Welcome to a new season of The Midlife Feast! I'm kicking off this season by naming the mindset that might be making things harder: treating your body, midlife, and menopause like an ongoing project to manage. I walk through what that costs, how it shows up in real life, and how we can shift from obsessive optimization to a steadier partnership with our bodies, including: • the core question that changes everything: what if your body wasn’t a project to solve? • the moving finish line ...

Welcome to Day 5, the final episode of the Midlife & Menopause Un-Dieting Mini-Series! Over the last four days, we've explored four pillars that can help you build a more trusting, flexible relationship with food: understanding, self-compassion, attunement, and gentle nutrition. But what happens when you put them all together? In this episode, we're looking at the fear that stops many people from letting go of food rules: If I stop dieting, does that mean I stop caring about my health? Th...

Welcome back to Day 4 of my Midlife and Menopause Un-Dieting series. Yesterday I asked you to sit with one question: what do I want? It's sometimes easier to outsource "what should I eat?" than to honestly ask what you want. Today we add the other half: what do I need? And that's where gentle nutrition comes in. Un-dieting doesn't mean throwing nutrition out the window. It means bringing it in as information, not another set of rules. The trap is that diet culture has made weight loss a...

Welcome to day 3 of the Midlife & Menopause Un-Dieting Series. If you’ve spent years following food rules, tracking what you eat, or being told you can’t trust yourself around food, “just listen to your body” can feel like a foreign language. In today’s episode, we’re talking about attunement - what it actually means, why your hunger and satisfaction cues may feel hard to hear, and how to start reconnecting with them. I also share a very real-life reminder that capability and capacity are...

Welcome back to Day 2 of my Midlife and Menopause Un-Dieting series. Yesterday we talked about the diet cycle - the plan, the tracking, the promise that this time you'll have more discipline… until life gets lifey and it all falls apart. Today I want to gently blow up the story we tell ourselves next: that we failed because we don't have enough willpower. Here's what I hear all the time: "I know what to do, I just don't do it." And I get it! You do know that protein matters and that eating no...

Half a million downloads. I'm still a little speechless! To celebrate, I'm doing a five-day un-dieting mini-series, and Day 1 starts with the one question I want you to carry into every episode: What would taking care of myself look like if I didn't require my body to get smaller in return? In this short episode I explain why un-dieting isn't the same as "not dieting." Un-dieting is unlearning, letting go of the default programming that says your body has to shrink in exchange for eating a ve...

This is the 200th episode and the season finale, and I'm closing out the season by defending the most controversial breakfast on the internet: oatmeal. I'm only half joking. Yes, I answer all of your oatmeal questions in this episode. Steel cut versus rolled, how to add protein, cooked versus overnight, and whether it deserves its reputation as a heart-healthy food. But the real conversation is about something bigger. If a humble bowl of oatmeal can make us anxious, then we have some food noi...

Whenever I talk about intuitive eating, women tell me the same thing: "I love the idea, but I don't trust myself around food." And when I talk to dietitians who help people shift from a weight-centric to weight-neutral or inclusive practice, they find it hard to communicate the idea of self-trust. If you can relate to either of these, this conversation is exactly what you need! This week I'm joined by Fiona Sutherland, an accredited practicing dietitian, author, and mentor from Melbourn...

Is it perimenopause, or are you just finally fed up with the world? Honestly, it might be both. In this listener Q&A, I'm answering the questions so many of you have been sending me, and they're the kind that probably sound familiar. We start with mood, because so many of us feel more irritable, less patient, and a lot less willing to tolerate things we used to put up with. I'll walk you through what's happening with your hormones and neurotransmitters, and why your reasons for feeling do...

What is acceptance is the requirement for growht? What would life look like if you just stopped trying to fix yourself? That's the question at the heart of this conversation with returning guest Alli Spotts-De Lazzer, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Eating Disorders Specialist who has spent nearly 20 years working with people around eating, body image, and the experience of living in a body. We dig into why self-esteem is a shaky foundation in midlife, when opinio...