Healing Through Food: Heather’s Journey of Emotional Eating and Family Influences on Nutrition Choices

Have you ever felt that a single comment about your body changed your entire relationship with food? Join host Heather Carey in this deeply personal episode of Real Food Stories, as she unravels her journey through food, healing through food, body image, and emotional eating. Heather reflects on how her early experiences were influenced by family dynamics and societal expectations, particularly during the tumultuous transition from childhood to adolescence. A pivotal moment in her life came when a seemingly innocent comment from her father about her weight transformed her view of food from a source of joy to one filled with anxiety and shame.

Throughout this episode, Heather candidly shares her struggles with dieting and emotional eating, revealing how significant life events, including her father’s death and her own health challenges, compounded her issues with food. As a culinary nutritionist, she offers invaluable nutrition advice, healing through food and healthy eating tips that resonate with anyone who has faced similar challenges. By sharing her personal food stories, Heather emphasizes the importance of storytelling in healing and encourages listeners to confront their own food beliefs and narratives.

Listeners will appreciate Heather’s insights into the impact of family food influences and societal pressures on our eating habits. She advocates for self-compassion and understanding in the journey towards a healthier relationship with food and body image. Rather than succumbing to diet myths and restrictive diets, Heather promotes a more mindful approach to eating, aligning with the principles of the Mediterranean diet and sustainable eating practices. This episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating women’s health issues, especially during midlife and menopause, as Heather shares her midlife nutrition insights and the seven pillars of abundance that can guide us toward healthier lifestyle choices.

As she weaves her narrative, Heather encourages listeners to challenge the weight loss myths that often plague our understanding of food and health. She also touches on the importance of mindful eating practices and how they can lead to a more fulfilling relationship with food. This episode is not just about food; it’s about embracing our personal food journeys and the culture around it, celebrating family food traditions, and finding peace in our bodies.

Join Heather as she invites you to rethink your own food beliefs and embark on a path toward culinary wellness. Whether you’re interested in cooking for health, exploring vegan cooking, or simply seeking to enhance your relationship with food, this episode of Real Food Stories promises to inspire and empower you to take charge of your nutrition and health.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Hi everybody and welcome back to Real Food Stories. I’m so glad you are here with me today. I’m your host Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, 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 eat. Last week I introduced myself and I talked about the the beginning of my food story. And I wanted to dive in further this week. to just close up those chapters on growing up and my own journey with diets, feelings about body image, and emotional eating. I also wanted to talk about the power of story. I’ve always been drawn to people who are really good storytellers. I think the most interesting people are the ones who are also so talented at telling a good story. I’m sure you’ve heard people talk on TED Talks. They literally created a whole business around this very subject. And if you haven’t, they have thousands of talks on any topic imaginable. There have even been brain studies done that show how the storyteller and the listener both benefit not only from telling a meaningful story, but also from listening to the story. I believe a storyteller’s vulnerability in sharing their stories is just good medicine. Sharing our stories around food, real food, is at the heart of this podcast. We all have stories to share, be it the cultures we grew up in, our beliefs around eating, the diets that dominate our lives, or the confusion around food. Isn’t it high time to have a conversation so we can take these stories that can sometimes be filled with so much shame and fear and dispel the myths so we can begin to heal? During my first episode, I told the story of my family and the many multifaceted sides of it. Take a listen if you haven’t already. It will help make sense for the rest of my story and today’s podcast. I probably got my first taste of storytelling from my dad’s side of the family. Many of my relatives were always sharing a good tall tale, particularly my grandfather, with almost anyone he met. literally anyone he met. His friendliness immediately put people at ease and it allowed them to warm up to him instantly. It was a trait I’ve always admired. I believe that people appreciate real people just like real food. We all have a story to tell. And during the first episode, I talked about my early days when I described food as fun, when food had no labels for me. No calorie counting, no rules or restrictions. For some other people in my family, this did not exist, but not for me when I was young. Yet something shifted profoundly when I became a preteen, and I want to share about that today. This is the middle of my story that I had mentioned the last time. It was as if I had graduated from being a kid and was getting initiated into the world of adulthood. And in my world and my family, a woman entering adulthood meant you had to start noticing the flaws of her body. This was so generational. I would hear or notice both my grandmothers, my aunts, my mother, talk about weight and appearance, mostly with fear, not for health reasons, but for pure vanity. Being good enough, worthy enough, or beautiful fell on how much you Wade. and what your body looked like. The first time I realized that something might be wrong with me, and I am making big giant air quotes right now around the word wrong, because there was never anything defective or not right with my body. But the first time I felt like something might be wrong was over one small but powerful one-liner from my father. That’s really all it took. My father made a helpful suggestion that I might want to lose a few pounds. That was it. One sentence that changed everything for me. Hey, you might want to think about losing a few pounds. My father, my first male role model, was my hero. I remember feeling like I had discovered a side of him that I shouldn’t have ever seen. He was not my dad anymore. More like a judgmental man scrutinizing a woman’s body, telling me his little girl had flaws, and telling me I need to change. And what if I didn’t? This felt stunning to me at the time. I remember it so clearly. I was 11 years old and definitely maturing faster than some of the other girls my age. I wore a bra young, I got my period, and then went through- all the puberty changes that you can imagine, but at least two years before many of my friends were going through the same thing. No surprise, I started a diet soon after that, which I remember vividly consisting of a ration of plain canned tuna, hard-boiled eggs, and orange juice with salt sprinkled in it. I don’t know if that was to maintain my electrolytes. I’m not sure what the reason for the salt was… But don’t ask. This was very late 70s and a diet that came straight out of some fashion magazine. It nutritionally made zero sense and it was my first experience with starving and suffering in relationship to food and my first experience with diets. The feelings that food could be destructive and that my body was not perfect in the eyes of my parents. Was it any surprise that this diet lasted me all of three days. Because who could subsist on something so depriving? I don’t remember if I even lost any weight, but if I did, I’m sure I quickly gained it all back. I can tell you though, that from then on, my definition of food was anything but fun. Sugar became a secret. Desserts were not something you were allowed to enjoy, but had to first be verbalized in, I really shouldn’t, or I’m dieting, I can’t right now. I dabbled with diets from that point on, and when I wasn’t on a diet, I felt guilty about eating certain foods because, well, that’s what women were supposed to do. In my world, when it came down to it, girls were not allowed to enjoy their food. You certainly couldn’t eat as much as the boys were eating. My boyfriends could eat freely because they needed to get big and strong. We girls ordered salads or skipped meals. or made a pronouncement that we just weren’t hungry. Anything to not look like you were eating too much or enjoying food too much. I didn’t know this at the time, but my emotional connection to food was becoming somewhat of a bigger reality. A couple of years later, when my dad died from cancer, not suddenly, but at an age way too young, I realized later in life that my connection to food as comfort started right then. Interestingly enough, I can only remember bits and pieces of the funeral itself, but the amount of food that came into my house after that is deep-rooted in my mind. Those sugary green and pink cookies that you see in Italian bakeries, almond cakes, and rich gooey brownies took over the kitchen. I was a terrified little girl handling a big adult problem, and sugar, yes sugar, became my b****. best friend. It seemed like the only thing I had to make me feel better was the food. Eating for emotional reasons, to think that food has the power to make you feel better or soothed in any way is very primal. I was confused, alone, and feeling so lonely. Eating for comfort is something we can learn early on. If you were raised getting a cookie every time you cried, or something wasn’t going right for you, the link between sugar and your emotions has already been set in place. Or when you’re in the middle of a trauma like I was and you feel there is no way to soothe yourself, food can quickly become the answer. Wires can get very crossed the older we get. If we learn to pay attention only to our emotional cues for food rather than our physical cues for food, we stop knowing how to use food. food for nourishment and enjoyment and turn to food as our rescuer. And this continued for me for years. I was fluctuating with my weight over and over again. By my senior year of high school, I had lost a lot of weight in another unsustainable way by cutting out more foods, adding in suspicious supplements, and the ever-famous Jane Fonda exercise classes I was obsessed with. For a while, I felt really in control of my body. I was using all the willpower I could muster to stay strong and thin. Yet every event after that that stressed me out, starting college, boyfriend breakups, family issues, my focus would turn automatically to food, mainly sugar and then alcohol too. But deep down, I knew. I knew sugar was not serving me. I knew diets did not work. I knew that being so restrictive with food meant I would go in the other direction and give myself permission to eat all the things. It was a yo-yo back and forth. It just was a never-ending cycle of beating myself up, feeling I had let myself down because I couldn’t maintain the willpower, then redeeming myself with a diet. But I finished college and then cooking school and had a solid relationship with using food in a more healing way. I loved experimenting with food for energy and having the courage to try new foods and cooking techniques. I was definitely evolving my awareness, but I wasn’t totally there yet. I had more big events and stress to contend with. I started graduate school and very soon in got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and this tested my emotional radar with food like nothing else. I felt endlessly grateful that I had had my cooking school experience behind me to support myself. I started learning more about the connection between stress and my autoimmune disease and what foods could complement that. I knew that what I ate can be stressful on our bodies or healing, but I was still very much in an emotional eating cycle. I know I’m not alone here with my experience with stress. Doesn’t it feel like sometimes that life is just one big ball of stress that we simply have to learn? to manage on a daily basis. There’s never-ending news. There are health issues. There are COVID. There is the war, just on and on and on. And there’s science behind stress, our food choices, and our weight. When we are chronically stressed, our hormone levels, cortisol in particular, which is our stress hormone, stays consistently elevated. In turn, Cortisol lowers metabolism, which can have a profound effect on weight. It’s important to pay attention to our stress, to understand it, and find ways to help lower it that hopefully does not involve foods like sugar or alcohol. So nonetheless, this journey lasted me for years. I was on and off diets and exercise programs where I would lose weight and then gain it back, and on and on. In there, I had gotten pregnant with my twins. And then very soon after that, my third child. I was trying to get my business up and running and I was juggling and hustling. But what I want to really share here and be vulnerable about is this was well after I had been to my health supportive cooking school and my graduate degree in clinical nutrition. I had the information, more like the facts on… how to lose the baby weight, how to get my body back. I knew about calories, how many, what kind, all the exercises to do. And I could certainly tell you and myself how to lose weight from a numbers perspective. I had all the information and I was still struggling to lose weight and overall just feel good about my body. But what about having a bad day or feeling overwhelmed by my twin babies and just wanting to sit down at the end of the day and reward myself and comfort myself with ice cream or a glass of wine. So when my kids were a little older and I could no longer blame the extra 20 pounds on baby weight, I started to slowly get more inquisitive about how to lose weight and keep it off and get off of the dieting roller coaster. My kids were certainly the impetus for the desire to make a significant change in my health. Not to mention, I was nearing the age that my father had passed away. I was tired of beating myself up for my body and I was done trying to lose weight simply to feel like I looked good in a bathing suit. I wanted most importantly to be as healthy as I could be for my kids. I know that many lifestyle diseases, diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers are definitely affected by weight. And I did not want to be responsible for an illness that could be in my control. So I started to do a lot of research, almost all of which they never taught me in graduate school. I knew as much as there was to know about the science of nutrition, but little was mentioned about getting focused on your why for losing weight. I learned to tune into mindful eating and being my own cheerleader. Kindness and compassion are two things that are never taught to you in a diet book. Trust me on this. It felt slightly radical and it worked. I now know that you cannot maintain weight loss without them. It’s just not negotiable. I also felt very fortunate. I’d always been curious about the connection between food and health. Food as medicine was the mantra of the cooking school I attended, and knowing how to cook and eat well was an enormous advantage. Yet, with all my education and hands-on experience in the kitchen, I still couldn’t make permanent shifts in my thinking about diets or my weight or body image and the food. until I infused self-compassion and intention into my life. So I lost the weight I wanted and I have kept it off. Again, for me, it is not about the number on the scale, but the journey that I had with self-kindness. It simply can’t be done if you are beating up on yourself. I’ve also grown older since then. My body is as ever-changing as always. My hormones fluctuate and I am constantly in a phase of transition like all women are. It helps me though and feels good to share my story because secrets only indulge the shame we have around our bodies and food. So I know this to be true. When we share, we heal. I wanted to add that when I first shared this story on my blog a couple of years ago, I was really genuinely scared to tell this story of my journey and my weight loss. I really thought that no one would want to hear from a nutritionist who coaches other women tell her story about her own issues with weight and emotional eating. Well, it turns out that it was my most well-received blog and it felt good to be transparent and real. We’re living in a society that shames women for those few extra pounds or a lot of weight. for not being disciplined enough or having enough willpower to persevere. If you know Brene Brown, as I think most of us do, she’s the famous researcher on shame and vulnerability. Brene says, shame for women is this unattainable, conflicting, competing expectation about who we are supposed to be. And she goes on to reiterate that to talk about shame means to be vulnerable, to let go of secrets. Shame that is heard with empathy cannot survive. I felt ashamed that my father judged me so harshly. I was ashamed of my emotional eating and drinking. And I was particularly ashamed that I was a nutritionist who had weight to lose and could not figure it out for a long time. Opening up our stories around food, embarrassment about our weight or body, and being vulnerable helps to diffuse the shame you might be feeling. feeling around your body and health. It’s not only good for you, but it’s good for greater womankind. The more we share, the more others feel comfortable sharing too. So today I wanted to ask you, what about your stories around food, eating, weight, or body image are you willing to share? How is shame and keeping secrets thought of in your family of origin? And how Is it with your family and yourself now? I have a free PDF that you can download in the show notes to help you ponder some of these questions. And if you would like to share in the reviews, that would be wonderful too. I know that I am not alone with my stories around weight and diets, and I want you to know that you are not alone either. I hope you have a great week. And if you love this podcast, please rate and review. It would mean the world to me. I will see you next time. Bye for now.