73: Atomic Health #3: How Do We Uncomplicate Our Relationship With Food?

Hey, this is Sonya from Dear Menopause. You've likely already noticed something a little bit different about this episode. Welcome to some bonus content that we have called Atomic Health. You are going to meet my good friend, Roma, and we will be breaking down some content related to women's health and longevity. I hope that you enjoy this fresh new bonus content that we have created just for you. Hi guys, I'm Sonya, I am the host of Dear Menopause the podcast, and I am here today with Roma.

Hi and I'm Roma. I'm the founder of Vitelle, which is a metabolic health platform for women in midlife to take care of their health right now and long term.

And today we are going to be talking nutrition and, specifically, we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into why we tend to gravitate towards what is familiar as opposed to what is necessarily the best choices for us and I'm choosing my words carefully here and Roma, and I just had this whole conversation around I specifically want us to stay away from terms like food that is good for us or choices that are good for us, or not eating things that are bad for us. So I have this real bugbear about labelling food and nutrition as good or bad. Now should we dive into why I feel like that?

Yes, Well, since we're talking about choosing, we heard this quote, which was we don't choose what is good for us, we choose what is familiar. There's so much to bring up, and I think as we get older, we also start understanding a little bit where it comes from. So please tell me what are your stances on the topic?

A lot of it comes from the language that I hear from the women in my gym, particularly new members oh, I was so good at dinner last night I didn't have dessert and oh, I'm so bad. I had a chocolate bar this afternoon before I came into train. I know you probably hate me for that, and I just feel that there is so many emotional connotations that we attach to our food and our nutrition that are not helpful. Eating is not good or bad, food is not good or bad. Yes, there are choices that you can make that are better for you than others, but when we start labelling things good or bad, we attach emotion and we also then attach experiences to those emotions, to our choices when it comes to food. So when I think about things being good or bad, I get taken right back to being a two or three year old who is told that I'm a good girl, I'm a bad girl, you know. Then you build in shame and you bring in, you know, all of these multi layered emotional attachments to things purely off based off words, and so I find that when I'm working with clients and we're talking about nutrition, or when I'm talking about nutrition in general, I really try so hard to steer away from labelling food or choices as good or bad, because we just tip into shame, shame, shame, shame and guilt, and these are not healthy and they're not places that we should be spending time, particularly when it comes down to food.

Yeah, I have so many thoughts on, you know, midlife and then going on. But, as you were saying the thing about the two or three year old self, I think of our kids are at different ends of their respective journeys and my youngest is just about to turn two and we made a conscious decision with both children to not give processed sugar. We don't not give fruit like we're not. We're not worried about her blood glucose, she's fine. We're worried that sugar as a food overrides so much other food. Right Like sugar is an energy and when you say, oh, someone said to you I was so bad today, I ate a chocolate bar before training, my initial response as an athlete it's, that's excellent, it's a quick energy source and you're going into training right away. You know your body is going to use that, it's going to lap it up, use it for all the hard work you're about to do. And it's actually a good choice, because if you had had a salad before training you'd probably not feel so good. So even in that, you know the salad is actually the bad food If you time it wrong. But with kids, the older they get, and once you get, in my case, over the validation or invalidation of the grandparents not agreeing with your decision. Food becomes a reward and even I catch myself not saying that it's good or bad, but having these cons and conversations with the six year old about whether he will be allowed to have a treat, and sometimes I catch myself and I go, oh man, you know, maybe I should do a social media experiment and just let him tuck in, just take as much as you want. But I've actually found that he self-regulates quite well and I want to say that's because his taste buds and everything formed up until a certain age without the interference of sugar. I think that we grew up differently and what stayed even now is that we think of treats, rewards, and we think of sort of the boring every day we have to do and what we lose in that or what we forget or what we don't feel anymore. I actually have days where a big green salad that is the right deliciousness of maybe some halloumi in there and this or that, that is a huge reward, like it just tastes so good and so in that instance it's not sugar, it's like this feels like the treat, and yeah, there are other days where I do want the sugar. I think when I was thinking about this episode from a longevity standpoint and for women in midlife. There are definitely energy sources that we consume that can wreak havoc on our sleep. They can wreak havoc on our day-to-day life, and I think sometimes that is sugar, and then in other instances it's caffeine, and then we talked about alcohol, and it all goes back to the habits we established as a younger person. I've been trying to figure out what the ideal way to eat is day to day in order to maintain even energy levels, in order to sleep well, in order to feel like I'm not depriving myself. And it's just not easy. And it goes back to when I was an athlete. I had to eat a certain way and people go oh, when you're an athlete, you're burning so many calories. It's great you can eat so much. No, I actually. I mean, we ate enough, but we ate just enough. That's what we did when we and I would like you to speak also about your bodybuilding experience, because people glamorize it as being a free fall. The easiest thing that I can tell people that I work with is choose a timeframe where it's incredibly boring. So at the height of my training, I would eat the same breakfast, the same lunch and the same dinner every day for three weeks. By the end of the three weeks I was so over it. And it's not because I didn't want to chocolate, I just wanted variety. That's the crux, so do you want to talk a little bit about how that applied to your straight training in the past.

Yeah. So if we talk about when I dabbled in doing their bodybuilding competition, you know for me my entry into that was straight into a shredding phase because I live in quite a big frame, like I am not a naturally lean person and as much as I can be super strong, I still carry a higher percentage of body fat. So for me to enter to something like a bodybuilding competition, the very first starting point for me was always going to be I had to shred, I had to lose fat. I've got such a really dysfunctional relationship with food, and I have had for many years. I have tried every single type of diet. I'm one of those people that has body dysmorphia, so I thought that I was always much bigger than I was. So I was. And you know, when anybody that ends up working in the fitness industry, you know, at their crux they pretty much have a pretty screwed up relationship with their body. Yeah, and then you enter an industry where there is all this incredible external and often internal pressure to look a particular way, and so my man, my relationship with food has been so messed up over the years. But I have, you know, I think, when I think back to so, the bodybuilding experience was horrendous for me because it was the most restrictive I've ever eaten in my life and it was what you were talking about the whole. I literally had the same serve of porridge with berries for breakfast every morning, to the point where I actually this is so gross because I look back in it now and think, how did I even eat that? I would make a massive, big batch of it and then I would portion it out by weight and I would just microwave that each morning and eat it, which you know, I don't even own a microwave now. I despise microwaves. Like there is no enjoyment in eating like that. It is just so prescriptive and so robotic. And I wasn't eating for joy or pleasure, I was literally eating to a food plan and it was the most restrictive food plan I've ever done. And I can remember, actually, at probably my lowest point, I went out for dinner with the girls for one of our birthdays. It was, you know, I had this beautiful, great big group of girls and we went out for dinner and I was so fucking hungry I was, I was angry to the point. It was ridiculous and we were ordering dinner and I was not having rice and I was trying to eat just the protein and I was trying to work out what to order and I remember one of my my girlfriends was like oh, come on, sonya, like seriously, it's a birthday dinner, can you just just eat? And I totally lost it with her. I felt so shameful afterwards I was reacting to being hungry and I, you know, put it in this frame of no, this is a choice I've made and I, you know don't give me a hard time about my choices and you know I'm choosing to do this because blah, blah, blah. But in retrospect it was such an awful way to show up and be a friend, it was horrid. So, yeah, so that was my experience of eating, restricted eating, restricted eating, you know, to that extreme, you know, look I've, you know I've. You know I've done all sorts of horrible calorie controlled and counting and stuff, but that was the worst.

And while we're bearing our souls, I mean my, the sport, my professional sport and the the need to be a certain weight, and then also comparing yourself to other people who that may come more easier, like easier to, and also just training methodology. At the time that was very different. We had coaches who actually called us fat pigs at a body fat percentage of like 15. And I think, before everybody on the podcast goes like, well, they're talking about this A lot of what happens during midlife often takes us back to that time, because now our body starts working a little less with us. I don't want to say it works against us, but it's trying to figure out its next stage in life. It has to decline in certain areas. So you know it has to remove our reproductive ability and with that comes come changes. And I think these changes, when they initially happen and we're not prepared for it, they feel like punishment, they feel unfair. You know we lose muscle mass, we metabolize differently, we start redistributing differently. There's a difference between the different types of fat in the body. So you could have been someone who had a slim stomach most of their life and suddenly everything starts landing in that area. And that's an adjustment and I think quite often then that takes us back to coping mechanisms from an earlier age. And again and if we go back we've talked about this in a previous episode when we look at the current landscape of nutrition being discussed, it's very much by men and, we would argue, for men. It's very generalized. It doesn't take into account our mental load, which is constantly discussed and yet nothing changes the fact that women have 200 tabs open at all times. It doesn't take into account the fact that our menstrual cycle contributes to how we fluctuate in every sense and as it makes its way out of our system. You know there's this huge changes. It could be this for two months and it could be completely different for three months the fact that a lot of the medical system treats a symptom, one specific symptom, in a specific period of time the 10 minutes in their room and can't fathom to look beyond that.

There's not enough exploration into root cause.

Yeah, and there's no research on our bodies, there's no data sets on that particularly, and so I think what I was hoping to talk about today is how do we talk about nutrition in a sense that removes it from what we've heard for 40 years? Right, we were a good girl or a bad girl, we were a fat girl or a thin girl. We were not up to a certain media standard, and now, even if we were, a lot of that changes. Then the fashion industry gives us sizes, and when I was in my 20s, I figured out that a certain jeans maker made it seem that you were two jeans sizes smaller, because that's how they were sizing. Their jeans, which had a different jeans maker, was more than the normal, and so I would buy my jeans from the one where I was a smaller size because it sounded fantastic. How do we maneuver that in midlife, like, how do we maneuver that, especially when it comes to nutrition, to still find that enjoyment that you were discussing? How do you do that? How do you try to do that? Has your relationship changed? Has it evolved?

I would like to think it has. I no longer use food as a reward, you know. That doesn't mean that I don't comfort eat every now and again and I do it a bit of emotional eating if I'm tired and stressed. But I do not use food as a reward and I do not label food as good or bad or naughty or cheat. And that's another thing I have really big issues with is that whole cheat day mentality. You can have a day where you feast, but it is not cheating. They are the areas that I've done a lot of work on. I would never now restrict a particular group of foods from my diet. You know all my meals are balanced. Yes, I ate a higher protein portion because all women should over the over 40s. My diet now is much more rounded and inclusive of everything.

Yeah, could you speak about the importance of protein for women that are getting older? Why that is?

Yeah, it's linked to what we've talked about in other episodes, which is our reduction in muscle mass. As our body naturally decreases the amount of muscle that it builds, then we can prop that up by including more protein into our diets. Protein plays a big part in satiety, that feeling of fullness that you get that then stops you from reaching for the chocolate bars in the afternoon. You know satiety is really important and it's not understood enough and it's not given enough validation. I don't think for the importance and that comes from. You know, fiber and protein Also repair. If we're going to talk about increasing our amount of strength training that we're doing, then you need to be repairing your muscles afterwards and protein is going to be a huge contributor to that. It helps with sleep. If you are having enough protein in your evening meal, you are going to sleep a whole lot better than having a bowl of carbs and waking up in the middle of the night because your tummy's hungry.

Yeah, I love that you mentioned that. The sleep and protein is something that nobody really talks about and again, I don't know if that's because most men may be taking more protein anyway, maybe shy away from it less exaggerating a little bit here but if they don't do it through their actual diet, they are much quicker to take a protein supplement. Yeah, again, a lot of women equal protein with bulking, so they don't take it, even though most women would benefit from it.

I also think there's a confusion for women between a meal replacement and a protein shake. I think there's a big gap of education there between what is a meal replacement shake and where does that have a place, versus adding some protein powder before or after a workout.

Yeah, and I want to talk about because you mentioned fiber. I want to talk about fiber in a second, but then, because we were talking about shame and food, I find myself in a phase right now with younger children where it's more guilt and food and it's guilt about food waste. I find myself eating the remainder of what is on their plate because it's there and because I don't want it to go to waste. And I do it less and less. But man, it's something that is so I think I'm not alone in it so ingrained it hurts my heart that I've prepared. I've washed it, chopped it, prepared it. So there's the labor. And then there's the fact that I don't want to see that food go to waste. I can't give it to my dog because she will get lumpy and die if she I mean she loves nothing more than a toddler, because it's like it's a free fall. But I have to like I have to pull the dog from under the dining table and then I go. So I'm not giving it to the dog, but I'm eating it. You know, and it's that's been a big learning curve to be to say, I grew up being told to finish my plate. I had to learn for many, many years not to do that. I lived in Germany, then I moved to the US. With portion sizes are enormous, there is actually no way to finish the plate. So when my husband and I started doing 10 years ago was we would actually go out for a meal where we would eat really nice dishes that we and we. Now what we do is if we want two particular dishes, we'll share them, or sometimes we'll share a nice appetizer like a bigger appetizer and then we'll share a bigger main course instead of me eating a huge burger with a mound of fries on the side. I now know I'm going to get all the things that I really want and I'll finish them, and it's more than enough food, and then I'll have dessert as well. So I had to unlearn finishing my plate and now that I can dish myself up, so I know how much I want and I I finished that, but then I also finished like two little people's plates. That makes no sense. So there's an enormous amount of like mum guilt about that whole area and essentially we become sort of like garbage hounds and quite often especially if it's there are only a few things where I really enjoy that which. In the US there's a macaroni and cheese that is called Annie's mac and cheese and it is. I don't know a single parent who doesn't prepare it and start like secretly sneaking spoonfuls even before they dish up the kids because it's so good.

Do you know what? When I was talking before about you know I still eat comfort food every now and again. Mac and cheese is my absolute go to comfort food, homemade mac and cheese. When I do make it and I look at it, I go this is the whitest food I have ever seen, and we mean the ingredients. Yeah, I did mean the ingredients. Thank you for clearing that for a food that actually has multiple ingredients in it. It is the blandest looking food you could possibly, but oh my goodness, the comfort that I get from a bowl of mac and cheese.

It's beautiful, it's so nice, which actually is a nice segue into fiber, not much fiber there.

Yes, because there's no fiber in there.

It's so important. I mean we need about 25 grams of fiber per day, I'd say. When I'm lazy it's really hard to get by. You know just like. And then I also, and I wonder what your thoughts on this are. I have a love hate relationship with smoothies and juices because quite often what happens? If you pulse it too much, you blend it too much, you end up getting rid of some of the chewing, the enzyme release and then also the fiber, like I've recently read that it's much better to do a smoothie where you're actually blending the whole fruit versus just the juice, where you're just extracting the juice and all the pulp, all the stuff you actually want in your stomach is lost, do you do?

smoothies. I do smoothies. Really. I tend to use smoothies as sometimes I'll do them as a breakfast if I'm like really really strapped for time and it'll be. For me it's more a protein shake. So, yes, there'll be some fruit in there, but there's always, you know, high quality protein Do you add things for fiber?

Do you add, like flaxseeds, a chia?

No, I'm probably a little bit lazy when it comes to that. Even on a Sunday I'll actually bulk make breakfast for the week, and my eldest son and I share them. So I'll do chia puddings or like a bircher in jars. So I make a massive big batch and then I break it all up into little jars and he and I work our way through those for the week. Always, always in those there are heaps of seeds. He has an elegy to nuts so I can't put any nuts in there, but there is lots of seeds and there's a chia and there's, you know, all the.

you know I do make sure that I Do you grate an apple in the bircher Grated apple.

Yeah yeah yeah, lots of fiber included in those. But if I was to make a smoothie I know I am a little bit lazy when I come to that but it would really be my Like. I cannot even actually tell you the last time I had a smoothie as a meal. So juices I completely agree with you. I am not a fan of juices for me and I would never recommend them for anyone else. I think that they're way too low in fiber and they're too sweet. They're too sweet. They're way too sweet. They make them super green in order. Yeah, yeah, I have a question for you. One thing that I do like is I'll make a green powder drink.

Yeah, I'm very intrigued by the green powder, so I have not jumped on the Athletic Greens bandwagon yet. I am so curious about it. This is probably the best time you know like I read this. So much hubris in being in your 20s and 30s Like I don't need any you know, you like, survive on a diet of like vodka and french fries, but I do feel that I could sometimes use the feeling of just absorbing nutrients better and maybe getting more of the complete packet of it, and this also goes into the gut health thing. So, I've toyed, I've played around with like spirulina and chlorella and putting that into smoothies. The first time I made that for the family they wanted to just own me and that tastes the haunts me. So when I think of green paradise, sometimes think of like spirulina or wheat grass or anything like that. No, but I know that they've come a long way and it's definitely a good way to incorporate it in a fun way that is, you know, tastes pretty good. Again, I think you made that really important distinction. A lot of people think that smoothies and these drinks and all that, that, that's actually a replacement for food and, especially when we talk about fiber, it is not, and it shouldn't be, the calories you get from a smoothie, unless I don't know what you put in there. You, yes, you can make a smoothie that will be highly dense in calories, but for the most part, if you just blend up a bit of strawberry and banana and add some collagen powder, that's not breakfast. So, yeah, so I think green spouters, the way that we live now, have more and more of a place in our nutrition. I'm thinking, I'm trying to think how to time it. Timing for me is sort of what I've become really good at, because we talked about this also when it comes to my digestion. Knowing what I consume in what order in order to go to the toilet regularly and do a poo, is really important, because the days where it's all over the place and not or not happening which I'm luckily not so much on that side of the spectrum, but just like a good meal with lots of fiber, where you know you'll digest it in the next hour or so, is just Roma just gave a chef's kiss. And it's a combination of timing, it's a combination of fiber, of what you ingest. I also often find it's the types of spices in food. So I think when we're talking about nutrition, adding a variety of good spices can just up level the enjoyment of food which we often forget about when we think about I just have to eat. I went to a place in here in Adelaide which is sort of South African inspired, but it's a bit like Otto lenghi. For the main meal. There's one main dish, a chicken salad that you can have, or if you're a vegetarian or vegan, you don't have that. And then these beautiful vegetable sides and they combine rice and pumpkin and lentils, or if you don't want as many carbs, you can do other things. But it's colorful, it's flavorful, it smells fantastic and it's just one of those dishes where you know exactly when you're full and you know that it just carries you through the rest of your day. And that's sort of what I want to get from nutrition more and more, which doesn't happen as much when I'm working from home because it's more mindless. But yeah, I think this is when we just go back to the gut health. I know that, or we've hadn't talked about it, but I'm sure you've had this on one of your episodes. The gut health and perimenopause menopause are really closely linked. Huge connection. Yeah yeah, hormones and gut health are closely linked. The prevalence of more and more gut related chronic conditions I can see that with women that I work with. It's anything from irritable bowel syndrome to Crohn's too. Just a constant feeling of you know, just not digesting well.

Yeah, bloating, bloating, it's really prevalent.

And so I think we think so much when it comes in terms of nutrition, of eliminating. But it's a little bit like, you know, that glass of water if you throw in a little bit of dirt and it gets muddy, you can't fish that out. So, yes, you could take a supplement that removes the bloat, you could take another supplement that will help you digest fat better, or whatever. But what really helps is when you keep pouring clean water into it, you keep adding good things and eventually it flushes out. It flushes out, yeah, all the crap. And I think you know nutrition for me is a little bit like that. So, yes, I have days where I come for the eat.

I have days where I just don't eat well because I didn't get on top of my delivery, and then what I try to do the next day is just add more good stuff, and I think that's a really important point to make as well, and it was quite late in life when I kind of wrecked my head around this concept, and that is, we don't have to look at what we eat across a 24-hour spectrum. You can kind of zoom out and look at what you've eaten across a seven-day pattern. We can be much kinder to ourselves around what our expectations are and what we've done well and what we haven't done well, and I think too often we take that really microscopic view of what I ate today. Your body doesn't do a hard reset at midnight and everything that you did for that day is wiped out and then it's a whole new day again. Like this is everything is a accumulation. We're constantly building blocks, we're building and building and building. When you can learn to step out, zoom out and have a look at how many days did I have where I felt that I was on track, versus how many days did I have where I felt like I kind of the wheels were a bit wobbly, as opposed to taking that day by day view? I think that's something that women really need to learn as well.

No, I think that's a nice way to go into summarizing this a little bit. I think today we talked about how our past and forms are present. You know, like really needing to have a hard look at ourselves around this age now of where we resort back to old habits and and finding ways to maybe add more good things to undo some of that that is not doing us any good, and and not making that about the actual food, but about how we feel I think there are very simple things that we can add to our lifestyle day to day that are not hard to do, even on days when we don't eat as clean, and that's more fiber, more protein, more water. Also, you know, more mindfulness around the things we don't need to consume, like our kids food. You know, paying attention to our gut health and adding in Good things like that are now out, you know, on the market, and that's things like green powders. I think you know there's episodes you've done. There's things that we've shared on our platform about Supplements and minerals that vitamins and minerals that make sense at this stage. I I'm really excited about redefining this new, more energetic version of myself that doesn't really rely on my stress hormones so much. I think my energetic self in my twenties and thirties was very much. How hard can I lean into my cortisol and adrenaline? Yes, I could finish my paper that was due three weeks ago, two days before, on a concoction of coffee and red bull and cigarettes at the time, but now I think I do take pride in knowing that I I had a few things that were really urgent today and this whole weekend I was like I'm not gonna have a drink, even though on the weekend I wanted to have a drink. I want to have a drink. I'll lean more into the calming. The kids are not always calming, but their ability to be present when you lean into it is very calming. So it's like I'll get down onto the floor and I won't focus so much on how stress where it is to have little children. I'll actually try and emulate that a bit more. And that also came down to the nutrition we ate together. There was like no, just sitting there and going at the finish. You know they're like stupid peanut butter and we don't do jelly peanut butter sandwich. Yeah, I'm excited for this next stage. I'm excited to see what my body does and, and you know, a lot of that is just preparation and Redefining those stories.

Yeah, I think the redefining of the stories is the real key and I think the acceptance that everything is shifting and changing and we lean into that as opposed to try and fight against it, then we can Become much kinder to ourselves. Roma, another good chat. Thank you. You've been listening to Atomic Health, a sub series of dear menopause With Sonja Lovell and Roma van der Volt. If you'd like to know more, check the show notes for links and further details. Thanks for listening you.