Joint pain, stiffness and those tin man mornings are some of the most common symptoms of menopause, yet they don't get the same air time as hot flashes and mood swings. With World Menopause Day on October 18 focusing on chronic pain this year, I invited Robyn Kievit, NP, RD, CEDS, MSCP, the first dietitian to become a nurse practitioner, to help me unpack what is going on in our joints and muscles. We talk about why estrogen matters for muscles, joints and connective tissue, why the ups and ...

If you've ever wondered whether your "healthy eating" has started to feel more like anxiety, this episode is for you. This week I'm joined by Jessica Thiefels, host of Nope, That's Not Normal, to talk about disordered eating. That's the wide, often invisible space between a relaxed relationship with food and eating disorders. Jess shares how a restrictive healing protocol in her twenties slowly turned into a decade of rigid eating, and the moment she said out loud, "I think I'm straddling the...

Most of us can still remember the diet ads from our youth. We can't remember why we walked into the kitchen, but we can remember the jingle. My guest this week is Lu Chekowsky, an Emmy Award winning creative director who spent her career inside the industry, spending time at MTV and Facebook, all while quietly struggling with her own body. Her memoir, Don't Buy What I'm Selling, traces the origin of how those messages shaped her, and how she found her way back out. We talk about the ads that ...

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...