Kate: Welcome to the Midlife Spotlight podcast. I’m Kate Campion -
Sara: and I’m Sara Garska -
Kate: and we’re certified life coaches obsessed with helping you find joy in this next act of your life. Whether it’s reviving your midlife marriage, losing weight, or scratching that “what next” itch, we’re here to share our experience and expertise with you.
This podcast is a weekly dose of YOU time, where you get the tools and tricks to improve your health and happiness. Talking to you is so much fun, so thanks for tuning in. Let’s get started.
Kate: Hello and welcome to Midlife Spotlight, the show that helps you enjoy your next act. I'm Kate Campion.
Sara:I'm Sara Garska.
Kate: And in today's episode, we'll be talking about how you can finally make peace with food for good.
Sara: All right, so this is one of my favorite subjects and I don't think it's one of Kate's. We'll get into that later.But this is going to be a two-part episode because as we were going over it, we realized that it really naturally fell into two different parts. So today we're going to talk about what not being at peace around your eating looks like and what peaceful eating looks like. And then next week we'll go into how to create that relationship because food for most women, most midlife women, is not peaceful. When I first started writing about eating and things, it's been about eight years now. I was excited. I wasn't life coaching at that point. I was doing other things. But I had lost weight and I understood what worked for my body. It felt good. I liked my weight. I liked how I looked. I wouldn't say I was necessarily peaceful around food. I had a lot of food rules. I believe, and I'll go more detail later about what that looks like. What I do know is when we don't have peace around food, we often don't have peace in our lives. The reason is, food is such a huge part of our life. We've all heard that. It's one of those things. If you give up alcohol, you can not have it in your house, you don't have to touch it, it doesn't even have to be a part of your life anymore. The food is always a part of our life. It is a necessity. We need it to live. in this world, in this, so one of the things that kind of surprised me when Kate said she wasn't super peaceful around food, I like, you don't live in the US, I thought this was just a US thing where we're all messed up around food.
Kate: No, we're messed up too.
Sara: This obsession that we all, and when I say all, I work primarily with women. Well, no, I work only with women. And that's what started introducing me to kind of the secret life of how women think around food and how not peaceful they are. And it became one of the reasons that I do the work I do because I just... Food is such a basic need that it just sort of breaks my heart that we have so much angst and unhappiness around it. And it just so many women have negative feelings around food, not just their bodies. That's one thing. Their bodies and their weight. But for a lot of women, food is something that they fear. And so what we talked about, I can't remember the episode, but we talked about diets not being the answer. And they aren't. And they just keep this problem going. And all of us seem to live with food police in our heads.
Kate: It's interesting because as I've also shared, when I was a teenager, until I was about 35 years old, I never had any problem with my weight, but I will acknowledge something I was thinking about was actually I used to smoke and smoking is a massive appetite suppressant. I would skip a lot of meals, particularly when I was divorced and my kids would spend a week with their dad or a week with me, even when that changed and they spent say every second weekend. with him. I would never cook for myself. I used to jokingly, I think they may call it a girl dinner these days, I never heard of that term until recently, but I would have a girl dinner of a couple of smokes and a packet of chips and call it a day.
And so I never had any problem with my weight and I was always actually very happy with my body until about the time that I quit smoking. And then, I do want to say I stopped smoking when I had kids in the early years, I went back to it after my first marriage ended. So in those early 30s, I was smoking, I wasn't eating that well, but I was thin. I stopped smoking, got together with my husband. I started cooking more regularly and I just like piled on the weight. And now I'm like 15 kilos heavier, I don't even know what that is in pounds, it's a lot. I;m going to say 30 pound maybe than I was for most of my adult life until that point. And it's become like, it definitely is a bit like what you said about drinking, like I don't drink either, right? And it's so easy not to have alcohol in your home, it's so easy not to engineer your environment. It's so easy to engineer your environment in a way that supports you when you're giving up certain habits. It's not around food. Because like you said, you have to eat to survive. And what ended up happening with me was over a period of probably like 35 to this year. I would do these diets, I'd just be really conscious about my weight, especially worse when people in the family would comment on weight gain and stuff.
The worst thing I ever did was calorie count, you know, and calorie count for an extended period of time, and that is what I'd say messed up my head when it comes to food, and I've got a funny story to share with you in a second. So because it just got me into that energy of restriction, and like you said, peace of the food is actually, for me, it's not having peace with food and weight. Like I could quite, I actually eat quite healthily a lot of the time. I enjoy eating. It's when I start to correlate what I'm eating with what it might do to my body that I start to be like.
And interestingly, like when I was saying to you in the beginning, ye, this is as much as I hate the word triggering thing for me, it's that. This week we got a food meal delivery service because they had like a special and I was like, oh, sounds easy, we'll just get this for a week. I usually enjoy cooking. They had the calorie amount of the meal and we always have to buy the four people meal anyway because my husband will eat double serving. He's very lean, runs, does weights, does all these things. He's a very lean guy. I cook for four all the time and he will have two portions and one for leftovers say and I'll have one portion kind of thing. So I buy for four. The minute I saw the amount of calories in these meals, it really created something funny in me. when it said only 500 calories in the meal, was like, oh, I've got to have more. It was like there was a little part of my brain that was saying, you will die if you don't have double portions.
And then there was like, yeah, just like to say my life is very well put together apart from this one area. And then there was one meal that was like a thousand calories. And I was like, oh my God, but I can't just have that. I'm going to have to have double serving. That's not enough. It was like a hot dog sort of thing. And, you know, and then after I had a hot dog and a half, I was thinking, oh, that was 15…. That 1500 calories. That's like more than my daily limit. Anyway, so the crazy thing is what I'm trying to say is that the association with food and weight for me has been personally something that I've really struggled with. And even when I have accepted my midlife body for being what it is and doing what it's doing, when I get myself into this headspace of dieting and calorie counting, it creates, like a super - it's actually awful, I mean, That's all I can say. I feel the shame and the guilt.
Sara: Well, thank you.Thank you for sharing that because here's one thing I know.
Sara: I know that so many women can relate to that because I hear it all the time. I hear it again in emails and I hear it in person. And so this struggle with food is real. And I don't even talking about overeating or binging or any of that stuff because I could do episodes on all the ways that it shows up for people. But the part that we're talking about today is really that part about not being able to enjoy food because you are worried about what it's going to do to you.
And in your case, seeing the calories ruined the experience of the food. I mean, if you hadn't seen the calories, you probably would have been able to enjoy food, possibly. But once you saw the calories, it was ruined. And that's, and I don't look at calories. They're one of those things that don't affect me. I have my own things, which I'll get to. But that part about not being able to enjoy food simply because of calories or old beliefs that we have. So another old belief is fat.
This is fattening.
We have all these words about things. And I'm going to go through that because I have a list of things and you want to be able to help me add to it. But we have all this language around food that is so, it's just not very loving of food. We have a love hate affair with food in that we want to love it. We know we need it, but our conditioning over our lives has taught us that food is the enemy. And so my purpose in recording this is I want to normalize eating. So when I'm selling coaching, so my thing in coaching is I want women to be able to eat food they like and eat enough that they're not hungry. And in one way, I think intellectually we can all be like, well, that sounds like nothing. Eat food you like and you eat enough that you're not hungry. But it is revolutionary for midlife women. Midlife women are so used to thinking you need to be, you should never be satisfied. Like that's just bad. Right? That's your smile like, yeah, if I'm satisfied, I've eaten too much. And if I'm eating food I like, it's probably because it's bad. That's kind of the stuff I want to confront. And I just I want to open people's eyes to. And I also, the other reason is, I actually just want you to eat without shame and guilt. Like just sit down to your dinner, which, you know, has been delivered. I know you have to cook some of it, but yeah, like, be able to enjoy it. That's why you ordered it. You know, that's why you had it delivered, so that you could enjoy the experience. And then, but, you know, we just have these weird things that go on our brain that kind of trigger us around it.And for you, it was calories. It's like, oh my god, like, I can't this. I don't know what the magic calorie amount that you could enjoy would be. Maybe if it was 350 calories, that would have been fine. But, you know, 500 was kind of tipping at the scale.
Kate: It was more the other way around. I thought 500 won't be enough. I'll need to eat more! And then it was almost like the thousand is a lot of calories but that doesn’t look like a lot of food.and so it was almost getting into a feeling of like I was going to starve myself.
Sara:. The next week when I go into how the actual action things, how to make peace with food, but I’ll kind of give a spoiler, spoiler alert, it doesn’t have to be dependent on calories or anything. It’s literally on, if I am - eat. And you eat until you're comfortable and then you stop. And I know that sounds like so basic, but nobody does that. We just don’t. We snack around the clock so we don’t feel hungry so we never feel hungry so we don't know when to stop. But when you learn that one thing, you can eat anything. Because your body really does always know. And that’s part of making peace around food.
Kate: I think I've given a wonderful example about what the opposite of peace with food looks like, but you've got a whole lot of other examples too, haven't you?
Sara: I do. I wish I didn't, but right now I get them every single day. So anyway, but most women really can't contemplate life where they feel at peace with food. It's just so ingrained in us that food is the enemy, something to be feared. We know we need it, but we're really frustrated. We're frustrated by how obsessed we are over it. And I just want to, I also want to say I don't have this in my notes, but part of it's not our fault. And I do believe that. believe that it's not a failing in us as a person. It's not because we don't have willpower. It's not because we're not disciplined. It's because we grew up in a diet culture, and so I was born in 62, you were born a decade later, but we grew up in a time when really the diet industry took hold, when low fat became the big thing, when the diet industry just blew up, and it is a multi-billion dollar industry. They don't make money if we aren't trying to diet.
And the other thing that concurrently happened with all this is all the processed food that is available. So when I was growing up, there was processed food. There was potato chips, the risottas available, but it wasn't a big deal. It was there, but nobody was, it just wasn't a big deal. then, but now, if you go to the grocery store, think about your grocery store, you are going to see a whole, an entire aisle of just breakfast bars, protein bars I'm not saying I've never eaten one, but a whole aisle of the store devoted to them? There are the last time I was in a store I was looking for, not soda, but I was looking for like, like club soda, something like that. And my store had three aisles of soda. Wow. I was just like, it's not even food. So we are surrounded by all this stuff that's not actually food. I mean, it's sold as food, but it's not. And it's been engineered to make us crave more and eat more. And so we have a lot of things going on that have created this kind of perfect storm of it really is hard to be peaceful with food.
But I do believe that you can find peace with food. And when you make peace with food, this isn't about you're giving up on your body. It doesn't mean you're going to gain weight. I prove that all the time to the women I work with, I don't know when you'll start losing weight all the time, but I can guarantee you're not going to gain weight doing this. When you make peace with food and you follow your hunger and stuff. So overall, you will feel better when you're at peace with food.
But let's talk about what not being at peace with food is, because you started it and we're going to dig in on it. So one of the things that I see quite a bit is binging on certain foods, or I'm going to say overeating, or almost compulsively eating. It's almost eating against your will. You know you don't want to eat that pound of M&Ms, but maybe you open it up and you start eating it when you sit down after work. And you just power through the whole bag. Sugary foods are, I would say, the drug of choice for midlife women. It's a thing, but it doesn't. doesn't feel peaceful and it doesn't feel good, but in the moment it almost feels like a necessity. And so that is not being at peace. I would say also, like when we're not at peace, we skimp on the other side of it is. Sometimes we're compulsively overeating, but on the other side we're skimping. And where I see women skimping is usually on their meals. And there is some research that kind of backs this up that we don't eat meals anymore. We snack. We snack. We grab things. We eat a lot of processed food. Like I had mentioned the whole aisle of protein bars, meal bars. Look at how much yogurt is in the grocery store. You know, yogurt is not a magic food that's going to make you lose weight, by the way. But there's a lot of it. Salads, know, also not a magic food, but that's a different thing.
But so when we don't have a good relationship with food, we often skimp on our nutrition. It's that weird thing of I'm not allowed to eat enough at dinner to feel comfortable. And unfortunately that often leads to overeating later because we're hungry and so then we start looking for food. But that's skimping because we don't think it's okay to eat is part of not having a good relationship with food.
Another way that we show we don't have a healthy relationship with food is we say punish ourselves. This is a strong word but we will try to, I'm going to go with it. We punish ourselves. we'll do it in two different ways. One is we'll want to hard core restrict. It's like if you had a pig out the day before, you know, in your mind you'll be like, okay, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I'm going to like really cut back restrict which usually lasts through breakfast. And the other thing we might do is over exercise. I used to do this when I did weight watchers. It's probably been 15 years or so ago, but you would get extra points if you exercised. So if you only had 20 points but you exercised, you might get a couple more.
And it's like, I would be doing my aerobics to get a couple of points. But it wasn't for the right reason. Uit wasn't a peaceful... I'm trying to take care of my body. It was like, no, I just want to earn the right to eat. And I think that's part of not having a peaceful relationship is to earn. And I've heard women say that. I was taking a walk with a friend once and she's like, she said, do you want to go to breakfast? I've earned the right to eat this morning.
Kate: That's very common.
Sara: Yeah, that made me sad. Let's see what else. Oh. Another one is women will either avoid or dread social events because of the eating situation. They will dread going to a birthday party or wedding because they're just afraid that when they're faced with certain kind of foods that they will just dive in headfirst and not be able to quit eating. So there's a fear of food and it makes them avoid certain situations because they don't want to get into a situation where they're going to overeat or the opposite they can use the situation as an excuse to overeat. It's like, yeah, it's a birthday. I have, you know, all the cake I want. I see you nodding.
Kate: I'm nodding because I'm thinking honestly, less formal scale we used to have whenever we'd go away in the motorhome would buy treats and we don't normally, so I don't actually snack. I, yeah, snacking is not something that I do. We don't have snack food in the house, but we would buy it whenever we went in the motorhome. And I remember one time we ate like the week's worth of snacks of like chips and things like that. Without the first two days, it was raining. That was my defense. Yeah, because it was there and because it was available was like, yeah, we must eat it all now.
Sara: And so it's that love-hate relationship with it where you want to have it or you're craving it, but then you're also telling yourself how bad it is. And yes. And so, let me just get down to this. So when we're talking about that unhealthy relationship, it's also about the language we use around the food. And I've mentioned. we use phrases like piggying out, cheating, overdoing it, or what we need to go back to. The way, like I need to hard core get back on track. I need to cut out all the bad food. We call food bad. To me, that's another, when you're calling food good and bad.
Kate: It's very judgmental, isn't it? Like judging yourself, yeah.
Sara: I think there's this moral thing about it. It's sort of like if you are overeating, you're a bad person. Because we use the words around food or our behavior. You think about it. I was bad last night. I ate a piece of cake. I've had people tell me, I was bad, bad at work. was like, what happened? I had a cookie during the meeting. We layer a lot of judgment on what we eat. We could easily be like, I had a cookie yesterday.
Kate: It's so interesting, a slight tangent as I'm thinking, you were saying we grew We're up in the diet culture and stuff and where fat was the enemy and so a lot of stuff was low fat but then actually I don't eat any. Okay, so I know it sounds like I've got a disordered relationship with food from this episode but actually, know, we really nice food like we eat whole food and like I said, I don’t snack and that sort of thing. But I'm obviously still triggered by things that I've done in the past but where I was going with that was that a lot of those low fat foods that we were told that we should all have actually are not as good for us as a whole food and often pumped full of sugar or other things like that in order to make them taste better.
Sara: Oh, I remember when low fat became a thing and I remember this one particular cookie came out with a low fat chocolate cookie and I can picture the name of it but I'm not sure how to say it properly so I'm just not going to say the name, but anyway, this chocolate cookie came out and had zero fat and they couldn't keep it on the shelves. Everyone was buying low fat, low fat, low fat.
And what happened was in that period of time, and I'm going to say, I don't know, I think it was the 80s, but what happened was that is when everything exploded. People gaining weight, diabetes, obesity, everything really began to explode when we adopted this low fat kind of idea. And it's because a lot of when we took fat out of things, nothing fills us up. Sugar just makes it hungrier. I remember, because I did low fat stuff for a long time, I remember going to work and I would take breakfast at home and then I would take a snack for work and lunch for work, thinking that would get me through the day. I would have eaten everything by 10 a.m.
The low fat stuff just wasn't filling you up. I think that's, but fortunately I was younger then and I didn't get a weight problem from it, but it did not help my relationship with food and it felt like I was hungry all the time. So it definitely was not peaceful and it began that period of time where started looking for fat content on labels. know what we look for now? Now we look for the carbs.
Kate: Now we look for the calories.Well, I look for the calories.
Sara: You look for calories. I look for carbs. How many carbs is in this? How many carbs? So we're always looking for things to let us know our food is okay. But we just don't feel at peace with it because we don't trust food, we don't trust our bodies, we don't trust our appetite and it's very, very confusing and frustrating. So that's where most of, I keep hitting my microphone today. Sorry everybody, because my hands are waving. If you see me talking, my hands are always all over the place. So that's what our not peaceful life with food is.
And what I want to say before I go into this is I don't know if it's 100% possible to be 100% peaceful with food. I almost feel like we've been so damn damaged by the media, even doctors, everything around food has just been so misleading. And advertising and things have played a big part of it. Part of it's foods are made to be, to make you crave them and to overeat them. mean, they really they do a lot of tests to see what will kind of taste and taste. texture will help you eat more than you're hungry for.
And so when I don't like calling food bad or good, but we also have to recognize some foods affect your brain as much as your body, and it's important to know. It doesn't mean you can't always, you can't ever have them. It just means you have to understand that they can have effects on your body and on your brain. But when you have a peaceful relationship with food, it's a little different. It means like you get to just eat. you're hungry, you eat. You're allowed to have food, and you're allowed to have really anything you want. You don't have to have special diet food. And so one of the things that I really spend a lot of time working with women on is they're helping them increase their ability to eat food they like in amounts that feel good to them.
And yeah, most of the time we try aim for whole foods, you know, like your protein, whether if you're a meat or that's going to be some form of meat, chicken, beef, eggs, whatever. And if you're not, you'll find your protein from beans and different things, beans and grains combined. And so we concentrate more on the building blocks of nutrition. And that's carbohydrates, fat, protein. I know. But at one time or another, all of these things have gotten a bad rep. I mean, we just talked about how eating low fat was the thing. Fat is actually a nutrient. And it was so harmful to all of us when it was villainized as not being good, because our bodies truly need it.
And I would say if there's one thing that will help you stick not snack, and not overeat and do all those things that you know get in your wa, it's eating more fat in your diet. The good kind. There is good fat and bad fat. I'll go into that next week because it's so important to get over that idea that fat is bad. But that is one of the things that creates that not peace with food is thinking that certain foods like fat or carbohydrates are bad. When you can accept that fat is a nutrient and it's really, really important and it doesn't make you fat. Fat by itself is pretty neutral in the body. Not that any of us would want to eat 2,000 calories of fat because that would not taste good either. But it's not going to make you fat. It's just probably going to pass on through in an unpleasant way. I'm not telling you to do that. I'm just saying it's not going make you fat.
But your body needs it and it actually helps you metabolize things better. And it keeps you from being hungry. And so that's the beginning of peace with food, is accepting that fat and carbohydrates, which also have a bad name now, but we absolutely need is part of having peace with food. think the bottom line is reading food that's good for us that we look like and we eat enough of it that we're not feeling that, you know, they call hangry..
Kate: So making peace with food also has to do with having a better relationship with hunger, I think, too, yeah?
Sara: Oh, absolutely. So most of us are so afraid of being hungry. And I was like that when I did that example about work and how I go through all my food by 10am. I just didn't want to be hungry, so I took snacks everywhere. How many of us, raise your hand, if you've carried your little pack of almonds around? Because heaven forbid, we feel hungry. But here's the thing. is such a natural part of a relationship with food. And hunger means it's time to eat. The problem is when we were eating those high-carb, low-fat kinds of food, we would get hungry really fast. And it was an uncomfortable hunger. It would just hit fast and hard and be miserable. Or if you were on a diet, I can remember when I was on Weight Watchers, I would be so hungry by dinner time, but I would only have three points. And I can remember just being so frustrated. I had lost weight, but I just wasn't. I didn't have enough food to eat. It was just miserable.
But hunger, when you have peace with food, means you eat enough food that you aren't hungry. You start hungry, you eat your food, you feel good. And then you can go four or five, six hours without eating a lot of times. And what happens with your hunger is it comes on gradually. So maybe an hour or so out from dinner, you start just gradually feeling hunger. And our hunger will feel like an empty thing inside of us. We might, our tummy might growl. And then we know it's time to start thinking about eating. That is your body telling you, eat. It's like a green light. to eat. And then you eat enough. And then you feel comfortable and that's your stop sign. Time to stop. It might not happen the first few times you try it, the first few days. It might take a few weeks for you to get used to feeling your hunger and trusting that it's okay to eat. It doesn't mean anything bad and you don't have to under eat at a meal so that you feel diety hunger, if that makes sense.
Kate: Yeah and this is actually making me think about the discussions that we've had on emotions because I'm hearing from this that hunger is kind of a similar thing. Like rather than judging hunger or feeling that something actually hunger is something you need to suffer in the pursuit of a slim body. Hunger, like an emotion is just a signal to do something. So hunger, when you don't feel hungry anymore, that's a sign to actually stop eating.
Sara: Correct.
Kate: It’s just signs.
Sara: Yeah, hunger is just a physical sensation in your body that says it's time to eat. And so what I have my clients do is if they want to eat at a different time or if the urge to eat comes up, I just say check in with yourself. Are you hungry? And if the answer is yes, then they figure out what to eat. If the answer is no and they're having a craving, then it's okay. You can sit with them for a few minutes or you can check in with yourself, what do I really need? A lot of times what women need is some rest, rest is a big one, or maybe they're bored or restless. But if you're not hungry, food is filling in for something. And maybe like somebody what's like a way to cover up, not cover up, but a way to deal with a life you're not happy with. Or a job you're not happy with or a relationship you're not happy with. And some food will make it better. And it's okay to have a lot of compassion for yourself if that's the case.
Kate: Yeah, those are such good points, Sara. I think this has been a really good discussion today. I've enjoyed talking about what the opposite of peace with food looks like. I've also enjoyed talking about what does making peace with food look like. I'm really looking forward to next week when we unpack what are some specific steps we can take to get to that peace with food. Thanks so much.
Kate: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you loved what you heard, you can leave a review so we know to keep more of it coming. You can also visit our website at midlifespotlight.com and learn a little bit more about us. We love connecting with you and can't wait to see you next week.