Empowering Women’s Health: Overcoming Diet Myths and Embracing Real Food Journeys for Lasting Change

Have you ever felt trapped in the endless cycle of dieting, only to find yourself back at square one? You’re not alone. In this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, host Heather Carey invites Elizabeth Dahl, a certified women’s nutrition coach and behavior change expert, to unravel the complexities of diet myths that have long plagued women. Together, they explore the struggles women face with body image, the societal pressures that shape our food beliefs, and the path to making peace with food.

Elizabeth shares her personal journey, revealing how early experiences with body image, diet myths and societal expectations impacted her relationship with food. Heather and Elizabeth recount their own childhoods, highlighting how comparison and dieting have influenced their lives and choices. They dive deep into the reality that while diets may yield short-term results, they often fail to foster sustainable, long-lasting change. Instead, they advocate for a compassionate approach to nutrition that prioritizes understanding hunger cues and finding balance.

This episode is packed with healthy eating tips that encourage listeners to overcome the cycle of dieting and embrace their personal food journeys. Elizabeth emphasizes that true behavior change comes not from punishing the body but from nurturing it. As they navigate the overwhelming landscape of health advice in the digital age, they stress the importance of curating a positive social media environment that supports a healthy mindset about food and body image.

Listeners will gain valuable insights into women’s health and nutrition, especially during midlife transitions. The conversation touches on menopause health, perimenopause nutrition, and the significance of body positivity as we age. Elizabeth and Heather encourage women to celebrate their efforts and redefine their identities around wellness rather than perfection, breaking free from the grip of weight loss myths and embracing mindful eating practices.

Join us for a heartfelt discussion that empowers women to nourish their bodies and embrace a joyful relationship with food. Say goodbye to diet culture and hello to a new era of healthy lifestyle choices that honor your unique journey. Tune in to discover how to overcome diet myths and cultivate a nourishing approach to health and wellness that lasts a lifetime.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. 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. Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. Today, we are joined by Elizabeth Dahl, a certified women’s nutrition coach and behavior change expert who helps women break free from dieting and create healthy habits that stick. Elizabeth’s mission is to empower women to make peace with food, embrace their bodies, and build sustainable healthy habits that support lifelong wellness. If you’ve ever struggled with you inconsistency or felt stuck in the cycle of dieting, this episode is for you. Hi, Elizabeth. Welcome to the show. I know that when we talked off air, we realized that we had a lot in common with how we work with women and making peace with food is a big one for me. And I have my own personal journey with that, which I have shared endlessly on this podcast. And I know you have your own story with food and body image. as I believe we all do. And I think it’s so helpful to listeners to know that they’re not alone. And so that’s why I wanted you to come on and just share your story and then we’ll just get into a conversation. So why don’t you just jump in and tell me how you got to where you are now?

Speaker #1
Absolutely. So my story begins like probably most women, some point in adolescence where We are taught that our body is different, right? Different than what it’s supposed to be, different than hers, different than the ideal. And mine really started, I have a very specific memory when I was younger, when I would wear this particular pair of shorts. I loved them. They were my favorite shorts. And when you’re young, you know, you find an outfit you love and you just like repeat, repeat, right? And I have a really vivid memory of my grandma. telling my mom that I shouldn’t wear those shorts because my legs were too big for them. And, um, I’m sure it was a mixture of that. And she’d probably seen me wear them several, several times. And like, they were like, they were kind of getting, you know, old and stuff, but, um, that really stuck with me. And it was a body image story that, that started that my legs are different, right? And I equated that with wrong. They’re not good enough. They’re not small enough. They don’t look good enough in these shorts. I mean, they were kind of short. They were short shorts. And interestingly enough, after that, I mean, for as long as back as I can remember after that, I never, I never wore short shorts. And that’s really kind of where it started for me and, and body image and working through that.

Speaker #0
I can so relate to that story. I have, I have very similar stories around, I can remember like the exact like moment where I felt like I turned from little girl into like younger woman who has to start being concerned about their body and their and their weight and and oh people are looking at me and it sounds like you had you loved those shorts and you love wearing them and suddenly someone pointed out to you and someone very influential that no you’re like these are this is not a good look for you. And maybe you should lose a little weight and maybe, right, there was some concern about what you looked like. So I can, yeah, I have many stories like that that I can definitely remember. Tell me what happened after that. I mean, you were a young girl then. And how did it go on from there?

Speaker #1
You know, it kind of started a little cascade of comparison, right? So I started to, I guess that was an entry point for me to compare my body to others. Oh. this must not be right or this must be wrong. And, and as I got a little bit older, um, you know, I was born, I was born in the eighties. And so we, you know, in the nineties, um, tanning was in, in full swing and I have really fair skin and, um, I used to get made fun of for my fair skin. Um, people would tell me, go to the tanning salon, go to the tanning salon. And I go to the tanning salon, I get burned and I’d peel and like, I would never get tanned. And It’s just interesting because it really… It started, honestly, if the one word could sum it up, it just started this lifetime of comparison. Oh, I wasn’t this size, so it wasn’t right. It wasn’t the ideal image, and so it wasn’t right. Then what I would do is go find things that would help me make it right. I never really went terribly extreme with things, but I do have memories of, you know, Even like living at home, trying to fill, I remember specifically like going to the grocery store and filling the bottom drawer of my fridge with vegetables that I was supposed to eat, but never actually did eat. They went bad, you know? And so I would start just like in my mind, trying to do everything, but not really in real life. You know, I think we do, we do that a lot where it’s like, I know I should be doing these things or I shouldn’t be doing these things. And And that’s kind of, it kind of. that kind of was the next step for me was, okay, a constant comparison of what is, what I decided was ideal, right? And I got that from society or from my peers. And I was constantly adjusting that, well, what is ideal? So it was kind of like the next stage in my story.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I can totally relate to that too. Although you are younger than me, But I don’t even think it matters. the decade that, you know, we were raised in, I was inundated with diets. From that point, I was about 11 years old when my father said to me, you might want to lose a couple pounds, you know, and this is like my dad, you know, and then the diets like rolled in, you know, and everyone around me seemed to be on a diet from like a magazine or, you know, like those, maybe you don’t even remember those magazine diets. Back when I was growing up, there was like, you know, the magazines with like the grapefruit diet or whatever the diet was. And just punishing, you know, just this punishing. And yeah, that’s where the comparison kind of starts. Then you start to look at other young girls who are naturally like fed or they, yeah, they don’t have fair skin like you do. Or I mean, it’s and it’s society can be ruthless, right?

Speaker #1
Yeah. And it’s interesting too. So I didn’t ever, thankfully, I didn’t ever receive negative body image information from my own mother. But it was interesting because as I was going through this process, you know, my, my mom was overweight and she never said anything. And I don’t know if I ever, I don’t, she didn’t like wear shorts or anything like that. There wasn’t, you know, there wasn’t a lot of confidence there, but she also wasn’t belittling. And it’s so interesting though because Because of the things that I was going through and the comparison, it bothered me that she was overweight. Like I was almost embarrassed for her, which was a little bit. It’s kind of interesting, like reliving this a little bit. I haven’t done that for a while, but I noticed that for her, interestingly enough. And I think that added another layer for me of like, well, I don’t want to. I don’t want to go there either.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I can understand that. Was your mom on diets and off diets? Because like my family, the women in my family were very much like there was just this you’re on a diet, then off a diet, then, you know, and there’s no appreciation or love of food. I mean, I grew up in like a big foodie kind of family. There was definitely food around, but women weren’t really supposed to like food. you know like it was More for like the men.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Mine was a little bit different. We didn’t have a lot of diets, but we didn’t have a lot of good food. Like we couldn’t afford a lot of food. And so my vegetable options were canned beans, canned peas, and canned corn. And, you know, I was raised on a lot of microwave meals and things from the freezer. And so I don’t know if there wasn’t a lot of resources. to diet, if you know what I mean, because some of those diet foods were like you had to buy them. But it was interesting because there was that lack of resources to do that. But interestingly enough, my probably biggest dieting struggles actually came when I got into college and started learning more about nutrition. And the more I learned about nutrition, and I was with a whole bunch of dieticians that were eating food that I was like, that’s not canned beans. Like you are eating food I don’t even recognize. And So then I felt like, wow, I’m way off base. I need to be eating this. And so then I restricted even more because I was learning these foods are bad for you. Ironically, right? You’re in school. These foods are bad for you. These foods are good for you. And that’s kind of the next step for me where like things started to get really extreme because I knew what would happen in my body if I ate these foods and what would happen if I eat these foods. So that’s kind of that. that’s where things got even a little more, I guess, dicey for me.

Speaker #0
So you got caught up in like a, right, this like either or, right? Like there’s, rather than the thinking that there’s really no bad foods, right, that there was like, right, good foods. And it’s, I mean, that continues on to this day. I mean, it’s even probably worse now, I think, than ever that, you know, if you’re not clean eating or… I see a lot of, you know, vegan diets because that’s supposed to be like the cleaner, better way to eat. And that sounds like you got kind of caught up in that whirlwind.

Speaker #1
Yeah, I have very vivid memories of like them bringing their lunch, these dietician students bringing. And no, nothing against dieticians. I think dieticians are great. But they were bringing their lunch and I was just like, oh, I mean, it looked like bird food to me almost. You know, it was like always salads are always. um, something really healthy that I barely recognized. Um, and I thought, well, I guess if I want to look like that, or if I want to be healthy, that’s the way I have to do it.

Speaker #0
How did that turn out for you?

Speaker #1
So I, I kind of, I’m going to rewind just a little bit. I started in nursing and decided pretty quickly that I wanted to be on the preventative care of preventative side of things. And so then I, you know, went and got essentially where everyone in the health, a lot of people in the health and wellness industry start my personal training certificate. So I became a personal trainer and I started getting clients and they met with me a couple days a week in the gym. And then I would give them a plan, you know, the plan that they told me in college would work, right? All of the textbook, perfect plan. And I’d give them this plan and I’d say, okay, this is what’s going to get you the results. And they would come back and they didn’t follow the I’m gonna. and they weren’t getting the results. And I was like, well, this is supposed to work. So follow the plan, you know? And it took me a little bit to realize, including my own story of, well, why can’t I follow the plan? Why do I sabotage every night and eat treats and all of that? That a textbook perfect plan doesn’t fit in a busy, imperfect life. And so I realized that true behavior change was about more than following a plan. And that’s what we’re given, right? Those diets or plans do this, get this result, but it doesn’t account for life. It doesn’t account for fatigue and stress and overwhelm and sadness and happiness, right? It doesn’t account for life’s imperfect structure. And so that’s really what led me then to go for more schooling down the path of like behavior change and coaching and like what actually helps us create. change that’s sustainable because we know these 30, 60, 90 day diets are just leaving us back in the same place we started.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I can absolutely relate to that too. Because when I first started my practice, that was, I mean, that’s what everyone wants, right? That’s what they come to you and ask you, just give me the plan. Just tell me what to eat. I don’t know what to eat. I don’t know how to do it. And so I’d give the plan, you know, here’s the plan. And then Nobody would. follow the plan. And I think I started to realize that I know that everyone is very, very individual, that they have food stories, right? Stories, backgrounds around how they were raised, the food and body image and how, you know, and maybe even saying get on a plan is too rigid and strict. And we also know that, we know enough now, I mean, diets just don’t work. Diets do not work, right? I mean, everyone can stick to a 30-day diet, right? You can buckle down, you can do that, you can, you know, focus, and then what happens? I mean, then life goes on, right? Or you have a celebration or you have something and then the plan is down the drain and then you’re feeling horrible about yourself because you can’t stick to the plan and on and on. And then, so I have… Lots of clients. And then myself included growing up. I mean, I was on diets and off diets. That was my whole thing. You’re on a diet, you’re struggling, then you’re like, I can’t take this any longer. You go off the diet and just on and on.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And I think it’s really important because, you know, there is a message that women that have been on diets receive that diets don’t work. But then we have a bit of a problem here because what their experience is, and probably both of our experiences, is that when I was on the diet, it worked. And when I was off the diet, it didn’t work. I wasn’t controlling, right? When I was tracking food, it was working. When I was not, I was all free for all. Um, And so it’s really, it’s kind of interesting because, you know, we can shout from the rooftops, diets don’t work. But when we are stuck in a place where it’s either I have to be rigid to get these results or else I’m out of control, then we have a lot of evidence on this side that actually diets do work. And I had a particular client that the only way she could ever like get to her goals was by tracking her macros. you know, you, she had to track her macros. That was the only way that she would get the results. That’s how she got her best quote body, right? That, that was how she got her results. And it was really difficult for her because she had a lot of evidence that as soon as she stopped tracking, she lost control around food. And so the story and the belief for her was that like diets actually did work. It’s just that she couldn’t maintain it. Well, she didn’t want to, I think she knew that she could like, she’s like, I can track macros, but I don’t want to live. that lifestyle. And so for anyone that might be feeling that way, where it’s like, okay, you’re telling me diets don’t work, but this is the only way I’ve ever been able to like control my weight or control my relationship with food. Just know it’s because we have a lot of evidence on one side and we need to start building some evidence on the other side of, okay, if diets don’t work, then what does, right? How can I start honoring my body’s hunger and fullness and satisfaction needs. How can I start creating balance with food that I generally lose control over if I’m not on the diet? And as we start to stack some evidence up on this other side, then it helps us realize, it helps us step into that truth that diets actually don’t work. But if you’ve been in that for so long, I can understand why it would be hard to believe that.

Speaker #0
That’s a very good point. And you’re right. I mean, diets, when you are on the diet, diets do work, right? You end up losing weight. You know, someone’s giving you the plan. You’re following it. And the goal is typically to lose weight, right? So and you can lose weight on a diet. It’s I guess what my point is that like it’s I don’t know anyone. Do you? I mean, maybe you do. I don’t know anyone who has ever said I went on the paleo diet. And I’m still on it. Two years later, nobody. I mean, said nobody ever. So I feel like diets take what diets do is, you know, you mentioned like hunger and fullness. It takes the guesswork out of everything, right? For 30 days, I can just just someone tell me what to do. But all of those things live tuning into your hunger, your fullness. Your moods, how you’re feeling that day, your fatigue levels, anything that’s going to like trigger hunger, just all your emotions is not part of the diet. Right. They don’t diets don’t teach you how to like pay attention and be mindful. And that’s those are the skills that you need for like long lasting change. So diets do work. You’re right for for the short term. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using tools. Like if you if counting macros is something that helps you, I love information. So tracking my food every once in a while is never a bad thing. If I feel like I’ve gotten like totally off base, we’re tracking my food forever. Probably not because I like to live and like enjoy food. And, you know, just but but for the information, it’s not a bad thing. So, yeah, but I like how you said that the diets. do work until, but until they don’t.

Speaker #1
Yeah. I have a funny analogy. It’s a potty training analogy. So anyone that’s potty trained a child will understand this. But you know what, when we start potty training, the first day of potty training, what you’re trying to do, the goal of potty training is to get your child to recognize those particular cues in their body. And the first day you’re not like going to Disneyland. You are at home. It is all hands on deck. You are in it, right? You’re teaching them. Lots of accidents and you’re learning. And then a few days later, you’re like, okay, we’re doing okay. Maybe we can venture out to the park. And then maybe a week later, you’re like, okay, we’re doing pretty good. This child recognizes those cues anywhere. We can go to the restaurant, we can go to the park. And that’s the same way when it comes to recognizing the cues in our body. Because we can go all the way back to the beginning of what we talked about today of somewhere in our lives, we disconnected from our body’s cues because of what we were told, right? This was wrong, so you should go on this diet. And so we shifted from listening to our body’s cues, which a baby’s really good at. It has that gift. And we have that gift still in there. but we’ve… we were told or we chose to suppress or ignore it, those cues. And so we said, okay, they’re supposed to tell me what to do. Right. And so now we’ve got all these women and including ourselves where we’ve been through this path of, well, they know better and I should follow that diet because that’s the way it is. And we don’t recognize these cues. And so when you were talking about, um, tracking. Sometimes I say, you know, tracking is a little bit like potty training. It’s not something that we have to do forever, but it can be helpful at the very beginning to say, I need to figure out how to recognize these cues, right? I need to pay really close attention. And I usually start women with a mindful eating practice where we sit down and I’m happy to provide, I have a free mindful eating audio meditation where you sit down and you just, you listen or you listen to your body with food. how do I feel? What are my hunger levels? What are my fullness levels? Am I satisfied with this meal? And you start creating that connection of trust with your body rather than with the diets or the plans. And the cool thing is, is you have that gift. You still have it in you. It’s always yours. And you’re going to start retraining your body to listen. And your body does the coolest thing. It tells you, hey, I’m hungry. Hey, I’m full. hey, I’m satisfied. This food is what helps me feel better. And you don’t need an outside diet to tell you that. There are good nutrition strategies, and it’s important to have one because certain foods help our bodies give us different signals, of course. But when you understand the principles of nutrition, right, which might take some little bit of tracking, understanding macronutrients at the beginning. Once you get good at it, then essentially like potty training, you can access those cues anywhere without losing control.

Speaker #0
Yeah, good point. I mean, I think that that’s a good analogy that, I mean, babies, you know, when they’re, let’s go back before potty training. I mean, they are so tuned into their hunger and fullness cues, right? When they’re not paying attention, like, oh, I should finish everything on my plate, you know. Like, you know, or because there’s, you know, my mom told me I had to like, you know, eat it all. I mean, they’re like when they’re, you know, you’ve got young children when they’re full, they’re like, you know, they’re done. They’re done. When they’re hungry, they’re hungry. And they’re listening. They’re tuning into their cues until, right, somewhere, somehow, somebody, society, whoever, like starts to influence them. Oh, you should eat everything on your plate. Even if like it goes past fullness, you should ignore your hunger cues. You just had a snack. Why are you like, right? All of that. So, but I like the potty training analogy too. I think most of us can, if we have kids, we can definitely relate to that. And it takes practice, right? It takes practice then to get back to recognizing your hunger and fullness cues. It takes a lot of mindfulness, right? It takes a lot of just like, just. pausing and just like, am I hungry? And am I physically hungry? Or am I like hungry because I’m having a bad day? Am I hungry because I just got into a fight with someone? Am I, you know, am I reacting to something else? And that’s a huge difference too. And also I think takes a lot of practice. So I’m just curious how, you know, we talked originally at the beginning about how you made peace with… food and your food. So tell me a little bit more about how you did that. Because you said, you know, we kind of left off of your story that you were in college and you were hanging out with the dieticians and food got a little confusing to you.

Speaker #1
Yeah, that’s a good question. I like to tell my clients that food freedom is not a perfect relationship with food. It’s a relationship with food where you realign quicker. So If you have a good relationship with food, that doesn’t mean that you’ll never overeat or you’ll never have an emotional eating episode. I think that’s really important because sometimes we’re, as coaches, you know, people put us on a pedestal, like you never have issues. And the truth is, is a good relationship with food is one that you’re always working on. And so I have ebbed and flowed in my relationship with food from there. And, you know, it was, it was a little bit of experience with my clients. where I would be like, okay, let’s try this or let’s work on this. And it would kind of teach me some things. But I think the biggest thing that has helped me and helps me keep coming back, when maybe I do have an emotional day and I’m like, oh yeah, I let this get the best of me or something. It comes back to your relationship with your body. And that’s where it came for me was that I had to come to a place of peace with my body because for so many years, the story was that my body wasn’t good enough. It was, I always needed to escape it. And that’s how we enter the diet cycle, by the way, is anytime that you enter the diet cycle, think about this, has been because you’ve wanted to escape your body. You wanted to get out of the size that you’re in or the look that you have. And then you do something drastic and that’s usually what starts the diet cycle. And so really what I had to do is come to peace with my body that it’s good and it’s going to go through seasons and it’s worthy of being nurtured and nourished to change rather than punished and shamed to change. And so once I started making that shift and I think it was me kind of teaching my clients that to then sort of digest it myself a little bit better, you know. Um, the, I realized, oh, okay, my body’s good. And instead of restricting all these things and looking like you mentioned earlier as black and white, all or nothing, it’s the pendulum or a swing. For example, if you pull a swing really, really, really far back one direction, it’s going to swing really, really far in the other direction. And diets usually pull that swing really far in the restriction side. And so when we lose control, when you something happens, sabotage, we swing really hard the other direction and we lose control with food and a good relationship with food exists somewhere in the middle, right? We need freedom, but we also need some boundaries. And when you have a better relationship with your body that says, you know, I’m worthy of enjoyment with food. My body’s worthy of nourishment and nurturing. Then you We can also discuss the, you know, like changing your body from a place of nurturing, right? Maybe weight loss is the goal. That’s okay. But it came from a different place. And so that’s what helped me then like get to my weight that felt the best and get my body to the place that felt the best. And my habits were all about supporting my body rather than looking a certain way or losing a certain amount of weight.

Speaker #0
Yeah. Totally agreed. Well, I also think that for a lot of women to get out of that mindset of I’m not good enough or my body’s not worth it is a very hard ask. I mean, with society and all our messaging around what a woman should look like, it’s sometimes impossible and takes a lot of like reprogramming. I mean, I know for me, it definitely did. I had to like, I mean, I was. I was out of getting my master’s degree in nutrition and still thinking like, you know, I was kind of in like a diet like thing. And it was not until I started embracing that just making peace with food, liking my body as it was, that I ended up, I had some, whatever, do I want to call it baby weight? You know, I was then like a couple of years past. my babies. And, you know, I couldn’t really call it baby weight anymore, but I’ll call it baby weight. And, you know, and it, but I could not have lost that weight and kept it off. If I was still in that mindset of like, I need to do this because of what society thinks I should look like, or I’m going to punish myself into like, you know, submission. I had to like, really do a lot of work with myself on, on just. making peace with food and making peace with my body.you know, and really cheering myself on. So I think there’s a huge difference, you know, in, you know, you said like, there’s nothing wrong with the goal of losing weight, but losing weight from a diet perspective and losing weight from, you know, this other more gentle, compassionate perspective is huge.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And it kind of goes, it kind of goes back to, you know, we talked about like diets don’t work and, um, I was just thinking when I, so I’m a year postpartum, a year and a few months, and this is my third baby and three for three, I’m three for three right now where I actually don’t gain a lot of weight during pregnancy and I usually am fine postpartum, but as soon as I stopped nursing, my weight just increases. And it’s something that I have to kind of process and work on because sometimes there’s that expectation like, well, gosh, I am a year out and I’m a believer that postpartum is like five years. But it’s interesting because when you say like diets, like I always attach it with a timeframe. And so diets are like time bound. Something, for example, like get my body back could be considered a diet because we’re like, oh, I got to get it back within a year or within six months or whatever. But the truth is my body just takes some adjusting. And I’ve had to learn that because I’ll like stop nursing and then my hunger cues are still there. And it takes me about a year for my body to like re-register that I’m not hungry all the time because I’m not like burning all the calories. I think sometimes we fight so hard against that because we don’t have a good relationship with our body. But when we understand, hey, sometimes our body goes through seasons of adjustment, right? We’ve talked about menopause. There’s some adjustment seasons that have to happen and weight will fluctuate. Body fat patterning will fluctuate, right? With menopause and all the transitions in a woman’s life, things will fluctuate. And if we have that solid And… foundation of my body is good and it’s worthy of still being nurtured and nourished. It’s going to be worthy then and now.

Speaker #0
Yeah, great. I mean, that’s a really good example and story. I mean, about your postpartum weight and where you’re at and everything, because I know for me, when I had my kids, it was nine months up, nine months down. That was the rule. And if you hit the nine months down and you still weren’t down, something was wrong, you know, like something. And even I mean, and then, you know, you always had those friends who like literally walked out of the hospital looking like they never had a baby. And that was huge pressure, too. And and it’s such a good point that we all I mean, we all react differently. It does take time. But I think if you’re in that like that postpartum phase and like, you know, you. and you’re beating yourself up about it and doing something drastic and radical, that’s not going to work. It’s, it’s, that’s never going to work. And it make you feel good. I mean, you really have to just embrace the, the season of life you’re in, the compassion around it, what you just went through as a, you know, birthing a child and then breastfeeding. And I mean, the whole thing, the whole experience is huge.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
So, yeah, it’s that’s that’s a really good a good point. So what would you say to women who are like struggling with some just consistency, you know, staying consistent? Because I know for me, for example, I you know, when I said I lost this weight, you know, that I ended up then keeping off for a very long time. But it’s the consistent it’s the, you know. it’s easy to lose the weight. Sometimes it’s much easier to like, right, we can focus, we can lose the weight. And then we have to, then there’s the after part, we have to maintain it. And then maintaining is a whole different ballgame. And because you have to stay consistent with what you’re doing, and then throw in, you know, just getting older and like aging and our metabolism. But besides that, let’s just talk about, you know, the staying consistent. What are you know, what would you say to someone who? is trying to just maintain what they’ve got, they’ve accomplished.

Speaker #1
Yeah. First of all, be proud of, of the efforts that you’ve put in. I think sometimes, I don’t know what it is as women. We just don’t, we don’t celebrate ourselves enough. We, we are always looking at the gap rather than what we’ve gained and what we’ve developed and what we’ve learned. Um, so I think that’s the first piece is like maybe you have overcome something that’s hard. Maybe you’ve worked through, um, a big diet history, or maybe you have birthed babies or worked through an illness or something. And I think it’s really important, first of all, to celebrate that, you know, your body got you through that. And there can be feelings and emotions, right? That maybe that was hard, or maybe you’re still struggling with some things, but, um, but you’re getting through it and you’re there. But I have a unique definition of sabotage. And it is… the expectation of perfection. We will sabotage every time we expect things to be perfect. And so what happens is we follow the diet, which is essentially supposed to be that textbook perfect plan, like we talked about. And then we don’t know how to keep up a perfect plan in an imperfect life. And so we sabotage because we expect it to keep going that same way. And it really goes back to identity. And I always tell women, since my platform is a woman of wellness, I always ask them to identify what a woman of wellness is to them. Who is that in them? What does she do? What does she like? What does she like to do? How is she healthy? Because that’s a different definition for you than it is for me and her. And so we really have to define, okay, what is a woman of wellness, first of all, and what does that look like for me? Does that look like I’m running 10 miles a day? Or does that look like I have a regular movement routine and I look for ways to move my body and I, you know, do strength training a couple of times per week, or am I a CrossFitter or am I a swimmer? Um, what is that identity of that woman of wellness I want to become? And then recognize that we’re not setting up expectations of perfection because that’s going to lead us to sabotage every single time, but rather… Can I find some consistency with things that support that vision? And then it makes those things a little bit easier to keep doing because we’re not looking at it as black or white.

Speaker #0
Right. Great point. All right. Final question for you. I’m a little, this is my own personal vendetta with social media and the internet. And I mean, you click on. Just one. I mean, you are much younger than me, but welcome to your 50s. And like, you know, see what the anti-aging movement is and, you know, and how you’re almost supposed to be aging in reverse. You know, so I I find social media to be absolutely overwhelming with information and a lot of terrible, terrible information. So how do you approach women? or help them who just feel overwhelmed by all the health advice out there? What would you tell someone who’s like, I saw something, you know, these supplements I should be taking, or this diet I should be doing, or these exercises I should be engaging in? What do you tell women?

Speaker #1
Three words, curate your noise. There is so much noise out there. And this is an opportunity. we can’t always control what’s coming in, but we can control what we’re going and looking for and, and that we’re actually engaging on the platform. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to, we can’t be on it, but we do need to be, we need to be ruthless in curating what we, um, what we want. And I, and I always tell women, um, if, if an account or, or a message makes you feel less than in your body, pass. Because it’s not supporting the… the core and the root of, I have a good relationship with my body and it’s worthy of being nurtured and nourished. So if you feel less than in any way, it’s not a supportive measure. And there’s some really good meaning accounts out there, you know, and that’s okay too. But if it specifically for you does not nurture or nourish your mindset and your body,

Speaker #0
toss it hard pass yeah yeah i i agree with you it’s it’s hard though to not get caught up and

Speaker #1
some of the I mean yeah internet is crazy it kind of makes me think about um gosh there’s like dating apps I don’t know because I haven’t been on them but where you swipe right and swipe left for yes part of me is like gosh wouldn’t it be cool if social media did that where you swiped right you’re like no I don’t want to see that no I don’t want to see that versus oh that’s a good one yeah

Speaker #0
I know it makes it almost impossible to just even swipe quickly through that you get caught up in like that. It’s like sitting in the middle of Times Square. you know, with all the lights and the signs and the, I mean, it’s just, you get, yeah, good, good, good suggestions. And I like that you said, curate your noise. That’s a good, good way to end things. Elizabeth, thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing your story today and talking about making peace with food and the consistency that we need to have and the mindfulness. that we can cultivate to have some more compassion and to make, I think, longer lasting changes with our bodies as women. So thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Speaker #1
Thank you for having me.

Speaker #0
And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating. our real bodies and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.