From Diet Myths to Healthy Choices: Megan Gall’s Inspiring Weight Loss Journey and Nutrition Insights for Women

What if the key to lasting weight loss lies not in strict diets, but in understanding our personal food journeys? Join host Heather Carey as she welcomes the inspiring Megan Gall, who shares her remarkable transformation of losing and maintaining a 100-pound weight loss since 2018. Together, they delve into the complexities of weight loss and the pervasive diet myths that often set us up for failure. Megan’s story is a testament to the power of small, manageable changes and the importance of cultivating a healthy relationship with food.

Megan candidly reflects on her early struggles with food and how a pivotal moment during her split shifts at work led her to recognize her unhealthy eating patterns. Seeking guidance, she turned to a cognitive behavioral therapist, who introduced her to practical strategies like drinking an extra glass of water and keeping a food journal. These simple yet effective techniques helped Megan to embrace sustainable eating habits without feeling deprived, allowing her to navigate her weight loss journey with joy and balance.

Throughout their conversation, Heather and Megan explore the challenges of maintaining weight loss in a world saturated with diet myths and unrealistic expectations. They discuss the vital role of community support and the necessity of approaching food with a balanced mindset, steering clear of perfectionism. Megan now empowers others through her coaching in meal planning, sharing valuable nutrition advice and healthy eating tips that emphasize the joy of food while navigating personal food beliefs.

This episode is not just about weight loss stories; it’s about embracing a healthy lifestyle that honors our unique journeys. Megan highlights the significance of gradual changes and tracking food intake to better understand our habits, breaking free from the cycle of dieting and dismantling diet myths. Whether you’re navigating menopause health or seeking to adopt mindful eating practices, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for women in midlife.

Join us for an enlightening discussion on how to cultivate a nourishing relationship with food, overcome emotional eating, and celebrate the empowerment that comes with understanding our bodies. Tune in to learn how to ditch the diet culture and embrace a sustainable approach to health, one delicious meal at a time. It’s time to redefine your food beliefs and embark on your personal nutrition journey with confidence!

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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. Hey everybody and welcome to the Real Food Stories podcast. I have an inspirational food story for you today. Megan Gall reached out to me because she thought it was important to share her story about her 100 pound weight loss that she has maintained for how many years, Megan?

Speaker #1
It’s since 2018, 2019. So we’re looking at, yeah, a good number of years.

Speaker #0
Okay. So while Talking to her, I agreed with her and I thought it was important because weight loss can feel so complicated sometimes. The diet industry absolutely gives you some radical ways to take off weight with little or no solutions for how to maintain it, which is the most important part. Diets are typically so unrealistic that gaining the weight back is likely the unfortunate consequence, which only leaves you feeling defeated and confused and just even not. just not great about yourself. So I wanted to talk to an expert and see how she has been successful so far. So Megan, welcome to the show. I’m so happy to have you here today. And let’s just jump in and hear your story.

Speaker #1
Thank you so much, Heather. Thank you for having me. My story really starts, it doesn’t have a starting point. None of our stories do. But I would say when I first started to realize that. there was something amiss with my relationship with food, it really came to a head probably when I was in my early adulthood working in a job that had a split shift. And it gave me two hours in the middle of that split shift to start to do a behavior that really showed me that there was something amiss in how I was treating food and how I was looking at food. So you What I saw myself doing is just going to a fast food restaurant, different ones every time, but really just getting myself enough food to last me those two hours between my work shifts so that I didn’t really have to think about anything. And a little background is I was kind of, you know, overweight at that point, but I really didn’t see it as a huge part of my life. I didn’t see it as a huge problem. at least not consciously. So it really wasn’t the weight so much that was top of my mind when I started to notice this difficulty with food. It was that behavior of me not feeling like I could stop getting that, having that kind of numbing out period in the middle of my day. I don’t know if that’s something that you’ve experienced or your listeners have experienced, but it felt so demoralizing when I saw that behavior from the outside. And that was in, you know, that was in probably 2017, 2018. And what that caused me to do was to kind of reach out for a little help, reach out for a second set of eyes on the situation. Because being in that place and seeing that behavior happening, it just felt like I was doing something. wrong that other people were handling in a more productive way. It felt really demoralizing to be behaving that way. And so what I did was I reached out to a cognitive behavioral therapist. I was lucky enough to have health insurance at that point that let me do that. I think before, I might’ve reached out earlier if I had had health insurance that let me reach out to a professional who I could talk to about it. But the question, After meeting with her a couple of times, the question that she kind of asked me, she didn’t jump right into like, oh, do you want to lose weight? Oh, do you, you know, but as we were talking, one question she asked me was, do you think you could drink an extra glass of water a day? And I think that question shocked me a bit because it seems so inconsequential and so non-related to the behaviors I was seeing myself doing. And I said, of course, of course I can. I can drink an extra glass of water a day. But what it really did and what when I look back on that moment, it just stands out as a huge moment to me because it let me start to see a small behavior change that I knew I was totally capable of. But I saw that I could do it seven days in a row. I could decide to do it and do it. And that made her next question to me so much easier to. to contemplate and do because I had had that small win of, hey, I did. I said I was going to have an extra glass of water a day and I totally did. And the next question she asked me was, do you think you could keep a food journal just to kind of see what’s going on, to see what’s happening in your day to day? There’s a lot of information that I’m sure feels mindless right now, but it could be nice to shine a spotlight on it. So to kind of zoom out a little bit, those two habits. drinking water each day and then starting to keep a food journal, I think really changed how I looked at my food each day, how I looked at how I was fueling myself. And it allowed me to look in a much more detached way at what I was choosing for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack. I didn’t change really a ton about the choices I was making. I didn’t change the fact that I didn’t, that I… would have takeout most nights. I didn’t change the fact that, you know, I was going to be eating sweets, eating, you know, having alcohol. I didn’t change all that. But what I did do was start to look honestly at that food intake. And I think the excitement about getting that information about myself really helped spur me to take on weight loss. First, not really consciously, but once I saw that it was possible. it was something that became more meaningful to me as I kind of moved on with that. So as I built those small habits and saw that it was possible to slowly lower my intake over time and kind of eat in a way that felt much more, to me, it felt like it was some way that other people were eating. It felt like a more natural way to eat, you know, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, rather than just kind of. What I saw when I look back was I was really eating in a way that was whenever I felt in the mood, whenever I felt like there was food around me and I wanted to chow down, whenever it felt like there was something uncomfortable, my kind of go to was was food. So I know that’s kind of a broad way to look at it, but many of us are in that space. I don’t know if that’s something that you you wanted to speak to also.

Speaker #0
Yeah, well. I mean, I think these small, tiny habits, right, are how it needs to start. Right. And so you’re a therapist is saying, can you just drink one glass of water a day? Sounds totally doable. Right. I mean, that’s not like, OK, what I need you to do is start food journaling and, you know, cutting out gluten, dairy and and, you know, and like some like overwhelming like diet thing that you’re like, I don’t know if I can. I guess I can do that. And, you know, it just becomes right. So drinking one glass of water a day. Yeah, I can do that. Like that sounds like, you know, a really tiny habit. But I want to just go back. I just want to ask you just a quick question about how the how you just how it really started when you were younger. I mean, when you were a child, I mean, did you know how was that for you. You know, because then, you know, to get up to a point where you’re you have, you know, a job where you are in these, you know, you have these shifts and you break and you’re, you know, and then you’re going to the fast food restaurant to grab food as a way of just maybe soothing yourself or, you know, giving yourself a break or, you know, that’s your reward. Is that something that you feel like started when you were younger?

Speaker #1
That’s a great question. And I think, I think what I saw, and I didn’t, obviously, when we’re in it, we don’t see it. But looking back, I see a lot of, I see a lot of the theme I see is there was desire, and there was the inability to get the stuff that I wanted, and then kind of a rebellion. So what I mean by that is, you know, I grew up in a a wonderful family that like we had pretty solid mealtime routines. You know, we always had dinner together. We always, we almost always had food at home. We didn’t really eat in restaurants very much. And we didn’t have, you know, a ton of sugary, sweetie, sweet kind of things in my house. So. And inadvertently, I think that really put some of these foods on a pedestal for me because I would see myself kind of I remember one moment when I was maybe six, seven, eight, something like that. And I told my brother who was a few years older, I really want that. The cookies that we have, I can’t remember what cookies they were, but I was like, I really want this. And he’s like, why don’t you just get it?

Speaker #0
And I’m like,

Speaker #1
what? I can’t just get it because anytime we had a food, the question would be like, oh, we’re having dinner in two hours. Put that away. That that kind of oversight felt very real to me as a six, seven, eight year old. You know, I’m not in charge of that. I’m not in charge of what food I get. So that question that my brother asked me was it really kind of opened a door to like, I can’t have this food. I just can’t really show other people that I’m having it. and I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that, to feeling like having something that is outside of mealtimes or is sweet or, you know, is super delicious and hyper palatable. All that kind of stuff should happen, you know, without anyone seeing. So I definitely saw myself grabbing food to watch during, you know, when we were watching TV and then hiding the box behind the couch if my parents came in, that kind of thing. So. So I think, and it’s funny because it can’t all be because of, you know, it’s not because of just one person in your life or one parent in your life or one TV commercial you saw or one. It’s the collective sum of the whole environment, you know, that impacted kind of how I see food and how we all see food. But I think that theme of kind of. not always being in charge of what food I could get. So if the food was available, really wanting to make the most of it is really what I saw. Another example, going to friends’ houses who would just have food on the counter, like sweet food on the counter all the time or chips just in a bowl all the time. I would dart to those things. As a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, I would grab all the mini candy bars out of the bowl. to the point where I was like self-conscious about it. Like, why isn’t my friend going and just chowing down on this food that’s here all the time? I would, if it was in my house, I would chow down all the time. And I think it really made me notice the different ways that people’s food environments in their home is set up when they grow up. That can have a really big effect on how we see food. So I think that played a big role in kind of, As I got older and got more freedom, we go to college. it plays a different, you’re more aware of the food and the heightened pleasure of effective food. And I think that really made me gravitate towards identifying myself as a foodie, loving to go out to restaurants, all that stuff, which really affected, you know, not just my weight, but affected kind of how I saw fun in my life. I really put a lot of focus on food as fun in my life. And that’s different for me now. So that’s a big change that I’ve seen over the course of losing weight and maintaining that weight loss.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I think everyone comes with with some kind of history around food from their family, just from their outside sources. And whether it’s good, bad, you know, I mean, there’s you get imprinted right as a young child and how your family just sees food as food, as love, as food celebrated. or you know are people on diets all the time I mean there’s there’s right it sounds like you know your parents are maybe like just kind of checking like what do you do you know you’re you don’t need to eat that now you’re like right there was like some subtle maybe food limitations restrictions yeah

Speaker #1
right so it doesn’t have to be like a big harmful restriction you know it doesn’t have to be like neglect or over controlling or authoritarian. It can even just be something, you know, relatively harmless, which is I’m going to give my child a very reasonable routine, you know, because all of us as adults, we have an eating routine. So why not model that for my child? And I’m going to cook a lot of food at home because restaurant foods, you know, can can pack an unhealthy punch sometimes with the amount of oils and salt and sugar that’s in it. So I think. it coming from very reasonable goals from a parent can still contribute to us feeling restricted in some way. So it really makes me wonder, I don’t know if it ever makes you wonder like what is the right way? I’m sure there’s no right way but it makes it hard to imagine. how do we stop this cycle of giving our kids some kind of, you know, relationship with food that or, you know, anything that that feels off? There’s no right way or perfect way to do it.

Speaker #0
Yeah. No, I think that that many parents, you know, your parents, all with good intentions. Right. You see the flip side was that your parents, your mom was cooking at home a lot. Right. She was trying to just keep you healthy. Right. And. So, I mean, all with good intentions and maybe just with telling, saying like, don’t eat that before we’re eating dinner in two hours. Right. It’s just it’s all. But it might have without them knowing it might have just kind of had an impression on you. And I totally agree. I mean, how do you stop passing down like, you know, your food beliefs down to your kids, down to, you know, I have a daughter. I mean, I have two sons and I have a daughter. And all of them are very impressionable, you know, as to what I’m doing with myself, with my body, how I look at food. I try to stay very neutral about food, never make a judgment on what they’re eating or, you know, or drinking. And I’m doing my best, you know, because food is complicated. We all have our own food, like really like settled beliefs around food and how it should be. And, you know, your parents might have grown up with their parents who, you know, so on and on.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
So it starts there.

Speaker #1
Any little choice, you know, because we can’t look at all those little choices and judge each one individually at all. Like we shouldn’t be doing that because there’s there’s just the I don’t know that that’s too much unrealistic pressure to put on a parent. completely because we all know that like you’re going to grow up and there’s a ton of influences on you that have nothing to do to do with your parents and your home. So it’s something that, you know, I always I always hope parents can kind of take off themselves a little bit, but there’s no I don’t have a solution. I wish we did.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I mean, for my my parents, my father, you know, when I was about to turn a teenager, like. There is talk about you might want to lose some weight to me. So, you know, those kind of things, I think, are, again, not their fault. You know, that’s just how I think they grew up. My mom grew up always, there was just dieting, always subtle dieting, always going on. And her mother grew up the same way, you know. And so it is what it is, you know, but I think it’s something to be mindful of. Anyway, so like, so you have, we all have our food stories from our past, but here you are then as a young, you know, an adult now, and you go to your therapist and you are successful with the drinking one glass of water a day. And that probably made you feel like in control of something. Right. And then she’s telling you to try the food journal. So I know that you, just from us talking off air before, like you were a big proponent of food journaling. And this has really, really helped you a great deal. I love the concept of food journaling too. I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s, I’m an information gatherer. So if you like that kind of information, it’s, it’s, it really can tell you so much. So tell me about, about you and how that you, how you got into it and, and what changes you made with it.

Speaker #1
Yeah, I, so I, like you, I’m an information gatherer. Emma. squirrel that way. I love, and I worked a little bit, um, in data analysis, um, in a nonprofit. So like, I, I really got to hone my skills there and it became very fun. But I think, what I really liked about it, about food journaling is that you, there are multiple reasons why it can help someone. And I think one big piece of it is the information. So the very specific information you can gather from it, if you are like me, if you really love the numbers of it, obviously all the numbers are estimations, but looking at it with a step back, you can get some really good information from it. If you get detail oriented and nerdy with your food scale and your calories and what your body weight does over time, you can get some really helpful information about what your body responds to. And that has really helped me in maintenance because a lot of folks, when they finish losing weight or they feel like they’ve gotten to a place where they don’t want to. you know they don’t they don’t want to continue kind of lowering their food intake they’re like this seems uh sustainable to me i don’t want to go any less than this um i think a lot of folks get to that point and don’t know what to do there’s no support for them there’s you know weight watchers doesn’t really have they’ll give you like you know maintenance points uh or um some places i i don’t know it’s hard for me to imagine what what the maintenance plan for a lot lot of these programs are because they never focus on that. There’s no, there’s no help for us.

Speaker #0
Yeah, there’s really no, I mean, right. Most of these diets are like, here’s the way to lose weight, you know, suffer, starve, whatever, cut out food groups, and then good luck. Right. I mean,

Speaker #1
yeah,

Speaker #0
I mean, honestly, in my whole entire career, I don’t know a single person who’s been on some radical diet who’s lost significant weight. and maintained it because of that diet i don’t i’m not lying like not a single person no there’s no maintenance right and that’s the most important part is maintenance yeah the losing weight is i mean is is still you have to have you know you have to be very committed but the maintenance is a whole different well it’s almost it’s the same you continue the same habits but the

Speaker #1
payoff of the scale is not there. So you’re doing it for totally different reasons, but all the same things. So that’s a whole new journey. But what I really like about the food journal is that getting it in the very nitty gritty way with the details and what your body does in response to different levels of calorie intake or, you know, protein intake. That helps that has helped me because it gave me a really good sense of what a day… looks like of, um, you know, meals and snacks that support one weight range. So for example, my meals and snacks supporting myself at 230 pounds looks completely different than the meals and snacks that, sustain, um, a weight range of 130 to 140. Like that’s completely different. Um, and so having kept that food journal and having kept that information, lets me know what the general range is to stay there. And then I can get really real with myself and say, is that sustainable for me? Look at what my month looks like, what my year looks like. There are some days and some weeks where I’m going to have a higher intake than that. There are some days and weeks where it’s possible for me to have a lower intake than that. Is that sustainable for me? So the information piece of the food journal with calories is very helpful for me. But the other piece of the food journal, which has nothing to do with the calories and you don’t like it’s not necessary for everyone, I would say. But the other piece that’s helpful about the food journal is you are giving yourself a daily practice of presence with what’s happening with how you’re fueling yourself. So one thing that… a lot of folks say is that I feel mindless with my food. I feel like it’s based on the situation. I don’t really know what my meals were for the day. I can’t even think about it. I was so busy with other things. I had to feed other people. I had to work 12 hours at my job. It feels like an afterthought and we just kind of got to shovel it in when we have the chance or, you know, have a bowl of cereal before we go to bed, just make sure we had something. So. The time that we spend on making sure that our body is fueled each day is very small. Like there’s very little thought or planning that can go into it. So the food journal is kind of, for me, it was a way to increase that time, even just by 10 minutes a day. Now there’s 10 minutes where I know what happened with my food today, or I know what I’d like to happen with my food. I eventually turned it into kind of a pre-planning. habit. So in the morning, kind of jotting down what was realistic for that day. If I wanted to during weight loss, one, reach my weight loss goal over time. And during maintenance, stay in a weight range. That’s kind of what the pre-planning habit became with my food journal. But it really helps you get in the habit of always devoting 10 minutes to thinking that through, which so few of us, especially in really busy seasons of our lives, give ourselves. And I think that also really encouraged me to spend more time on making sure I had foods that felt good available. So if you’re working on having your foods at a lower calorie intake than you used to. you want to make those foods count. You want to include vegetables. You want to include protein. You want to make sure that you’re giving yourself food that feels good more than you used to. So for me, that really showed up in another habit that I developed probably a few months into starting weight loss, which was every Sunday setting aside time to make one batch meal for myself, usually for work lunches. And that habit is one that I keep to this day. I Bye. I know it’s something that if on a Sunday I see that I have a time going on, I’m going to make sure I do my grocery shopping and my meal prep on the Saturday or make sure there’s time on the Monday. I don’t let that week go by without saving that one or two hours for myself. And that is a big challenge for a lot of people. Is that something that you often like you see in folks that you work with too?

Speaker #0
Yeah, you can see me nodding at a camera. I mean, yes, it is. I mean, that, well, I know just for me, I am the same. I mean, planning my meals and knowing what I’m going in for, right, and maybe getting things prepped and ready, grocery shopping is high, high priority. And I think it is a secret, if you want to call it, to healthy eating and weight loss. I mean, and so I just want to go back to the food journaling. I mean, because the food journaling takes so much guesswork out of when people come to me, they’re like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I just can’t, or I’m plateauing in my weight and I don’t know. And I will say, let’s food journal for a couple of days. People don’t, a lot of my clients just don’t like to food journal. They’re not that into, you know, they kind of roll their eyes. But I’m like, it is so much information and not having, it takes the guesswork out. When you don’t know, it’s stressful. Why am I not losing weight? Why am I failing at this? Well, let’s get the information down on paper because it is calories in and calories out. It just is. I mean, so another thing I wanted to mention, and you kind of touched on it, was that food Certainly. you know, I’m a nutritionist, so I want to make sure that what you are eating, what those calories are eating are not just McDonald’s and an ice cream. I mean, you can lose weight doing that, right? You can cut your calories and lose weight, but you’re not going to feel good and you’re not going to be healthy. So food journaling, then also you can see where you’re maybe not eating enough vegetables or, I mean, it can really help you eat a lot healthier.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
So I think that, you know, so yes. And so then, and then food journaling, right, just helps with the meal planning and meal prepping. And, and I know those weeks when I’ve been traveling, you know, all weekend and I come back on a Sunday night and it just, it’s just kind of unravels my week a little bit, you know, but, you know, it’s like, I know that that’s maybe going to happen and I have to start on a Monday rather than Sunday, but. Yeah, when I’m not planning, it just it doesn’t feel good in my week at all. Yeah, it makes you feel like,

Speaker #1
yeah, like you haven’t given yourself a game plan. You haven’t given yourself a roadmap. It’s like past you didn’t quite help. And even people,

Speaker #0
right, people will say to me, like, I don’t have time. I’m like, but you have time to schedule out your kids soccer games, your your work. commitments, right? You schedule those in, you schedule, you know, like, so do the same with your food.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
Pull it in, tell, you know, tell yourself what you do your busy nights. Then maybe that’s a different kind of a meal than slower nights. And so, yeah, it’s, it’s a game changer.

Speaker #1
Yeah. And I’m a, I’m a fan. I love cooking as a hobby. Like that’s something I learned over time too. I jumped into it when I first started losing weight and then it just became fun. I always like to bake. but this was the first time that I really got good at cooking proteins and cooking vegetables.

Speaker #0
started baking bread and I’d never done that before. But, um, that’s more of the hobby piece of it. And that’s not necessary to, to feel like you’re becoming a little healthier over time. Like when I, when I have those weekends, like you do, like you mentioned, when you are away for the week and you come back and it’s Sunday night, when that happens, there are what I always suggest, because what it’s worked for me is either get that grocery order delivered or get the curbside pickup or have this list. This is what works for me, like having a list of the lunches and dinners that take almost no prep at all. So for me, it’s like frozen meatballs, like the single serving veggie steamers that come with the sauce, like grilled cheese and soup, like these kinds of easy meals that, you know, if there are things that are slightly more processed, they have a little more sodium, but they’re things that help you. eat during the week in a way that, that, you know, either supports your weight journey or allows you to not have to go out for takeout five nights in a row, then it’s a better choice than doing nothing or like, so it’s something that like, there’s a lot of resistance to getting those kinds of foods or even like pre-chopped vegetables. There’s a lot of resistance to that because one, the diet industry says that the more processed it is, you should cut it out completely. and to… Sometimes those things are a little more expensive than the raw ingredients or the whole food versions of them, right? Like getting a chopped butternut squash that’s already in a container is more expensive than buying two butternut squashes. But the beautiful thing is that when you spend a little more money on the chopped butternut squash, then you eat it rather than letting the whole butternut squash rot on the counter for two months.

Speaker #1
That’s a great point.

Speaker #0
Exactly. Then you eat it and then you’ve done the thing you wanted to do rather than buying the whole food and then ordering, you know, dinner from the restaurant around the corner. So it’s it’s funny because we we see that choice and our desire to be perfect with that whole foods mentality really bites us in the butt when we’re trying to actually do the actions that support the goal. So that’s a big learning piece for me that obviously I’m. you know, we’re all still on this journey of reducing perfectionism. But that has been a big part of this process for me, not just with the food piece, but with the managing stress piece and managing anxiety, because all of that really has to do with influencing your food decisions over time too. And just influencing the way that you feel you’re moving towards a better life in general. so all of that is to say like perfectionism is something that can really work against us and it’s worth it it’s worthy work to really unravel that the best we can every little um every little chance we have to kind of notice this i don’t have to be perfect here what’s a choice that feels like it’s going in a positive direction even if it’s not exactly the way i want to see myself doing it if i can’t do my perfect five tupperware meal prep Can I at least get a can of vegetable soup and some cheese for a grilled cheese so that I can eat from home this week?

Speaker #1
Yeah, no, I think that’s such a good point. I mean, that that a lot of women that I see are is kind of this all or nothing that I can’t eat all organic and I can’t prep it all, but I don’t have time to do it. But I can’t. So there’s just a. We have to be reasonable with ourselves, right? And get out of that perfectionism mode. And we know that cooking is much better than ordering in, ordering takeout, going to a fast food restaurant. Then we lose control of what’s in our food. We really don’t know what’s in our food. When we cook at home, we know we can track those calories and that information. And it’s okay to eat frozen vegetables. I mean, it’s perfectly, they’re perfectly healthy, actually.

Speaker #0
You’re more nutrients in the frozen vegetables. Have you seen that? There are like some studies that it, it changes more vegetables.

Speaker #1
Because they flash, they flash freeze them. And so they, I mean, they’re not texture wise. They’re not great, but in a pinch, I’d rather eat frozen vegetables than eat McDonald’s. I mean,

Speaker #0
and the interesting thing is like, if you had told me in, When I was 230 pounds and just starting to drink that water. If you had told me in that moment, like, you have to eat takeout much less than you do now. You have to stop that habit of getting tacos every night for dinner or getting. burgers or pizza. If you had told me that, I don’t think I would have started. I don’t, I really don’t think I would have. And I still, to this day, do have tacos occasionally from a takeout place for dinner. I might get a burger from a restaurant. I still do. The difference is the frequency and the habit that I have of knowing six dinners that I could make from home in any given time. Like that’s a different skill that I have now that helps me. maintain where I am. But if you had told me that when I was 230 pounds, I would not have started. I would have felt overwhelmed and felt like I can’t become this person that you’re you externally, you the general sense are trying to make me be. I can’t become this person. I can’t see myself doing it. I’m just overwhelmed as it is every day with work. I just feel like I’m giving all my energy to that. And so I think what the other thing that food journaling did for me was help keep things simple. It gave me a minimum and that minimum was writing down what I had. You can’t always control whether you have a day that fits, you know, that works in your weight loss goal. You can’t always have that day, no matter how much you want and you plan and you cook for it. Life is not like that. But usually I still do have the power to write it down. And so it gave me one little baseline habit that I could keep daily and keep a boundary for myself, like a compassionate boundary for myself of even though I can’t do it perfectly, I can’t make all the choices I want to. I can still write this down. And that means I can tell myself, you are successful today. You you did what you set out to do. You got the information for yourself. You work towards your goal. And that’s, I think, what. Many people find hard to do for themselves, especially when they’re living in that uncertain place where they don’t have the information. Like you were saying, they’re working in the dark. They don’t know where their calories are. They’re not seeing the scale move because they don’t have that information. It’s really easy when you’re in that place to say like, this isn’t worth it because I’m so uncertain and I don’t know what’s happening. And I had a cookie today. What am I going to do? It’s easy in that point to kind of. step back and say, this is not working. And then kind of revert to habits that if you keep in five years down the road, you’re going to be, you know, in a more unhealthy place. So that’s what I think food journaling is for me. And it could be different for other people. Some people, it might be like a walk around the block or, you know, a certain amount of water a day or a stretch when they get up in the morning, but a minimum habit that feels like when I do this, I make sure I’m engaged in the fact. that I want to take care of my body. I want to take care of my health. So that’s what I think food journaling is for me. That’s my version of that.

Speaker #1
Yeah, no, that’s a great summary of it. And I think, you know, one thing you just mentioned was just if someone had told you at the beginning, like you are not allowed to eat pizza, burgers, and any of that fast food anymore, that I imagine would have felt… I know because I’ve been I’ve been here, too. Like, I mean, when when suddenly you’re on like a diet and they say, OK, like cut all that stuff out, that feels so restrictive and punishing. Right. And like that feeling of like, how am I going to do this? Like, and I don’t want to. I like those foods, you know, and. Yeah. And so we have to be reasonable with food is food can be fun. It doesn’t always have to, you know, always look like, you know, this. this restrictive thing and it can be incorporated but you have to know the information right we have to know how much how many calories actually is in a slice of pizza yeah a large slice of pizza the

Speaker #0
hardest one I always say like I still I do eat pizza but it is the hardest thing to estimate completely like well I know and you’re like well how large is a large piece of pizza It comes in eight different shapes and sizes and every town has its own like size of crust to cheese to filling ratio. What what the different layers are. Connecticut has a certain kind, doesn’t it? Isn’t there a town somewhere that has like a really

Speaker #1
New Haven? Yes, it has. It’s like the world. Yeah. World famous pizza comes out of New Haven.

Speaker #0
Is that the the the cracker crust one?

Speaker #1
Oh, there’s so much pizza happening in Connecticut. Cause I live, I live close to new Haven. So it’s like, it’s just, there’s so much, there’s so many pizza places with all different kinds of.

Speaker #0
I live in New York, like Staten Island. So we have like the Brooklyn, the Staten Island, the Manhattan, like all these different rivalries of the right pizza. And then my family’s from Chicago. So you got that piece. But yes, the point is, if you say you can’t have these things, there’s you feel that restriction immediately that that it’s like when I was back at eight years old, like you can’t have the cookies like you know that the cookies are for after dinner, not right now. Um, that feeling of restriction feels like I got to either sneak this or I got to get around it somewhere somehow, you know? Um, and so what, what food journaling did to help me there was say like, I’m not going to be able to control what I have every day, what I, you know, I’m going to want to include these wonderful foods in my, in my life. So food journaling is my way of like writing it down and getting information about it. And I think I really leaned into that and had fun with it because I kind of almost felt the challenge of like, how can I fit all the foods that I really like in a day where my weight slowly turns down over time? And I think peanut butter is hard to do that. But peanut butter is my favorite food. And I have peanut butter every single day. And I very much purposefully do that because that’s something that a lot of people nuts can really trip people up. They have a health halo around them. Rightfully so. They’re awesome. They have lots of micronutrients. Some of them have like really good fiber and more protein than other nuts, you know, whatever. But I think it’s hard because they have that health halo. So they seem like a good snack. So then folks, you know, will eat a handful, two handfuls, three handfuls. As we tend to kind of like use food to just kind of keep ourselves busy, they’ll just… and that can because they’re nuts they will have much more calories per gram than other kinds of snacky foods and so that’ll really make people think I’m working so hard towards my goal and they are but they don’t have the information to tell them that nuts are something that you can really plan in but you have to be proactive in how you plan it in because you can go overboard super easily whereas with lettuce it’s very hard to go overboard um so that’s something that like the neutrality of being able to fit in something that you super love. Like, I don’t know, I think there was, it was a few years ago, I wanted, I’ve never had a fudgy the whale like cake. And I’d always seen these like commercials as a kid. Fudgy the whale, it looks like the best cake ever. And a few years ago, we had a birthday party and my partner got it for the party. And it was an opportunity for me to fit into my day. Like, I have the information. I can even pop it on the scale if I want to. I don’t think I did. I don’t think I popped the fudgy the whale cake slice onto the scale, but I could have. And it allowed me to fit it into that day. So it’s something that like I found a bit of fun in making sure I could get these foods that have no health halo whatsoever into my day. McDonald’s too, like McDonald’s, fast food, Taco Bell. I was like, let me, if I don’t want to give these things up. when can I have them? How can I make them work in my kind of new overall consumption of food? Like how can I make it work in this new slightly lower calorie average? And it can be a challenge and it takes planning, but it was something that I felt was important to do because if you said I couldn’t have it, I’d feel restricted. And that would lead to, you know, me feeling like this wasn’t the right process for me.

Speaker #1
I think we take away is that food journaling is really important. I know it’s really important for me too, when I, when I lost weight. So, I mean, it was, I think, and I, and I agree with you on that, the health halo of some foods, because a lot of my clients will say like, I eat a handful of nuts every day. Like I just always have nuts with me in my car. I had, I don’t like how much, this much or like, right. Like a handful can suddenly, right. So we’ve had the drill, like, you know, that can all of a sudden add up as far as calories. And we want to definitely keep it healthy, but we have to be mindful of how much we are consuming. So so it sounds like so food journaling, the takeaway for you has been hugely successful. So let’s fast forward a little bit. You started food journaling. You were committed to it. And I think committed is the critical word here, right, that you stayed committed. Yes. Diets don’t make you stay committed, maybe for a couple of weeks. But so you stay committed and you have to stay committed to lose weight. It always has to be with you and then to maintain weight. So let’s. Let’s fast forward. How long did this 100 pound weight loss take you? Did you lose it slowly? And where are you now?

Speaker #0
Great question. So I would say it took, I believe if I look back at the data, which I collected, which is fun, I believe it took me around 11 to 12 months to lose that. And I think looking back, it seems on the fast side. Maybe it’s, I think it’s within, it definitely was within the one to two pounds. And I think in the last few months, it was more like a half pound a week. I think I very intentionally went down to a half pound a week. Because when, when you have dieted, and I didn’t really know at the time about breaks, like kind of taking maintenance breaks or diet breaks. And I think I would have, if I had been advising myself, I would have. But when you’re eating less than your body needs to maintain its weight for many months in a row, you’re going to notice that your kind of overall metabolism is dwindling down a little bit. You might need even less energy than you did before in order to maintain your weight. So as you do that, you slowly get to a point. I think I was aiming for an average of around 1300 calories a day, which it. When you’re trying to do that, it doesn’t feel like you can fit much in. It doesn’t feel like you can get a nice, I don’t know, a slice of life. It feels like you can’t. Right.

Speaker #1
I mean, 1,300 calories is pretty low. And then you’re really focused on, you have to be really mindful of how much you’re eating. And is there any room for some fun in there? Right.

Speaker #0
And that’s important to me. It’s important to all of us. And I think… Um, and there are people out there who are older, shorter, more sedentary, who do in fact do that. And like some folks have a really good relationship to that. They just feel, you know, fine with that. Me as a beginner at that time, um, I don’t think it would have, if I had tried to continue that, I don’t think it would have felt great for very long. Um, so I was, you know, connect the main way I connected with other people who were. losing weight was on the MyFitnessPal forums. They had a lot of people connecting with information there about their journeys, what they were doing, a lot of question and answer, helpful threads. And so I connected with a lot of people there who love looking at the data of it and said, well, you can kind of adjust your calories and slow your weight loss down here. And so I bumped everything up and I purposefully kind of slowed my rate of loss so that the the feel of the week was more open, more, you know, forgiving, more because when you’re trying to stick to a lower calorie number than you ever have before, open and forgiving are not the words that I would describe that as. Life just doesn’t set itself up to make that easy. So I purposefully tried to lose slower at that point. And I got to the point where I wasn’t sure when I wanted to stop. But I think I aim to go. to maintenance. I aimed to bump back up to maintenance and continued my habits of food journaling and measuring and meal prepping. And with seeing myself slowly continue to lose weight, because I think many, I don’t know if you’ve talked to people who have achieved weight loss and then feel a lot of fear because they’ve never done that before. Or if they have, they’ve seen themselves regain quickly or slowly. Either way, they feel a lot of fear at that point. So I was feeling it too. And so I was saying, you know, should I really bump that? Like I’m calculating with my information that I could be eating around this level and be maintaining. Should I do that? And I was not because I was scared. And so a lot of people in my, in the forums were saying very kindly, like, well, look, look at the information you’ve collected. what’s holding you back from trying that? And I love that they did that because it really helped me kind of try to accept like, okay, no, I can, I’m an adult, I can try this, I can experiment with it. I can make, you know, I if something feels like it’s not right, and I feel like slowly over time, I’m gaining weight, I can look at it again. And I can adjust. I’m an adult, I have self trust. So I think that was it was really nice to have some people. uh who had either done it before or were on the same journey that i could kind of uh debrief with and really get a reality check on it. Cause that’s a really hard transition to, um, end your weight loss period and purposefully say, I’m going to maintain here. I’m going to live within a certain range here. Um, so I, I I’m actually curious about your, you, you doing that as well. Cause it, it sounds like, you know, you’ve also had that experience. It’s a hard one.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Well, I mean, right. It’s like so much that, that. There definitely comes a point where there’s like a fear, right? That you’re going to gain it all back. You’re going to then blow it. You’re not going to be able to maintain it. And, and it’s all, all your effort for, for nothing or, you know, or you’re like, you’re just going to lose control. I, you know, that’s totally understandable. I think that there’s also, I mean, so, so a couple of things, I mean, losing weight too fast. You know, when I see my clients and I say it’s. one to two pounds a week, like you want to lose it slowly because you want to maintain your metabolism or you don’t want to drop too quickly, your metabolism is going to get all wonky and then it’s going to try to hold on to every calorie that you have. People don’t like to hear that. They want to lose five to 10 pounds a week and just get it done already. And that’s not how it works. Not if you want to maintain it, right? And not if you want to maintain it. So So I think, and I love how you were into like the forums and talk to other people. I think that’s, you know, others, it sounds like successful people who were losing weight too. I mean, that’s to have that community is really important, you know, just to get that support is I’m just curious, is, is my fitness pal, what you use to track your, your food?

Speaker #0
Yeah. that’s my main journal kind of. location. I have tried other things in the past just because, you know, it’s nice to shake it up every once in a while. So I’ve done the eight app ATE where you, you snap photos of what you’re enjoying and you can put little notes on it. And so that it’s all like other ways to do that mindful check-in of, of I’m aware of what I’m having and how I’m fueling myself. Another way I have done it is there’s a wonderful woman who’s a health coach, a weight loss coach, and she has the podcast Half Size Me, Heather Robertson, another Heather. And her method, one of her awesome methods is like kind of a paper pencil journal, where it has a pre planning element to it as well, you kind of pre plan your day. And then you see, at the end of the day, you kind of give yourself a rundown of what what has happened. And you use that ritual of planning and reviewing to kind of give yourself you it allows you to really build habits that support what you want to do because you’re seeing that information. You’re seeing how your day changes and you’re getting a sense of what are those things that are changing my plans. And you can really learn how to work around those things, which is awesome. So I’ve done that also. But yeah, I think because I’m someone who loves having the certainty, relative certainty, I’m putting in quotes of um of my calorie intake. I like having that. So MyFitnessPal has been the free method of choice that I’ve used.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Well, I think the takeaway is that anyway, if you will, if you like to use paper and pen, right. You know, if you want to use MyFitnessPal apps like that are really helpful because they’ve got so much information already in there. You don’t have to do a lot of extra looking up of, of, of things. So whatever I think works for you. I just to answer your question about just the like weight loss plateaus and everything, you know, and like when to stop and like just start maintenance. I think for me in my story, I got to a weight that it was becoming. It sounds like for you to like it was just becoming harder to lose weight. I think my body was just really comfortable at that weight. And I was comfortable at that weight, too. I didn’t you know, I wasn’t looking to become a size zero. I just wanted to be at a healthy weight. for me. And, and, and I felt very happy and I, I could just feel intuitively, this is where my body is settling and, and otherwise it’s going to take, it’s going to take a lot of work. It’s going to take like that. I’m going to start to not feel good mentally and physically if I have to, you know, if I want to like keep going any lower. So that’s, that was my, my story as well.

Speaker #0
I love that you had that sense intuitively that this. felt right because I think there’s so much that confuses that into intuition for us growing up in um a culture that really prizes women for how they look there’s so much that that clouds up that intuition oh yeah i don’t think i yeah oh i don’t know if i had that intuitive sense um well i guess i didn’t see it consciously i think what was signaling to me that this was a reasonable place to be was probably the bmi chart which i wouldn’t go by these days anyway i think that was signaling to me and i think um i think unconsciously The fact that I could, I had heard by that time, a very helpful phrase, which was kind of don’t, don’t do something for weight loss that you’re not willing to do for the rest of your life. Whatever way that was phrased, I can’t remember exactly. But that was really helpful for me, because I was saying like, okay, so in order to maintain this level of weight loss, I kind of have to plan out my week in some sense, I have to see what big events are coming up, I have to say. If there’s a party here, if there’s a crazy day here, there might be one or two days that are higher calorie. And therefore, I’m going to find two other days that are slightly lower. You know, I was seeing that there is a price to this level of leanness. I think that’s a that’s a book, actually, like the price of being lean or the cost of being lean. There’s a level of oversight that you have to have. A lot of like bodybuilders, fitness people, athletes will probably say and reinforce that there’s a level of. work and planning that has to go into maintaining a body of a certain type. So ideally, many of us want to kind of eat, fuel ourselves, and then kind of keep that amount of time pretty low so that we can focus on the really important parts of life. We can focus on building our skills, being the best family members we can, making memories, planning trips, all that kind of thing. So we want to focus on those important… parts of life. We don’t want the food part to overtake those. So I think that’s the point where we should be looking like, is the food piece overtaking these parts of life that I know intuitively are more important? And once it does, it sounds like that’s a place where we should stop or reassess or take a step back and say, you know, is this worth it? Is this, you know, the small difference in the size of my waist, is that worth this amount of time of my day and my week and my life? And it’s different for everyone, but it’s important to do that step back.

Speaker #1
Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think that’s a really great way, I think, to maybe end our conversation is that losing weight is a commitment. It can be challenging, but we don’t want it to get into some zone of this is going to take over my life. And I think that’s where you then by the time it’s, that’s when maybe you know when to pause, you know, and maintain.

Speaker #0
Because otherwise we lose sense of the reason why we did it in the first place. Like if, if there’s, many of us have a weight loss goal because we want to feel more energy. We want to do more things in our life. We don’t want to say no to things because it would be uncomfortable or we couldn’t find the right clothes or we wouldn’t have the energy or we’d be in pain if we did it. The reason we did this is so that we could make more of life, not take away parts of life to fit some ideal. So I think that question, it’s easy to lose sight of, but always worth coming back to.

Speaker #1
Exactly. Yes. So Megan, you now coach women or women and men. right? On weight loss and planning and your whole philosophy. How can people find you and how do they work with you?

Speaker #0
I would love folks to come join my newsletter. And they can do that if they go to my website, www.partakemealplanning.com. You can join my newsletter there. It’s free. And I’ve recently started a kind of meal, a free meal planning club. So this is going to be kind of a private Instagram live every week where we kind of it’s like a co-work space. So I’m going to plan my week. You’re going to get to ask your questions as you plan your week. I have an awesome kind of template that I use that you all can and can print out for yourselves. So that’s kind of you get access to that if you join my newsletter. So come in and see me on my website at partakemealplanning.com. And you can also follow me on Instagram, which is partake. underscore foodie.That sounds great. I love the weekly meal planning and that’s a membership sort of like that people join.

Speaker #1
Yeah. It’s almost like a club. I’m calling it the partake meal planner club. So I love when you join the newsletter, you, you get the kind of weekly, um, link to, to that club on it’s a private Instagram live.

Speaker #0
Okay, great. Well, I will put all of those links in my show notes too, so people can access it that way. And… Thank you so much for just sharing your story. This has been really inspirational. And I think, and I don’t think, I know that people will get a lot out of hearing about you and how you lost 100 pounds and maintained it.

Speaker #1
Thank you so much, Heather. I love talking to other people who are just as passionate about this and, you know, just as focused on helping this become like. a piece of life that doesn’t overtake our lives. That’s like the key. It can be interesting to talk about, but the more we get people to kind of, I don’t know, focus on the small habits so that they can then step back and enjoy more of life. I think that is the key. So thank you so much for having me on and letting me share my story.

Speaker #0
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.