Navigating Grief and Growth: A Culinary Journey Towards Mindful Eating and Self-Kindness

Have you ever wondered how grief can transform your relationship with food and family? In this deeply personal episode of Real Food Stories, host Heather Carey opens up about her journey through grief after the loss of a beloved family member and mindful eating. She candidly shares how this experience affected her mental state, leading to a necessary pause in her podcasting schedule. Heather emphasizes the importance of allowing ourselves the time to process emotions, illustrating how her summer vacation with family became a pivotal reset in her life.

Join Heather as she reflects on the meaningful connections forged with her children during their time in Maine, where the joy of togetherness over food choices brought healing and comfort. This episode is not just a narrative of loss; it’s a celebration of the real food stories that bind us, reminding us of the power of family food traditions. As she navigates her path through grief, Heather introduces a reflective exercise for listeners, encouraging them to evaluate their own summer experiences, set intentions for the upcoming fall season and mindful eating.

Are you ready to embrace change with a gentle heart? Heather invites you to explore key questions that will help you reflect on what summer meant to you, the lessons learned, and how you wish to shift your habits for fall. With her background as a culinary nutritionist, she provides insightful nutrition advice and healthy eating tips that resonate with women in midlife, particularly those navigating the complexities of menopause health and emotional eating.

As the episode unfolds, Heather introduces her upcoming fall reset program, designed to nurture a healthy lifestyle without the constraints of traditional dieting. She encourages listeners to approach this new season with positivity and awareness, emphasizing that it’s never too late to make healthy lifestyle choices. By focusing on self-kindness rather than self-judgment, you can cultivate a nurturing environment for your personal food journey.

So, whether you’re interested in mindful eating, exploring food beliefs and culture, or simply looking for inspiration to overcome food confusion, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights. Tune in to discover how you can embrace the upcoming season with a renewed sense of purpose and connection, guided by Heather’s warmth and expertise. Let’s celebrate the beauty of real food stories together!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back and if you’re tuning in with me for the first time today, it is so nice to meet you and I’m really glad you’re here with me. 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 relationship to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you Sweet. Well, I am so happy to be back on the podcast. It’s been a couple of weeks for me and a couple of weeks of just pausing. I had really every intention of staying consistent with the podcast through the summer. And as life would have it, a couple of important things got in my way. I had an important family member pass away a few weeks ago, and I didn’t realize the impact. it would have on my whole family and most importantly myself. Dying and death has, I don’t know what you want to call it, a heavy energy to it. It makes you reevaluate your relationship with that person who has passed away, or at least this is for me. And it’s actually pretty amazing how our brains and our bodies react to grief. I know you probably have heard this. There are five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And really like clockwork, I felt myself going through almost every one of them. And for a while, you just don’t feel like there’s a lot of mental room for much else. And that’s totally okay. I’ve just felt like I was really just going to flow with it. We can’t. all ignore these stages of life or pretend like they don’t matter. And I was just really giving myself the time and the space to process. So I just let myself have that. And in turn, a few things fell by the wayside, like the podcast. And as I was getting back on to very quickly and hastily record a podcast before going on my vacation, The mysteries of technology wanted to intervene and they wiped out my entire recording. So I pivoted and I created a blog post instead. I will put the link in my show notes if you want to take a read of that. And I just simply let it go. That’s my new mantra. There’s really nothing I can do about it. The recording is gone and maybe it was just meant to be. I was very distracted. I was rushed. And now with being away for a few days on a really great vacation, my mind feels just ready to jump back in. So here I go. And that is exactly what I wanted to talk about today. How to pause, reevaluate, and then reset specifically after vacation and or just the summer in general. I just got back from one of the best vacations I think I have had in a really long time. I didn’t travel very far. It wasn’t anything exotic, but it was incredibly meaningful to me. Even though I had planned this trip months ago, the timing was perfect with everything that had just occurred with my family and the loss. So the timing was really, really nice to just get away and relax. I spent the week in a small Airbnb in Midco’s, Maine, and I was with my three kids and my husband, Mark. And this is significant because I rarely get to have all of my kids not only together at the same time, but trapped in a small Airbnb with me for an entire week. They are either in college, they’re living in some far off location, and Now with working and things like that, it was such a treat for me to spend so much uninterrupted time together. We hiked in Acadia National Park. We went sailing. We swam in the cold Maine water, which is freezing but really refreshing. We just meandered. We explored. We played games. It truly was a week of stress-free relaxing for me. And I loved every single minute of it. you Definitely ate out a lot when we were away. I ate lobster twice. I ate ice cream and all the things you might likely do on vacation. Now, I am mindful of what I am doing and what I am eating. I am mindful enough to know that I do not want to come back from vacation feeling down on myself for blowing it or messing up. I’ve learned that a long time ago. That is hardly ever worth it. It’s a two-way street and I had two… important thoughts going on when I was on vacation. My first thought is that I do not eat like this on a daily basis. And so yes, I am going to have a little more ice cream than usual and eat out much more than I normally do. I wanted to take a little bit of a break from all the cooking I had been doing lately. So it was a treat to be able to just go and sit in a restaurant and eat. The second thing was that I also know that What I eat on vacation does not define my vacation. The last thing I’m remembering right now is the ice cream cone that I got two days ago. What I’m remembering, though, is how much I laughed with my kids and the fact that for the first time ever, I won at the Monopoly game that we play every single year. I couldn’t believe it. I’m so proud of myself. I have officially done summer. It was a beautiful season. My garden fed me well. I made everything I could with tomatoes and zucchini and all the seasonal vegetables. And I just pulled out dozens of beautiful butternut squash from the garden and I’m feeling ready to make soups and stews and more warming meals. I am definitely ready for a new season. You might be feeling the same. If you live in the northeast like I do, then… You are certainly feeling the seasons right now. It’s pouring rain out today. When I was in Maine, we were wearing sweaters at nighttime. It was cold. It was getting cold out. And fall is a great time to have a reset for so many things. Our food, our physical activity, our relationships, our work, or just revisiting how we want to end this year. Now notice I did not say the words it. detox, cleanse, diet, or lose weight. I believe there is a lot of value in looking back over the last few months, not so we can judge ourselves or examine all the ways we screwed up, but so we can make peace with our past and clear it in order to move forward. There are certainly an endless number of health gurus and diet crazies who want to shame you into trying something radical right now. I can already see it out on Instagram and on Facebook. And the fall is no different than the day after New Year’s. You are vulnerable right now. We are entering a new season and those people know it. So I was wondering if you wanted to do a little exercise with me today on the podcast. At the end of each season, I always like to sit down and give some thought to how things have gone for me in the last few months. What’s worked? What could I improve on? And what do I want to set my sights on for the next coming up season? So if you want to do this exercise along with me now, you can grab a pen and a journal as I do, or even just a piece of paper and consider the following questions. Now you can pause in between questions. Take a moment to write them down or listen again or just write down the questions and answer them later. So my first question and what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is what did summer mean to you? So for me, the summer season is a season I always look forward to a lot. I love the heat. I love feeling like I need a little less sleep. I’m up earlier in the morning. My energy feels good. I’m more exposed to sunlight and all of that good vitamin D. I get so much joy out of gardening and growing my own food. Food is naturally lighter for me, and there’s just so much in season and so much fresh, and the farmer’s markets are vibrant, and everything just seems to taste better in season. I see more friends. We meet at the beach pretty frequently where I live. So overall, summer for me is a pretty good time. Now, for many of us, summer can mean one giant nonstop party, one more excuse to eat and drink all the things. And I totally get it. I wouldn’t normally go out for ice cream a couple of times a week while I was just at home. But on vacation, it seems like all too natural to do that. Now, although I don’t drink anymore, it seems natural to live in the moment with summer cocktails. And I think we might overall have a I’ll think about that later attitude. If you feel right now that you blew it or ate and drank more this summer than you thought, Please, please, please be easy on yourself. These questions are not intended to do a shame session on you. It’s really to just build awareness. So again, pause the podcast, take a few minutes to write down your answers to the question, what did summer mean to you? Okay, second question I would like you to ask yourself is, what can we learn from the past couple of months? What can we learn from the past couple of months? Now, here is what I feel like I have learned. I learned that I love the easygoing pace of summer, and I would like to have more of that in my life. For some reason, I frequently assign easygoing with the warmer months and tend to give myself more permission, if you will, to be a little more carefree. But why can’t I incorporate that feeling into my life all year long? It’s something I need to seriously consider and go into fall with because truly, I think that my stress and my health really are starting to depend on it. I really want to incorporate it to some more easygoing, go with the flow attitude. I was also reminded that during vacation, it is not about the food. Now, I know this. I’ve talked about this many, many times over the past couple of years with people. Now, it’s totally fine that I ate dessert more than I normally would. But again, it’s not what I am even remotely remembering about this last vacation. This last vacation was all about my family and spending time together, finding new places to explore, being outside in beautiful Maine, not about the food. I’m not really remembering. what I ate for lunch a couple of days ago. So now what about you? Take a moment to pause and write down with no judgment what you feel like you learned from the past couple of months. Okay, on to question number three. What do we want to do differently for the fall? What would you like to have be different for the fall? First of all, let’s be realistic. We can’t fit in. all the things into a three-month window. This is one season and after you answer the last two questions, your head may be firing off all sorts of ideas. Lose weight, get healthy, exercise more could be among them, just get back on track, let’s get more focused. But remember, we’re only focusing on the next three months. So let’s hone it down and just get a little more specific. When we have goals or ideas that are too big, too vague, and too out of touch, they can become like those dreaded New Year’s resolutions. You may start off with a bang and then fall off soon after. So here’s what I would like to do differently this fall. Knowing that I will be doing much less traveling and likely seeing my kids a lot less, I will naturally have more time to focus on me and just getting excited about healthier eating again. The fall gets me excited for brightly hued winter squashes and cold season vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli. Yes, these things do bring me a lot of joy. I’m looking forward to even more time outside, but in cooler weather, which actually suits me a little bit better than hot and humid. And I want to get back to painting, a really fun hobby for me. And I actually just signed up for a class the other day. I definitely got a little off track with my journaling and my meditating this summer, which are so, so important to me. So I will definitely get back into a morning routine with both of those things. Okay, now you take a moment to pause the podcast and give some thought about how you want to shift this season. Is it playing around with fall vegetables like me? Is it experimenting with new recipes? Is maybe cooking a little bit more? Try and be as specific as possible here and not drift into overwhelm. And now the final and what I think is the most important question. How can we make these changes? in the most loving and kind way. So grab that paper and pen again and write down that question and let’s give some thought to this. Now here’s what I know. None of this can happen. No change can happen when we are beating ourselves up. Believe me, I have tried it and it doesn’t work. You might have had experiences like me talking to yourself, asking why you just can’t get a grip and get it together? Or what’s the matter with you? This kind of talk is what prompts us to jump onto the next desperation diet. Diet creators love vulnerable people. Try not to fall for it. It will only make you feel worse. Now, if you feel like you really blew it this past summer or feel incredibly confused as to how to get back on track, try to talk to yourself as you would a good friend and ask yourself again, how can I make these changes? in the kindest way possible. Now here’s what I’m going to do this fall. I’m going to spend some time in the mornings writing for a few minutes, focusing on simple affirmations, and ending my journal entries with some real positive talk, such as, I am doing the best I can right now. Repeat that to yourself. I am doing the best I can. I promise that that simple phrase alone can help relieve so much stress and anxiety right in the moment. Now the other two very kind things I am going to do for myself is one, to get back on a regular sleep schedule because that is the best thing I can do for my energy and my overall just well-being. The second thing I’m going to do is to nourish myself with the healthiest foods that I… cook and not from a restaurant. Now, both of those things feel very gentle and kind to me right now. And I’m really looking forward to just getting back into that routine. And on that note, I wanted to mention to you my healthy midlife fall reset. Now, I have to tell you right off the bat that the fall reset is not a diet. You might assume that by now from listening to me on enough of my podcasts. The fall reset is simply a way to you gently nudge yourself back on track and get excited about the season in the most nutritious and delicious way. So here is how it works. The fall reset is two weeks of done-for-you meal plans, beautifully curated recipes with pictures, because I know everybody loves pictures, a detailed shopping list to save you so much 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. I’m also including in this go-around a one-on-one coaching session with me during your time doing the reset and a very important webinar on emotional eating. Again, this is not a diet because I do not believe in diets, but I… do believe in giving yourself an opportunity to reset and restart in a gentle and very kind way. And that’s exactly what the reset is. Now, when you sign up, you can start anytime. This is self-guided, but this is a fall reset, so it will not be around forever. Sign up as soon as you can if you’re interested. I will definitely put the link in my show notes. So I hope you you can consider the questions that we talked about today and ease yourself into fall in only the very best and kindest way. Thanks so much for listening. And as always, if you have any thoughts on today’s topic, please feel free to leave a comment to continue the discussion. Look for my links in the show notes for my fall reset. And if you loved this podcast, do not hesitate to rate and review. I would love it. Have a great week and bye for now.