Full episode 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. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. I hope you’re having the best summer so far because my summer has been great. And thankfully, it’s not over yet. Now, I’ve been up in Maine for most of it. And more about how I even ended up in Maine and how and why we spend so much time in Maine, I’ll get to that in a minute. But up there, I have had some really meaningful visits with friends and family. I also got my creative side out through art classes that I took up there, classes about food, classes about medicinal herbs. I went camping in Canada. And even though I was working with clients around all of that, I decided to put the podcast in my sub stack on summer vacation too. So that’s why you haven’t heard from me in a little while, but I’m definitely getting back. And… Sometimes when you’re trying to gain clarity and figure things out like I have been, you need to create a little physical and mental distance. You know that expression people use when you’re younger and you’re just trying to decide whether to break up with your boyfriend, right? What is it? Set it free. If it’s meant to be, it will come back to you, something like that. I wasn’t trying to break up with my podcast or my sub stack or my business, but I’m going to say honestly that I have been feeling stuck in my work lately. I knew that something wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t see clearly enough to give it a name, to name it. Something just has been or was just feeling off for me. And having some time away and having that distance just from my… office. And even though I’m working, I can work from anywhere because I can work, do a lot of remote work. But having that distance and being in a place like Maine, which I’ll describe to you, it gave me the space to understand what has been bothering me and what I want to do next in my career. So like I said, I was in Maine for about a month. Now, you might have heard me mention that a few years ago, my husband, Mark, and I bought a house up there. And when I say Maine, I really mean up there. Okay, I don’t mean you cross the border and you’re in Ogunquit and you’re like with the crowds and the beaches. We are about an hour from Canada and so far east that we… almost changed the clocks to Atlantic daylight time, which I didn’t even know existed when we first got this house, that there is another time zone, Atlantic daylight time. So if you go all the way up there and you continue just east and you go just cross the border into Canada, you are changing the clocks ahead one more hour. So Yeah, we did this thing. Okay, we bought this place. And I’m not going to lie, though. It has taken me and us, I think, a few years to ease into it. I mean, it’s really taken me a few years. Mark would happily live there full time, I think. He’s got lots of projects to do. And there’s lots of things that are great for him. But it’s taken me a few years to balance, to have this balance of traveling up there. It’s a far distance from where I live, where I’ve raised my kids and everything. And it’s taken me just a little bit of time to adjust. Where we are, it is very remote. It is very quiet and it’s incredibly peaceful. That remoteness has sometimes been the part I’ve had the hardest time with though. Because it’s so remote and I don’t know a lot of people and it’s just quiet, right? And you need to settle down and give yourself like the space to ease into this slower pace of life. But this year, spending a longer stretch of time there gave me an unexpected opportunity to really calm down, to become more present. And opened my mind to possibilities I couldn’t see from my home in Connecticut, where it is very, very easy for me to become distracted and very busy. There’s a lot going on here compared to up there. I have family here. I have just more things going on. My kids are closer. Everything is just sort of brewing here. My to-do list becomes bigger and things become more responsible and I can get really distracted. So we went to Maine for a month. And this summer, I was really eager to explore the community more, where I am spending a lot of my time now. I took classes. I spent time outside more. I had long conversations with friends who came to visit where we could just simply sit and talk because the nice thing is that there’s nothing else going on up there. So it does give you the opportunity to just sit and have meaningful conversations. I had room to follow my curiosity without needing every experience to become something that’s productive or something I can check off my list. And I started having a lot of intuitive moments about what I want to focus on in my business and what I believe women are wanting and needing in midlife and how I can serve them. I kept thinking about health and menopause and creativity and confidence and peace and contentment, but everything kept leading me back to food. Real food, real nourishing food, growing food, preparing food, teaching about food, and bringing people together around food. And then I think I realized the most important thing. I don’t want to spend all of my time talking about food. I actually want to be cooking the food. I want to be gathering with you around food. And I want to… get my hands dirty in it, right, rather than just doing the talking. Now, if you’re new to the show, or if you need a reminder, food and cooking have always been central to my work. I mean, that has been the pinpoint of my work. Because I’m not only a nutritionist, I’m a culinary nutritionist. And before I became a nutritionist, I worked as a private chef in Manhattan. This is many, many moons ago. I mean, I am very younger than my kids are now. I entered that work after going to cooking school specifically for health support of cooking. Cooking was never an unrelated skill I just happened to have. It was the way I understood nutrition. It was the bridge between knowing that food affects our health and knowing what to make for dinner. The relationship between food and health has also had a profound effect on me personally. I didn’t grow up with an uncomplicated relationship with food. I mean, if you hear my story and you can go back to earlier episodes of this podcast, I went on and off diets beginning around age 11. I was an emotional eater for years. I understand the cycle of trying to control food, feeling out of control around it, and believing the next diet. might finally fix everything. If only I could just follow something like as unreasonable as that. So it took me a great deal of introspection and practice to make peace with food, to eat with the intention of supporting my health and enjoying my life, rather than using food to manage every emotion. That history is part of why I became a nutritionist. But cooking is what helped turn nutrition from an abstract set of rules into something pleasurable, creative, and useful. And over time, I began coaching more women in the menopause space, which has been, and still is, so deeply needed. Women are understandably confused about where to turn, and it’s… getting even crazier and crazier as time goes on. For years, women were given incomplete or frightening messages about menopause treatments. Many were left trying to manage disruptive symptoms with cooling sheets or over-the-counter remedies and sheer endurance, right? We just need to tough this out. I’ve heard that from many, many women over the years. It’s just something we need to go through. It’s just something my mother went through, and now here I am. grinning and bearing it. We now have more nuanced conversations about hormone therapy and other treatment options, although those decisions still need to be individualized with a qualified medical provider. And that’s hard as well to find someone who is qualified to talk to you about hormones. And at the same time, menopause care is about more than treating hot flashes. We need to think about our hearts, our you bones, muscles, brains, sleep, and overall quality of life. At the same time, menopause care is about more than just treating hot flashes, right? We know that. We need to think about our hearts, bones, muscles, brain, our sleep, our energy, just our overall quality of life. Food is not the only factor in any of those areas, but it continues to matter enormously. regardless of hormone replacement therapy, which is now called menopause hormone therapy, by the way. I just keep, I use these two still just interchangeably because a lot of women do not know that new, that new acronym. And lately though, I have felt a growing separation between food and the larger field of nutrition and wellness. It is like glaring to me. Between GLP-1 medications, microdosing conversations, supplements, peptides, protein targets, and an endless stream of internet, quote unquote, advice from wellness gurus, the conversation about actually feeding ourselves seems to be like almost disappearing overnight. I don’t see a lot of talk about food anymore. My work used to involve helping women eat more fruits and vegetables, get enough fiber, cook satisfying meals, and understanding how food could support their health. Now I can spend an astonishing amount of time reassuring women that they do not need to eat 200 grams of protein a day or explaining that fruit is not inherently bad for them. I mean, I am just spending a lot of time debunking. misinformation that people find on the internet. Nutrition trends have always come and gone, but our current moment feels particularly detached from the ordinary act of eating. Sometimes I have coaching conversations in which food is barely present at all. The focus is numbers, supplements, medications, body optimization, or weight loss, but not on the meals, not the taste, not the pleasure, not how a person is going to feed herself today. I also work with women who say they hate cooking or have no interest in learning how to even boil water. They don’t want anything to do with it. And I can understand how that happens. Because when you’re in the thick of perimenopause or menopause and you’re exhausted and sleeping poorly or caring for everyone else, cooking can feel like one more obligation. And when you become an empty nester or no longer have to prepare dinner for children every night. You may feel completely finished with the kitchen. If food has always been tangled up with dieting or caregiving and body dissatisfaction, the suggestion that you should cook more can sound like another demand being placed on you. I don’t think every woman needs to become someone who lovingly prepares an elaborate dinner every night. I don’t even think everyone has to love cooking. But I do believe that being able to feed yourself matters. a great deal. Food is not a magic cure, okay? I’m not saying that like food is everything. It’s not a magic cure, but it is one of the ways we care for our health every single day. We all need to eat food. So learning a few basics, learning flexible skills can make nourishing yourself easy, more affordable, and much more enjoyable if we just lean into the process of it and get curious. And I’ve realized something about my own role. I don’t want to spend all my time endlessly persuading people to eat vegetables. cook a meal or care about feeding themselves. I know food is complicated. Believe me, I know. People carry history, beliefs, dieting baggage and enormous amounts of emotion around food. I can hold empathy for so many of those stories. I really can because I understand it. I grew up in a very similar way. I can help someone separate sound nutrition from diet culture, and I can recognize when emotional patterns are shaping how you might be eating. But I am a nutritionist and a chef. I’m not a therapist, and I don’t want to pretend to practice outside of my scope ever. So I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, when I was up in Maine, when I had this time and space to just breathe the air outside, and give myself a lot of time to think, where do I do my best work? And the answer I keep coming back to is this. I do my best work with women who are curious about food and willing to participate in nourishing themselves, even if they are complete beginners. You do not have to be an experienced cook. You can be cooking curious. I just came up with that, by the way, while I was like thinking about what I was going to talk about today. I love that cooking curious, right? You can just be curious about it. You could just open the door a little bit and just look inside, right? You can be nervous. You can begin by learning how to hold a knife properly or how to just roast some vegetables or make one soup that you genuinely like. All of that is welcome in my kitchen because I understand the trepidation that comes. with trying to nourish yourself when you genuinely don’t know how. I have also seen the shame women can feel about not knowing how to cook, as though women should instinctively know how to feed themselves and their families. We definitely should not. Okay, cooking is a learned skill. It’s not an inherited female trait or a moral obligation or proof that you are taking proper care of everyone. It’s like any other skill that you have to learn. It becomes easier through practice and you do not need to ever do it perfectly. I don’t cook perfectly. I mean, I could tell you stories all day long about like mishaps I’ve had in the kitchen. So you don’t need to be all that. You just need to give yourself permission to open the door a little bit and begin at the beginning. like with a beginner’s mind, right? We just need to feel comfortable about beginning and being curious. Now, I want to explain why this feels so important to me and why I’m talking about it now. The midlife and menopause space has become insanely crowded and noisy. I find it to be so frustrating. And honestly, I’m getting a little tired of it. There are… Certainly legitimate medical treatments, medications, and tools in this space. Right? GLP-1 medications can be appropriate and life-changing for some people. Hormone therapy can be very helpful for properly selected patients. Right? Not everyone’s a candidate for hormone therapy, but it can be extremely helpful and sometimes life-changing. Strength training is extremely important. Protein matters, right? We, of course. course we know that because we’ve seen it all on Instagram. But it does matter. But so does every other nutrient that we’re supposed to have. But that’s for another day. Certain supplements may have a role when there is an identified need. So I’m not arguing that food replaces medical care or that every new development is a scam. I talk about food being like medicine, like food is medicine or food is healing. What I’m… Not saying is that food replaces medicine, right? So I just want to be clear on that. I am questioning what happens when every aspect of midlife becomes a product to buy, a number to optimize, or a problem to fix. There is always another supplement, a peptide, a powder, a wearable, a weighted accessory, a laboratory test, or so-called menopause hack. promising to give us more control over our bodies. The message is often that ordinary habits are no longer enough and that the answer must be more specialized, more technical, and more expensive. And somewhere in all of that… junk and noise, food has become the least exciting part of the wellness conversation. Because food is with us, right? All day long. Food can just be kind of boring, right? It’s not as exciting as thinking about what kind of peptide can I inject myself with. That’s remarkable, though, when you think about it, because eating is something we do every single day, that we have to do every single day. Food is like your edible vitamins, right? But food does not have the novelty of a new supplement. A pot of lentil soup is not going to generate the same excitement as a product promising to reset your metabolism. Roasting vegetables does not sound as advanced as monitoring every fluctuation in your blood sugar. Learning how to make a satisfying lunch is not marketed as a menopause breakthrough, right? These ordinary practices matter precisely because they are ordinary. Health is ordinary, right? Sustaining your health is not that glamorous. And these ordinary practices are available to us repeatedly. And they become part of the fabric of our lives. So I don’t want food to become another optimization project. I don’t want women standing in their kitchens wondering whether every ingredient is adequately high protein, low glycemic, anti-inflammatory, hormone balancing, and approved for menopause. I want us to understand the science without allowing the science or the marketing dressed up as science to take all the life out of eating. I want us to make food, taste food, share it, and enjoy it. I want us to grow herbs and visit farmer’s markets and try an unfamiliar vegetable and become good at making a few meals that truly take care of us, right? Cooking curious. I want you to be curious about food. That might not look like cutting edge wellness, but to me, it looks like health. And I promise you, this is what is going to sustain your health. Now, here’s what I believe now. Women in midlife deserve more than another list of what they should or should not eat. We deserve confidence in the kitchen. We deserve good food, pleasure, creativity, useful skills, curiosity, and nourishment. And we deserve to eat. Okay, just because we are now menopausal or in perimenopause doesn’t mean that we have to get on a GLP-1. and start starving ourselves. That is not how this works, okay? Nutrition science still matters enormously, right? But we need to have the pleasure in food. I mean, think about, we have so few pleasures in this world and in life. I mean, why not make our food, our healthy food, taste amazing and delicious? and enjoy it and look forward to it. So I’m not abandoning evidence science-based nutrition at all. I love nutrition. I love talking about nutrition in the science. I’m not abandoning menopause education. I still care deeply about helping women understand how much protein, fiber, cardiovascular health, bone health, muscle, blood sugar, and the ways our needs may change as we age. I love that. But I want to bring that information somewhere more useful. And the question I want to keep asking is, how do we turn the science into dinner, right? Into our just like everyday food? Because I’m telling you that it matters. It’s one thing to tell women that you need more fiber. It’s another to show you how to make a pot of beans. that tastes absolutely delicious, that you want to keep coming back for more of, or even how to use canned beans on a night when you have absolutely no interest in cooking. That happens too, right? That happens to me often. I’m exhausted at the end of the day. I’ve worked a full day and I want something really simple, but I want it to be nutritious. Great. I have those skills. I have those secrets for you. It’s one thing to be talking about maintaining muscle, and it’s another to build a breakfast or lunch with enough protein that you enjoy eating and can realistically repeat. Or it’s one thing to recommend more vegetables. I can just tell you to eat more vegetables. We’ve all heard that on the internet, right? We all know all these things. But it’s another to help you learn how to roast them, how to season them so they taste delicious, and turn them into a meal that you actually want to make again. That translation is where culinary nutrition comes alive. And nutrition should not live only in research papers. targets, and lists of ideal foods. It needs to work on a Wednesday night when you’re exhausted, right? It needs to account for appetite, your pleasure in eating, your budget, your culture, your cooking ability, your time, and the other people who are sitting at the table with you. That is the work I want to bring back to the center. And I want to be clear. This isn’t about becoming the perfect home cook. Perfection is exactly the kind of pressure I want to move away from, right? I do not want this to be about perfection. This is about agency. When you know how to make a few things, you have choices. When you understand how flavors work together, which is another skill to learn, and I’m telling you it is an easy one, leftovers become Super useful. And when you can look at what is in the refrigerator and you can actually create something, feeding yourself becomes less dependent on motivation or a rigid plan, right? It becomes powerful. You have a skill. Cooking also can offer something that nutrition advice often forgets, and that is creativity. Now, I said earlier that this summer, I was taking a lot of… art classes. There’s a town that was pretty close to us. Well, I mean, everything’s a drive there. When I say close to us, I mean, at least 20 to 30 minutes away, because we are very rural where we are. But there is an amazing little town and they were having this two month art fair, and they were having tons and tons of art classes. These little one-offs, drawing classes, painting classes, watercolor classes. And I loved it because honestly, I cannot even draw like a stick figure. I have one of my kids is an artist and he has taught me a lot about painting. But drawing and even just using different mediums like watercolors, I don’t have much experience. So I signed up for a couple art classes as a beginner. I went in with a beginner’s mind. And going in with a beginner’s mind is actually really useful because you have nowhere to fall back on, right? You’re just like a kindergartner in class. What do you know? You’re starting from square one. And I drew and I painted without expecting myself to be good at it immediately, right? Because the perfectionist thing, yeah, I can have that. in spades, okay, all day long. But I’m learning to just be more open to the process and to make mistakes. And who cares, right? Who cares if I like didn’t draw perfectly. Now there was freedom in having a beginner’s mind. Nothing had gone backwards because I was already starting at the beginning. I was just simply learning. And I’m excited to learn more. I’m excited to take another drawing class. I can’t wait until next summer to take more classes with them. And I’m telling you this story because I want women to be able to bring that same attitude into their kitchens. I realized that taking art classes is no different than taking cooking classes. It is the same exact thing. It is a skill. Art is a skill. And there’s not like you’re not like you’re not just like born with like a paintbrush in your hand, right? And you just like naturally can like start painting. I mean, I saw my son go through it. He went to art school. I mean, he went through years of learning how to finally become a good painter. So maybe you believe that you can’t cook in the same way that I believe that I couldn’t draw. That belief does not have to be a permanent fact. You can learn one technique. You can make something imperfect. You can become more comfortable through repetition. Cooking is not another performance. It’s not another thing that we’re getting judged by. It can just be a practice. Just be one that supports health while also making room for pleasure and creativity. Okay, so here’s what I’m excited about. And here’s what you’re going to start seeing from me beginning this fall.You are going to see more of this in my work, okay? There will be more cooking, more recipes, kitchen skills, seasonal food. There will be more classes and more opportunities to explore what nourishing ourselves actually looks like. The membership that I have, the Well-Nourished Woman, will have a more food-centered feel. And you will hear more conversations about cooking and culinary nutrition on the podcast and in my writing. This feels so good for me. And it’s not like I haven’t been doing this in some way, shape, or form, right, for my entire career. But I have been drifting away because of all of the noise on the internet. And I am so excited to just come back to what I was meant to be doing. So I’m still working out exactly what all of that will become. And I’m giving myself full permission not to have every detail finalized before I begin. But I know the direction. And I want to spend less time adding to the noise and more time showing women how health can take shape in a real kitchen, not in some fantasy kitchen. Now, if you don’t consider yourself a cook, you are… absolutely not excluded from this, right? You are welcome, right? This is who I want in my groups with me. In fact, you may be exactly the person I just want to reach out to. You don’t need culinary training. You don’t need an expensive kitchen. You do not need to cook every day or grow all your own food or make everything from scratch. You don’t even need to cook. along every time if I’m teaching a class. You can just come and like take a peek in, right? And just take a look. What you do need though is some curiosity. You need curiosity about food and you need a willingness to explore. You can watch, you can ask questions, you can try one thing. You can begin very quietly, right? My goal is not to convince you that you should love cooking as much as I do. My goal is to help you discover what would make feeding yourself easier, more interesting, and more connected to the life that you want to live. So here’s my invitation. I want to hear from you. I really do. What would make you feel more confident or simply more interested in your own kitchen? What do you want to learn how to cook? What feels confusing to you in the kitchen? What do you wish someone had taught you years ago? What would make dinner feel less like a burden and more like a way of taking care of yourself? I would love it if you sent me an email. My email is in my show notes, okay? And simply just answer these questions for me. I would love to hear from you and I answer every single email that I get. I’d love it if you just sent me a message or share your ideas with me. You could even go on… my membership and become a member right now for free and shared the ideas. I genuinely want to know because I want what comes next to respond to the real questions women have, not the questions the wellness industry tells us we should have. So this summer gave me enough distance to recognize what I had been missing. And I thought I might be changing direction. But the more I considered it, the more I realized I was returning to the part of my work. that has always just felt the most natural to me and the most useful. Bringing nutrition into the kitchen, making it a little more fun, right? And helping women turn knowledge into something they can actually eat. This feels less like changing direction and more like coming back to where I started. And I feel really excited about it. So I hope you do too. And be on the lookout for more. offerings and more conversation around food and cooking. All right, everyone, I hope you have a great rest of your summer. I can’t wait to hear about it and looking forward to spending time with you in the fall. Have a great day, everyone. 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.
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