Navigating Food Confusion: My Journey to Healthy Eating and Food Peace in Midlife

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by conflicting nutrition advice and the ever-changing landscape of dietary guidelines? You’re not alone! Join host Heather Carey, a passionate nutritionist and chef, as she takes you on a personal journey through food confusion in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories. Heather reflects on her own struggles with food choices during her teenage years, the impact of societal norms, and her path to making peace with food. With a focus on healthy eating tips, she shares how she learned to appreciate and enjoy real food, while navigating the complexities of food beliefs and diet myths.

Throughout the episode, Heather dives deep into the historical context of food guidelines set by the USDA, exploring how these have evolved and contributed to widespread food confusion among consumers. By sharing her insights, she aims to empower listeners to cultivate a healthier relationship with food. Discover the seven pillars of abundance that guide her approach to cooking for health, and learn how to simplify your eating habits without sacrificing flavor or satisfaction.

As a culinary nutritionist, Heather emphasizes the importance of balance in our diets and the necessity of incorporating a variety of fruits and vegetables. She also addresses the unique nutritional needs of women, food confusion, particularly during midlife and menopause, providing valuable insights into how to navigate this phase with confidence. Whether you’re grappling with emotional eating or seeking to debunk weight loss myths, this episode is packed with practical advice and personal food stories that resonate.

From mindful eating practices to sustainable eating choices, Heather shares her expertise on how to create a healthy lifestyle that is enjoyable and satisfying. She encourages listeners to rethink their food beliefs and consider the cultural influences that shape our eating habits. Tune in to learn how to embrace the Mediterranean diet, explore vegan cooking options, and discover effective cooking techniques that promote heart health and overall wellness.

Join Heather Carey on this transformative journey towards understanding nutrition and health, and find inspiration in her personal food journeys that pave the way for a balanced and fulfilling relationship with food. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable nutritionist insights that will empower you to make informed choices for your well-being!

Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well hi everybody and welcome back to Real Food Stories. 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 our health, our weight, and our bodies so you can finally make peace with what you eat. And happy summer We have been having a fabulous month of June where I live. Temperatures have been hovering in the 70s. My garden is growing so nicely. My bees are humming along and I’m about to get some honey from the hives. Chickens are laying their eggs. Everything seems content in my little world at least. After many, many years of being in the nutrition and food arena, I can say without hesitation that I am totally at peace with the food that I eat. And there is not any confusion for me as to what to eat or not to stay healthy and well, even with all the confusion about diets and what to eat. It wasn’t always this way. By the time I was a teenager, just food itself was suspicious. All food. Eating food I actually liked meant you could gain weight because that food was what my friends liked. Pizza, fast food. Ice cream. Salads and vegetables were diet food and meant to taste bad or just be tolerated. I was never eating a salad for the pure pleasure of loving arugula, but because I felt I had to. The food I liked came with a price. Salty, fatty, and sugary. But as I grew up, got educated, got mindful of my food, learned about the relationship between food and health, and then realized that there could be a convergence of what I like to eat and foods that are so good for me, I really started to love real healthy food. I realized, for example, that I love bitter foods. Greens like dandelion or mustard greens are some of my favorites and some of the best foods you can eat for nutrients. Saute them with a lot of garlic and olive oil and salt and pepper and you have the best of both worlds, food that is delicious and so good for you. This is not the case for almost, well, everybody I know, especially my dedicated clients who are searching and have a desire to make peace with food. One of the first questions I get asked almost weekly is what am I supposed who even eat anymore the confusion around what to eat is real. And so I thought it would be a great idea to finally answer the question and get to the bottom of it. Food is like a complicated word problem with one very easy solution. And I would like to talk about why food has gotten so problematic and how to make real healthy food easily fit into your life. I mean, after all, who wouldn’t get confused with food? We have food marketers to contend with, fad diets, friends who are starting the latest eating trend, social media, or the latest headline news. From the 1900s until now, the USDA, which is the United States Department of Agriculture, and the government branch that sets the guidelines for food in the United States, has changed those guidelines approximately a dozen times. And that is just the USDA. There are big research universities such as Harvard and independent researchers and authors of diet books and food bloggers and social media healthy coachy gurus who all want to tell you exactly how you should be eating. And the opinions change like the wind. One day it’s. high fat, one day it’s low fat, one day it’s high carb, one day it’s low carb. It’s just insanity. So I wanted to tell you a story about how our food even got set into guidelines in the first place so you can have some kind of an understanding of where we were and how we got to where we are right now and then what we can do about it. So I know a lot of us might be wary of the government, especially when it comes to controlling our food, but I certainly don’t want to knock the USDA because they’ve been an important part of getting our nutrition up and running in the first place. But I want to tell you the story of how the food guidelines and the food pyramid and the healthy eating plate became famous in the first place, because I think that is important to understand where the myths perceptions even started. Back in the early 1900s, creating guidelines and adding in nutrients to the food we eat in the United States became more of a necessity because of the growing understanding of micronutrients, which are our vitamins and minerals, and our macronutrients, which are fats, proteins, and carbs, and their relationship to preventing diseases and bolstering health. The field of nutrition was pretty brand new and I imagine pretty exciting. If you think about it, the more we grew as a country and the more we were learning that food had a relationship to health, it became even more important for the government to create a framework. But this was back in 1894 before we even knew that specific vitamins and minerals were identified and were a thing or, you know, had a relationship to our health. Of course, now we know that deficiencies of certain vitamins, vitamin D, for example, can cause rickets, which is the softening of our bones, or B12 deficiency can lead to anemia. But back then, we really didn’t have a good understanding of the relationship of these small nutrients. So the government has stepped in to make sure that most Americans were getting properly nourished. And one way they did this was to fortify certain foods. with essential nutrients that might be hard to come by. Vitamin D in milk, for example, or adding B vitamins to white flour. Now, side note, if, for example, we just ate whole wheat flour rather than white flour that is stripped of all its nutrients, with some of those nutrients added back in, then we’d probably be in better shape in the first place. But again, we were a growing country, and there were millions of people to feed. convenience foods were already popping up and we had to get up and running nutritionally. White flour, although nutritionally deficient, is cheaper. It stores better than other whole grains and can be made into a variety of quick, fast foods. Nonetheless, nutrient deficiencies used to rule the health world. And when those problems got a little more in focus, other chronic diseases like heart disease or diabetes began to rise to the surface. as the main culprits of poor health and even death. Nutrition research began to focus on those larger macronutrients in our diet. Remember carbs, fats, protein, even fiber, all of which we now know have a profound effect on health. But if you look back, has the government been doing a very good job at feeding and nourishing this country? And should the government tell us how to eat and live? Now that is a… subject for huge debate and huge discussion. Should the government be stepping into our lives and telling us what we should and shouldn’t be eating? So in 1917, two women, which was rare in those days, created what I think was the first blueprint for how to eat. Home economists Caroline Hunt and Helen Atwater wrote the guide called How to Select Foods, and I will link it To the show notes, if you’re interested in reading this, it’s not long, but it is an important little pamphlet on the first guidelines for eating and selecting food. Its purpose was to educate people on how to keep the body in, quote, good working order and provide it with fuel or energy. I love this. Food is medicine, right there, back in the day. The two women were aware of the relationship between food and health. They also mention adding in spices and herbs and some sugar in order to make this food taste enjoyable. Another win. They knew back then, as we definitely know now, that healthy food has to taste delicious or you will not stick with it. They also go into the seasonality of foods, not wasting money on tomatoes in winter, for example, not only for the price, but because of the taste and the lack of nutrition. They talk about thinking and planning with your health in mind first. They mention calories in terms of the labor you’ve performed. I have to admit, reading these beginning guidelines gave me hope that we can get back to the basics that are the only requirements for healthy eating. But here’s where I see the beginning of food confusion in this country. The food groups that these two home economists proposed. were as follows, mineral substances, which is now known as I think fruits and vegetables. That’s what they were emphasizing to get them all the micronutrients. Protein to serve as fuel for the body. Starch in the form of cereal foods. Sugar, which they mentioned is found in milk and fruits, but also in honey and syrup. Fat for fuel and mostly for flavor. Cellulose, which I know means fiber today from fruits and vegetables. flavoring and condiments, including salt, herbs, and spices to make food taste more palatable. The document goes on to emphasize the use of vegetables, protein, and fats while cutting down on starches such as bread and sugar. Great. All in all, I believe what they were trying to say was you need fats, you need protein, you need vegetables and fruit, you need grains without them being the largest food group of the day, and you can have a little sugar. Don’t get me wrong. The emphasis on dairy products, butter, cream, eggs, meat, even sugar as a food group is totally outdated. I understand that. There’s barely a mention of vegetable oils or other kinds of, you know, fats, plant-based fats. Vegetables and fruits are mentioned, but they are typically just apples, pears, spinach, turnips, celery, and grains are typically bread. I can’t blame them. These are the foods that were available to them at the time. These were the foods that people could afford and could get their hands on. And these foods were also known to… have health benefits. And it can be argued even today in some circles that butter might be better for you than plant-based oils, whole milk better than skim milk, things like that. And so for the most part, I agree with them. With a little tweaking and updating, it can be that simple. So where’s the confusion? How did what on earth am I supposed to even eat become the battle cry of midlife women everywhere. I couldn’t help but wonder. When the big food lobby started to exert their influence, there’s the big four, dairy, meat, sugar, and wheat. And they are hugely influential today. And they have been hugely influential for the last 100 plus years. These foods are big, big business. And they have definitely had a lot of influence with the government. So what are we supposed to believe anymore? After Caroline Hunt’s first guidance, The education basically went downhill from there. I mean, gold stars to Caroline. She tried her best with the information she had. But World War II came about and the goal became strength, staying strong, being able to handle a war. So the seven food groups was developed. And this is where we went off the rails. And I don’t believe we ever came back. The tagline on the basic seven chart was, quote, the U.S. needs us strong. eat the basic seven every day. And then in addition to the basic seven, underneath was another tagline, eat any other food you want. Say again? Okay, I guess that’s what we’re even still doing today. But the seven food groups alone with no serving size guidance was confusing enough. Vegetables and fruits got divided into three groups, mostly by color, but also by nutrient. In other words, eat the rainbow, as we might say today. But back then, it was probably pretty confusing. Then milk and dairy, meats, bread and flour, and butter had its own food group. I believe that with more misguided information, more processed and convenience foods, bigger food lobbies, and more snake oil salesmen, we went totally astray from the question of what am I supposed to eat? We dumped it down then to four food groups. If you remember that, if you’re old enough to remember that. We had a food wheel. We had a couple of food pyramids and finally a food plate, which might be considered the most simplest of all the guides and is still pretty confusing. We have had hundreds of books written on diets, low fat, the low carb category with Atkins and Paleo, the high fat category with the keto diet, the gluten-free diet. Diets that eliminate whole food groups, diets that promote ethical viewpoints like vegan, and on and on and on. As I record this, the most prominent diet that I can see right now is intermittent fasting, which just eliminates food, period. No wonder we are so confused. Scream into a pillow if you need to. I get it. It is just unbearable sometimes. And it makes my job exciting because there are so… much in the quacky world of food. But on the other hand, when you ask me for guidance and I tell you what to eat, I look boring to some people and old school, as I’ve been told before. But old school, seriously? Because I refuse to follow a fad diet? Because I refuse to fall into the mindset that there is some bigger magic bullet out there that hasn’t been discovered yet? That I refuse to promote? fad diets just so I can probably make more money? I mean, seriously, how much can we eliminate, cut out, add in, or substitute? Here’s the good news. There’s been so much research done since Caroline Hunt wrote her first guide. Now, there have been plenty of missteps too. Botched research and advice given from professionals that was found out to be totally false. Like when researcher Ansel Keys promoted a no to low fat diet in reaction to heart disease and its rates increasing. That was totally false information. really what was going on was the amount of sugar consumed. We dropped fat and obesity rates went through the roof. So did heart disease. It’s amazing to think about sometimes. Something we need to do every day is eat food. All of us require food. And why has it been so confusing and misguided? I get it. I really do. So let’s do ourselves a favor and keep things really simple, Okay, it’s good for you and your stress levels. You can be relieved that you can take the question of what should I eat off your plate, literally. I want to add that we’re still learning, just like we’re still learning about curing cancer or autoimmune diseases. It’s all a work in progress, but I promise you, food does not have to be confusing. It doesn’t have to be restrictive. It doesn’t have to suck. Doesn’t have to be a diet and it can taste delicious while also being so good for you. Another thing I want to emphasize today on this episode is nutrition for women specifically, since I believe this is who I am mostly speaking to today and we are women in midlife and there are a few things to consider that men might not. So I’m going to be talking of those things. That doesn’t mean that men… Don’t need to also eat healthy and well, and you can certainly follow a lot of these principles too. So I’m going to talk about my guiding principles, the ones I follow, the ones that have kept me from gaining weight back, the ones that keep my energy even and my moods in check as well as my health. My guidelines are, of course, based in science. And from all that I have learned over the years as a nutritionist and a healthy food chef. They emphasize a love of food rather than a disdain or fear of food. Okay, ready? And if you want a hard copy of this guide, be sure to download it from the show notes. Okay, number one. My number one guideline before you even get into the food is this. Let it go. So what do I mean by that? Let go of what others are doing, how they live. what they are eliminating or not, and you do you. Because what matters most in the long run is that you find a healthy way of eating that works for you. If the microwave is more your friend than the stove, that is perfectly fine for right now. If you have heard that eating six small meals a day is superior, but you really like to eat three larger meals, totally fine too. Meet yourself wherever you are at. An important consideration is to recognize where you are in your life situation. Are you totally stressed with a couple of kids at home? Are you a single woman with a high-end career? Are you trying to figure out what obstacles are getting in the way of your health and feeling great? Start to get honest with your triggers to overeat or not eat your best. Okay. Let’s get on to the second one. My number one food rule now is to eliminate refined and processed foods as much as possible. Okay, first, I want to get clear on what I am defining as a refined or processed food, because many of the foods that you eat every day are processed in some way. If you freeze food, if you dehydrate food, if you can food or preserve them, they are processed, right? So. many of them are totally fine to eat. Those are not what I’m talking about. The refined processed foods that I recommend reducing from your diet are foods that are altered in some way with high doses of undesirable fats, too much salt, too much sugar, chemicals, and preservatives. Refined processed foods are stripped of all the important nutrients and pumped up with fat, sugar, sodium, Additives, dyes, preservatives to make them taste more desirable and make you want to come back for more. Food manufacturers know this about you, okay? They know that about everybody. These foods light your brain up. Refined processed foods provide unwelcome calories with little to no nutrition. These types of refined foods can contribute to a lot of inflammation in our body, okay? Basically, your body is kind of under attack. which in turn can lead to weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, cholesterol, and a myriad of other health problems. They deplete your energy, they disrupt your hormones, and they overall just make you feel bad, sluggish. Okay, so some good for you processed foods, canned beans, canned sardines, salmon or tuna, frozen fruits and vegetables, peanut butter, other nuts. butters, plain yogurt, condiments that you can use a small amount of as like sriracha sauce, capers, curry paste, kombucha, sauerkraut pickles, fermented foods. These are good for you processed foods. The ones that you want to try to crowd out and get out of your life, pre-packaged meals such as frozen dinners. Turn the labels over, turn the package over and look at the label and look at the amount of sodium that are in some of these things. Fried foods, any packaged cookies, cakes, cupcakes, breakfast bars, granola bars, white flours, white bread. These are all full of extra additives and sugar. The third guiding principle that I want to talk about is this concept of balance. I talk about this a lot with my clients. I talk about it in my cooking classes. I teach my cooking classes with balance in mind when we’re making a dinner or meal. I want you to start thinking about balancing out your meals with a variety of healthy foods. They can be organic if possible. It’s not imperative. I talked about organics in episode number three. on eating with the seasons. If you want to take a look at that and grab my download there on foods that you can buy organic and foods that you don’t have to necessarily buy organic. So balance really is balancing out your calories and your meals throughout the day, making sure you’re evenly nourished through the entire day. Now, as far as each of your meals, we want to think about balance in there as well. Meals are typically a mix of good for you carbs, which are whole grains, vegetables, and fruits, protein, and fats at every meal, as well as the right portion sizes. This assures that you are getting all the nutrients that you need in a day. Balancing out your food during the day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, maybe a snack, helps maintain a steady energy throughout the day and helps keep your blood sugar balanced. This is important for women, and this in turn helps cut down sugar cravings, caffeine cravings, which usually occur when we get too hungry. So let’s get to the specific foods. We want to first ramp up our fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables should be the foundation of a healthy diet, any healthy diet, no matter if you are eating vegan. paleo or any other diet you choose to follow or any other eating plan fruits and vegetables are loaded with fiber antioxidants phytonutrients all of those micro vitamins and minerals i talked about they’re low in fat and calories they keep your blood sugar low they contribute to heart disease and stroke prevention and they help fill you up with very few calories They are a mainstay of weight loss, but they’re a mainstay of just healthy eating and living. So consider fruits and vegetables, your edible vitamins and make half of your plate for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, vegetables and fruit. As far as which vegetables and fruit you should eat. If you ask the internet, there’s even certain vegetables and fruits that are off limits. I think that is absolutely ridiculous. My advice, like I said before, is eat the rainbow. concentrate on eating a variety of just different colors, yellows, orange, green, red, blue, white, and you should be assured a variety of certain nutrients. That can be dark green leafy vegetables such as kale or Swiss chard, mustard and dandelion greens, which I said that I love, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, carrots, summer squash, winter squash. I mean, Right now we’re in the best season. Of the whole year, we have so much variety. Stone fruits, citrus fruits, berries, the list goes on. So visit a farmer’s market, experiment with vegetables or fruits that you have not tried, and just really try to get creative with that. Okay, so let’s talk fat because fats are really important in our diet. And we want to eat the healthiest types of fat and lose the fat makes you fat rule. This is old school thinking back from the 1980s. So there’s three kinds of fats. There’s the good for you fats. There’s the bad fats and the ugly fats. Fat is an essential macronutrient in our diet. It helps absorb nutrients. It aids in hormone production, nerve function, brain function. It makes our food taste good. Caroline Hunt back in the day was right about that. Contrary to outdated beliefs, fat does not make you fat. Thanks. the sugar and refined carbs that are the main culprit. We need fat in our diets. The good fats help to actually lower our cholesterol. They keep us satiated and they carry flavor in food. The bad and ugly fats, however, increase inflammation in our body. They raise our LDL, our bad cholesterol. They lower our good cholesterol, our HDL cholesterol, and they have been proven to contribute. directly to diseases such as cancer and heart disease. So the fats you want to include every day in your diet are extra virgin olive oil, avocados, organic canola oil, sesame oil, almonds, nuts, nut butters, flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, any of those are really great for you. The fats we want to think about limiting you And we don’t have to eliminate them, but limit because the jury is really still out on saturated fats, right? Some people from some schools of thought say that butter, whole milk, whole milk yogurt, all good for you. Saturated fat is not the culprit. But there is research to support that we definitely want to be eliminating our saturated fat. There is a connection between saturated fats and heart disease. So let’s just limit butter, cheese, whole milk, ice cream, fatty meats, coconut oil, and palm oil. Coconut oil and palm oil are vegetable fats, but they are high in saturated fat. And then, of course, we want to definitely totally avoid the bad fats. And the bad fats are… any fats that have been altered to stay solid at room temperature or that have been genetically modified. Okay, so I think that it’s been pretty well emphasized that protein is one of our most vital sources of energy, which helps with muscle development and keeps you fuller longer. It takes longer to break down protein. So it’s a great idea to include protein in every one of our meals. For women, especially the older we get, the less muscle mass we have. So it is especially important to keep adding in a little more protein. We don’t have to go crazy around protein like some diets have told you. But we do need to include protein at every meal. We want to keep our protein lean, especially when it comes to animal protein. Animal sources of protein contain saturated fat, and I just mentioned that saturated fat is not our best fat to turn to. So we want to turn to lean proteins, which are fish, shellfish, chicken, grass-fed beef. These would be our best sources. And we definitely want to mix it up with some vegetarian or vegan proteins. These are plant-based proteins.Not only are these great sources of protein, but they’re also great sources of healthy fats and fiber. And those are tofu, all sorts of beans, nut butters. Like I said, you can start to see the overlap in some of these food groups. So let’s talk about carbs. Carbs have gotten a notoriously bad rap because number one, they are the main ingredient in a lot of processed junk foods. At number two in the diet world, in the paleo and keto world, grains just are thought to just wreak havoc on blood sugar and just cause you to gain weight and do nothing beneficial. But the fact is grains, whole grains I’m talking about here, have a lot of health benefits. They have a lot of fiber. They have a lot of phytochemicals and antioxidants. They have a lot of B vitamins. Whole grains maintain all their fiber, their phytochemical and antioxidant power. These are key nutrients that help fight disease, lower cholesterol, keep energy steady, and just overall really good for your health. There have been studies that have shown the connection between eating whole grains and lower risk of heart disease. So we want to definitely include them, but we don’t need to make whole grains the star of our plate, right? The star of our plate is fruits and vegetables. Really great for you whole grains would be 100% whole wheat bread. Corn, popcorn is a whole grain. Brown rice, wild rice, oats, barley, quinoa, bulgur, farro, millet, polenta, amaranth. I mean, these are all amazing grains. I wanted to talk about two categories that are very specific to women so we can make sure that we are at our healthiest. And the first one is calcium. Most women do not get enough calcium and men for that matter, but I’m just focusing on women right now. This is an essential nutrient. It keeps your bones strong. It helps muscles contract. It keeps your heart beating. An important tip is that calcium and vitamin D work in sync with each other. Calcium cannot do its job without vitamin D. And so we want to be sure to be mindful of your vitamin D intake as well. Calcium is really found heavily in sardines. I know sardines are, you know, might be a little weird for some people, but they really are one of the best sources. Calcium is found a lot in dairy products. right? Milk, yogurt, fortified plant-based milks. Calcium is also found in dark leafy greens like kale or collard greens. It’s found in tofu. So we want to make sure that we are emphasizing all of these foods and make sure we are definitely getting enough calcium for our bones. I want to also just speak specifically about hormone health because as you might know, If you’re around my age or if you are… in somewhere in midlife, you know that as we get older, our hormones naturally begin to shift. Every woman is totally unique. You might barely notice menopause, or you might be like so many others and experience anything and everything from weight gain to hot flashes, night sweats, totally wacky periods, mood swings, fatigue, all of it. It’s all real and there is ways to definitely help with hormones. So the main hormone that we usually talk about when we’re talking about menopause or perimenopause is estrogen, right? This is the female hormone and it’s really the hormone that’s mainly responsible for the disruptive symptoms you might be having. It’s also connected to heart health. It’s connected to our cholesterol levels and our bone health. So… Pairing menopause and menopause is an important time to check in with your health and make it a priority. So the top foods that you can eat for hormone health are water, staying hydrated is incredibly important, dark leafy greens, berries, calcium rich foods, foods that are high in vitamin D, omega fats, whole grains, lean proteins. Are we seeing a pattern here? It’s really focusing on making healthy eating is just absolutely essential to keeping your hormones balanced and to just feeling your best. The foods you might want to start considering crowding out of your diet, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar. These can all aggravate menopause symptoms and can only make things worse. So try to limit these things as much as possible. So there’s a couple other things that we definitely wanna consider when we’re thinking about healthy eating to keep it simple. Number one, don’t drink your calories. Liquids such as soda and sports drinks and fruit juices and fruit cocktails and Alcohol and sugary iced teas all provide calories and sugar with almost nothing else in the way of good nutrition. They’re usually filled with dyes and chemicals and preservatives and are really full of a lot of sugar. So let’s try to push that out and opt for water or flavored seltzer instead. You can add cucumbers or mint to your water. That tastes really good. If you’re looking for a sports drink replacement, you can use unsweetened coconut water. That has a high amount of natural electrolytes, but usually water is just fine. So we definitely want to just emphasize water as your hydration. We also want to think about our portion sizes, right? This is not a free-for-all eat whatever you want, like in one of those original food guides. We want to think in terms of our plate. And one. guide that I do like, and I will link it in the show notes, is the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate. And it helps just to have a visual of what your plate of food should look like. And here’s how it works. It’s really simple. Take a plate, you split it in half, and one half of that plate would be your fruits and vegetables. You take the other half, cut that into two halves. One quarter of your plate would be your protein, and one quarter of your plate would be your whole grains. You drizzle a healthy fat on there, such as a salad dressing or a pesto or some other kind of, you know, delicious condiment, and you have water as your hydration. Simple as that. Definitely also want to make sure we get enough sleep. Consider our stress levels. Not getting enough sleep has been shown in many studies to increase your cravings for sugar. increased snacking, nighttime eating. So we want to definitely aim for at least seven hours of sleep a night. Now I know that that can be difficult sometimes. I know that sometimes when you’re in midlife, sleeping can really be a challenge, but we want to try our best to do what we can to get enough sleep. Stress can be a major factor in overeating or mindless eating. If your first tendency is to reach for a bag of cookies after a long tiring day, practice awareness around this and find other ways to handle a stressful situation, such as taking a walk, writing in your journal, talking to a friend on the phone. Try to think about how you can find ways to de-stress without linking it to food. And then finally, one of my favorites is fail to plan, plan to fail. Now, Caroline Hunt was talking about this in her first food guideline, the planning of your meals and how to plan for a family. Because planning your week, your day, even the next few hours is a key skill when your goal is to eat healthier or lose weight. Grocery shop for the week, stock your pantry and refrigerator with cut up vegetables. Make a pot of vegetable soup to keep on hand. Know what your next meal is going to look like. Don’t get caught off guard. It’s all too easy to be hungry and grab for something processed, convenient, takeout, and junky. So think ahead. I hope that talking about food today can take some of the confusion out around what to eat. Food does not have to be complicated. We want to stick to our macronutrients, eat a lot of vegetables and plants. That will ensure that you are getting all the nutrients you need and filling foods to be healthy, to have energy, and to help you lose weight. I hope you have a great week this week. And if you loved this podcast and have thoughts on anything, do not hesitate to leave a note in the comments. And most important, be sure to rate and review. It would mean the world to me. I will see you next time. Bye for now.