Discovering Sustainable Weight Loss: A Nutritionist’s Journey to Mindful Eating and Self-Compassion in Midlife

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the endless diet fads and myths surrounding weight loss? You’re not alone! Join host Heather Carey on this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, where she opens up about her personal weight loss journey, sharing the transformative tools that led to lasting results. As a dedicated nutritionist and chef, Heather reveals why traditional diets often fall short, emphasizing the importance of sustainable practices over temporary fixes.

In this episode, Heather dives deep into a multifaceted approach to weight loss, encouraging listeners to explore their personal motivations. She passionately discusses the significance of understanding your ‘why’—for Heather, it revolves around being a responsible parent and managing health risks. This episode is packed with nutrition advice tailored for those navigating the complexities of women’s health, especially during midlife and menopause.

One of the key insights Heather shares is the power of journaling as a tool for processing emotions tied to food and weight. By fostering self-compassion and practicing mindful eating, she guides listeners toward making healthier lifestyle choices that resonate with their unique journeys. Heather’s experience as a culinary nutritionist shines through as she highlights the importance of tracking food intake for awareness, cooking at home, and meal planning—essential components of a sustainable eating strategy.

Furthermore, Heather addresses lifestyle factors such as exercise and stress management, reinforcing the idea that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to weight loss. Instead, she encourages listeners to break free from diet myths and discover what truly works for them. By sharing her own weight loss stories, Heather aims to inspire others to embark on their personal food journeys with confidence and positivity.

As you tune in, you’ll also learn about the influence of family food traditions and how they shape our food beliefs and culture. This episode is not just about weight loss; it’s a holistic approach to wellness that encompasses culinary wellness, midlife nutrition, and the seven pillars of abundance. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insights from Heather Carey, a compassionate voice in the realm of nutrition and health. Discover how to cultivate a healthy relationship with food and embrace your journey towards a balanced, fulfilling life.

Join us for this empowering episode of Real Food Stories and take the first step towards understanding your body and nurturing your health!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back. I’m so glad you’re here with me again 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 relationship to health, your weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Today I’m going to let you in on my weight loss story and the tools I used to lose weight and keep it off for good. These tools I used are not secrets or anything that is not accessible to you, but when you think about going on a traditional diet to lose weight, a lot of my tools are simply non-existent. Diets, like I have said a million times before, you’ve probably heard me say this, hand you a meal plan with some suggestions and rules to follow. They package it in a lot of bells and whistles and promises, and they want you to follow said diet and then send you on your way. They don’t really care whether or not you gain the weight back. They actually want you to gain the weight back, so you go back on their diet and you continue buying their packages and their boxed foods and everything. I mean, think about Weight Watchers. How many times have you been on Weight Watchers? I know many, many women who have been on and off Weight Watchers a dozen times. So when you are on a diet and you’re gaining the weight back, there’s no way to show you how to prevent you from doing that. When I lost weight years ago, I was determined for this not to happen. I had mentioned this in previous episodes that a while back when I was a young mom with three kids under the age of two, I was a very mindless eater. Even though I had gone to school for clinical nutrition and cooking school, I knew all of the things. I knew all of the things. And I still was very stuck in a trap of… eating to soothe myself. I was exhausted. I was stressed out. And so I really got to a point where it was time for me to lose the last 20 to 25 pounds that I really was holding on to that I could not call baby weight anymore. So I’m going to share my story about how I lost weight and kept it off even years later. So first off, I just want to say weight loss for me was very multifaceted. And I 100% believe that if you want to lose weight and keep it off forever, or at least in the long term, you must adopt a multifaceted approach, period. This is not a just do this one thing and you will lose weight. You will likely gain it back. You need the other skills to help support you on the way. I was so over the diet mindset of losing and gaining. I talked about this in last week’s episode. I was done with losing weight, then blowing it and gaining all the weight back. It was too confusing. It was too punishing and really so unproductive for me. If I was going to do this, I was going to be all in. Now, I’m totally wired for this kind of thinking. Once I make a decision to set a goal and achieve something, I am in all the way. I was going to get into a growth mindset like I had talked about last week and lose weight with the intention of learning permanent skills and never have to go through this again. I wanted to prove I could do this. Again, I’m a nutritionist. I was going to literally just be my own science experiment too, because like I had mentioned also last week, I had a lot of clients who came to me at the beginning and just said, give me the diet plan, give me the diet. And there wasn’t a lot of success with that. So I wanted to really figure out a way that would be permanent and would work. Yes, I wanted to look and feel better in my clothes. I wanted to feel comfortable. I had spent my life stressing out about clothes shopping, wondering if my clothes would fit in the summer, covering up. I know this sounds vain, but… this takes me to my first tool that I had used, which was really to understand why I wanted to do this. I realized quickly. though, that it had to be more than wearing a certain pair of pants or getting myself into a bikini. These reasons were, they’re fine, but they were fleeting because winter would come around and I could just cover up in big sweaters until spring. It just wasn’t enough for me. But the why was definitely something that I had to incorporate. So the most important thing it. of losing weight first off is to get a grip on why you want to do it. Now take it from me, because this has not been my first rodeo with big giant goals. And when you are encountering something that is big and sort of scary, the only thing that is going to keep you on track is to fixate on exactly why you are doing what you are doing. And it has to be a very firm and compelling reason. Getting into a bikini was not enough of a reason for me. The reason is the thing that gets you through the times when you feel like giving up or you just don’t want to do it anymore. Your why is what gets you back on track when things just get a little off base. So for me, my why centered around my kids. You know, if you’re a mom, you might fully understand exactly what I mean. Once you have kids, you start to feel a responsibility towards them. I mean, at least I did, to just take care of yourself so you can take care of them. My dad had died when I was really young. He died from cancer, and while there was nothing he could do about it, it obviously left an irreplaceable hole in my life. Knowing that even a little extra weight can contribute to the lifestyle diseases, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, et cetera, I did not want to be responsible for an illness or a disease I could prevent. Now, full disclosure, sometimes we get things that our lifestyle just simply cannot help us in any way. I totally get that. But I felt very, very strongly that I had to do my part to feel in control of my body. And losing weight just seemed like an obvious one to me. I wanted to feel in control rather than out of control. And that is what diets can do to you. Diets are messy that way. Eventually, the diet just becomes unsustainable and you end up feeling like a failure and out of control of yourself. So no more for me. So my second tool that I implemented in my weight loss journey was journaling. Now, this was an easy one for me. I’ve always been a journaler. I’ve been journaling since I was 10 years old. with my lock and key little like pink journal. My journal has been a lifeline for me. It’s taken me through a lot of very hard times in my life and its purpose could not have been more useful now when I was trying to really focus and lose weight and commit. Journaling for me is like talking to your most trusted friend. Your journal is never for anyone else’s eyes unless you want it to be. You know that saying, dance like no one is watching? Well, journal like no one is ever going to read it. Pour your heart out into it. Burn the pages after if you feel like you need to. There are a few years that I was journaling with the assumption that one day when I was gone, my kids would take all my journals out and read every single one of them. And so I kept myself a little guarded in my journals. But no more. I still have them. And they can read them if they want. because this is the real me. Sometimes it’s not pretty in those journals, but this is the real me. And I might end up making a sacrificial fire and burning them in the woods or something one day. The point is to get it out, get your honest, scary feelings around your weight, how you have felt growing up, feelings about your mom, your dad, anyone who judged you and on and on. But please. And this is the most important part of journaling. Please do not forget to be kind to yourself. My surprise is that I became my biggest cheerleader when I started journaling around my weight loss and, you know, when things just started to feel hard, when losing weight did not feel worth it, which then leads me to my next tool, which is practicing kindness and compassion towards yourself. As a recovering perfectionist, I know how to be super hard on myself. I knew this was going to be a challenge and I made a very firm choice not to be critical, but to stay committed. When you are losing weight in a healthy, sustainable way, There is no room in the arena for perfect. Compassion, in its simplest terms, is really treating yourself like you would a good friend. So words like, you’re doing great, I’m really proud of you for your commitment, were the words I was writing down often to myself. It might sound silly, but it worked, and it still does. I’m not perfect with this, and I want to do a future podcast around the importance of self-compassion because As the more time goes on, I am learning that self-compassion is truly the foundation to making changes within ourselves more than anything that I can tell you to do. I wanted to also circle back on journaling for a second in terms of this perfection piece, because some of you may get hung up on not having the exact right journal or the perfect pen to write with. And therefore you just. can’t start a journal practice. Try not to get hung up on any of these things. I have used hundreds of journals. I have used just random lined paper, sketch pads, my computer. There’s apps that hold your journals. You can use that on the computer, on your phone, whatever. I have done The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron on and off a dozen times, which is a daily. Practice of writing three pages in your journal first thing in the morning to help spark creativity and to simply get it all out and onto the page. It’s a very meditative type of practice. You can use journal prompts if that helps. Look at it like self-help or the cheapest therapy you’ll ever have. Trust me on this. I have been doing this for years. My next tool has to do with tracking and calorie counting. I had to get clear on what I was eating. So I spent some time tracking my calories. I know tracking calories is controversial because there are so many theories and diets that tell you not to count calories. You don’t have to count calories as long as you’re eating this way or that way. It’s not about the calories. It’s what you’re eating or it’s the timing of your eating. And I agree. There are different types of calories. You might have heard… that a calorie is not a calorie. Again, I also agree with that. Calories from broccoli are not the same as calories from a cupcake, for example. The broccoli is loaded with nutrients and a cupcake is just loaded with nothing. It’s just not. It’s all sugar and white flour. There is nothing you need from a cupcake besides a tasting good. So there are better for you calories and there are worse for you calories. But let’s debunk something right now. Now, a calorie is in fact a calorie. If I figure out how many calories I need in a day to lose weight, say for example, 1500 calories, and I want to eat 1500 cupcake calories, let me tell you something, I will lose weight. How do you think people lose weight drinking SlimFast, for example? Have you ever looked at the labels of SlimFast? The first ingredient is water, and then it just goes dangerously downhill from there. It’s just ingredients I can’t even understand. I don’t even know what they are. But people somehow lose weight doing that. It is possible, and I can say without hesitation that it’s not sustainable, though. Now switch those 1,500 calories to filling protein and fiber from vegetables and fruits, healthy fats, and whole grains. Now I’m losing weight, but I’m feeling… filled and satisfied. And this takes some investigation as to how to know how to make my 1500 calories work for me in a day so I can feel really good. I don’t feel hungry. I don’t feel starving. Tracking your food is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. You find out what you’re eating. You realize that you might have been eating much more than your 1500 calories and you become aware. You figure out what works for you, what foods feel better, what foods don’t fill you up. So there’s a lot of investigation and awareness that just comes from tracking your food, not forever, but for a little while. Which leads me to my next tool, mindful eating. As you are figuring out how to make your calories count, you will naturally build mindfulness into your day. Tracking calories is mindful. learning how to work. with a set amount of calories builds mindfulness. Mindfulness is really just the art of paying attention without judgment. It’s the pause before you start eating. It’s paying attention to hunger cues and signals and learning to distinguish between emotional hunger and physical hunger. I had mentioned that I was very much an emotional eater and drinker. I grew up this way. Tears or a bad day meant getting a cookie or going to the candy store. When I got older and was a stressed out younger mom, it meant a glass of wine or some ice cream. Eating for emotional reasons throws your physical hunger cues into a tailspin. You never really know when you’re hungry because you’re constantly soothing yourself with food at any given moment. Mindfulness was the pause I needed to stop. and ask myself if I was physically hungry or I just needed to talk to a friend, for example. And then if I was physically hungry, guess what I did? I ate food. Mindfulness also helps you pay attention to your feelings of fullness. It helps to pay attention in the kitchen when you are cooking and helps you to appreciate using all your senses with food, smelling, seeing, touching. tasting, and hearing get activated when you pay attention. So there are a lot of other things that went into my commitment to losing weight and most importantly keeping it off. I’ve talked about the relationship you want to have with your kitchen and as a chef this is one of the most important tools that you can use. We know that reducing calories, any calories, will help you lose weight And we also know that healthy eating is a… key to doing this too. Number one, if you like to eat like I do and don’t want to feel like you have to skimp on portions, vegetables and fruits need to become your best friends. Most vegetables have almost no calories. Seriously, a cup of kale has about six calories, but it’s also so full of filling fiber and water, not to mention nutrients. These foods fill you up and make you feel like you’ve eaten a lot when in reality you’ve eaten very few calories. So knowing how to cook vegetables and make them taste good is a skill. Knowing how to cook any healthy food for that matter and make it taste like you want to eat it again is definitely a skill. Now I had training but that does not mean that you can’t learn how to cook well and simply. Getting into your kitchen can feel intimidating. I totally understand that. especially if you didn’t grow up around it. But it is essential that you know how to cook your own food. It is far too easy to order out food, but the reality is when you order out or you’re eating at restaurants a lot, you lose the connection over what’s in your food. You lose the connection of the portions and how many calories are in your food. To make this so much easier, a meal planning system is vital to keeping consistent with healthy eating. week after week. Meal planning takes the guesswork out of what to eat every night. I’m definitely going to get into more detail around meal planning in a future episode because it’s that important and it is so vital for my day-to-day eating. Even my breakfast, my lunches, my dinners. So I’m definitely going to spend some more time in a future episode talking more about that. But for right now, I just want to let you know. that meal planning is really an essential tool to have when you are on a weight loss journey. And then, of course, there are some other important factors that traditional diets might skip, such as your exercise. movement, how much you sleep, how many hours you get, your stress levels, your cortisol levels, and being sure to add in something like yoga or meditating to address your stress. Again, I use and I still use all of these to some degree. Now, I’m not perfect. I don’t typically track my food anymore because I’m so aware of my food now. and my hunger and my moods. But if I ever feel like I need to nudge myself back on track, I certainly will track for a day or two. Mindfulness is my daily practice, as is journaling and meditating. It definitely all counts. It’s what keeps this weight loss journey a multifaceted experience. I want to end by saying that there is not one single way to eat and lose weight. This is how I coach my clients too. It has to, of course, work for your lifestyle and stage of life. But this is why diets are not a one-size-fit-all box of goods. They rarely are good for everybody. But shifting our mindset, knowing why you want to lose weight, having compassion for your dedication and hard work, Becoming a more mindful eater and having more command over your kitchen definitely cannot be disputed. And with that, I hope you have a great week. Please check out my show notes for any links I mentioned today in this episode. And if you want to leave your thoughts in the comments, please do. I would love to hear from you. And finally, if you loved this podcast, please do not hesitate to rate and review. Bye for now.