cooking fears. When you go to cooking school, people have big expectations of you, and it is in my nature to have ridiculously high expectations of myself. I know, I’m working on this part of my 2023 goals. I cooked in restaurants, I cooked for caterers, and then I cooked privately for very wealthy families in Manhattan, and then in my own business teaching live cooking classes to groups. Now I teach classes online with groups as small as one person, all the way up to 600 people. When you cook for other people, you have a spotlight directly on you. Your worth revolves around the success of your food. That was a lot of fear for me and still to some extent is. So I know firsthand how it feels to face some fears around cooking. Not to mention the fear of just letting your people down. When you are in a family, as I assume many of you are, the fear of not knowing how to cook or cook well And disappointing those people you’re cooking for can feel monumental. I hear this from my clients all the time. And that is how I realized the block that people can have around getting into their kitchens. Not living up to the expectation women put on themselves to be perfect mothers, spouses, daughters, and friends can feel crippling sometimes. We’re not born with a kitchen knife in our hands. And if you were not taught by your mom or your grandma or another family member how to cook, then how do you know how to cook? I had a couple of good cooks in my family, but the reality is that it takes baby steps and it takes a lot of practice. It means being okay making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. Most important, it means tuning out the criticism. Your goal is to cook healthy food for you first. If your family likes it and benefits, that’s all the better, but you’re going to try and you’re going to do your best. I’m not going to lie. Cooking can feel like a total drag sometimes. There have been many, many times when I have felt way too tired to cook and when it feels way too easy to order in, or it doesn’t even feel worth it. Like this past Thanksgiving when I was cooking a turkey all by myself. and making side dishes because there was only two of my three kids at home, but I had to make sure as a mom that they had a proper Thanksgiving. It felt just tiring and my heart wasn’t really into it, but I did it anyway. So I wanted to bring up five truths about healthy cooking and your kitchen so you can ease in to cooking this year and actually find some joy in it. Truth number one about healthy cooking in your kitchen. Find your motivation. Think about it. Why do you want to cook? Now I’m going to assume for the purposes of this podcast, it’s because you’ve heard through the grapevine that healthier cooking can help you actually lose weight, or it’s because it’s good for other health conditions. Both are great reasons. I’ve talked before. many times about the importance of lifestyle diseases, such as high cholesterol, heart disease, and diabetes, and their relationship to what you eat. People who have good control over their weight typically just eat healthy foods without the diet or the restrictions. I remind myself of these things all the time, especially when I don’t feel like cooking. I’m doing this not to be a better mom. or to prove my self-worth, but to be a better me. Food is like my medicine in this instance, and it motivates me to prepare my own food almost every single day. Truth number two about healthy cooking and your kitchen. Think about starting very slowly. Cooking is akin to learning how to ski or ride a bike as an adult. You can imagine how awkward that can be. If you put on skis and went down the black diamond slopes, you would be terrified, I imagine. I mean, I know I would. You would want to start out on the bunny hill or the green slopes, right? We don’t want to go from A to Z. We want to go from A to B. I’m going to give you a little exercise that you can do right now. Grab a piece of paper and a pen, and I’m going to have you write down three lists. On the first list, write down what you are good at cooking. Everyone has at least one signature dish, and it can be as simple as, I make a great piece of toast with butter and honey. Just write that down. Whatever it is that you can make, usually without a recipe, that always comes out pretty well. Maybe it’s a pasta with shrimp and sauce from a jar. Maybe it’s your mom’s chicken curry. That’s fine. But I bet you know how to make the pasta or the toast and toast it well. Just write all of this down. On the second list, I want you to write down the foods that you are curious about. Maybe you’ve never eaten them. Maybe you’ve never cooked them. But what foods have you tried in restaurants or that you heard about that are really good for you to eat? Or maybe you’ve had them at a friend’s house and they wowed you with some kind of great Mexican dish. What dishes are you craving right now? Go past the thoughts of, oh, I love Indian food, but I could never make that at home. You very well might realize that many dishes are easier than you think. It can certainly be made right in your own kitchen. For now though, just write them down. And then I want you to make a third list. These are the foods that you know in your heart that you will just never make. If you do not like Mexican food, totally fine. Put that on the list and let it go. Maybe it’s tofu. If you just can’t even think about eating that, write that down. No big deal. Now consider though, if you say you don’t like it because it feels too confusing to make, maybe the spices and strange ingredients don’t add up for you, or is it just that you really do not like it? Either way, put it on the no list for right now. We can always revisit and revise this list later. The point is that we don’t have to focus on everything right now, just the foods and dishes we know, like, and trust and are curious about. Truth number three about healthy cooking and your kitchen. You need to get your kitchen set up. You cannot cook without the proper equipment and pantry items. I mean, you can. You can certainly do that, but you will struggle. But why struggle? Let’s make this easy and simplified. Look at cooking as a long-term investment with huge returns. What I’m saying here is don’t wimp out on pots and pans and go cheap on the stuff. The things that you use frequently, like a chef’s knife, for example, are well worth the price. Consider that good quality pans, like all clad, have a lifetime guarantee to them, so they don’t ever wear out. My kitchen knife. for example, from Wusthof is a knife I’ve had since cooking school. And that was many, many moons ago. And it is still chopping and cutting just like a brand new knife. You don’t need a ton of equipment either, nor do you need the latest gadgets like an Instapot or a rice cooker, unless those items feel indispensable to you and you use those frequently. Now the same goes for your pantry. You don’t need weird, obscure spices like large jars of nutmeg, or just any spice that you’ve never even heard of before. But you do need a couple of basics. You need salt and pepper. You need olive oil. You need balsamic vinegar, dried thyme, chili powder, any spices or herbs that you will use frequently. These can all make cooking easier for you. Today, I’m going to give you my essential kitchen and pantry guide setup. full of useful information on everything I’m talking about today, how to clean up your kitchen, what to lose, what to add back in, all the things that make simple, easy cooking streamlined and help your kitchen just run smoothly. There’s a link in my show notes, so please definitely download that guide right now. Truth number four about healthy cooking in your kitchen. Know that you will definitely make some mistakes. I’m sorry to break it to you, but you are not perfect. I’m not perfect. We are human and people make mistakes all the time, especially in the kitchen. There is so much that goes into cooking, which is why we make mistakes. And that is totally okay. I have made many mistakes as a private chef. and as a cooking instructor. And I have learned the art of winging it and improvising. So to try and avoid mistakes, here’s what you are not going to do at your healthy cooking debut. You are not going to start out by making a recipe that you’ve never even heard of with ingredients that you have never even used and throw a dinner party, right? We are going to practice our recipes. Maybe first with our family and then practice it in friends coming over for dinner. Now here’s what you are going to do. First step, look around on the internet. Use your friend Google and look back at that list of foods you know how to make. If pasta is doable for you, Google healthy and easy pasta recipes. You want to cook with chicken breasts but only know how to throw it on the grill? Google healthy stir fry with chicken. Healthy easy chicken bowls. Get specific with your ingredient and add in the words healthy and easy. Also, you might want to add in the technique like stir fry. Now you have dozens of recipes to look at. Do any of them stand out? Give one a try. Try it out for yourself first and then try it out with friends. And by the way, not every recipe you see on the internet is a winner. There are millions of recipes and there is… thousands of pretty bad recipes out there. I catch mistakes all the time when I read recipes, which is easy for me. It might not be as easy for you if you’re just not that seasoned at cooking. So another pro tip, gravitate towards cookbook authors or websites that you know, like, and trust. I have tons of recipes on my own website. I will link that in the show notes. The point is, Don’t look to total strangers for your inspiration right away. Know who you’re cooking with. And finally, truth number five about healthy cooking in your kitchen. The more you cook, the better it will taste and the more you will look forward to it. Now, people ask me all the time what my favorite restaurants are. And I usually say my house because I… know how to cook and I know how to use spices and herbs and other ingredients to make my food taste good, it sometimes doesn’t feel worth it to go spend the money out at a restaurant when I know I can make it myself. You have to know how to use herbs and spices, balance your flavors, throw a spritz of lemon juice or vinegar to brighten up a soup and other of those secrets to making food taste great. Now listen, healthy food is simple. It’s single ingredients. right, like brown rice, onions, garlic, celery, they don’t taste delicious really on their own without some help. It’s frustrating to guess at cooking or just wing it without knowing what you’re doing. Trial and error doesn’t hurt either. Making mistakes is part of cooking, but also getting some help with cooking can do the trick too. The best way to learn how to cook and turn our simple healthy food into something that’s flavorful and delicious and that you want to keep coming back for is to really learn from someone else. Now, I’ve mentioned a lot of times I teach healthy cooking classes online. And if this is something that’s interesting to you and you want to find out more, I will also link in the show notes my… email and contact information. Okay, so to review, there are so many other things we can focus on when it comes to our 2023 goals and the new year. And the one I talked about today was getting back into your kitchens and realizing that to lose weight, to feel great, to feel healthy, knowing how to cook and use your kitchen is an essential skill. Now, We have five truths that I talked about today when it comes to healthy cooking in your kitchen. Number one is to find your motivation and why you want to be cooking. Truth number two is to start out very slowly, as in baby steps. Truth number three is the importance of getting your kitchen and pantry set up so cooking can become streamlined and easy and simple. Truth number four, when it comes to healthy cooking in our kitchens, is know that you will definitely make some mistakes, that we are not perfect when it comes to cooking. There’s a lot that goes into it and a lot that we need to learn. And finally, truth number five is the more you do something, the more you will get better at it. It’s practice, Same goes with healthy cooking and getting our kitchen set up. On that note, I want to thank you so much for being here today and listening. And if you have any thoughts on today’s episode, please do not hesitate to leave a comment. And if you loved this podcast, please leave a review. It helps me to get the word out. Have a great day, everybody, and bye for now. And before I sign off, I want to tell you very quickly about my upcoming guided holiday helper, Pound Zero, which is a two-week… hand-holding guide to help you navigate through the rest of the holidays with total ease. We start next week in December, and I want to make sure that you find the link in the show notes. You don’t want to miss this. And best of all, it is entirely free. It’s my gift to you for the holidays.