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Midlife and the menopause transition: they’re big, messy, and a little mysterious, right? Between the symptoms that are ...
15/01/2025

Midlife and the menopause transition: they’re big, messy, and a little mysterious, right?

Between the symptoms that are apparently “normal” (but feel anything but) and the stage of life that has many of us flying by the seat of our pants (politics, jobs, raising tweens and teens, oh my!), it’s a lot! But you’re not alone.

We are Britt Richardson of A Full Bite Nutrition and Kate Morris of Among the Trees Counseling and Wellness, and we are working on something special for this stage of life—an offering where we can come together, share, learn, and grow. But first, we need your help.

We’ve put together a quick questionnaire (link in bio!) to hear from you. What’s been surprising? What’s been hard? What do you wish someone would have told you about this season? What do you want to know now?

Your voice is so important, and it will help shape something that truly gets what midlife feels like.

Whatever midlife looks like for you right now—whether it’s the strange marriage of a hot flash and a cold coffee or feeling a little like an emotional snack pack—we want to be here for you. 🫶

Are you a practitioner looking to learn more about weight stigma? Save your seat at the March 8th session of Taking Care...
31/01/2024

Are you a practitioner looking to learn more about weight stigma? Save your seat at the March 8th session of Taking Care: Practicing with Size Inclusivity and Social Justice!💥

The link to register is in my bio! ⬆️

Taking Care: Practicing with Size Inclusivity and Social Justice, course #5345, is approved by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credits. Social workers completing this course receive 2 cultural competence and 1 ethics continuing education credits.

Diet culture equates hard with healthy. ⚠️It tells you that exercise needs to be sweaty, grueling, and regimented, come ...
25/01/2024

Diet culture equates hard with healthy.

⚠️It tells you that exercise needs to be sweaty, grueling, and regimented, come hell, highwater, below freezing temperatures, or winter bugs.

⚠️It tells you that eating needs to be premeditated and mechanical and that meal prep is a nonnegotiable, nevermind the fact that you’d rather be sledding with your kids or catching up on the Crown or that you’re so sick of red peppers you can hardly see straight.

⚠️It tells you that on this day whatever-it-is into that shiny new year’s resolution, those of you still holding on by your fingernails to avoid joining the ranks of the already-lapsed are winning, but remain just one missed workout away from a speedy descent into mediocrity.

But you know what else is hard? Doing the things that are good for you in the face of diet culture. Things that diet culture deems lazy or undisciplined or (gasp!) easy.

✨But I see you, refusing to make another weight-based resolution because you remember how it’s gone before, how all-consuming it was to follow and how horrible you felt when you stopped. Your word of the year may be “balance” or “gentleness” or “stillness” or “connection,” and you may be blocking diet ads like your life depends on it. And it probably feels really hard.

✨I see you, settling into a rest day. Turning off your alarm and tolerating the antsiness that ensues. You’ve learned so many unhelpful messages about exercise, and their guilt- and shame-laden barbs are loudest on a rest day. If you tune into the music that you’re listening to as you whip up your favorite boxed brownies, you can almost forget that they’re there. But gracious, it’s hard.

✨I see you, following your meal plan despite the fact that your eating disorder voice is berating you and scaring you, despite the fact that it’s excruciating to eat a snack in the middle of class and that you are almost never hungry. I see you doing everything in your power to hold onto hope that it gets better. It does. But what you’re doing is really hard.

Sometimes the hard thing isn’t what diet culture says is the hard thing.

Whatever your hard is, I see you. You are not alone, and you’re doing a great job. 👏🫶

Look again! 👀 Got everything? A commitment to boundaries and bodily autonomy can look like a lot of things at Thanksgivi...
21/11/2023

Look again! 👀 Got everything?

A commitment to boundaries and bodily autonomy can look like a lot of things at Thanksgiving.

🦃 It can look like calling ahead and setting some expectations for what you would prefer not to talk about.

🦃 It can look like bringing a safe meal that you know, on an ordinary day, your kid(s) would be happy to eat (and understanding that holiday hubbub being what it is, they may still be too overstimulated to do so).

🦃 It can look like not saying a word when your kid grabs another roll or piece of pie.

🦃 And it can look like noticing your own overwhelm and excusing yourself for a moment of peace and some deep breaths in another room.

Lean in, friends. Thanksgiving is a day for food, yes, but it's also, and arguably more, for connection, for relationships.

And in the words of Nedra Glover Tawwab, "People don’t know what you want. It’s your job to make it clear. Clarity saves relationships.” Boundaries save relationships.

So by all means, bring the pie. 🥧

But also bring the boundaries. 💥

No kidding! The study was aptly titled "Putting Feelings into Words" (Lieberman et al., 2007). The researchers showed pa...
21/11/2023

No kidding! The study was aptly titled "Putting Feelings into Words" (Lieberman et al., 2007).

The researchers showed participants photographs of angry or fearful faces. Seeing these photos (even subconsciously!) prompted increased activity in a region of the brain called the amygdala, the processing center for emotions.

Participants were then asked to label the emotion as either anger or fear, and attach a name to the face in the photo. When participants attached a feeling word to a photo, they saw a decreased response in the amygdala. When they attached a name to the photo, they didn't see that reduction.

In Lieberman's words, "In the same way you hit the brake when you're driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses."

This allows the response to move from the amygdala, which is more likely to interpret the emotion as a threat and respond accordingly, to the frontal lobe, which allows you to start thinking about and processing the emotion.

Y'all. This is the magic of therapy. When a feeling lives in our heads, it can take on a life of its own. But when a feeling is spoken, and all the more when it is witnessed and validated, it shifts. It loosens up and slows down. It ceases to be a threat to our rationality and relationships and instead has the opportunity to tell us what it knows. What it needs.

+++

So cool, right? Above, I've included two versions of a tool - the feelings wheel - that is so helpful with this process: one geared more towards older adolescents and adults, and one for kids. But really, it matters less how you do it and more that you do it.

So, let's give it a go. How are you feeling?

I was recently invited to join Dr. Ili Rivera Walter on her blog, Family Therapy Basics, to discuss how to address weigh...
21/11/2023

I was recently invited to join Dr. Ili Rivera Walter on her blog, Family Therapy Basics, to discuss how to address weight stigma, and clients' use of weight loss drugs, in therapy.

If you are a practitioner of any kind, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the article!

You can find it at https://familytherapybasics.com/blog/therapists-address-weight-stigma

As many of you know, I spent last week on vacation with my family. For a week, I got to swim and explore and play and vi...
21/11/2023

As many of you know, I spent last week on vacation with my family. For a week, I got to swim and explore and play and visit with some of my most favorite humans. And for a week, I shared a house with nine other adults and eleven children, six of whom were five years old or younger.

There was a lot of activity and joy. There was a lot of screaming (the delighted kind, mostly) and silliness and sun. There was not a lot of sleep. There were a lot of wet swimsuits and towels.

And there were a lot of snacks. So many snacks. All the snacks. And while the snacks were often intended for the littler vacationers among us, everyone partook. (FYI, those extra-small Nutter Butter snack cookies are delicious.)

And you know what? Nothing bad happened. In fact, everything went better for all of us because of it.

We are often quite good at anticipating and providing for others' hunger, especially the kids in our lives. But we don't always do similarly for ourselves, choosing instead to ignore our hunger (or flagging attention span or irritable mood) until eating is more convenient or "reasonable."

But we also have brains and bodies that can benefit from snacks. Our patience, energy, creativity, and decision making improves with consistent nutrition, and our hunger does not always fit neatly within a three-meal-a-day schedule.

So here's your permission. Go get a snack!

We are not so different from kids. Snacking is not something that we outgrow. And we will likely feel better, think better, and behave better after a snack.

Say what???Recently, in my conversation with dietitian Leah Kern on her podcast “Shoulders Down,” I shared this sentimen...
21/11/2023

Say what???

Recently, in my conversation with dietitian Leah Kern on her podcast “Shoulders Down,” I shared this sentiment.

Here's the thing, in many circles, eating "healthy" has come to mean ascribing to a binary in which goodness and value are attached to a particular style of eating, and badness, guilt, and shame are attached to others. It has come to mean eating for performance needs only - "optimization" seems to be the buzzword du jour - and not considering the role of food for comfort and joy and connection and play. It has come to be understood as the sole contributor to overall health. And it perpetuates anti-fat bias and is a primary cause of disordered eating and eating disorders.

So yeah, if that's what we mean by "healthy," I don't want that. And I sure don't want that for my kids.

✨I want to raise kids who understand their bodies' cues, can identify when they're hungry, and allow themselves to eat to fullness and satisfaction.

✨I want to raise kids who unapologetically enjoy food - so many kinds of food. All of the food! I want to raise kids who are curious eaters and who - eventually! without pressure! - choose foods that surprise and delight them...but also, who can go to town on some gas station snacks with freedom and joy.

✨I want to raise kids who are skeptical of destructive diet messages and their counterparts in the beauty and fitness industries. I want them to know deep in their bones that they are good just as they are and that the wisdom of their bodies is more reliable than any outside "expert."

✨I want to raise kids who give some thought to food: enough that they have access to what feels good in their bodies, but not so much that it causes them anxiety or stress or takes too much time out of their full lives.

✨And yeah, I want my kids to have full lives. Lives that are not contingent on their size or constrained by their diets.

This way of relating to food isn't neat or marketable. It's inexact and always changing, depending on so much, like time and money and mood.

But this way of relating to food is normal. And this is what I want for my kids.💛

*Adapted from Ellyn Satter's "What is Normal Eating?"

Virginia Sole-Smith has been a teacher to me for years. Her first book, The Eating Instinct, and her original podcast, C...
21/11/2023

Virginia Sole-Smith has been a teacher to me for years. Her first book, The Eating Instinct, and her original podcast, Comfort Food, helped me work out so much about feeding my own family and helping others do the same. Her writing in the NY Times and elsewhere is without question my most shared. And her Burnt Toast community - complete with podcast and newsletter - is one of the most interesting and enjoyable enclaves on the internet.

Her new book, Fat Talk, has found a way to compile all of that - Virginia's 10+ years worth of research and reporting on family feeding, diet culture, and anti-fat bias; her empathetic approach to folks who are figuring it out; and her passionate advocacy for those who have been hurt by it - and make it both accessible and transformative.

If you have kids, if you know a kid, if you were a kid - I wholeheartedly recommend that you read Fat Talk.

And I am honored to have contributed even a little bit to the conversation, my indexed name situated right between "More Than a Body" and "mortality," which feels significant. 🙃

Thank you, Virginia!

And there were other moments, too. Like when my youngest shoved a half-eaten Reese’s in my mouth before 7am. Or when my ...
21/11/2023

And there were other moments, too. Like when my youngest shoved a half-eaten Reese’s in my mouth before 7am. Or when my middle challenged me to throw jelly beans in the air and catch them in my mouth (which I did more than once, garnering me some tougher-to-win-these-days points 🙌).

If it was hard today, hang in there. It takes time, but there’s ease and joy and peace and play on the other side. 💛

In her book Pursuing Perfection, Margo Maine writes, “Clearly, the passage of time isn’t helping aging women feel more a...
21/11/2023

In her book Pursuing Perfection, Margo Maine writes, “Clearly, the passage of time isn’t helping aging women feel more at peace with their bodies, or making things better for younger women following them into adulthood. The legacy of body image and weight obsession is passed down from one generation to the next, reinforced for women of all ages by the body myths of our youth- and appearance-oriented culture.”

Adult women are at risk for eating disorders. But because we live in a culture that tolerates - and more than that, that celebrates - disordered behaviors, they often go unrecognized.

Patterns of overexercise, over-control of their or their family’s food intake, and constant rumination about their body and appearance are normalized and the pain that results is invalidated. And because those suffering are adult women who no longer fit the stereotype of “who gets an eating disorder,” they often suffer alone and for a long time.

To be sure, it’s important to name it when we see it, as so many leaders in eating disorder treatment and prevention have done this week, following Gwyneth Paltrow‘s latest whatever-that-was.

But I think it’s also critical to offer an alternative, that is, the possibility that adult women might experience respect of, gratitude for, and trust in their bodies. That adult women might know confidence and joy and spaciousness in a world that would have them do otherwise. And that an experience that is anything less than this deserves to be taken seriously and met with care and support. 💛

I’ll say it again: the relationship with your body is just like any other relationship in your life. And the conditions ...
21/11/2023

I’ll say it again: the relationship with your body is just like any other relationship in your life. And the conditions you put on caring for it matter.

Your family members will change. Your friends will change. Your body will change. Weathering these changes with relationships intact requires not control, but curiosity and compassion, gentleness, patience, and usually, a sense of humor.

Unconditional love and care does not come with contingencies.

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