Navigating New Year Resolutions: Mindful Eating and Compassionate Growth for Women in Midlife

Are you ready to set meaningful resolutions that actually stick this year? Join host Heather Carey in the latest episode of Real Food Stories as she dives into the transformative journey of mindful eating and personal growth. With the new year upon us, Heather reflects on her own experiences and the challenges that come with setting New Year’s resolutions, especially as she prepares for her upcoming surgery. She opens up about the fears that often hold us back and the importance of embracing the present moment.

Many of us set ourselves up for failure with unrealistic expectations and the pressure for quick gratification, leading to a cycle of disappointment. Heather compassionately guides listeners to slow down and reframe their goals, encouraging a focus on the process rather than just the outcome. With her background as a culinary nutritionist, she shares actionable steps to help you set achievable goals that align with your personal food journeys, mindful eating and healthy lifestyle choices.

From creating a vision board to honing in on one key goal, Heather introduces the SMART criteria—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based—as a powerful tool for success. She emphasizes the significance of journaling as a means to track progress and reflect on the emotions tied to your goals. This episode is not just about nutrition advice; it’s about nurturing a compassionate relationship with yourself and your food beliefs, especially during midlife and menopause.

As you navigate your resolutions for the year ahead, Heather advocates for a patient approach that encourages letting go of perfectionism. Embrace the journey of mindful eating and understand that personal growth is a process worthy of patience and kindness. Whether you’re exploring vegan cooking, understanding the Mediterranean diet, or tackling weight loss myths, this episode will inspire you to trust your unique path and cultivate a healthier relationship with food and your body.

Tune in to discover how to overcome food confusion and make sustainable eating choices that resonate with your family’s food traditions and cultural backgrounds. With insights into emotional eating and cooking techniques that promote health, this episode of Real Food Stories is a must-listen for anyone looking to empower their health journey in the new year.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back and if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it is so nice to meet you and I’m very glad you are here with me. 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. And happy, happy new year. Can you believe it’s 2023? It’s just always so strange to put the new number on to the year and we have to get used to that. But nonetheless, here it is. And it’s so nice to be back on the podcast. I feel like it’s been a long time and that has passed. And even though it’s only been about two weeks, but I hope you had a joyous holiday and rested and relaxed. COVID still lingered around my family and disrupted yet another holiday for us, but it was all okay. I had my three kids at home, and that is all I really want to do these days. My kids are all grown and flown, and I just want to spend some time with them, and I got my wish. You know, when you have grown kids and they live away from you, it’s such a treat to get them all together all at once. So I was thrilled with that. How does a new year feel for you? I have to admit, I am usually pretty excited for any new year because it just feels very full of possibilities. The world is bursting with options and creativity, and I’d love to imagine what paths I am going to take this year. I know for me that pursuing creativity like signing up for a new art class or upping my journal practice, always fuels new ideas for my business or my cooking. I have a lot of new ideas for work, new workshops, cooking classes are in the works, and I am definitely planning ways to be able to strategically take my business on the road with me and work remotely. I can start to imagine that now. My three kids are now all out of college, which just feels unbelievable to me, but it’s starting to feel very attainable. Now, right now, I’m also facing an unexpected surgery that came up that I’m going to have in February, which is threatening to block my idea funnel a little bit. It’s not what I had planned for, but nonetheless, it’s something that I’ve realized I need to do. And it’s definitely been on my mind a lot, considering that it came on very unexpectedly. And I’ll possibly go into more detail about the surgery and everything in another episode, but that’s not really relevant right now. Because what really has come up for me in relation to having the surgery is not so much the surgery itself, but a couple of other things. Namely, patience and fear. Two things that I am admittedly working on in my journey of my own life. The waiting, the slowing down, and the letting go of outcomes. This has been the theme of the last few months since I found out about the surgery. So being intentional and self-assured that I am making the correct decisions with the correct doctor at the right time is definitely up for me right now. Not easy for a person who likes to have the answers and wants to make sure I am doing the right thing for myself, not to mention other people. Now I know we live in a world of quick gratification and quick answers and quick. is not what I have been getting lately from the universe. Pressing the pause button until I felt totally reassured that what I was doing was okay for me. It’s sort of like those go nowhere resolutions you may find yourself in right now. Many of you may have set out a new course and started a dry January challenge where you don’t drink for 30 days or another round of… Whole30, which is just another diet that pretty much eliminates anything good in this world. Maybe you went on a cleanse or you’re on a detox, a goal to get to the gym five mornings a week. Now, I’m curious to know how this is all going for you, because statistically, almost every New Year’s resolution fizzles out about the third week in January, and by February, totally yesterday’s news. For so many of us, the new year brings. new beginnings in terms of getting healthy or eating healthy. Health is a big thing in January. And in fact, when I googled how to eat healthy in 2023, just a mere 1 billion hits came up. So this is one popular search term right now and for every year around this time. Now, I just mentioned that part of my 2023 is to pause and wait a little. bit more. There’s no harm in the wait. But let me explain what the pause means to me and what it might mean to you and why slowing down and giving your goals some deeper thought and why this is so important if we want to make progress with ourselves. When it really comes down to it, my pause and wait theme that I have going on right now has everything to do with fear. Maybe you can relate to this if you really stop and just think about what’s going on with you. Actually, really give the word fear some thought for a minute. Almost all of our hesitations or why we start something and don’t follow through or why we never start something are based on fear. The other day, someone asked me a very profound question. What would you do if you weren’t afraid? At the time, I eye-rolled a little bit because you too have probably heard that sentence, that question floating around somewhere in a greeting card or on an Instagram quote. What would you do if you weren’t afraid? So I shrugged because what would I do if I wasn’t afraid? I would do everything. because I realized that my life is very centered around fear. Now, coming closer to home with my surgery looming, I realized I have been feeling nothing but full-blown fear. I am the first to admit I am really nervous to have surgery. Actually, my word of the moment after pause and wait for the last three months has been, quote, terrified. When you are filled with terror, all you want to do is run and hide. And that is exactly how it has felt for me in regards to having the surgery. I’ve had surgery before, so I have experience with this and I know there is pain involved. And in fact, my last surgery, there was a lot of pain. I had successfully tucked that memory far away into a deep, dark drawer until just recently. I didn’t realize how fearful I had actually felt and how traumatic the last surgery was for me. And now here I am faced with another unexpected event, and it’s dragging up all sorts of fear. And cue the what-ifs, which is fear’s best friend. What if something goes wrong? What if it doesn’t work? In case you’re wondering, what if… is just another way to say, I am in fear. I am scared. It’s your brain’s way of trying to make sense of what’s happening and to be in charge, to protect you, to keep you safe. But I can’t be totally in charge of everything, including the outcomes of surgeries. And if I had acted on the question of, what would I do if I weren’t afraid, I probably would have had this surgery a month ago. and it would have been well behind me now. But consider that sometimes the journey is part of the process, and I believe that I had to learn this lesson in my time, and that time is right now. I’m at the part where I need to trust a surgeon and trust that all will go okay and be okay. I’m learning to lean. in a little bit more into my intuition and into my spirituality, whatever you want to call it, the universe, whatever you choose to call it, and just simply trust. And that can take time. That can take a lifetime. So this year, we can all start to focus on what is rather than what if. What is. What is keeps us in the here and now. What is keeps us cultivating gratitude and compassion for ourselves. What is says I am doing my very, very best. And what is helps us look at what we can. control and what we cannot, like the fact that we are getting older, for example, and what we might like to consider changing as a result. Now, just because we’re in the start of a new year, that does not mean that we need to change everything all at once. I have gone down this road many, many times before, and I am sure you have too. I was getting on some diet not drinking for a month, which I felt at the time would be impossible, and I was getting to the gym six days a week. I’d allow myself one rest day. Okay, you can imagine how that all went. Not well. My, quote, resolutions were way too much, way too big, and totally unrealistic. They would cause me to go into the what-ifs. into the future, into fear. What if this didn’t work? What if I can’t handle it? What if I can’t do this and succeed? You may have some fears and what ifs right now too, if you are considering big resolutions and big goals and big things are just coming up. What if I don’t lose weight right now? What if I jump into a detox and it doesn’t work? What if I’m unhealthy for the rest of my life? and I can never get myself out of my spiral. This is all your fear talking to you. So what can we do right now to get ourselves out of the what-ifs and into the what-is? Well, I’m glad you asked, because I have an actionable plan for that, and I love action. Now, in my show notes, I have a free Resolution Redo guide. So take the time to go into the show notes and download that guide. It’s totally free and it will totally help you reframe how you look at resolutions and goals for this coming year. And I want that for you because I have been around that block. I know how this feels. And by February, you will probably have forgotten about the resolutions you were considering in January. So let’s go through this a moment. The first thing I want you to do when we are reframing how we want to look at our new year and any goals or resolutions that we want is to take the time, give yourself a couple of hours to create a big vision for yourself. That means sitting down with a journal, piece of paper. a whiteboard, whatever it is, whatever it works for you, and think about all that you want to achieve this year. Now think big here. This does not mean that you are doing it all. It just means that you are having a dream session. Get creative. What do you want to accomplish in the next couple of months for this year? I mean, I know I have a lot that I want to do. Half of them might not even make sense to do them now. But I’m just writing them down. I’m getting them out of my head and onto paper. Don’t go into overwhelm here when you do this. We’re not committing to all of these goals because too many goals typically means we do absolutely nothing. It becomes too overwhelming. So you will get confused as to what to do first. We’re just sitting and having our dream session and that should be fun. That should be a creative pursuit. So again, I have that. guide in my show notes on resolution redos. You can print that out and use it for this. It has pages you can fill in right there to help keep you focused on this. And focus is a requirement here because the fact is, like I said before, 90% of those vague resolutions fail within a month of setting them. So if you want to try something different this year, I suggest grabbing the guide And again, of course, worse. It’s totally free for you. Okay, number two, I want you to take one of those goals. and just pick one, one goal that feels very important to you right now. It does not mean that your dream of scuba diving in the Caymans is not going to happen. It just means that we’re starting with one. Simplify here. If you don’t know this by now, we are all inundated with information. We are in absolute overload. There’s nothing simple about living life today. But you goal setting can be simple. So let’s start with just one. Just trust me on this. You can always go back to all the other goals that you have on that list. And before you decide on your one goal, I want you to take a minute. If you’re just sitting and listening, if not, you can get to a comfortable place and just get still. I want you to close your eyes for a moment and breathe. Put aside the goal. and consider how you want to feel. If weight loss is your goal this year, look at the feelings that sit around your goal. See yourself. See yourself a little bit into the future. Are you happy? Your goal has been set for you. You’ve succeeded at your goal. How do you feel? Do you feel content? What is coming up for you? Do you feel fearful? This helps to tap into why you want this goal. It has to go beyond just the goal of I want to lose weight so I can be a size two again. It might sound something like losing weight will make me feel stronger and healthier. Healthier in turn feels very powerful to me and I love that feeling. I want to be a woman who steps into life with confidence. And as a side note, we always assume that our goals focus on health and weight and exercise right about this time of year. But the reality is that we have a lot more in our lives than just our physical bodies. You also might want to just consider your home life, your relationships, your career, your spirituality. Consider that focusing on one goal can be like a domino effect for all of the other goals. Making a career change, for example, might mean that you work closer to home, which in turn gives you more opportunity to exercise more or spend time with your partner. Focus on what most needs your attention right now and reflect on it flowing into all your other goals and how that would make you feel. Now, if you have your one goal that you want to truly focus on, and you have taken a little time to just consider how achieving this goal will make you feel, then let’s take action. You may have heard of SMART goals, and if not, let me explain. The word SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. The failure to simplify things is what makes us lose sight of our resolutions in January. I’m going to lose weight is totally vague. If your goal really is to lose weight, get specific. How much? How much per week? And ask yourself if this is really the best time to start this goal. Now I know for me the deep dark of winter is really not my best time to start a physical goal. I know it’s the new year and we all get kind of motivated to do that. We’re post-holiday now and we have time on our hands. But I see winter as a time for creativity and work. But that’s just me. Your goals might be totally focused on weight loss and that’s great. But the goal needs to be relevant. If you saw a doctor and she said that losing 20 pounds would make a significant difference in your blood pressure numbers, this may very well motivate you to begin that weight loss goal. It’s relevant. It’s necessary. Finally, making the goal time-based takes it from, I want to lose 20 pounds sometime this year, to I want to lose 20 pounds by May 1st. That can help you keep on track because you now have a deadline. Now let’s get even more specific and figure out the next steps and what actions can you take right now. to get this goal in motion. Let’s stick with the weight loss goal as an example. Some action steps might be to set a start date. You may want to figure out how many calories you need as a guide for losing weight. I happen to love a good reward for good behavior, so how about a non-food reward like a massage for every five pounds lost? In my resolution redo guide, I give you more guidance on this and a worksheet to actually hone in on these very specific action steps. So definitely download that guide. Now, the very best way to keep all of your goals and actions top of mind is to buy yourself a journal and record your progress. Write this down. Journal when the days feel tough. Cheer yourself on like you would a good friend. Write about your fears and those what ifs and focus on what is happening right now. This is hard work. Goal setting takes commitment. And you are doing your very best. And you, my friend, have got this. Finally, this year, let’s learn to just let go a little bit of the outcome. The results of your goals may not be perfect. You may not even reach your goal. And that’s totally okay. This is how we learn and grow. Trust your process. Thank you so much for listening and being here with me today. I can’t wait to see how your progress goes with your goals and how you’re doing. Please be sure to grab my resolution redo guide so that you can make this year a great one for you. And if you loved this episode, please be sure to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I would love it. Have a great day, everybody, and bye for now.