Navigating Midlife Changes: Emotional Resilience and Personal Food Journeys with Andrea Johnson

What if the journey to self-acceptance and body positivity could be paved with real food stories and personal triumphs? Join host Heather Carey in this empowering episode of Real Food Stories as she welcomes Andrea Johnson, a trainer and coach dedicated to helping women navigate the often tumultuous waters of midlife changes. Together, they explore Andrea’s incredible personal journey through bulimia, obesity, and her transformative decision to undergo gastric bypass surgery, shedding light on the emotional resilience needed to embrace life’s challenges.

Andrea’s candid reflections on her upbringing and family history reveal how deeply ingrained food beliefs and societal pressures shape our relationship with nutrition and body image. As they discuss the importance of inner work and mindset coaching, listeners will discover the seven pillars of abundance that can guide them through their own midlife nutrition journey. This episode is not just about weight loss stories; it’s about breaking generational cycles and fostering a healthy lifestyle that empowers women to take control of their health.

Throughout their conversation, Heather and Andrea delve into the significance of intentional optimism and the role it plays in achieving personal goals, especially during midlife changes. They touch on the necessity of self-advocacy and understanding one’s body, providing valuable nutrition advice and healthy eating tips that resonate with women navigating menopause health. Whether you’re curious about the Mediterranean diet insights or seeking to debunk weight loss myths, this episode is packed with nutritionist insights that will inspire you to embrace your personal food journey.

As they explore the ongoing journey of self-acceptance and the importance of mindful eating practices, listeners will be encouraged to cultivate a healthy relationship with food. Andrea’s story is a testament to the power of vulnerability and the healing that can come from sharing personal food stories. With a focus on cooking for wellness and sustainable eating, this episode is a heartfelt exploration of how to nourish your body and soul, especially during those pivotal midlife changes.

Don’t miss this enlightening conversation filled with culinary wellness tips, empowering women’s health strategies, and the joy of cooking for health. Tune in to Real Food Stories and embark on a transformative journey that celebrates body positivity, emotional resilience, and the strength found in community and shared experiences.

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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. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Real Food Stories. Today, I had a really interesting, in-depth talk with trainer and coach Andrea Johnson, who not only helps women take control of their lives and change their future by teaching intentional optimism and emotional resilience as key skills to know when navigating through life. But Andrea also has a very heartfelt personal story around bulimia and her decision to eventually have gastric bypass surgery. That’s no small decision to make. And Andrea could not have done it without the help of a lot of inner work and mindset coaching. Andrea has a really interesting story. I learned from Andrea that life is not linear and there are a lot of wagons we sometimes need to circle to get to a place of peace with our bodies. So I encourage you to listen to my interview with Andrea Johnson.

Speaker #1
Hi, everybody. I’m here today with Andrea Johnson. Andrea is a trainer and coach who empowers others to take control of their lives and change their future.

Speaker #0
As an adoptive parent who grew up internationally navigating mental and physical wellness, she learned that emotional resilience must be earned. Uncovering her own voice became the key to the process that allows her clients to do the same. Andrea was raised on the mission field of Seoul, South Korea, and as a third culture kid, She’s familiar with navigating cultural diversity to find her own place of belonging. A family history of obesity showed up early, along with bulimia and depression. Her determination to become healthy led to gastric bypass surgery and is testament to her persevering spirit. She experienced early menopause and became an adoptive mom through private adoption at 42. Her personal journey of deconstructing her own assumptions, beliefs, and conditioning produced her signature tool, Intentional Optimism. And today, Andrea works with ambitious female leaders, founders, community leaders, and public officials who feel stifled and have grown unsatisfied with their current level of impact. She facilitates improved communication and corporate culture in women-owned or operated teams. Her passion. is equipping female leaders to define a new culture by trusting their own ability to think critically, create imaginatively, and lead effectively. So welcome, Andrea. I’m so glad you’re here today. I feel like we have a lot to talk about personally and professionally. Let’s start off by talking about your personal story, the one where you realized your family history of obesity and being overweight and the changes that you made because of that.

Speaker #1
Thank you, Heather. I am so excited to be here. We have talked before about whether or not I’m comfortable sharing my story. And I just want to make sure that people understand that when we share our stories, others are both encouraged and given the courage that they need to actually take control of their stories. So it is my privilege and pleasure to share. Some people, my mother would be included and say, don’t air your dirty laundry. And I’m like, this is not dirty laundry. This is the journey that we’ve made. So going back to my childhood, my entire family, we’re genetically predisposed, right? We’re just those people who tend to carry. We probably, if you go all the way back to, I don’t know, millions of years ago, we were those people that survived because we tend to carry a little bit more weight on our bodies. But for me, it wasn’t so much the genetic predisposition. It was the need to control my environment. And I did that through… Eating I did that through taking care of my creating a safe space for me with the small things that I could control and My mom’s side of the family didn’t really have high obesity. My dad’s side of the family had more and they had diabetes and that kind of thing. But my mother, and I’m 57, so we were definitely raised in that period of you must look a certain way in order to be a pretty woman and not in this age of body positivity or different kinds of diversity and beauty. And we were not raised with that. We were raised that this is what you look like and doggone if it wasn’t Christie Brinkley. So, and I’m 5’1″, so it’ll never happen. But I was taught at a very young age that if you were overweight at all, it was a sign of the inability to control yourself. So it was a self-control issue. And people talk about that all the time, don’t they? We talk about, oh, I’ll just white knuckle it. Or, and it’s not that. It just might be that’s how your metabolism starts and then you develop a coping mechanism. So for my… And I didn’t realize when I was starting to hide food at eight or nine years old. And like I said, or you said, we lived in Korea in the 1970s and 80s. We didn’t have, I mean, if you watch K-dramas now, the technology they have and the beauty, I mean, they’re exporting food here, right? But they didn’t have canned goods. They didn’t have peanut butter. They didn’t have frozen foods. They didn’t have all of the stuff that they have today. And so we took… canned goods in our homes, in the missionary homes that top half of the, in the second floor, half of the entire second story of the house was a walk-in attic in which we basically had our own store. We took canned goods. We took tuna. We took peanut butter, jello, anything that was non-perishable. And I would slip in there and quietly find jello packets or peanut butter or something that I could hide. under my bed or under my pillow that nobody would see and that I could have control over. And I don’t know that, I don’t even know that I thought that, I mean, I knew I needed to hide it, but I don’t know that I cognitively thought that it was bad or was detriment to me until I like went off to college. And then things started kind of getting a little more out of control. But looking back at my life, I can see early, early on that my family’s way of handling that genetic predisposition. was to buckle down and do the right thing. And that didn’t work for me.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I can totally relate to so much of what you’re saying. I mean, just being raised, I’m just a year or two younger than you. So, you know, we were raised in the same generation and that belief that you must look a certain way. do not gain weight. I mean, right. It’s a lack of self-control. It’s a lack of willpower. It’s, it’s just something against you. And, and we got to buckle down and figure it out. Sometimes you have genetics working against you, you know, and it becomes even really difficult, which then it sounds like turned into right. Hiding food, sneaking food. And you had a, It sounds like a store up in your attic. I mean, just the choices and the, you know, and the, yeah.

Speaker #1
So I tell all my secrets from my childhood. We even had a huge deep freeze and we would go onto the military post and we would go to Baskin Robbins and Baskin Robbins had these big round containers of ice cream. They still, I don’t know if they still do. I don’t even, I don’t even go in these places anymore, but instead of buying something off the shelf, they would take this amazing wire cutter and they would take those five gallon or 10 gallon, whatever things. And they would slice. off a gallon or two and they would put a lid on the bottom and a lid on the top. And that was your ice cream. And so I had, we would, my parents would go and buy like four or five of these things on the army post and come home and we’d put them in the deep freeze. So I was even really good at sneaking in there in the middle of the night, lifting the lid of the actual freezer very quietly. And I would keep a spoon and then I would find the sherbet or I would find the rocky road. And I would very carefully make sure that you. I didn’t just dive in with a spoon, right? I had to make it non-detectable, right? So you see where all of this stuff is going. And it wasn’t until I was in the hospital for bulimia and depression, turning 21 in the hospital or 20 in the hospital, that I was willing to admit all of the, gosh, the deviousness that went into that. But recognizing that a lot of it came from this fear of being found out. We would make no-bake cookies and leave them out on wax paper, you know, the kind with the chocolate and the peanut butter and the oats and stuff. And I would walk through and pop one in my mouth and scoot them around so you couldn’t tell. that I had taken one.

Speaker #0
But it’s almost, you know, it’s almost asking a kid to be, you know, really disciplined. I mean, that’s not even fair in a way. Would you agree with that, that you had gallons and gallons of ice cream in your freezer and the Jell-O packets and you’re making the cookies and, but you’re expected to be in control with it?

Speaker #1
Yeah. Um, it’s Thank you. And I think there were plenty of times when I would want to blame my environment. And to a certain extent, that’s, it’s a case. I mean, there’s a case to be made there. But we reach a point where we take on responsibility for our response to the environment. It may not be to your 25, right? I mean, it may be. It may be that even at 15 or 16, I still couldn’t. I mean, even at school, I was a cheerleader and we would, we. had hot dog buns in the freezer in order to have game time stuff. And I would pull one frozen hot dog bun out and eat it in the bathroom because I just needed some control. So it became much more than that. It became my response to my environment that included more than just food stores that were there. My sister didn’t have that problem, right? So it’s totally different people, totally different reactions to what was going on. And none of my other friends had that problem. And I was in a country of people who are still quite small today. You know, I mean, Koreans, they, we now know a whole lot more about the Asian diet and what that does for you and how that helps you and how it does different things in your metabolism. But I don’t really love the Asian food and I don’t digest sesame oil very well. And so I didn’t embrace that. And so everything was very Americanized, but I think it is easy to say it’s not fair to a kid. But my parents were working with what they had at the time too. They just, they didn’t know any better. And I think I shared with you when we spoke earlier that my mother always tried by helping me. Like I think we had our own Weight Watchers group and I think I was a couple of missionary ladies and me. And I think the earliest memories I have of being in Weight Watchers is fifth grade.

Speaker #0
That’s young.

Speaker #1
Yeah. That’s way too young to talk about dieting. And my mom didn’t know any better. She just wanted me to be happy. And she wanted, and in her mind, she thought that, you know, being healthy and being thin would make me happy. And the reality is it had something totally different. But she would send me to school with a boiled egg for lunch, a boiled egg, half a tuna fish and mustard sandwich, and a tab.

Speaker #0
Diet food.

Speaker #1
Total diet food.

Speaker #0
And I think that belief that your mom wanted to make sure that you were happy. And being happy means thin.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
Right. Not her, not her fault or not. You know, that’s just how she grew up. That’s how my mother grew up too, is that, you know, happiness equals thin. My whole family is, you know, in that mindset. So that’s just passed down beliefs, right? Old, outdated beliefs, I think now, but, but that’s, that, that sounds like exactly where your mom was at.

Speaker #1
And, you know. The more I learn about when you talk about I work with women, one of the reasons I want to work with women is because it’s not just this women pass down to each other. We’re part of a bigger understanding of the way culture works and the patriarchal system of women are, and I may just step on toes here, but women are performative. Boys are just good for being boys, but girls are always sweet. or kind or gentle. I mean, even if just a little poem about puppy dog tails and whatever, I don’t even remember what it is, but young women, girls are, and have always been in Western society raised to perform to certain duties. You will make a good wife. You will make a good mother. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but when that’s what we’re told, it’s all outside of ourselves. Whereas boys are taught to be courageous and smart and energetic and the leader, you know, which is all inside of themselves. And so we have the skewed view and that’s a very binary way to look at it. So don’t call me out on this, anybody, but seriously, it affects everything. And when we talk about how we’re supposed to be happy when we look good, it’s all a piece of that because it’s outward.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And I think when it comes to food and diets and Body image. Girls, I think from a very young age, are expected to watch their weight, watch their food, not really love food. Always be on a diet just in case where boys are encouraged to get big, get strong.

Speaker #1
Yeah, get strong. Book up.

Speaker #0
Yeah. Eat, you know, eat. You know, I have many memories of being a teenager and going out to lunch with my boyfriend and I better watch what I’m eating or he was able to. Yeah, I’ll get a salad. You get whatever you want. You enjoy. I will have to sit here and, you know. be really aware of what I’m putting into my body.

Speaker #1
And chew your food 30 times and, you know, put your fork down in between. I mean, I know all the hacks and habits, you know, I mean, it’s just,

Speaker #0
yeah, yeah.

Speaker #1
It’s exhausting.

Speaker #0
Yeah, it is exhausting. It really is. Well, so then let’s fast forward to, you said that you, by your twenties, you were diagnosed with bulimia, depression and Why don’t you just finish that part of the story?

Speaker #1
So it was when I was in college and my family was still in Korea and I was in Houston, of all places, huge city. And I didn’t do well. I ended up my sophomore year of college sharing an apartment with a friend. And I had gained, I don’t know what I weighed at the time, but it felt, I mean, I know that later I gained all the way up to over 300 pounds and I’m only 5’1″, so that tells you. um, the capacity there, but, um, I don’t know, maybe it was at two to 30 or something. And just, it felt like the biggest, I didn’t have clothes that fit. I couldn’t afford anything. And I had a big flannel nightgown and I would count the number of days that I could miss class and still pass because I’m smart. Right. Because the other thing is that I was not the normal girl. I was the courageous girl. I was the smart girl. I was the outspoken girl. I was the critical thinker. And that had to be kind of not beat out of me literally, but kind of like, beat out of me, right? It’s like, no, we just hammered in. This is what girls are supposed to be. So by the time I hit 19, almost 20, I was counting the days, closing the curtains, sitting in my apartment, eating. I was from Texas, right? Bluebell ice cream, back to the ice cream thing. It’s a comfort food. And realizing I can’t go on like this. And I didn’t know where to get help. And I didn’t know what to do. And Thank you. Back then, the radio, it was like 86, I think. I heard, because I’d always heard, I mean, I was a Karen Carpenter fan. So I knew about anorexia and I knew about bulimorexia. I knew like the binging and purging, but no one had ever said to me that some of the behaviors I had were unhealthy. No one had ever said, this could be a mental issue. This could be something that you’ve gotten yourself into that you need. help outside of yourself and outside of a diet pill to get out of. And I heard a commercial and it was for a group called the Raider Institute. I think they’re still in business. And it was a 12-week inpatient program. And it was the first place I’d ever heard the term mindful eating. It was the first place I had ever heard the term, well, because I come from a conservative Christian background. So it was the first time I’d ever been told, it’s okay to meditate. You need to meditate. Pardon me. It was the first time anybody had ever said, what do you think about this? How do you feel about this? Or what are your thoughts about food? It just never occurred to me. And we did a 12-step program in there, which is very common for anybody who’s an addict. And I don’t espouse to everything that I learned there, but it was a really good way to set me on the right road. And so what I learned was that I was not able to deal with life on life’s terms. I needed different ones. It didn’t make me broken. It just meant that I was a little different. And my son has ADHD. And so we talk about being neurodivergent today and how it’s a little bit of the same kind of thing. It’s like your brain works differently than other people. There’s nothing wrong with you and you’re not broken, but we need to figure out how to help you thrive. And so that was the first step for me is figuring out how to help me thrive. It was the first time I had been in with a counselor. It’s the first time I’d ever really talked to a psychiatrist. we had group therapy and it didn’t go over well. My parents were on furlough. So they were home from Korea. This was in Southeast Texas. And I learned that part of, this is where I first was told about the outward expression of my self was like, Andrea, you put on a mask every day. You put on your makeup every day. You curl your hair every day. This is in the 80s. So it was big. And the example that was given was you need to strip all that down. You need to be able to be you without all of that stuff. And I wasn’t prepared. I was losing weight because I was being given, here’s the plate of food that you’re eating, and we’re going to walk two miles a day, you know. But I needed someone to say to me, you have to drop that mask. And so she said, all right, for the next week, no makeup, period. And preferably just wash your hair, stay clean, you know, that kind of thing. It was while I was in the hospital, I had my first post or preventricular contractions, which is PVCs, which is when your heart skips a beat. And it was because the anxiety of doing that was so intense for me that my heart was telling me your nervous system is freaking out, right? And so I ended up wearing a heart monitor that week just to see what it was. And then when my parents came for group therapy, my mother, because I was terrified for her to see me. You don’t leave the house without lipstick, right? And she came in and she looked at me and she said, you look different. And I said, well, I don’t have any makeup on. And she said, no, I can tell you don’t have any makeup on, but you look different. And as much as I didn’t. I fully understood at that moment that maybe my mom could see and that maybe my mom was teachable. She wasn’t 100% ready. And then when we started talking about things in group therapy, she ended up storming out. And I thought I would never see her again. It was just horrible. It was hard if anybody’s been through that. My mother, however, was the one person in my family who was willing to grow along with me. And by the time we lost her in 2017, she knee to knee with me said, Did I tell you how amazing you are? Did I tell you to fly? Did I tell you? So that came full circle, but that was 30 years in the making. So this was the process that I had in this inpatient center. And it changed me and it really set me on a path to say, I can be me and it’s okay.

Speaker #0
Yeah, that sounds like a really pivotal moment for you when you went into the inpatient therapy.

Speaker #1
12-week inpatient program.

Speaker #0
I mean, you learned, I mean, the 12-step program, meditation, mindfulness, all things that you’d probably never even heard of before at such a young age. I mean, you were still-

Speaker #1
Tastes like, I don’t know, it goes down too fast, right? I mean, just all of those things.

Speaker #0
Noticing your food, being aware.

Speaker #1
And here I am 37 years later, and I still, even after gastric bypass, I still have found myself thinking, well, it doesn’t really taste good, but I need to eat all of this nutrition. what? I grilled chicken and I didn’t like the consistency of it. It’s okay to give it to the dog. Right. It just, I, I’m still having those conversations. They just don’t go away.

Speaker #0
Right. That you feel like obligated to eat it maybe or.

Speaker #1
On your plate, baby.

Speaker #0
Oh yeah. And it sounds like your mom who, and you, who, you know, when they said, don’t wear makeup for a week. And then your mom saw you, that was. almost traumatic. I mean, it sounds really, really big adjustment. And it’s nice to hear that your mom turned it around so she could really be a big supporter of yours.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And it was work that she had to do. And she started and she even started seeing a counselor, but she figured out that there were cycles in her family and cycles that she wanted to be the one to break. The reality was I stuck a big old wrench in the works and said, this cycle is broken. And so she said, all right, let’s figure out how to fix it. And she wasn’t perfect. And I have lots of stories that I’ve had to work through with my mother because, well, mothers and daughters, that’s just, you know, we could say that’s enough to say right there. But of looking back all the way to that moment, she is one of the people that was willing to say I see you. And when people see us, all of a sudden we have the freedom to be us. And even if we’re not prepared, that’s the road that we need to be on in order to heal, in order to whatever trauma we had, in order to grow, in order to be who we were created to be. And so even though that was hard, and there were other times during college and even afterwards that we Thank you. clashed and she didn’t always see me, there was always that piece back there that said, but she can, and eventually she will. And she did.

Speaker #0
That’s fantastic. I mean, you said, you know, you mentioned just like breaking the cycle or breaking the chain. Sometimes I call it, you know, that you were the impetus. Sounds like in your family, right? You’re the one who for better or for worse presented with these challenges and You were there to recreate new ways of, I think, working in your family.

Speaker #1
Yeah. I saw a counselor who was, his main way of working was called Family Systems. And he talked about, if you’re familiar with them, the first thing he did with us was, my husband was there too, and he did the full family tree. And some of his insights, just looking at the family tree and having us talk about different people all the way up to my great grandparents was very insightful. But one of the things that we’ve never forgotten was his example of When you’re in a family system, you’re on a stage and you each have lines and a script. And if somebody exits stage right when they weren’t supposed to, or if like if someone dies or if someone decides to change the script, because that’s what I always say is I change the script. And the rest of my family was like, are we? This doesn’t make any sense. But my mother was like, hang on. I think I know where we are. Let’s find where she is. Right. Because she was willing to change the script. And that’s just a hard thing to do.

Speaker #0
That’s a great. way to look at it that you change the script and then everyone has to either adjust around you jump in or not right and there’s a very

Speaker #1
Shakespeare is very different from improv right Shakespeare’s very you know every single line is his his lines are specific you have to say them the way he designed them or they’re not funny or they’re not they’re not impactful whereas improv you get to figure it out on your own with a basic script Most of us are just programmed to be in a Shakespearean play. We are not programmed or taught how to do improv. So that’s what I basically said, script’s gone. We’re going to do improv. And my mother was the first one to say, well, this could be fun. My dad’s still not really on board, but he’s learning.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And your responsibility, I guess, ultimately is with you, right? And taking care of you.

Speaker #1
And my family. Moving forward with my son and my husband, right?

Speaker #0
So let’s talk about the gastric bypass surgery then. How did that come about? It sounds like you were doing a lot of work in your 20s. You really made, you know, big progress. And tell me about just the decision to have gastric bypass. I know that’s not an easy decision.

Speaker #1
No, it’s not. It wasn’t at all. And I did do well in my 20s. and I learned how to eat, you know. healthy food, 1200, 1500 calories a day. And like I said, I’m only five one, you know, and, and walking was good for me running. I did a lot, but I managed to, I was like 125 pounds or so when I got married. And, but like I shared, I was, I met my husband, maybe I didn’t in grad school. We were both in seminary and he’s a pastor and we moved to Baltimore and just being. married and in seminary because there were other things I realized I had not really been trained well for. And his family system was very different from mine. And my reaction to stress is eat. And people talk about that as if it’s like this normal thing. And it’s like, well, I think a lot of people have that reaction, but mine was seriously that reaction. And I noticed there were times when I was hiding food for my husband. There were things I was doing. I was putting food on my desk at work. all kinds of things like that. But when things got really hard in the pastorate, my weight, and so I guess 1999 was a hard year. And my grandfather committed suicide. My grandmother then died of a stroke while after having aneurysm surgery, she never came out. Things at church were really hard. Baltimore is a big city. It’s a harder city to live in. And I just was not doing well at all. I guess I had gotten up to about 300, 310 pounds. And my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. And she was only 60. And that’s not young, young to be diagnosed, but it’s still young considering general age. And I was working at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center and was able to get her in to see someone. But I knew having worked at the oncology center that obesity is one of the largest contributors to any kind of cancer. And… When you walked out of the building, there were yellow lines beyond which you had to stand in order to smoke a cigarette, right? Because we want to protect people from secondhand smoke. But you walk in and there were vending machines and drink machines, and it was really easy to access that kind of thing. But I started realizing…

Speaker #0
And I learned a lot about physiology and I started understanding ghrelin and how that works and all the different hormones that affect that your fat cells actually secrete hormones that tell your body we’re supposed to do this. This is how we stay safe. So I found not only my genetics, but my physiology working against me. And I was still under a lot of stress because not only was it hard at church, but now my mother was diagnosed with cancer. And I started looking at. options. What do I have? What are my options? And so I initially wanted to do the gastric sleeve just because that’s much less drastic. It’s much more, it’s reversible. I don’t know why I would think I would want something that was reversible, but just because we always want to weigh out, what are my options? I’m an Enneagram six. So I want all of my options covered. All that to say, I tried to do the gastric sleeve because I just wanted to have my options covered and it didn’t feel is scary. as like cutting your insides and changing your plumbing, you know? And my insurance said no. And they said, we appreciate that and we understand why, but the success rate with a gastric sleeve is nowhere near. At the time, this was in 2005, the Ruin Y, which is the classic gastric bypass, was the Cadillac of bypass surgeries and weight loss surgeries. And it was considered the safest, most effective, the most long lasting and just with the best success. And so I appealed that and I pulled from journals because I was in medical research. I pulled from all this stuff and they still said, here’s your option. You can have gastric bypass or you can just continue the way you’re going. And I said, oh, darn. So I looked at my husband and I said, if we do gastric bypass, there’s things that have to change. I can’t have sugar. I can’t have soda. I can’t, you know, small portions. And the way you eat will have to change. And the other piece that I researched was that another thing that obesity affects is fertility. And we had been married 2005. We’d been married 10 years at the time, and we weren’t getting pregnant. And so here I was, 36, 37, thinking my days are numbered if I want to be a mom. And because of those things, that just said. I said, I’m going to do it. And Hopkins had one of the better bariatric surgery centers there in Baltimore. And so I met with a young surgeon and she said, oh my gosh, your mindset is perfect. And she said, I think by the time we were ready to go, she said, I think you’re going to be my poster child. And I’m like, well, that’s encouraging to hear. But part of that, Heather, was that I was talking with a counselor for two years beforehand who helped me make decisions. And then that family dynamics counselor was talking about. And all the way through gastric bypass and an entire year after gastric bypass. And he looked at me one day and said, I have never watched anyone do anything more courageous than what I watch you go through. And it isn’t an easy thing. It is a hard surgery. It is the kind of surgery that you have to change beforehand and then you have to be committed. you I quit drinking. If I, once I knew I was going to have the surgery, like by Christmas, I knew I was going to have the surgery on March 31st. And so I said, all right, so does need to be out. I don’t want to have to deal with this. And they said, go on the sugar busters diet. So I did. And I lost a few pounds, but part of it was just changing my taste buds and changing what I knew to be the right things to eat. I did all the preparation work. I did all of the food prep. I got… Little things that would make it easy for me to digest. I got mashed potatoes in the house. I got lots of really good, high quality powdered protein. And I did all of those things. And I, unfortunately, at the end of the first week, ate a little bit of tuna fish. Why? I don’t know. But I did. And it got a little stuck. And I got a little scared. And I ended up having a second surgery. Because they went in through the same, it was laparoscopic, which is nice. I knew friends that had been cut from stem to stern. And so this was nice. But they just wanted to make sure that I didn’t have a true blockage. So they went back in. But doing that so changed my understanding of what my relationship needed to be to food that for a minimum of two years, there were things I didn’t even think about touching. And I lost 185 pounds. And the lowest I have, like I said, I’m 5’1″. The lowest I’ve ever been, I think, was 116. I’m hovering right around 130, 135 right now. But I’m two years into entrepreneurship and telling myself, it’s okay. And I’m 57, right? So. I feel good, but it has been a long 16, 17 years. How long has it been? It’s been a long road where my mindset still sees me as a heavy person. I will walk past a mirror and I will go, who is she? You know, the other thing I’m doing is my hair started turning gray when I was 22. And I decided this year in March, I guess it was right around. It’s funny. Thank you. now that I mentioned that it was March, it was right around that, I guess, 18th anniversary. I was like, I’m tired of, I’m not going to not wear makeup because that’s just, I don’t feel like I wear a mask anymore. But it was the idea that I have beautiful white streaks in my hair and I don’t need to continue to color my hair. And so now I, now I doubly look in the mirror. I’m like, who’s that? Oh, we were in Target yesterday. Look at the white haired woman. But our brains? It take a lot longer to change than our bodies. And I think that’s the work that we need to understand we have to do. And anytime I’ve had three colleagues go through gastric bypass surgery, and I’m always very supportive, but I always want to know, what is your expectation? Because, and now they just prescribe it for everybody. I’m like, they need to have a good psyche valve. They need to have a good counselor because I’ve watched people just gain it all back. And it just… Breaks my heart because I know, I know how easy it is for my body to put weight back on, but I also know how hard it is for me to eat that much food. So, I mean, I know somebody who taught themselves, their bodies, how to tolerate alcohol, which we cannot do, which was never a thing for me anyway, but all of those things. So that, I’m sorry, I feel like that was very long-winded and an answer, but it’s, it needs to be comprehensive when we look at something like that. It’s not for everyone.

Speaker #1
Absolutely. No, thank you for sharing that so openly. And I think what I’m hearing is that you really need to go in very mentally prepared. This is not a diet. It’s not, we’re just going to tough it out. You know, you need willpower. You really need to know how to eat differently.

Speaker #0
Yes.

Speaker #1
How to eat better. And your reasons for the gastric bypass. were not for vanity reasons, sounds like. It was really for health reasons. You saw your mom go through a cancer diagnosis at a pretty young age. And that sounds like what prompted you to really think seriously about this. But your mindset going into it sounds like it has to be really solid and strong. And you had been doing a lot of work up until that point.

Speaker #0
Yeah. And you do. So it’s not, you have to, I went into it knowing that my, I was ready to change my life. I didn’t like where I was. And, you know, I talk about that. If women feel unfulfilled, let’s talk about what needs to change in your life. If it’s gastric bypass, if it’s my, my sister’s doing a beautiful job losing over a hundred pounds, she has Meniere’s disease. And so she needed to eat differently in order to manage a lot of that vertigo. But she’s now, she’s finally losing weight. She didn’t gain it until she had babies, right? A lot of women don’t do that. They don’t gain weight until they have babies. And she’s doing it without gastric bypass. And yet now she’s coming to me saying, so how do I eat this? And what’s, you know, oh, now you want my, yes, please. I’m happy to share my wisdom that I’ve learned over. This is how many proteins you should eat in a day. And the little food pyramid tells us this thing. But the reality is you don’t need that many carbs. You don’t need to be no carb, but you need more protein and you need healthy fats and you need all of these good things for your body to function well. And to say that things like nuts are always off the table means that I’m not getting any of those really good fats. So I have walnuts every day. And I’ve learned how to eat certain things in certain ways and make sure I get my protein in. But I eat popcorn every Friday night. I mean, we have family movie night and I have a big bowl of popcorn. And I still maintain my weight, you know, because I want it fresh popped. It’s like that’s my splurge. So. understanding how your body works. I mean, this, I think this goes back to anything we need to know is understanding who we are and how we function. If it’s mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically, we need to know. We are taught to take answers from other people. We are taught to take answers from experts. And I see this in ADHD. We had to become, my son’s adopted, right? So we had to become advocates and understand ADHD without having that diagnosis in our family before. And when people tell me, well, my GP says this, I’m like, let me explain to you what a general practitioner is. They know a little bit about everything. The specialist knows everything about that one thing, right? My sister said, my GP thought this about my ear, but when I see the specialist, it’s like he knows all of it. I mean, I spent 25 years in the medical field. That’s why they specialize. We need to be willing to think critically for ourselves, advocate for ourselves, and be willing to take the hard steps in order to actually achieve the things that we know we can and we want to achieve and to believe that we deserve it.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Absolutely. And it sounds like you just in your process with this gastric bypass have learned to advocate for yourself and not listen to your intuition. Can we call it or, you know,

Speaker #0
just your gut,

Speaker #1
your inner knowing, whatever. Rather than relying on like the outside people telling you how it should be. It sounds like you really have a gut. good grasp on this just inner knowing, you know, to make your decisions about your weight and what you’re eating, how much, giving yourself permission to eat healthy fats and nuts and not go out into the realm of like fad diets and just that, you know, do’s and don’ts and rules. And does that make sense? Is that, am I on the track with that? It does.

Speaker #0
I do want to be able to put the caveat in there. I’m not immune to that, right? This is not a straight road. This is a wandering, weavy, turn around in circles road. And I learned through the mistakes. I learned through trying a fad diet. I learned through, I did well for a little while on 5-2 fasting. I did well for a little while on the super high protein. But the reality is I know what my body needs. And at 57, it might be different than it was at 37 or 47. And it may be that my expectations of my body weighing 116 pounds at 57 are completely unrealistic. Now, I’m not here to tell you that I’m not going to try and get down to about 120, 125 again. But I have tried the fad diets. And in between the bulimian depression diagnosis and the inpatient and the gastric bypass, I did American weight loss. I did new system. I did all of those and I had limited success with each one, but you know, I’ve tried them. So when I say to someone, I’ve tried it all, this is where I landed. It may not be for you. I can honestly say that, you know, even with exercise, I’m learning what my body can and cannot do. Every good doctor will tell you that you know your body better than anyone else. And if you’re not listening to what your body has to say, then nobody else can help you and nobody else can advocate for you. And I think that’s just a really important point.

Speaker #1
The important thing is that it seems like time and time again, maybe you went back to yourself. You were forgiving yourself and then realized that the gastric bypass is probably your best option for you. Yeah, it’s not for everybody.

Speaker #0
Right. Certainly not for everybody. Some of this is since my gastric bypass. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, it just is. I mean, it’s because it’s not a magic pill. It’s not you take it and then you don’t have to do anything. You still have to live a lifestyle. You still have to care for yourself. I still exercise and I still walk and I still log my food because otherwise I hide food, right? That’s my tendency. Some people may not need to do that, but I’m really good at sneaking one or two things. Still, all these years later, that’s something that my body says. Or my brain says, oh, we need to like fix this stressful thing. And I just do. So I have to be aware and start writing my food down. And when I’m really honest, I just do better.

Speaker #1
That works well for you. And that’s great. Yeah. Some people hate writing their food down. Some people can’t live without it. And whatever works for you individually is good. Is good. Exactly. So let’s talk about emotional resilience. because I know, you know, gastric bypass being so… life-changing, and it is truly a life-changing surgery. I mean, you cannot eat like you used to. How does emotional resilience, because I know you mentioned this in your bio and the people and the women that you work with, cultivating emotional resilience, how did that play a role with you? How is it playing a role with you right now and just in life in general with the women that you coach?

Speaker #0
So back to my counselor friend, Terry, one of the other things that he taught me was emotions are like wind blowing through a screen door. If you put something up there that blocks the wind from being able to blow through the screen door, it’s going to blow the door off the hinges. You’ve got to allow the wind to blow through. Now, you may not want it. You want it to be latched or something so it doesn’t go slap, But that’s an analogy that’s helped me. But another one that’s helped me is I grew up going to the ocean every year. And in Korea, we went to a beach and then back and forth to Hawaii. And I have been in Hawaii where I have been. All of a sudden, there’s a six or eight foot wave and I’m a little person and I’m upside down with my head stuck in the sand. But realizing if I just hang on, it’s going to go over and I’m going to be okay. That’s what I call emotional resilience is understanding that emotions are just that. They just are wind or a wave that flows through and that who we are is not dependent upon our emotional state. It is not dependent on even understanding our emotions. But the resiliency, resilience itself, the definition is basically being able to get up when you fall down. And so there are some people that have that natural ability. My mother seemed to have that natural ability. She was like a bottle of champagne. You know, the bubbles would pop, you know, the cork would pop and the bubbles would happen. And then she would need to like allow that to resurface. But being willing to go through the hard things. And being willing to say, all right, I don’t want to do this and I don’t feel safe doing this. This goes back to the Enneagram part. I’m going to do it anyway because I know that building up like a good strong tree, a good taproot of knowing who I am and a tree that can bend with the wind as it blows so that I realize these are just emotions. They may feel really, really strong, but I don’t have to run from them. I don’t have to fight them. I can just let them blow through. and they don’t define me. My emotions no longer define me. There are times when I will walk into my husband, he works from home as well, walk into his office and I’ll sit down. And he knows when I do that, he should turn around and listen. I’ll just say, I’m feeling a lot of anxiety today and I just need to tell you that. So it’s just getting it out of my system, learning that that’s how I experience resilience is by acknowledging the emotions that are there. thanking them for the work that they’re doing in my life, right? So I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety. I think I’m really scared about giving this talk, or maybe I’m just really excited because they feel the same. So what is it? And then having somebody to talk that through makes all the difference. But I’ve also learned I can do that to myself in the mirror. So sometimes I will just go in my bathroom and just start talking. I’m telling you all my secrets, like now my throat’s closing to talk about all my secrets, but it makes a difference. Being able to look myself in the mirror if I’m really angry, pretend I’m like just chewing somebody out because that is the emotion that I’m not allowed to express in my history. Anger is not okay. Like women are not supposed to be angry, you know? And so for me, being able to express that anger, just really like give them a piece of my mind. And then I’m, oh, okay. I may never need to do that. But that sure, that allowed the emotion to blow through. And the more we experience, some of it we… plan on experiencing like a gastric bypass. Some of it we don’t, like the death of my mother in 2017. Some of it we do, like adopting a child or we don’t, being told I can’t have a baby. You know, I mean, all of those things, as long as we allow ourselves the grace to let those emotions blow through, we will develop the kind of resilience that means we can get through anything.

Speaker #1
You also talk about intentional. optimism. And I’m just really curious, you know, like, I know we’ll end with this, you know, because I just, I love, I love this, the, I just love the words intentional optimism. So let’s talk about what that is. I know you work with your clients on this. You say that it provides the framework for how and what we do. And it’s the attitudes and mindsets we employ and embody to live out our own values. goals, and dreams with excellence. So I’m intrigued.

Speaker #0
Okay. Well, in a nutshell, it is a lifestyle and it consists of six tenets that I boiled down after my mother died. I said, what do I believe and why do I believe it? And what do I want to stand for? And I just made like a big brain dump and words. This took several weeks to come up with what I call the tenets of intentional optimism. And the first is optimistic, which includes hope. And it includes positivity and moving forward. The second is being present. And that includes wonder. And I call it grown-up wonder. If I know how things work, it’s more wonderful to me than not knowing how they work. But it also includes kindness and just being present with other people. Because a lot of times we think of presence as being… in the moment or with other people. The third is energetic, which includes excitement and joy and being willing to share that with others. Even going so far as to saying, I get to manufacture my own, right? When we know ourselves, we know we can do things that will raise that excitement for us and then we can share it with other people. The fourth is courage and it is, or being courageous, and it includes being undaunted, like seeing the mountain and knowing we can climb it. The resiliency I talked about, that’s where That’s all part of courage. And the fifth one is wisdom or being wise. And one of the things I was never comfortable with was being a wise person. I just never thought that was okay. But the reality is we’ve been around the sun a certain number of times. We have all these experiences. We have our own stories that we can share. And if we respect ourselves and other people enough to share them, then that’s a way that we can live in wisdom. And then it’s all kind of bookended with intentionality. It includes… having a plan and being proactive and being willing to figure out what needs to happen next so that I can walk with my head up, looking at the horizon and be able to pivot whenever I need to, rather than looking down at whatever cracks I might be trying not to step on or trip over. But intentional optimism is the daily, it’s how we do what we do. It’s the daily practices of being willing to say, I’m going to be courageous today, or I’m just… And I love that word, undaunted, you know, or I’m willing to share my wisdom with you.

Speaker #1
Yeah, it sounds like a really important framework for living life. It is for me. Yeah. And you touched on core values, too. And that’s also equally as important to, I think, just adding into your framework of who you are, right? Your beliefs, really. You’re really like deep down, you know. strong beliefs that you don’t want to waver from?

Speaker #0
Well, it’s the easiest way to have self-awareness is to figure out what your core values are and to understand that the beliefs are what your, the core values are what your beliefs are built on. So when you understand that your core values may be respect or like I said, belonging. So for me, that being weird and being different, I’m not that, I don’t know, I’m maybe not that weird, but being different meant that I didn’t necessarily belong. And so I was always doing something. I believed I didn’t belong. I believed that I was broken. I believed that I needed to be different. So I was always trying to do something to fix that, always trying to do something to alleviate that pain of living in tension with not feeling like I belonged. So I think it’s just important to understand that foundation, but that’s how I work with people. And I think that even on a weight loss or a healing journey for any kind of food, Um, gosh, what is the word I’m looking for? Bulimia or anorexia, an addiction or anything like that. One of the best things to do is to know who you are and to understand that you’re good. There’s nothing, I mean, your core values, you’re not going to find anything in there that’s bad. You’re not going to find greed. You’re not going to, when you look, you’re not going to find those things. You’re going to find things like, I need to belong and I want other people to belong, or I need to be respected and I want others to be respected. So that’s when we can start really being honest with ourselves, looking in the mirror and saying, it’s okay to be me.

Speaker #1
And you mentioned that before we just got on our recording that you have a freebie, right, to give to the audience.

Speaker #0
I do. I have a downloadable exercise that will kind of walk you through how to kind of start the process of your core values. And it’s really simple. It’s at my website, theintentionaloptimist.com, but it’s forward slash foodstories. So it’s very easy to find it. And I’m sure you’ll include it in the show notes. But it’ll just kind of, if you’re a self-starter, if you’re somebody that works well with just reading the instructions and going, it’ll give you a really good start. If you’re somebody who needs a little more, I have other options there listed on there. But to me, it is so important that we know it that I’ll give it away for free.

Speaker #1
That sounds fantastic. Thank you very much. And I will definitely put that in the show notes for sure. So people can easily find that. And Andrea, thank you so much. This has been a insightful conversation and you’ve been really a delight to talk to. And I appreciate you being on today.

Speaker #0
So thank you. Thank you. It’s my pleasure. And it is my desire that my story encourages and helps others.

Speaker #1
Yes. And that is my intention as well, is just to get people’s stories. out into the open so other people can feel less alone and know that other people are going through similar situations. So thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Speaker #0
Thank you.

Speaker #1
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.