Breaking Free from Diet Mindset: Embrace Real Food for Lasting Wellness and Growth in Midlife

Are you tired of the relentless cycle of dieting that leaves you feeling ashamed and confused about food? Join host Heather Carey in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, where she delves deep into the pervasive diet mindset that often rears its head after indulgent holidays like the 4th of July. Heather candidly shares her own journey from the restrictive world of dieting to embracing a more mindful approach to eating, a transformation sparked during her culinary school days.

Throughout this episode, Heather challenges the traditional diet mindset myths that can trap women in a fixed mindset, stifling their growth and learning. Instead, she champions a growth mindset, one that encourages adding nutritious foods to your plate rather than restricting what you love. With a focus on healthy lifestyle choices, Heather emphasizes the significance of cooking and becoming comfortable in the kitchen as vital components for developing a healthy relationship with food.

As a culinary nutritionist, Heather provides invaluable nutrition advice that resonates particularly with women navigating midlife and menopause health. By recognizing the impact of family food influences, the diet mindset and the cultural aspects of eating, she empowers listeners to confront their own food beliefs and reshape their narratives around food. This episode is packed with healthy eating tips and insights that will inspire you to take charge of your nutrition and health.

Are you ready to break free from emotional eating patterns and the weight loss myths that have held you back? Heather’s personal food stories and her exploration of mindful eating practices will guide you in making peace with food and your body. She invites you to reflect on your own challenges and consider how a shift in your diet mindset can lead to a more positive relationship with food.

Don’t miss out on this transformative conversation! Tune in for practical tools that will help you achieve sustainable weight loss and health in the next episode. Join Heather on this journey of culinary wellness, and discover how to cultivate a life filled with abundance and joy through food.

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Hang out with Heather on IG @greenpalettekitchen or on FB HERE.

Let’s Talk!
Whether you are looking for 1-1 nutrition coaching or kitchen coaching let’s have a chat. Click HERE to reach out to Heather.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hi everybody. I hope you are doing well today. We just finished one of the biggest holidays here in the United States, the 4th of July, and for some, one of the biggest eating and drinking holidays of the year. When you are in a diet mindset, every holiday and gathering seems to be the ultimate excuse to eat and drink whatever you damn well want. Doesn’t it seem that way. Because when you spend the rest of the year restricting, dieting, shaming yourself, you might feel like you deserve a true holiday from it all, right? And right now, post-holiday, you may be feeling like you need to drag yourself back into the game, maybe do a detox or something drastic to get back on track. I’ve been seeing this a lot on social media lately, and I’m here to tell you that you can give yourself permission to finally stop doing that. Mainly because, well, it doesn’t work either on a physical level or an emotional and spiritual level. This is diet speak. They eat well, then blow it all cycle that so many women find themselves in. That roller coaster ride of toughing it out, and then letting it all go. Is it possible to live any other way? Well, yes, there is another way. And today I wanted to talk about how to completely get yourself out of the diet mindset you may be in and save yourself from one more minute of shame and confusion around food. 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 relationship to health, weight, and our bodies so that you can make peace with what you eat. Okay, so a story about ditching the diet wouldn’t be complete without me telling my story as a clinical nutritionist who finally freed herself from not only the shackles of diets, but the mindset around believing that diets were really the only way to eat. I shared before that I went to cooking school before getting my graduate degree in clinical nutrition, and it was from culinary school that I really learned to get mindful with eating. There is nothing like months of chopping, sautéing, stirring, and tasting different flavors, textures, and foods to get you in touch with eating. We spent hours talking about spices and herbs, slicing pounds of onions, using all our senses to see, feel, taste, smell the delicious flavors, and listen to the sizzle of a mise en place, sautéing in the olive oil when making a soup. Cooking school nudged me to pay attention and really look closely at how food made me feel. Did I feel dragged? down after eating a hearty winter vegetable and bean soup? Or did I feel energized? Did animal protein serve my energy better? I explored all types of vegetables, learned ways to make desserts with less refined sugar. And overall, I was taught how to make real healthy food taste delicious. So when I went to school to get my master’s degree in clinical nutrition, things were wildly different. I definitely needed and wanted to know about the science of nutrition. I realized a couple of things though when I started school. One was that I was not in cooking school anymore. This education was going to obviously be very different. Learning the science meant learning theories on how to lose weight effectively, using food to help with disease states, and coaching clients. But wow, what you a difference. There is nothing mindful about a scientific eating plan. It is actually the furthest thing from that. The science took all the attention off of using your senses to really just enjoy food. Instead, I learned about fat grams, types of carbohydrates and proteins, the use of micronutrients and fiber, and how this affects your body. All useful information, don’t get me wrong, but not a word about how to take all of these nutrients and turn them into healthy, delicious foods. you would actually like to eat. And at the same time, knowing that they were helping you improve your energy, your weight, your moods, and just make you feel good. I’m so grateful I went to cooking school. Almost all of my fellow students didn’t have a clue about how to cook, much less boil a pot of water. Many of them came into the program with such rock-solid diet mindsets that you could tell it would be impossible to sway them. I know because I was a dieter for years. I have eating disorder issues in my family. I could spot it a mile away. So my graduate program was pumping out a lot of nutritionists who could talk to you about what to eat to lose weight, i.e. the diet, and really nothing about how to eat to lose weight. Don’t get me wrong. the science is so important. Having the information on calories, knowing what a calorie is, being educated on all the micronutrients and macronutrients and how energy works in your body is absolutely necessary and vital, but it is far from learning how to make changes, how to lose weight, how to get your energy back, and how to make peace with what you eat. So when I was starting my own practice, I was determined not to go down that path. I wanted to always show you how to eat. And that started in the kitchen. That’s how I was originally trained. I wanted women to happily join me in the kitchen, to learn what I had learned, to learn like I had learned with all of their senses. I wanted you to love food as much as I did. And then I had a couple of really big reality checks. So for my first reality check, I had a lot of very determined women come into my office and say right off the bat, just tell me what to eat. And there I was feeling a lot of pressure into creating meal plans that they rarely followed and being thrown off track by the guidance of my school. Most women were so conditioned by someone else’s diet plan and to mindlessly follow it that it never occurred to them to be more mindful and intuitive with their eating. But it occurred to me, and I was typically met with so much resistance that I felt a lot of pressure to just create meal plans for women. I talked last time about the confusion around food in the last episode and how we even got here. When you don’t have solid guidance on how to nourish yourselves, eating becomes an act of desperation. When you are told by food marketers that their convenience foods are supposed to be healthy, it’s so easy to fall into the trap. And when you’re gaining weight from overeating those processed foods, sugar and alcohol, and don’t know how to get back on track, it is natural and normal to gravitate. towards the next best diet, the next shiny object. So when you start to hear that it worked for your cousin’s best friend and they lost 50 pounds without even realizing it and it was easy and look at how great they look, how can you not be intrigued? We all want fast, quick, and painless. Having to put in what seems like a lot of effort or a lot of time, especially when we live in a world of quick gratification can feel like your impatience meter is just about to go through the roof. So the second reality check I had when starting my own practice was the disconnect between eating, getting healthy, and getting into the kitchen. In order to be mindful and present with your food, you have to be comfortable in your kitchen and simply be comfortable with cooking food with all of your senses. I have to admit, I was totally unprepared for women being inhibited by their kitchens. I naively assumed that my clients would be excited to cook and would be looking forward to experimenting with new foods. What I was totally unprepared for was the tremendous amount of fear around the kitchen and food. I quickly learned that not everyone grew up with adults that cooked around them as role models, or with adults that even enjoyed food to show them how to really enjoy food themselves, or even a parent or a grandma that cooked. If you are not raised with cooks or people cooking around you, how do you know how to cook? We’re not born with a mixing spoon in our hands. And let’s add to that we women being natural born people pleasers who may or may not have picky kids, a vocal partner or husband who may or may not criticize the way things taste when you cook them. And suddenly you can feel a lot of resistance to getting in the kitchen. In turn, you may turn to your own diet or somebody else’s meal plan that you are more likely than not just throwing together food without paying mind to how it tastes, even if you like it or don’t like it. You’re thinking about following the diet, losing weight, toughing it out, sacrificing. Or making separate meals for yourself because you’re not allowed to eat what the rest of your family is eating because you are on a diet. This is such a diet mindset. If you feel this way now, I don’t blame you one bit. So many of us were raised to not enjoy food and to be on the diet and eat diet food when everyone else gets to eat meals. So as a result, a lot of fear and trepidation can just surround your kitchen. And most important, one of my biggest reality checks was I started to get confused with my mission of helping women. Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe the buckling down on a diet was the way to go. I mean, I knew that I could give women some instant, quick gratification. It wouldn’t last long, but I could do it. And after all… I was in the midst of my own mindless eating adventure. And if you want to hear a little bit more of that, just tune into episode number two of my food story. I was in the middle of raising three kids under the age of two, running my household and running my business. To put it plainly, I was doing a fair amount of numbing out with food and wine, thinking this was making me feel better or giving myself a break. I knew what made me feel so good when I was in cooking school, and I also knew that my life was getting in the way of what I believed to be so true about food and weight. I knew that diets did not work. I had been on a bunch of them growing up. But what do you do when you are busy, stressed out, and burnt out, and you really just want someone to tell you what to do and fast when you just don’t want to have to put in the work or effort. Just tell me what to eat. I hear this all the time. And make it super simple on top of it. Unfortunately, we live in a world of stress and busyness. Busy is a badge of honor for so many women. It certainly used to be for me. Saying I’m so busy must mean you are doing great things and accomplishing so much. In my world now, Busy says, I don’t have the time to care for myself first. And if you don’t have the time for you, you do not have time to care enough to lose weight in a mindful, kind way. The only way, as far as I’m concerned, to losing weight. I spent years being on and off diets, waiting for the next holiday, be it the 4th of July or Christmas or really whatever holiday. and lazily floating down that river with everyone else who said yes to drinking and eating whatever they wanted because we had the excuse of the holiday. Everyone was doing it. It was group mentality. And in turn, everyone was then rebounding off onto another diet right after. So what is the real definition of a dieting mindset and how you can we turn this around to make smart food choices that last, where you can lose weight, you can up your energy, and overall just feel really good about what you’re eating every day. Let’s just first talk about the importance of mindset. Okay, just that word. So if you’ve not read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, then you definitely should, and I will link it in the show notes. This is a book that has been around for a really long time. I think she wrote the book in 2006. It’s been updated since then, but it’s really the gold standard for defining what mindset is. You probably have heard it in some way, shape, or form. in different versions now, but Carol Dweck is really the creator of this concept of mindset. Carol Dweck is a Stanford psychologist who defined mindset as our ability to influence our lives based on our perceived ability to do so. Mindset falls into two categories, fixed and growth. In a fixed mindset, you may see one solution that is just unchangeable over time. On the other hand, a growth mindset allows you to look at what has worked, what hasn’t, and come up with new solutions to a problem. A diet mindset is a fixed mindset. This is why the diet industry is such a big business. Diets teach you one solution to your problem of losing weight and for getting healthy. Follow an unreasonable diet, eat too few calories, lose weight, burn out, and gain it back, and then start again. Think about New Year’s resolutions, for example. We make our promises, we’re really good for the month if we can even make it that long, and then it’s suddenly Super Bowl. All those alluring foods, cheap beer, you’re gathering with your friends, maybe for the first time since the holiday. and it’s so hard to resist, and you cave. Do you get the point? Diets are a one-lane solution to a superhighway problem, and one route is not correct for everyone. A diet mindset places blame and judges your self-worth. If you failed the diet, you may believe you failed yourself. And let’s have a little nutrition science here about diets and how they Thank you. actually work. When you start to diet and under eat, your brain gets really smart. It begins to believe that you are starving. And in turn, your metabolism slows down to conserve all of your calories. Your hunger and satiety hormones get confused and you likely start to overeat, not because you are a weak person or you have no willpower, but because your brain wants you you out of your self-imposed famine. Now, you’re not starving. We know that. You’re not stranded on a desert island, but your brain, being that it is, believes this. Because your metabolism is slowed down, once you start eating the way that you were eating previously, you will likely end up gaining all of that weight back and then some. This gets confusing because what happened, what went wrong, what did… I do wrong. I couldn’t control myself. I didn’t have the motivation, the willpower, the strength to keep up with the unreasonable diet. But let’s talk about the positive things and how we can shift out of a diet mindset to actually lose weight and not gain it back. In my next episode, I’m going to talk about the specific tools I use to lose weight and not gain it back. But for right now, I want to talk about… the very first most important step to losing weight, and that is to go into a weight loss goal with a growth mindset. In a growth mindset, your thinking is reset to growing, changing, and learning, to listening to your intuition and what feels right, deeply listening. A couple of things that are drastically different from a diet mindset. is thinking what you can add in rather than what you need to restrict. So adding in things like fruits and vegetables, good for you fats, lean proteins, because these foods make you feel satisfied and filled up. Another thing is you might be more open to trying new foods and curious about crowding out more undesirable ones. You feel committed in a good way because you care about yourself and your health, not… because you are judging your body against unreasonable standards. You honor and pay attention to your hunger, not your emotions. You stop eating when you are full rather than a diet giving time limits on your eating, like intermittent fasting, for example. You recognize your challenges around food and dispute the negative self-talk that we can so easily have about ourselves. You recognize that you are doing your very best and you keep at it. Most important, when you recognize the type of mindset you’re in, you begin to pay attention to the food you’re eating rather than getting caught up in the shiny object and promise of a diet that is luring you in. I hope that this helps to take some of those initial steps that I want to share with you around debunking the myths surrounding this diet mindset so you can make better choices with your weight, your health. and making peace with your body. I have a link in my show notes that can help you define mindset along with a few journal questions if you want to grab that. This will just get you thinking about how to change your mindset and be sure to tune in next time to get my very specific tools I use for losing weight and keeping it off for good. So until then, have a great week. Please rate and review if you loved this podcast. And bye for now.