Embracing Joyful Eating: A Nutritionist’s Journey to Mindful Food Choices and Body Positivity

What if I told you that joy is your birthright, especially when it comes to food? Join host Heather Carey, a compassionate nutritionist and chef, as she dives deep into the transformative power of joyful eating in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories. Heather shares her personal food journey, revealing how societal pressures and dieting myths have shaped her relationship with food and body image. This episode is not just about food; it’s about reclaiming the joy that comes with nourishing ourselves and embracing our worthiness to enjoy every bite without guilt.

Throughout the episode, Heather emphasizes the importance of self-compassion and mindfulness in creating a joyful eating experience. She skillfully distinguishes between physical hunger and emotional hunger, encouraging listeners to listen to their bodies and honor their hunger cues. With practical nutrition advice and healthy eating tips, Heather guides you on how to cultivate a positive relationship with food, allowing joy to lead the way in your eating habits.

As a culinary nutritionist, Heather also addresses the impact of social media on our perceptions of body image and eating habits. She advocates for a break from negative influences that can cloud our understanding of midlife nutrition and women’s health. By sharing her insights, she empowers listeners to embrace mindful eating practices and to challenge the food beliefs that no longer serve them.

In this episode, you’ll discover how to navigate the world of food fads and trends while focusing on what truly matters: enjoying real food and celebrating your unique personal food stories. Heather’s empathetic approach resonates with women in midlife, especially those experiencing the changes of menopause. She highlights the importance of family food traditions and how they can enrich our lives, creating a sense of belonging and joy around the dining table.

By the end of this episode, you’ll be inspired to embrace joyful eating as an integral part of your healthy lifestyle choices. You’ll learn to replace guilt with gratitude, recognizing that you are deserving of joy in every meal. So, tune in and let Heather guide you on this beautiful journey towards a more joyful and fulfilling relationship with food, where you can finally say goodbye to weight loss myths and hello to a life filled with culinary wellness!

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Let’s Talk!
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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back and if you are just tuning in with me for the first time, it is so nice to meet you. I am very glad you’re here with me today. I’m 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. I was recently listening to a talk and someone who was speaking had done a reading from a book that is based in the recovery world. And it was a very simple sentence and it said this, joy is our birthright. Joy is our birthright? I think I’ve certainly heard this phrase before, definitely about joy. things like that. But to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I really have ever let that sink in because I’ve always felt joy as a default mode was for other people, not me. Joy and happiness as a daily practice? No way. My belief was always that joy was something that had to be earned, and the effort was sometimes painstaking and grueling. Joy was after a big effort, such as toughing it out on a diet or losing 10 pounds. Then you are allowed to feel a tiny slice of joy, never during and never before. What was there to be joyful for anyway. Life was hard, and weight needed to be lost. Growing up, I had critics scrutinizing my body, telling me my body was not satisfactory to society’s norms, and I might want to consider changing a little bit. The way to do that was to have a new perspective on food and eating, and there I was starting my first diet in earnest at age 11, which really didn’t stop until I was an adult with my own children, even after I became a nutritionist, even after I became a chef who specialized in healthy cooking. I’ve talked about my history with dieting in episodes two and I believe episodes four. So take a listen to that if you want more details about my story around my first diets and more about my body image. So I admit, I got myself into a very bad habit back then. Struggling, beating myself up, and suffering felt like my true birthright, not joy. But this is no surprise. The people around me, the women in my life, my friends, society in general, and then the internet and social media were drowning in this mindset. If you are a woman, you are flawed. And there’s always room for improvement, especially if you are larger size or simply feel like you have weight to lose. And honestly, I don’t know a single woman who has never said the words, I need to lose some weight. Do you? I’m a full believer in staying in the present and working with what is right now. But I wish that back then. When I started getting the messages that food was the enemy, that my body was not perfect, just the way it was, and I believed that dieting was the only answer, that I had the knowledge and the confidence to question that dogma, to stand up for me and say, enough, to really believe that I was and I am enough. It was a runaway train with no stops. And it takes a lot of courage, a lot to go against the grain, to really love your body just the way it is in all its imperfect, flawed contours and shapes and sizes, to have the audacity to go against the grain of what our society says, what social media claims we should look and act like. It takes a truly strong-willed woman, and I have to admit that I am not always there, even now. As a professional in the world of nutrition and food, it’s really hard to fight back the non-stop talk on the internet sometimes, but it is not impossible. If you feel like social media and the diet gurus. are controlling way too much of your physical and emotional time, my suggestion is to stop right now. Take a social media break or simply stop following anyone who even remotely shames you for your body or lack of willpower. For me right now, the menopause diets are screaming at me. Anytime I’m on Instagram or Facebook, it is truly scary how social media just knows me as if they were reading my mind or listening to my words when I speak out loud. It’s a little scary, but suddenly I have been inundated with diets for women who are 50 plus, who have hormone imbalance, all of it. Now, this is what I know to be true. Kindness, self-compassion, and understanding are everything. literally everything if you want to break the cycle of criticism and in turn cultivate your joy. This is non-negotiable. There have even been studies done on women presenting with eating disorders. The one thing that stood out from women who were able to overcome an eating disorder, they practiced fierce compassion for themselves. You cannot shame yourself into a diet or a way of eating and feel good about it. Shame is a terrible motivator. Trust me, I have tried it. Kindness leads the way every single time. So I’m curious, do you feel this way too? I would love to know your thoughts. And speaking of Instagram, you can leave me a comment on my podcast post. I will have the link below in the show notes. please come and visit. Say hi to me there. It’s a non-judgment zone, so no worries about diets or anything like that. Okay, so joy. It’s a big topic, isn’t it? We can find joy in so many areas of our lives and realize the fact that, yes, cultivating joy is something all of us are absolutely entitled to. But what about food and eating? Do we have the right to like what we eat, sit with friends without making some judgment about our weight, or simply be hungry enough to not feel pressure to split a meal because we want to have all the food to ourselves? Or we can say, I’m not dieting today. I just want to enjoy my food. The bottom line is that food is truly one of life’s greatest pleasures. And it could also be one of life’s greatest sources of stress and anxiety. If you have a history of disordered eating or are so used to eating like you are on a diet, you have most certainly lost the joy in food. I’m confident that you are what is called disembodied, meaning you are letting others, and that goes for diets too, dictate how you should eat, what you should eat. and why. You’ve lost control of your pleasure around food, which we are all innately born with. No one is born fearing food or hating their bodies. Babies do not come into this world saying, I’m going to be a picky eater, or I probably shouldn’t eat this. No one is born this way. This comes from interacting with others in the world who try to tell you how it is and Thank you. feed stories to you about not being enough or not being good enough. So the act of eating can cause a lot of stress and anxiety to what should be a pleasurable experience. Now, if food and eating feel this way for you, there are a couple of action steps you can take right now to make joyful eating a birthright for you. I want to add one more consideration in the pursuit of joy is that the more you eat with joy in mind, the better you want to eat. I’ll say that again. The more you eat with joy in mind. the more you want to eat to nourish your body in the healthiest way. You want to eat better for yourself. Food feels good. It tastes good. It is good for you. Beyond thinking about what joy itself is, you might want to ask yourself how you want to feel. For me, regarding myself as a whole, I want to feel healthy, energized, alive. I want to be physically active and I want to be peaceful and serene. I know one way to help me is through the food I choose to eat. I can understand that highly processed junky foods are not going to help me achieve my joy. Cooking and eating the best and healthiest foods are what I need to do for me. This brings me joy, which in turn compels me to eat well. Eating well is… definitely an individual choice, which is why I almost never create generic personal plans for people in my practice. What my definition of eating well is, and that is mostly a plant-based diet, Mediterranean type diet that’s heavily influenced by a lot of herbs and spices and flavor, it may not be your way of eating. So my way of eating might feel foreign to you. because joy for you might be in a pint of ice cream. But consider, is that allowing you to feel alive and healthy and energetic and good? Okay, how exactly do we begin to cultivate joy with our eating and food so it becomes a standard everyday practice? This is where mindfulness comes in and plays a huge part in implementing joy. Just like we get caught up in the day-to-day routine of life or work, and forget to even plan something fun to do on the weekends. The same goes for our eating. Mindfulness, in simple terms, is the act of paying attention. And when it comes to food, there’s a lot to pay attention to. There’s our hunger, our senses, our cooking, our health, our togetherness, our gathering. We can easily, with our busy day-to-day lives, lose a lot of this mindful attention that we can put on our food and become more mindless eaters. Eat for quick and convenient reasons. Eat just because it tastes good. So let’s first talk about hunger. Hunger comes in two forms, physical and then all the rest. And all the rest I put under a wide circle of what I call emotional hunger, which I’ll explain in a second. When it comes to hunger, we want to eat when we are physically hungry. And not only do we want to eat when we’re physically hungry, but we want to honor that hunger with food. When you are in a diet mindset, it becomes particularly hard to know what physical hunger feels like. You start to lose your cues because you are fasting until 2 p.m., for example, or eating only protein and kale. Sometimes you’re not even eating all day. You might be starving, but the diet puts up rules and regulations for when and how to eat. Now, if you begin to pay attention, you will know what real physical hunger is, and you will honor that hunger and eat when you are hungry. So I’m going to give you a couple of things to think about to help you recognize what true physical hunger is. Physical hunger occurs when there have been a couple of hours passed between your last meal. So if it’s noon and you ate at 8 o’clock in the morning for breakfast, you should be physically hungry about that point. So about four hours. Another one, you start to physically have symptoms such as stomach growling or your energy starts to wane. You start to feel distracted. You feel like food is on your mind. Your hunger grows slowly and you want to eat something good and nourishing. So it taps you on the shoulder. It doesn’t hit you like a ton of bricks. It just starts kind of nagging at you a little bit in the background. So knowing what physical hunger is can be important to give yourself full permission to eat. And going further with our mindfulness around food, we begin tuning into our senses, our sight. by looking at all the different colors and shapes of our food or wondering where your food came from and who grew it. Maybe you’re smelling all the delicious aromas. And of course, you are tasting it. Is it crunchy? Is it creamy? Is it cold, warming, steaming hot? And of course, we hear our food cooking, the sizzle of the grill, the blender whirring, making a smoothie. Again, we’re just noticing. Noticing brings awareness to what we are eating. It compels us to pay attention to our hunger. And when we are full and we have had enough, and we can take this even further and go even deeper, we can practice being mindful in our kitchens by paying attention to chopping the carrots, slowing down, slowing our breath as we do this, giving ourselves the permission and time to cook our food and making the time. it is important to us to have healthy home-cooked food. Preparing food can turn into sort of a meditation when you slow down and simply start to notice. Now there is another side to our hunger and there is another way we might consider bringing joy to our food and eating. Food is nourishment for our bodies, but it’s not just physical. We eat for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with calories or fat grams or phytonutrients. We often eat together, celebrate together, join for holidays together. These are typically joyful times to eat, and yet we can get our emotions in the way of food all the time. Now, some of us have been conditioned to eat, not because we are physically feeding ourselves, but because we might be bored or tired. or lonely, or sad, or we got yelled at at the guy on the road for driving too slowly. We had a fight with our spouse. We get conditioned sometimes to lean in on food as an emotional crutch. Now, until I got really mindful with my food, I was certainly an emotional eater to the core for a lot of my life. I learned early on that food could feel like a false friend in hard times. It was always a temporary fix though. And once I became truly aware of this, I learned to soothe and comfort myself in other ways besides food. Now, what do I mean by soothing and comforting myself with other things besides food? Well, there’s a lot of things you can do. I often might call a friend or call my sister and just have a talk. I am a big Thank you. proponent of journaling, so I will write in my journal quite a bit. I will do things like go just take a walk outside, get out of my house and step away from my kitchen. I will take a bath, get a massage, whatever it might be for you. Think about some other ways, if you are not physically hungry, that you can soothe and comfort yourself too. doesn’t involve eating food. That doesn’t feel joyful. That feels stressful and anxiety-provoking. So again, the thing is, you want to be checking in with your hunger all the time. If you are physically hungry, honor that hunger with food. Eat. Eat joyfully when you are physically hungry. And we want to check in with our emotional hunger. Now, what does emotional hunger look like exactly and how can you identify it? Here are some signs that you might be eating for emotional reasons. Number one, you feel no physical hunger cues, as in it’s been an hour since you just ate dinner and you feel like you need a reward for your very hard day. So you’re going to sit down on the couch and grab that bag of chips. Get your TV on, put Facebook on, and do all the things and just eat mindlessly. There’s no physical hunger cues. You’re not physically hungry. You might start thinking about specific foods like chocolate. Eating food might feel just like the only option. You just got yelled at. And in your brain, it triggers a, where’s the ice cream? Little time has passed since you last ate. Maybe it’s only been an hour, but it’s not. been long enough where you should be feeling physically hungry. Food is unsatisfying. It doesn’t solve the issues like sadness or loneliness. You eat, you eat a couple of cookies, but the loneliness and sadness is still there. Or you eat because it looks good, it tastes good, it smells good. Think about walking into a bakery and what that sets off in your brain, and that suddenly you feel like you just need to have the donut. Often we say, then we shouldn’t, I’m not allowed. How many calories is that? I can’t eat after 8 p.m. I’m not allowed to eat gluten because my naturopath said so. All sorts of things can start triggering in your head. Now, all of these emotional factors can bring up so much extra stress and hopelessness around food and remind us that food is not fun, but hectic and laden with rules. Eating too much when you are so tired from a long day can leave you feeling ashamed and guilty and hurt on yourself. So when you learn to distinguish between these two hungers, physical and emotional, through mindfulness, you begin to feel the joy in eating and in food. You’ll be eating for the right reasons, planning meals around nourishing, healthy, delicious food, and giving yourself permission to enjoy every single bite of it. Now, please know again that you are worth every bite of food that goes in your mouth. This is not an easy journey, but joyful eating is your birthright. You are allowed to love food and not fear it. And it is totally possible to do that. Thank you so much for listening today. And as always, if you have any thoughts on today’s topic, please feel free to leave a comment on Instagram or on Apple and continue the discussion. Look for my links in the show notes. And if you loved this podcast, do not hesitate to rate and review. I would absolutely love it. Have a great week and bye for now. Now, before I leave, I wanted to mention to you my healthy midlife fall reset. I am so excited to get this started. Now, I have to tell you right off the bat, you probably know this. The fall reset is not a diet. The fall reset is simply a way to gently nudge yourself back on track and get excited about the season in the most nutritious and delicious way. Now here’s how it works. The full reset is two weeks of done-for-you meal plans, beautifully curated recipes with pictures. I know everybody loves pictures. A detailed shopping list to save you time in the grocery store, as well as a priceless action plan to tell you what to do every single day of the two weeks you’re in the reset. I’m also including in this go-around a one-on-one coaching session with me during your time doing the reset and a really important guide on emotional eating. Again, this is not a diet because you probably know I do not believe in diets, but I do believe and giving yourself an opportunity to restart. over in a gentle and kind way. And that’s exactly what the reset is when you sign up. And you can start anytime. You can start the minute you sign up, but this is a fall reset, so it will not be around forever. Sign up as soon as you are interested. The link will be down below in my show notes. Thank you so much, and I hope to see you in the reset.