It’s Not What Food Can Do To You, It’s What Food Can Do For You in Midlife

Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed by food choices and the constant pressure of diet culture? Join host Heather Carey in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, where she delves into the complexities of food and wellness for women in midlife. Heather’s mission is to transform the narrative around food from one of fear and anxiety to a source of nourishment and joy. As a culinary nutritionist, she critiques the pervasive diet culture that bombards women with fear-based messaging, leading to confusion and self-doubt about what to eat.

In this episode, Heather shares her insights on how these food beliefs can create a strained relationship with nourishment, resulting in decision fatigue and a loss of trust in one’s own body. She emphasizes the importance of intuitive eating, encouraging women to listen to their bodies and embrace a healthy lifestyle that prioritizes nourishment over perfection. With practical nutrition advice and healthy eating tips, Heather provides listeners with the tools to overcome food confusion and reclaim their relationship with food.

Heather introduces her community, The Well-Nourished Woman, a supportive space designed for women to engage in meaningful conversations about food, health, and their personal food journeys without the pressure of diet culture. This episode is a call to action for all women to embrace a calmer, more joyful relationship with food, highlighting that meals should be a source of comfort and support rather than stress and anxiety.

Whether you’re navigating menopause health, exploring midlife nutrition, or simply looking for empowering women’s health insights, this episode is packed with valuable information. From the Mediterranean diet to sustainable eating practices, Heather covers a wide range of topics that resonate with women 40 and over. Discover how to ditch diet myths and embrace mindful eating practices that nourish your body and soul.

Join Heather Carey on this transformative journey as she empowers women to embrace their midlife changes with confidence and joy. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to reshape your food beliefs and cultivate a healthier, more fulfilling relationship with food. Tune in now and start your personal nutrition journey toward a nourished, empowered life!

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Transcripts:

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 the Real Food Stories podcast. Before we get into today’s episode, I just want to say this. If you are someone who feels confused, overwhelmed, or honestly just tired of all the noise around food and wellness like I am right now, you’re exactly who I created my community for. It’s called The Well-Nourished Woman, and it’s a space for women, especially in midlife, who want a calmer, more grounded relationship with food, their bodies, and their health. This is not about diets, it’s not about trends, and it’s not about fear-based rules. It’s just real conversations about what it actually means to nourish yourself in this stage of life. I want your nourishment and your health. to be a bonus for you, a success. And that is what the membership is all about. I want you to take the next year and really focus in on you because the time is now. We’re not getting any younger. We’re not getting any healthier just because and just because we can get away with things. The time is now to empower yourself to be the healthiest, the strongest, just… and the most energetic and happiest that you can be. My Well-Nourished Woman community is all about having meaningful conversations with relevant topics. I’m gonna bring in experts. I am teaching cooking classes in there and so much more. So I’ll share more about it at the end, but I wanted to name it here right now because today’s episode is really at the heart of what the community is about. Okay, I’ve been thinking so much about this lately because it’s just been up in my radar. But somewhere along the way, food became, I think, literally something to fear. All food. And I don’t mean it in a rational, like I have a food allergy kind of a way. I mean culturally, emotionally, and psychologically. Food went from being something we grew, we cooked, we shared and enjoyed, to something we are analyzing, tracking, optimizing, restricting, avoiding, and just second guessing all the time. It’s like every few months there’s a new villain in the food world, right? First it was fat back in the 80s. Carbs are always in there somewhere, you know, being the enemy. sugar, gluten, seed oils, lectins, insulin spikes, then inflammation. It’s always something and it always goes back to our food. Now, every week, it seems like there’s another headline telling you that the thing you ate yesterday is just quietly destroying your health. Don’t eat canola oil. Don’t have beans. They have lectins in them. And the message underneath it all, is basically your body cannot be trusted. Food is dangerous. And unless you’re managing it correctly, correctly, according to whatever wellness influencer out there, you’re just doing it wrong. You are doing food wrong, which is such a strange place to land when you think about it, because eating is one of the most basic human acts there is. We’ve been feeding ourselves since the beginning of time. Long before macro tracking and microbiome testing and biohacking and whatever new supplement has dropped on Instagram and… Let’s put an honorable mention into the GLP-1s like Ozempic, which just stops you from eating. So now I feel like eating just feels like a constant medical decision. We’ve lost the joy in eating. Should I eat this? Is it inflammatory? Will this spike my blood sugar? Is this bad for my hormones? Is this good for my hormones? Is this going to make me gain weight? Is this aging me? I mean, honestly, it just is starting. As a culinary nutritionist, someone who has been in the food and nutrition world for decades, it’s getting exhausting to me. And as a nutritionist, I just, I see this all the time. So you might not notice it as much as I am, but I see it all the time, especially with women in midlife. Women who are smart, educated, health-focused, and complete. completely anxious about food. So they’re not asking anymore, what do I feel like eating? They’re asking, what am I allowed to eat? What are the food rules? And that’s the shift I want to talk to you about today, because I think somewhere along the way, we turned eating into a high stakes medical decision instead of a basic human act that can be also infused with joy. But we don’t see it like that anymore. And the cost of that is that a lot of women are walking around afraid of the very thing that’s supposed to support them, which is their food. So how did we even get here? What’s the food culture behind this? Honestly, how did we get to a point where the only way to lose weight is to inject yourself and then stop eating? Or that all food just is kind of enemy number one? How did eating, something humans have done pretty successfully for thousands of years, become this complicated, anxiety-producing, rule-filled thing? I think it’s a mix of a few forces that all collided at the same time. First, we had our classic diet culture. We’ve always had that. The kind many of us grew up with in the 80s and 90s, right? It was low-fat everything, Snackwell cookies, diet soda. I mean, skinny in the 90s was just really in, right? Get as skinny as possible. And I’m seeing that so much again now in 2025, 2026. Calories as the ultimate moral scoreboard, thinness as health, hunger as weakness, right? These are the things that are just infused in our diet culture. That was already enough to mess with our heads. But then diet culture got kind of a glow up and rebranded itself as wellness. Suddenly, it wasn’t about being thin. It was about being optimized, balanced, biohacked, anti-inflammatory, low-tox, hormone-friendly, gut healing, same control, new language, better lighting. And then social media poured gasoline on the whole thing. Because now… Instead of getting one diet message a year from a magazine, you’re getting hundreds of thousands of micro messages a day from influencers, podcasts, reels, newsletters, ads, people with zero training, but with very confident opinions. I mean, zero training. This drives me crazy beyond belief because there are just people out there just with They have no backgrounds in anything. And then add in wearable tech, the Oura Ring, the Apple Watch, the Whoop bands. Now we’re just not eating food. We’re monitoring ourselves constantly. Sleep scores, glucose curves, recovery metrics, which sounds empowering on the surface. you know, I like numbers, I like data, I like all of that. But for a lot of people, it actually just creates more anxiety and not less. I mean, and just by the way, I do not own a ring or a band or a watch because I don’t, I mean, I feel like I’ve had it, I have enough technology already. And I sort of like to fall back on things like my intuition and my mindfulness and those things have worked for me all the time. And another reason why I don’t love all of the technology is because now every normal human fluctuation feels like a problem that needs to get fixed. A bad night of sleep becomes a crisis. Higher blood sugar reading becomes a personal failure. A slice of bread becomes a metabolic event. I mean, I already know when I’ve had a bad night’s sleep. I don’t know if I need to have my watch tell me that I only slept 7.2 hours. I already know that. I’ve slept poorly. I’m tired. I get it. But here’s the part I think we really need to talk about. There is an entire industry that profits from you feeling confused, anxious, and slightly broken. Because if you’re calm and confident around your food, you don’t need constant products or endless testing. You don’t need to take food sensitivity testing and you don’t need to keep buying the next protocol, plan, the next supplement, or the next device. But if you believe your body is fragile, unpredictable, and always one wrong meal away from disaster, Well, that’s a business model for some wellness influencer. And midlife women are the perfect target because our bodies are changing so much right now and our hormones are shifting and our weight is being distributed around and our sleep is changing and our energy is changing that it is wildly confusing to be a woman in midlife. So instead of saying to yourself, your body is adapting and we can support it, the message now has become something’s wrong with you and you need to fix it. Fix your hormones, fix your metabolism, fix your gut, fix your inflammation, fix your glucose, fix your cortisol, fix your mitochondria. Do you even know what that means? Do you know what your mitochondria is exactly? Okay. It’s just endless and it keeps you looking outward. for answers instead of learning how to listen inward. Now, somewhere along the way, we stopped trusting our own bodies and started outsourcing that trust to devices, data, and people on the internet, people with no credentials, no training, no nothing behind them, just selling products, selling promises. And I think that’s a big part of why food feels so stressful now. It’s no longer just nourishment. It’s information. It’s performance. It’s self-optimization. And it’s our identity. And that’s a heavy emotional load to put on something you’re supposed to do three times a day, plus snacks. That’s something that we have to be thinking about all day long. All right. So if food isn’t the enemy, then what is it actually doing for us? Because when you strip away all the trends and the noise and the fear-based messaging, food is actually pretty simple, if you think about it. It’s how your body keeps itself going. It’s how you build tissues and hormones and you repair things and you fuel your brain, you regulate your nervous system, and you literally stay alive with food. And I think we’ve made this way more complicated than it needs to be. We talk about food now like it’s some kind of behavioral experiment or metabolic gamble, when really it’s just input. It’s information and fuel going into a very intelligent system that knows what to do with it. Our bodies know what to do. When you eat, you’re not trying to hack your body. You’re giving it what it needs to function. That’s it. Not perfectly, not optimally, just… functionally over time. And especially in midlife, this is such an important reframe because food stops being about weight control and starts being about support. You’re not eating to manipulate your body anymore. You’re eating to take care of it. You’re feeding muscles you want to keep, bones you want to protect, a brain you want to stay sharp, energy you want to actually have during the day. But when food is framed as dangerous or inflammatory or constantly doing something to you rather than for you, what happens is that people start relating to eating from a place of tension instead of trust. Every meal feels loaded. Every choice feels like it has consequences. And that’s just not how the body actually works. Your body is designed to handle a wide range of foods. It adapts. It adjusts. It responds over time, not meal by meal. One lunch does not make or break your health. One dinner does not determine your hormone balance. And one snack is not ruining your metabolism. The bigger picture here matters so much more than we’re led to believe. Regular meals, enough food, variety of food, a basic level of nourishment that’s consistent. That’s what actually supports health long-term, not perfection. and cutting things out, not micromanaging every ingredient that goes into your food. And there’s another piece of this that I think is really overlooked, which is the nervous system side of things. When you’re constantly stressed about food, when you’re tracking, restricting, worrying, second-guessing yourself, that stress is real. It’s physiological. That stress affects digestion. your hormones, appetite, and your cravings. So ironically, a lot of the health behaviors that people adopt around food end up creating more stress in your body and not less. So what actually helps the body function better is feeling supported, eating regularly, eating enough, feeling satisfied, and enjoying food without guilt. Letting meals be normal instead of loaded with meaning. Not because you found the perfect way to eat. There is no perfect way to eat. But because you stopped treating food like something that needed to be controlled. So there’s a cost around, you know, all this food fear that we have. There’s a price that you’re going to have to pay for that. So if that’s what food actually is meant to do, support us, nourish us, keep us functioning, then I think the real question becomes, what has all this fear around food been doing to us instead? And this is the part I think a lot of women don’t realize because it’s become so normal. Being tense around food, feeling guilty around food, overthinking every meal, feeling like you’re either being good or you’re off track. Needing rules in order to feel okay about eating. I mean, I see this constantly in my work. Women who technically know a lot about nutrition, right? We know a lot. There’s the internet, right? We know a lot about food. They’ve read the books. They’ve listened to the podcast, tried the diets. And yet food feels stressful. Eating feels like a decision that requires mental energy. There’s this low-grade anxiety running in the background all the time. Am I doing this right? Am I eating too much? Am I eating too little? Am I eating too many carbs? Am I getting enough protein? Is this bad for me? Should I avoid this? Should I be better than this? And that kind of mental load just adds up. It creates decision fatigue. It disconnects you from your own hunger and fullness cues. It makes you rely on external rules instead of internal signals. And it turns something that’s supposed to be grounding and stabilizing and joyful into something that feels charged and emotional. And then there’s the guilt piece, all right, the shame, the sense that if your body isn’t doing what you want it to do, if your weight isn’t where you think it should be, or your energy isn’t great, or your digestion just feels off, it must be because you’re not eating well enough. So instead of curiosity, it just goes back to self-blame. Instead of support, there’s a self-correction. Think about it. Think about how you view food. Are you correcting yourself? Are you shaming yourself? Are you blaming yourself? And what I find really ironic is that this fear-based relationship with food often pulls people further away from their health, not closer to it. Because when eating feels stressful, people start skipping meals or they restrict. or they swing between control and rebellion, or they stop trusting themselves entirely around food. Food becomes something to manage instead of something to experience. And for a lot of women, especially in midlife, this shows up as a kind of quiet exhaustion. They’re tired of thinking about food all the time, tired of trying to get it right, tired of feeling like their body is a problem they need to solve. And so many women I know are leaning now into GLP-1s like Ozempic or Manjaro to quiet down that discussion, that never-ending discussion they have in their heads. And that’s really the cost of food fear. It’s not just about what you eat. It’s about how much mental and emotional space food takes up in your life. And when food becomes a source of stress instead of support, it stops doing the very thing it’s meant to do, help you feel nourished, steady, and cared for in your own body. So the goal here isn’t to control your body with food. Okay, so then what is it? What is our goal here? I think the goal is actually much simpler than we’ve been led to believe. It’s to support your body, to give it what it needs consistently without making food the center of your entire mental universe. We can take food off of its pedestal and just look at it as just food. And for most people, that doesn’t require a new diet. It doesn’t require cutting anything out. It doesn’t require tracking, measuring, optimizing every bite, injecting yourself. It usually starts with a much quieter shift. Eating regularly, eating enough, and paying attention to how food actually makes you feel. Not in a moral way, not in a good or bad way, but in a physical embodied way. How does it feel? How’s your energy a few hours after you eat? How’s your mood? Are you satisfied or still thinking about food? Do you feel steady or wired or depleted? Those kinds of questions are way more useful than any food rule because they reconnect you with your own body instead of outsourcing your decisions to someone else’s system or medication. And I think that’s really the heart of this, learning to trust yourself again around food. Letting your body be part of the conversation, letting eating be something that supports your day instead of something that requires constant analysis. This doesn’t mean eat whatever and don’t think about health. I’m not talking about that. I’m not saying that in any way, shape, or form. It just means shifting from a mindset of control to a mindset of care, from micromanaging to listening, from fear to curiosity. It means building meals that feel grounding and satisfying, including enough protein, fiber, enough real food to actually sustain you, and letting pleasure be part of it, letting satisfaction be part of it, and maybe most importantly, letting food take up less space in your head. Because when you stop treating eating like a problem to solve, It frees up so much energy for the rest of your life, for your work, your relationships, your creativity, your movement, your rest, all the things that actually make life feel full. The goal isn’t to eat perfectly. It’s to eat in a way that feels supportive, sustainable, and kind to the body you’re living in, not for a week or for a reset, but for the long haul. I think the biggest thing I want to leave you with today is this. If food feels stressful for you, you’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re just living in a culture that’s made something very simple feel very complicated. And it makes sense that you’re tired. It makes sense that you’re confused. I’m tired of watching it. I mean, it’s just exhausting to me sometimes. someone who has made a lot of peace around food and my body. It’s really disheartening to watch what’s happening out in the world and on the internet and social media. So it makes sense that you’ve tried to do everything right and still don’t feel settled in your body. Because most of the messaging around food right now is built on fear. Fear of aging, fear of weight gain, fear of getting it wrong, fear that your body is somehow working against you. And I really believe we deserve something better than that. We deserve a relationship with food that feels supportive instead of stressful, steady instead of chaotic, and grounded instead of constantly up for debate. That’s honestly why I created my community, The Well-Nourished Woman. It’s a space for women, especially in midlife, who are tired of dieting, tired of wellness trends and confusion. And… Tired of feeling like their bodies are a problem to fix. It’s not about perfect eating or about tracking or restricting or optimizing. It’s about learning how to nourish yourself in a way that actually fits your real life with real food, real conversations, and a lot more compassion than rules. So if this episode resonated with you, if you’re craving a calmer, more grounded way of relating to food in your body, you’re exactly who my community is for. And whether you join the community or not, I hope you take this with you. Food is not something to fear. It’s not something that we have to be always working on. It’s something that we want to be learning from. And it’s something that can support you. Food can support you over time in ways that are quiet, steady, and human. You don’t need to eat perfectly. You just need to eat in a way that helps you feel nourished in the body you’re living in right now. Okay, so I’ve said my piece around food. I would love to see you in the community and have a great day, everybody. See you next week. 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.