Embracing True Happiness: Karen Seitz’s Journey to Self-Acceptance and Women’s Health Insights

Are you truly happy, or are you just putting on a brave face? Join host Heather Carey as she dives deep into the complexities of happiness with happiness expert Karen Seitz in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories. As women, we often grapple with the societal pressures to maintain a positive demeanor, especially during midlife when our bodies and emotions are in flux. Karen shares her inspiring personal journey, revealing how she transformed her struggles with confidence and fulfillment into a path of self-acceptance and empowerment. This conversation is not just about women’s health; it’s about understanding that we are both the problem and the solution in our lives.

Throughout the episode, Karen discusses her spiritual journey through various healing modalities, yoga, and therapy, emphasizing the importance of embracing our true selves. She sheds light on the unique challenges women face in balancing societal expectations with personal happiness, particularly when it comes to nutrition and lifestyle choices. With her online program, Awakened Grace, Karen aims to guide women toward building self-value and navigating their personal happiness journeys. This program aligns perfectly with the principles of women’s health, offering insights on how to cultivate a healthy mindset and lifestyle.

Listeners will gain valuable nutrition advice and healthy eating tips that complement their emotional well-being. Karen and Heather explore how food beliefs and culture influence our happiness and health, particularly during significant life transitions like menopause. They discuss the impact of emotional eating and the importance of mindful eating practices in fostering a positive relationship with food. As culinary nutritionists, they provide practical cooking techniques that not only nourish the body but also support emotional health.

This episode is a call to action for women to take responsibility for their happiness and recognize the ups and downs of life as opportunities for growth. With insights into midlife nutrition and the seven pillars of abundance, Karen and Heather encourage listeners to embrace their personal food journeys while debunking common weight loss myths and food fads. Tune in to discover how you can align your nutrition and health with your happiness, and learn to navigate the complexities of women’s health with grace and confidence.

Don’t miss this empowering conversation that will inspire you to rethink your approach to happiness and health. Whether you’re seeking guidance on menopause health, exploring the Mediterranean diet insights, or wanting to overcome food confusion, this episode has something for every woman ready to embrace her true self. Join us for a journey of self-discovery, culinary wellness, and the celebration of life’s delicious moments!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. This week, I sat down to talk with Karen Seitz, a self-proclaimed happiness expert. For me, happiness is such an elusive topic. There is so much pressure to just be happy all the time. Despite all the troubling news in the world or scares about our health, hormones, all of it, how do we actually stay happy and can we achieve that state of peace of mind? Karen has a beautiful personal story of discovering her own happiness. If how to get happy is a question you ask yourself on repeat, I strongly encourage you to take a listen to my interview with Karen Seitz. It was a pleasure to sit down with her and hear how she gained her happiness and now also practices this by teaching her philosophy to other women. Take a listen.

Speaker #1
Welcome to the podcast, Karen. I wanted to introduce Karen Seitz, who is a happiness expert.

Speaker #0
And as a former spiritual healer, Karen realized her clients were not getting any better. She was frustrated that she could not deliver the results her clients wanted, even though she was trying lots of different healing modalities and coaching techniques. Karen knew she also wasn’t getting the changes she wanted in her own life. She secretly lacked any confidence in her ability to change. Her adult life had stalled. I think we can all relate to that in some way. And in a fresh new search for answers, Karen found the missing piece that would ultimately transform her life and her clients. Through working on herself, she realized that not only was she the problem in her life, but also the solution. This awareness pushed her to confront herself and get serious about herself and her life. Karen now teaches others the same journey she has taken to find herself and to be happy. Karen calls herself the happiness expert and teaches an online happiness course for women called The Awakened Grace. So hi, Karen. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. And I can’t wait to talk about happiness. This is such a huge. topic for so many women, right? How do we just be happy, especially with everything going on in our lives and the busyness and all of that. So why don’t you just tell me a little bit about you, how you got into this, how you call yourself the happiness expert, and we’ll just go from there.

Speaker #1
Great. Well, first, just thank you for having me, Heather. It’s really nice to be here and And I’m excited to… talk with you and to also share with the audience just my own journey and hoping that women and others listening can learn from my experience and the things that I teach. So it’s great to be here. And yes, I call myself the happiness expert, really from my own trials and errors of really trying to figure myself out and find happiness in my own life. And my journey really started of trying to learn to be fulfilled, trying to have meaning and purpose to myself and my life really started out in my late 20s. I’m 40 now. And I went down a path of spiritual seeking. And I went into it pretty hardcore. I studied things like shamanism and trained in shamanic practices. I became a yoga teacher. and a meditation teacher. I had every self-help book you could think of. Like if one of my girlfriends recommended a book, I was on Amazon probably like within five minutes ordering it. And my husband wondering like, when are the books going to stop coming? Are you actually going to read them? Because many of them just stopped. bookshelf right uh right my bookshelves too i’ve been saying yeah yeah way too easy just to click on amazon you’re like it is right looking for the answers it is uh and i went through years and years of therapy i had my own healing practice as you read in my bio but the problem was is i was doing all of these things trying to work on myself, trying to find answers, trying to figure myself out and life out and happiness out. And I very much had what I called a spiritual facade. And I think many of us can relate to this if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves, where we think we’re doing all the right things. And we wear this facade and persona of I’ve got life figured out. I, you know, touted myself as the spiritually enlightened, put together Zen person. But on the inside, I felt very insecure, lacked confidence in myself. I felt very lost in my life. And I often describe it as I felt like a little girl trapped inside a woman’s body. And I had to evaluate whether the things that I was doing, either I was doing them wrong. And that’s why I was still unhappy and unsure of who I was and confused and insecure. Or the things I was doing didn’t work to bring me happiness and connection to myself and meaning and purpose. And I met my mentors who helped me to realize that it was the latter, that it wasn’t anything wrong with me. The things I was doing, while good in their own way for different. things were not actually the tools and the answers for me to connect with myself and create happiness within myself. That what I really needed to do was learn how to build a relationship with myself and learn to accept myself for who I am and actually get to know who I am through the path of taking responsibility and seeing myself as the problem in my life, yet also the solution. and learning to make choices that put me first and showed me that I valued myself and that I matter. And as I began to learn that, I completely flipped my healing practice and I no longer had people coming to me for healing and their answers. I began teaching the very things that my mentors were teaching me, especially to women, because I think we get really lost trying to become somebody more than who we are and we work on our issues. from the wrong place and the wrong angle. And I love sharing a different path and a unique path to really understanding happiness. And it works. And I’ve been happy in my life for almost a decade now, but it’s a journey and it’s got ups and downs. And a huge part of that journey has been my own body image and my challenges with weight and food. So I’m excited to dive more into that today.

Speaker #0
Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s great. So it sounds like you’re you when we’re on, I think like so many women, you know, we’re on this kind of path, we’re expected to just take on roles of being a mother, right. Being a good wife, being like all these like, like pieces in society. And we can write, have this internal struggle and we don’t really really talk about it that much. I mean, cause that was, we have to get vulnerable. So I’m…

Speaker #1
if I can, just from my experience of myself, is that it wasn’t for me so much even expectations of roles. Like I actively took those roles on in my own pursuit of happiness of thinking like, if I become a wife and I get married, if I have my own business, if I get my college degree, if I have this amount of money, if I have this amount of status, if I have a home, Then I’ll finally be happy and things will be good. And I kept checking those boxes, right?

Speaker #0
Yeah.

Speaker #1
And coming up empty every time. And then asking myself, like, is this, is this what it’s going to be? Like, is this going to be in my life? Yeah. Is this it? And I think we can so relate to that.

Speaker #0
Yeah. So, right. If I just get married, if I have the kids, right, I have a degree, I even get a master’s degree. Like then I’ll be happy rather than happiness comes from. from within. So yeah, so I’m, I’m, I wanted to talk about this, your, you know, you being the problem, as you describe it in your life, and how that understanding shifted your life. Because I know for me that, you know, part of my growing up meant taking responsibility for my own weight loss, and my health journey, and no longer blaming failed diets and like getting out of that, like, that kind of thinking and all the other outside influences, it had to come within me first, right? And like this kindness and compassion that I had to cultivate with myself. So I’m just curious to talk a little bit more about, you know, not just being the problem, but you also talk about being the solution. I love that. I love that. I mean, that sounds so positive and happy to me too, right? Because I think also like the problem, I think women can also just do a lot of blame game with themselves, but I think being the solution too, sounds very empowering.

Speaker #1
So you want to talk a little bit about that? I would love to talk about that. Yeah. What I found for me, cause I, I, you’re, you’re spot on in that we. do a lot of blaming ourselves, which is very different than seeing ourselves as the problem. And so what I had to learn and teach my clients and the women I work with is that seeing ourselves as the problem is meant to be constructive. Because for me and my journey of trying to find fulfillment, trying to get to know myself, trying to figure myself out, everything that I did and this is part of the big problem and the different things we do to work on ourselves. Everything I did from the different healing modalities to therapy, to talking to my girlfriends, trying to get advice, everything enabled me to have a story about why I had turned out the way that I did. And my weight and my journey and continued journey with weight and body image is the perfect example. And I know the perfect fit for your show, everything enabled me to… put the blame somewhere else. So I could put the blame on that I grew up in a household where you finished your plate and you didn’t get up from the dinner table until you were finished eating. I like to joke, I come from hardy Midwestern stock. So blaming my genes or blaming society or Ben and Jerry’s or, you know. everything enabled me to have a story about why I had the problems and the experience of myself that I did in life. And while that could make me feel good in the moment and validated, it didn’t lead to any solution because I think as adults, we all know, and we might not like it, but we all know that the only person that we have any control over to change is ourselves. I don’t have… I don’t have the ability to change my genes. I can’t go back into my upbringing and change the style of parenting. I can’t change society. I can’t put Ben and Jerry’s out of business. I don’t have any control over those things. And I had to realize those things were not the problem in any shape or form. And as long as I continued to think that they were, I was going to be stuck in victim mentality. And I was going to spin around in circles and my issues and never see the light of day from them and actually move forward.

Speaker #0
I was just going to say, right. I mean, my story centers around, right, like my parents, you know, encouraging me to be on diets when I was starting at 11 years old. But, right, I can’t totally put the blame on. I mean, that was also how they grew up, too, right? They had a… mentality of what should you know be so I right so eventually you have to take responsibility which is a very adult it is right it is adults we have to become you know learn to become adults so yeah and one of the things I realized is that and

Speaker #1
this is what I use with my clients too and I had to do for myself is we have to decide at what point have I become an adult and that the problems and issues that I have as an adult. or a result and consequences, positive or negative, of my own choices and decisions. I believe that age is 18. Some people believe that age is 21 or somewhere in that range. And so for me at 32, I had to say, okay, Karen, where you are in your life, the issues and problems you have are from your own choices and decisions as an adult, not from what happened. when I was in grade school or in my childhood. As long as I continue to think that, I’m going to be trapped in a lot of story. I’m going to be trapped in a lot of limiting beliefs, and I’m going to keep myself stuck. So it was very empowering to see, no, where I am and my weight. So I’ve always struggled with being overweight and being beyond what’s an optimal weight for my health. I’ve struggled with emotional eating. I struggled with hating myself and hating the way that I look and hating what I see in the mirror. I had to make a decision of which road do I want to travel down? Do I want to keep looking outside of myself for why these issues exist in me? Or do I want to start looking at my own choices and decisions that are creating the issues that I have around my weight and my emotional eating? And that’s the path that I chose and was mentored down. And it’s been completely, completely life changing.

Speaker #0
I mean, so it sounds like you came up with some solutions for yourself.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
Right. And looking at just even from a physical level, your weight, maybe having some acceptance. around that. So can you talk about the solutions? I mean, what, what were some of the solutions and your mentors? I’m curious about your mentors that you’ve mentioned a couple of times. Um, who, how did you find your mentors? How did you, sometimes I, you know, I believe a little bit in, you know, divine timing and intervention and, you know, so when maybe you’re asking for the help but there it is.

Speaker #1
Very much. Yeah, I very much feel… meeting my mentors, it’s very much divine intervention. And I, you know, through my own path and journey of what I call the journey of being happy and building a relationship with myself for me, and this isn’t necessarily true for everyone. And, and, but for me, my, as I formed a relationship with myself, I also formed a relationship with God and very much believe that God and however you want to. look at that or not look at that for anyone listening. But for me, I believe God was there looking out for me as I was taking all these wrong paths and that there was a bigger plan and purpose for me and my life. And so I very much feel that my mentors were put on my path to get me on the right track for me to become and fulfill my potential and who I am in this life. And so my mentors, David and Peggy, I actually work. for David. And he champions me in my own path and putting myself out into the world as Karen cites and teaching others this path that he’s taught me on how to be happy. And his partner, Peggy, they’ve just been central in helping me understand, not just intellectually or conceptually, but experientially, what it is to be happy and what it is to have a healthy relationship with yourself. what it is to be healthy. And so for me, a huge part of the solution in learning to accept myself and accept myself and my healthy optimal weight, which isn’t anywhere near the delusion of what I thought it should be when I was dieting and, you know, trying to look like the supermodel in the magazine or on TV that I saw. A big part of it for me has been a concept. called parenting myself and doing the things that I know I need to do, even when I don’t want to do them and not just muscling through, empowering through and making myself do them, but actually slowing down, catching my temper tantrums. So, you know, who thought as adults, we could have temper tantrums and meltdowns, but we absolutely do. But catching my temper tantrums and my meltdowns Sup parent myself through it just like a good parent would and tell myself no in a loving but stern way of no we’re not going to sit on the couch and watch Netflix tonight you need to get your laundry done and get your food ready for tomorrow and you need to to work on this a little bit and then maybe if there’s time for a show then you can watch but if not these are your priorities tonight and really parenting myself through that as a way to build. value in myself because what I learned is that my weight and my issues with food did not stem from food or from calories in calories out. I very much had weight on as a reflection of how I felt about myself on the inside, that my weight was a result of me not being emotionally healthy and not feeling well. just feeling bad about who I am because of the choices and decisions I made that devalued who I was and made me feel unimportant to myself. So as I learned to parent myself, to do the things in my life that show me I’m important, that show me that I matter, I began to feel good about who I am. Not how I look, not who I’m perceived as out in the world, but me, Karen, really feeling good about who I am on the inside based on. my character as a person and my integrity with myself to be the person that I say that I am and to follow through on the things that are important to me. And as I did that, Heather, that’s actually when I started to lose weight and find what was an optimal weight for me, which like I said, was not the 130 I wanted it to be, which like I said, I come from hearty stocks. So that is not the frame that I have and begin to It’s… be able to look in the mirror and appreciate who I am because of who I am on the inside. And then all the ways I felt about myself physically. went away because I realized that was actually a result of me projecting onto my physical body, of me hating myself on the inside. Well, then I hated my body. And it was just this nasty cycle that I stayed trapped in for a very long time.

Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, that’s like, right. Parenting yourself is just taking responsibility, right? If we didn’t have that healthy parenting, maybe when we were younger, right, it’s hard to… It’s hard for most of us just to go into adulthood and like be like a good parent to ourselves, you know.

Speaker #1
Just as adults, we don’t know how to do that.

Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, and I think that just, right, that ties so closely. I’m sure you have lots of different instances of being like happy, you know, like the solutions, not just around weight, but, I mean, just thinking about emotional eating, you know, because I’ve had to do this myself that, you know, having those conversations, it’s so easy. That at the end of the day, for me, it was always like my reward was like, it’s the end of the day. And I am going to reward myself with, you know, some kind of ice cream or something. And to have that sort of parenting conversation. Are you really hungry right now? Do you really like do you really need this right now? Can you do something else in its place?

Speaker #1
You know, like, yeah. Or why?

Speaker #0
Right.

Speaker #1
Why do I actually want this? Because for me, that became my… benchmark and my clue, there was something I was stuffing or not dealing with in my life emotionally. And so food was my way to bury that and give myself that like, you know, initial like instant gratification of having what I want when I want. But then the result and outcome of that was then me feeling even worse about myself. So it, and then that, that’s what caused me to have. weight on it. And it also became this huge physical barrier that I began to talk about, you know, taking responsibility. I had to see, no, I’m choosing the weight I’m at. I’m making the choices that is making this happen. Why is that? And it’s because it was the perfect excuse for me to hide in life, whether that be not getting up in front of people and putting myself out there, whether it be not wanting to have sex with them. with my husband and hiding from sex and my marriage, being intimidating to people because I had this physical barrier that made me look bigger. And so it could physically push people away. There are all these things that I didn’t, I wasn’t allowing myself to be conscious of as I was doing it. But once I shined the light on it, it was very clear. And now I know, no, we all know what we’re doing. We were choosing where we’re at and we have reasons why it doesn’t make us a bad person or wrong. It makes it very human. But that’s the empowering part. If I can see why I’m doing this to myself, take responsibility that I’m doing it, then I have a solution because I can actually change my choices.

Speaker #0
Right, exactly. Yeah, we can hold on to weight for all sorts of reasons, right? To I think those are such good points, you know, just to protect ourselves. Or, right, being vulnerable with your husband or being vulnerable with other people, you know, and it’s, yeah, so it can get, it’s, can be complicated. But I love the, just that, that, that inner parenting, you know, that you, that you talk about. I think that’s really a great point and, and something to really think about. What do you think, though, has, you know, so it sounds like you really have. come a long way. I mean, you had all the books, you had all the things, you got all the certifications and right. And it’s, you know, and still you weren’t feeling completely fulfilled until you found your mentors and everything. So I guess a couple other questions, were there other areas in your life that you felt needed your attention as far as happiness? And also then And what have you been your challenges with just. finding happiness because that you know again like happiness i think in our society like that’s you know in our overdriven like so you know just be happy just you know just and i know right we know now like it’s coming you have to do the inner work to find you know you can’t just say i’m going to be happy today like today’s just going to be a happy day and i’m you know so you need to do a lot of that you know that’s a different work so were there other areas in your life that you felt like you put this attention on. Also, and then also what have been the challenges that may, you know, that might come up in this work.

Speaker #1
Yeah, of course. I think it’s important to know and what I have learned on my journey is that things like my issues and challenges with weight and body images, another huge area for me was my marriage and the issues and challenges that I had in my marriage. My family of origin and relationships with my siblings and my parents, money, my career. it. All the challenges and issues, it didn’t matter where they were stemming from. They were all symptoms. So the challenges with my weight, the challenges in my marriage, the challenges in my family, with money, with my career, they were all symptoms of my own unhappiness in me. I very much have experienced and believe that our external world is a reflection of our internal world. So how I was feeling about. myself on the inside and the poor choices I was making in my life to devalue myself and really give myself the constant message that I wasn’t important to me were then showing up in my external relationships and in my external world. So what I was doing before I found this path of being happy, and I’m going to talk a little bit about what that means, is I was playing whack-a-mole. Trying to, okay, I’ve got to work on my weight and now I got to work on my marriage and oh, nope, there’s issues with weight again. Oh, no issues with my marriage again. Oh, now there’s family. Oh, marriage again. And it was this constant whack-a-mole trying to work on these things outside of me. And so learning to take responsibility, learning to parent myself and as a way to build internal self-value, that is the foundation of being happy. And I define being happy very differently than how we might see it in our society and culture, where a lot of times we want to equate being happy to a feeling, whether that be joy or gratitude or feeling happy. And I have found that that is not a sustainable. way to try to be happy because that’s not what happiness actually is. I define being happy as a deep self-acceptance where I only want to be me and I only want the life I have, not because of who’s in it or who’s not in it or what’s in it or what’s not in it, but because I have a foundation and a path of building internal self-value where I feel good about who I am and I value. who I am and my actions and my choices and my life reflect that so that I’m constantly growing and learning to become the best version of who I am. And that’s what it is to be happy. And then in that way, nothing in your life needs to change. You’re not missing anything. You don’t need another zero behind the numbers in your bank account. It’s not about the job promotion. It’s not about the relationship. It’s not about having kids. It’s not about any of these things. Those are all just experiences of life. And when we try to find our sense of happiness and fulfillment from those relationships, we give away our power unknowingly because our experience of fulfillment and meaning and purpose, which is another way to look at happiness, is now dependent on these external people and things that I have no control over. So when I can find it in myself. by building value in myself, those relationships actually become healthy. And that’s what I experienced with weight and my marriage and my family and money and my career. All those relationships changed and became so much healthier as a result of me taking away the burden of them providing me my happiness and meaning and purpose and actually developing that and finding that within myself.

Speaker #0
So it sounds likeRight. Rather than like taking each of these things in your life, marriage, career, how much money I have, my weight. Yes. And like working on each of them individually.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
You write working on yourself and being true to yourself and knowing that the only person in control of your life is you. Right. All those other people outside of you can’t. But then once you work on you, it all reverberates into all your everywhere.

Speaker #1
Everything changes. And in that way, I know I’m okay no matter what. That even if something happens with my parents or my family or a challenge comes up in my marriage, I can see that as a normal, natural part of life and then use that as an opportunity to grow and learn and build more value in myself. And then those relationships become so much healthier because I’m not dependent on them and not needy from them to give me something I can’t provide.

Speaker #0
within myself right the only person that you have to rely on really ultimately is you and and so trying to that and sometimes maybe that’s easier said than you know it’s like oh I have to work on myself I don’t have to work on all of you that’s a relief yeah on the other hand right working on yourself takes yeah work right I mean it takes like it probably takes daily where you know or even you know it gets easier but it takes it’s a commitment to ourselves.

Speaker #1
It’s a commitment of who do I want to be and what’s important to me in my life.

Speaker #0
Right, exactly. So tell me about your program that you have called Awaken Grace.

Speaker #1
Yeah, absolutely. So I teach a program that is a roadmap and an educational program to teach people, especially women. I love working with women because I am a woman and I know that the issues and challenges that we have in our own ability to accept who we are and to really get to know ourselves. So my program Awakened Grace is a 10 week educational program that takes women through a step-by-step process and an education of how do I build value in myself? How do I get out of victim mentality and put the power back in me? And what’s the roadmap that I need to be doing in my life to be happy. And the result of the program, so I work with women who are in their 30s or 40s or midlife who have done all the things, they’ve got a great life on paper, but they still feel like something’s missing and they have a nagging emptiness or void that they can’t seem to shake no matter what they do in their life or no matter how they work on themselves. So it’s for women who come in and they’re feeling you lost. They’re feeling disconnected. They’re feeling confused and overwhelmed. Like, how do I figure myself in this life out? And the result of the program is having a deep transformational shift of how you feel about yourself. So at the beginning, we define how you’re feeling about yourself. And at the end, it’s a completely different experience. And you have a roadmap to continue building a relationship with yourself and making the lifestyle change. to make different choices so that you can feel good about who you are and be happy in your life. And that’s what Awakened Grace is all about.

Speaker #0
That sounds great. I love roadmaps. I love anything like that. So that sounds like a really comprehensive program and taking the time to work on you first rather than trying to deal with all the external stuff first. We do this right in reverse and that’s how it should be. So any takeaways just for the listeners, you know, about happiness or your program?

Speaker #1
Yeah. Well, earlier he had asked about, you know, some of the challenges and something that I like to leave listeners with is when I was working on myself before in modalities that did not work for me. to connect with myself and really understand and learn how to be happy. I was trying to get myself to some perfected state where I felt good all the time. I could coast, everything was good. And that was really shooting myself in the foot. And what I’ve learned and what I want to leave listeners with is to understand that the journey of being happy and the journey of feeling good about who you are is in a straight line that life in itself by nature is full of ups and downs and tests and challenges and losses. And so it’s not about trying to get to a place where those things don’t exist or you can just sail right through them. You actually use those tests and challenges and losses as your opportunity to grow and learn within yourself and to know that we make mistakes. It’s not about becoming perfect. It’s not about doing everything right or never having negative emotions. It’s really learning how to navigate and embrace the ups and downs of life. as kind of your weights to build the muscle in yourself, to believe in yourself, to trust in yourself and feel good about who you are. And that’s the journey of being happy.

Speaker #0
Right. Because life is totally unpredictable sometimes. Right. And even with women and weight just going through changes, you’re just you’re different in your 30s than now I’m in midlife. I’m 55 years old. I mean, my body is not the same as when I was 40. you know yeah well yeah I’ve got to pivot with that you know and yeah and learn how to be happy and you know and accepting of the changes you know just getting older and it’s a journey it’s I recognize now I wanted to get my weight and my challenges and with food which I are

Speaker #1
not a straight line um I had a temper tantrum last night about wanting to eat what I wanted and I’m parenting myself through it. And sometimes I don’t. But my weight and food has really become a relationship and become my friend for me to see and know when I’m getting off track. So if I’m off track with my weight or I’m off track with food, it’s just a mirror that I’m off track in my life. And that’s a good thing because then I can catch myself and begin to get back on track before I get really lost in the woods or spiral down. So weight and food can actually… become your friend. And it’s not about getting to a certain place. It’s about accepting it as a relationship and letting it be a journey.

Speaker #0
Right. Exactly. I love that. That’s a great way to, I think, end our conversation is just that, right, it is a journey. And it sounds like you’ve got a lot of great tools that you teach women to just, you know, learn how to find acceptance and happiness and even when they get off track. or go through different changes in life to be able to just get back on. Where can people find you?

Speaker #1
Absolutely. So you can find me on my website, which is ahappinesscourse.com, like ahappinesscourse.com. And you can also find me on YouTube under Karen Seitz, the happiness expert. I’m in the process of building up my YouTube channel. So if you want more… more videos and just more information that you can apply to your life, you can find me over there too.

Speaker #0
That sounds great. And I will definitely put those links in the show notes of the podcast. Great. Karen, thank you so, so much. I appreciate it. This was a great conversation. And I know people are going to love to listen to you and hear all about happiness.

Speaker #1
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker #0
Thank you and have a great day. And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating, our real bodies, and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.