393: Reclaiming Your Plate: How to Avoid the Top Nutrition Traps of Midlife

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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:29
Hello, my friends and welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. I’m your host. Courtney Townley, before we get into today’s episode, I did want to share with you that I know we are living in challenging times.

Courtney Townley 0:45
There is so much troubling news coming at us, it seems like on a daily basis at this point, showing us violence, talking about international conflicts, all the things, it is a lot for the human psyche. And the news of Charlie Kirk’s death yesterday, I should say his murder, because that’s what it was, just has me reeling. And I don’t think it’s only because of Charlie Kirk’s death. I think it’s because of everything that has happened prior to it, and to see someone, whether you agree with him or not, I didn’t agree with everything that Charlie Kirk said, but I did agree with his ability and right to say it, and to see someone like that killed, a life lost for what, for what it just, it really is so frustrating, and I don’t know how we got here, and we have to do better.

Courtney Townley 2:01
I mainly want to tell you that I care deeply about you and your families and how these events affect you and your families. And while this is not a political podcast by any stretch of the imagination, I am a big believer that mental health should be a political conversation, because until we make mental health a political conversation, I don’t I don’t know how this is going to end. I don’t know how this is going to be resolved.

Courtney Townley 2:38
So I just want you to hear that I am well aware that wellness exists beyond the conversations of diet and exercise, and I think I do a pretty good job at talking about a lot of things beyond diet and exercise, but this is just one more reason to emphasize it. Mental health is health, and we will never have a healthy world unless we have healthy people. And healthy people are multi dimensional. Yes, physical health matters, but mental and emotional health matters just as much.

Courtney Townley 3:27
Please take care of yourself, mentally, emotionally and physically right now, whatever that looks like for you. If it means up leveling the attention you’ve been giving yourself lately, if it means having some difficult conversations with family and friends, if it means reaching out for outside help take care of your health, all of it so you can show up in the world in a way that is effective and impactful.

Courtney Townley 3:58
If you’re enjoying this episode, but you don’t have time to finish it, or you want the cliff notes of the episode to remind you of some of the things that we highlighted here, we have created a free vault of resources for you, and all you have to do to get access is head on over to graceandgrit.com/resources. And once you register, you will get access not only to this week’s podcast resource, but you will get access to past resources and all future resources. So once again, graceandgrit.com/resources, okay?

Courtney Townley 4:41
Today’s episode is not about mental health, although to some degree you could say it is. We’re gonna dive into a topic that touches nearly every midlife woman I work with, how our relationship with food needs to evolve and change. As we age, the nutrition rules that guided us through our 20s and 30s often stop working at midlife, leaving a lot of women frustrated and confused about what to eat, and in that space of confusion and frustration, women do a lot of interesting things with their food, which only creates more challenges with their midlife physiology.

Courtney Townley 5:32
And this is what I really want you to hear if the things that you were doing in your 20s and 30s with nutrition are not working. Now, in your 40s and 50s, you are not failing my friend, it is the conventional wisdom that is failing you. It is the dogma from the wellness industry that is failing you.

Courtney Townley 5:55
So in today’s episode, I really want to pull back the curtain on what I believe to be some of the most common nutrition traps that sabotage your midlife health journey, and also explore why some of your usual approaches to eating aren’t really delivering the results they once did. So if that sounds good to you, stick around, because that is what we’re going to be talking about.

Courtney Townley 6:25
And let me also say what kind of qualifies me to have this conversation. If you’re a longtime listener, you already know this. You already know this part of my story. But if you’re a new listener, I think it’s really helpful to hear that for a decade of my career, I was very heavily rooted in the fat loss industry, so I helped a lot of people lose a lot of weight. Mainly I did that through very prescriptive cardiovascular exercise and a lot of macronutrient counting, so counting calories and really being hyper specific about what those calories were made up of, and there was value to that.

Courtney Townley 7:06
A lot of people shed a tremendous amount of weight, built muscle, got leaner than they had ever been, and that was beautiful and well and good. And it isn’t necessarily a sustainable practice for most people, right, living your life by a food scale and by chronically counting calories your entire life is exhausting, and there comes a point where women start pushing back against that, and I get it because I’ve pushed back against it, too, and that whole experience in the fat loss industry just really got me wildly curious about other ways that we can honor what our body needs without so much discipline. Right now, I’m not saying that calorie counting and macro counting and all of that doesn’t have a time and place. It does, and it is a powerful education for people who are willing to go there for a period of time. But is it a way of life for most women, I would argue it’s not a healthy way of life. So it’s not something that we can sustain forever. Nobody wants to live their life that way forever. Or I should say very few people do right.

Courtney Townley 8:32
So trap number one that I think a lot of midlife women fall for in the nutrition realm is this idea that everything in moderation is a good thing. And I would love to say that that is true. Everything in moderation is a good thing, but I don’t think it is, and I base that on my past experience of working with so many women, this mentality of everything in moderation fails to recognize that some foods, some substances like alcohol, affect women in midlife differently than it did in earlier years, so differently than in their youth. So this idea that just a little bit won’t hurt mindset does not account for how certain foods now trigger stronger physiological responses.

Courtney Townley 9:35
I’ll just share a really quick example. I have a client. We’ll just call her Sarah, for the sake of just keeping her identity anonymous, who absolutely was one of those people who always was touting this everything in moderation role with her evening glass of wine, right? So it wasn’t really moderation. First of all, when you’re doing something on the regular, consistently, every. Single Day. It’s not really moderation, but we often rationalize those things by saying, well, it’s just a little bit, just a little bit of wine, right?

Courtney Townley 10:11
And for Sarah in her younger years, in her 30s, it seemed to be working. She enjoyed her wine, she slept relatively well and she maintained her weight. But at 48 which is when she came to work with me, that same single glass of wine had a completely different effect in her system. It was disrupting her sleep. It was contributing to more brain fog the next morning. It was contributing to her inability to lose weight, because it wasn’t just on occasion, like when a good friend came to town or in celebration of something, it was every night, and it wasn’t until she experimented with really a 30 day break from alcohol that she realized how dramatically her body’s response had changed.

Courtney Townley 11:09
What had once been truly moderation was now imbalance in her midlife body, and this wasn’t moral failure on her part or lack of willpower. Her physiology had simply changed. Her body was more pro inflammatory because of going through perimenopause, because of losing certain hormones. And that required her to get radically honest. If this idea of everything in moderation around alcohol was actually working for her, and I see people do this with not just alcohol, but we do it with sugar, we do it with other foods that inflame us. So people who get inflamed every time they eat gluten, and yet they still argue with themselves that I should be able to eat everything in moderation, but every time they eat gluten, they get a horrible response.

Courtney Townley 12:09
So I think everything in moderation does not work when your body is acutely sensitive to something and or you just have a more complicated relationship with something like sugar or alcohol. I can’t tell you the number of clients I’ve worked with over the years who have abstained from sugar for a while. They feel amazing. They notice their energy going up. They get themselves out of thinking about sugar all the time, and then they go to a party, or there’s just an occasion where they decide to have a little bit of sugar, and it sets that on this whole trajectory of a downward spiral. I’m not saying that happens to everyone.

Courtney Townley 12:58
Some people, absolutely, a lot of people can eat sugar in moderation, but everything in moderation does not work for everyone. And I also want to offer that hormonal shifts, which, of course, we’re experiencing at midlife, makes our body more sensitive to certain dietary triggers. We see this with things like caffeine, right? A lot of my clients used to be able to drink quite a bit of coffee. Now they drink coffee and they experience anxiety or sleep disruptions or it just really hurts their stomach, where before it never did. I also see midlife hormonal shifts affect our response to alcohol, right, which I kind of mentioned in my example with said client, Sarah.

Courtney Townley 13:46
So we experience more inflammatory responses with alcohol. We experience more sluggishness in the morning. We might experience more joint pain. We are I think our liver struggles to detoxify from alcohol in the way that it once did. Our bodies don’t tolerate carbohydrates in the way they once did. Right? Some people are incredibly sensitive to certain carbohydrates. So again, not saying that you shouldn’t be eating carbs, please do not hear that. But for some people, some carbohydrates have a very negative response, so everything in moderation for that person makes no sense. And I just want to offer here that true freedom around food sometimes comes from abstinence, not from unlimited moderation. And again, I cannot tell you the number of times I have heard a woman arguing everything in moderation, specific. Specifically with a food that is clearly causing inflam inflammation and unnecessary stress on our body. So the takeaway here is, where are you using this rationale to keep consuming something that is clearly hurting your body every time you consume it, or is throwing you into some kind of reaction or inflammatory response that you then have to spend days recovering from. Is everything in moderation actually working for you? Maybe it is, and if it is awesome, more power to you. But if it’s not I think it is just a kindness to call ourselves out on that.

Courtney Townley 15:49
The second nutritional trap that I want to speak to in this episode is diet dogma. Because this is a big one, right? I mean, the diet industry thrives on one size fits all approaches that ignore the unique needs of women in midlife, and these rigid systems typically fail because they don’t account For your biological individuality and specific life circumstances. And sure, the human psyche can do anything temporarily. I mean, I’m not saying it’s always easy, but we can kind of work our way into committing to something for a short period of time. But a lot of these approaches, a lot of this diet dogma, is not sustainable, and then when we can’t sustain it, we convince ourselves that something’s wrong with us, that we must be broken in some way, and none of that is true. The system itself is broken. The approach is too extreme.

Courtney Townley 16:56
So what comes to mind for me, recently, I was having a conversation with a client who I hadn’t worked with in a while, and she started the conversation by telling me that she had been doing some keto, she’d been doing some intermittent fasting, she was still doing high protein, and my brain is going crazy as I’m listening to her talk, because I’m thinking, well, which is it? Because keto and high protein kind of conflict with each other, right? And if you’re doing high protein in my brain, that means you’re having to eat pretty frequently throughout the day, and that kind of conflicts with intermittent fasting. So how are you engaging with all these different food systems, or all this different diet dogma in a consistent way, and the answer is always the same. They’re not right.

Courtney Townley 17:46
It’s like we’re dipping our toe into the pool of all these different approaches, but we’re never really doing anything all all out, which is partly why, number one, we aren’t getting results. But if we are getting results, because we are going all in, we also may not be able to sustain those results. So most diet frameworks are pretty damn extreme and unsustainable in the long term and generic approaches. I said it before, but I want to say it again. Ignore your unique life and your unique circumstances, hormonally, physiologically, mentally, emotionally, all of those landscapes are ignored when you’re following cookie cutter programs. And I’m a big believer that bio individuality matters more at midlife than any other phase in our life, again, because our hormonal system, our chemistry, our nervous systems, are more challenged than they’ve ever been challenged before, and not all of us have the same things challenging those systems.

Courtney Townley 18:59
So buying into diet dogma number one promotes some eating disorders or disordered eating. It can it can definitely encourage both. It makes us crazy because it’s so disciplined and requires such extreme measures, and rarely does it work in the long term, because kind of like the macro counting that I was telling you earlier, nobody wants to live that way forever. So diet dogma can really get us into a lot of stuckness at midlife around improving our relationship with food and improving our health in general.

Courtney Townley 19:41
The third trap is the starting point. Oversight is what I’m going to call it, and this is just basically speaking to the fact that a lot of women seem to attempt dramatic nutritional overhauls without honestly assessing. Changing their current habits. So I saw this a lot in the realm of fat loss, where a woman would come in wanting to lose weight, obviously, and when I when I prompted her to tell me more about her nutritional habits, she would say things like, Well, I’m hardly eating anything. And sometimes that was true. I mean, the number of women that I helped to track food with and saw that, wow, they were hardly eating, like 1000 calories a day. That definitely can be true. But I also saw the opposite. I also saw where women were massively over consuming and convincing themselves that they were under eating.

Courtney Townley 20:40
And unless we know truly where we’re starting, it’s really hard to move the needle just a little bit. So I often think it’s a really powerful exercise to track food for a week in some kind of online database, to get data about what you are truly doing, because we have a lot of stories about what we’re doing, but the data usually shows something else. So when you track food for a week, you will get data like, how many total calories are you consuming on average in a day? Of those calories, how much? What is it made up of? How much protein are you doing? How much carb, how much fat, how much salt, how much sugar these this is great information to know. It doesn’t mean that you have to keep tracking meticulously moving forward, but just a few days or a week of tracking can give you really valuable insight about where you’re truly starting, so you can move the needle just a little bit without these massive overhauls, because massive overhauls create a tremendous amount of stress, and we all know that stress jacks up your chemistry, Which does not help you at midlife with anything, and the last trap that I want to speak to here in today’s episode is just making dieting a lifestyle.

Courtney Townley 22:10
Man, I have seen this so many times, where women are just chronically dieting. They’re always on a diet, which really creates physiological and psychological stress that becomes increasingly problematic on the midlife body. If you are chronically dieting, I would say that you’re probably not following systems that are in the best interest of your physiology, and that might be for a few reasons, like I have women who are chronically dieting because they’re never actually in a calorie deficit for very long, so they’re always like going in and Out of the dieting mentality. But I have other women who are chronic under eaters because they are so convinced that if they actually feed their body a little bit more food, that they’re going to get their weight is going to get out of control.

Courtney Townley 23:18
So I always like to remind my clients that dieting is meant to be a temporary thing. And let me be clear, that when I talk about dieting, I’m talking about creating a nutritional deficit. So when you are consuming less calories, it isn’t necessarily intended to be a lifelong endeavor, right? A calorie deficit is specifically designed to help you lose weight, but if you are constantly in a deficit, it can start to start to wreak havoc on your physiology. It can start to stress your body out the thyroid, which is kind of the barometer of your metabolism. When it senses that too little food is coming in on a regular basis, it’s really smart, and it will tell the cells of your body to slow down their processes, because we don’t have enough energy to run at high capacity.

Courtney Townley 24:21
So let’s slow down our physiological processes. Well, that’s not a good thing, because it makes you feel sluggish, and all of your systems slow down. You don’t digest as well, you don’t eliminate as well. You don’t have, you know, detox. You don’t detoxify as well. We do not want ourselves slowing down their jobs, but when we have too little food on board, that’s the messaging we’re sending if we stay in a chronic state of under eating. So again, I think it’s it can be very healthy and wonderful to be in a deficit. It for a period of time, but if you are in a deficit, forever ongoing, never taking a break, that can be really stressful on the body, especially at midlife, when the body is already contending with a lot of stress and not as many hormones to help manage that stress. So the things that I think are useful at midlife when it comes to nutrition, none of this is sexy, none of this is exciting, but it works rather than following trendy approaches, buying into diet dogma designed for younger bodies, midlife nutrition thrives on principles that honor your changing physiology while also supporting energy, mood and long term health, right? That’s really the name of the game.

Courtney Townley 25:54
And the things that help us to do that are things like prioritize protein, right? Protein has so many values in the human body, especially at midlife. Number one, it helps us to repair tissues and help build muscle. It All. Protein also has a lot of other jobs to do in the human body, but protein also satiates us. It helps us to stay fuller longer. There’s a metabolic advantage to eating protein. We actually expend a little bit more calories. We utilize more energy to consume protein. And fiber helps us to support metabolic health in that it helps to clean out the pipes, it helps to move things through and constipation for a lot of midlife women, is a very real thing. So prioritize protein and fiber.

Courtney Townley 26:55
The second thing I would say is choose real minimally processed food in your diet. Eat real food. Simple, right? Simple is not always easy. I get it, but eat real food. Real Food is the food that’s found on the outskirts of the grocery store. It doesn’t come in a can or a box or a bag. It’s really just, it’s just food, right? So your vegetables and your fruits and your meats and your eggs, these kinds of things, if your diet is mostly made up of real food, your body will probably do beautiful things with that. I’m not saying there isn’t some nuance there that you might not need to tweak things in other ways. But if you are looking for a starting place, starting by eating more real food. This you’ve heard a million times. This is not news to you.

Courtney Townley 27:52
The third thing I would say is respect the timing of calorie deficits, rather than engaging with chronic restriction. This kind of goes to what I was saying earlier about women being on being chronic dieters. There is a time and a place to go into a calorie deficit, if a calorie deficit makes sense for you and your goals, but it typically isn’t the best time to go into a deficit when you have absurd amounts of stress in your life. Because guess what a calorie deficit is? It’s stress. It can be good stress in a body that can handle it. It’s not great stress in a system that’s already in distress. So you have to be very discerning about when you go into a calorie deficit. If you don’t have a tremendous amount of stress in your life right now, cutting calories, if that’s a smart choice for you, it could be a great time.

Courtney Townley 28:55
But if you have copious amounts of stress, you’re struggling with sleep, you’ve got issues in your relationships, you’ve got projects due at work, you’re not really feeding yourself well, you know, in terms of even the quality of food, is it the best time to go into a calorie deficit? I would argue, probably not. Like we need to tackle your total stress load and get some load. Let’s get some of that stress off your plate before we put you into a deficit. And then the final thing, and this isn’t like an exhaustive list, but the fourth thing that I did want to mention today, in terms of things that are helpful to focus on at midlife, specifically around nutrition, is attune to your body’s unique responses to food, to alcohol, to everything. Start paying attention to how your body responds to what you’re putting in your mouth, because so often we’re not paying attention.

Courtney Townley 29:53
We’re just kind of bypassing the restless nights and the aches and pains and the weight gain. And we’re not really necessarily linking the dots between specifically what we’re eating and how our body is responding. Right? I might be getting headaches every Saturday morning and just popping Advil without ever pausing to consider what is happening in the previous 24 hours that might be contributing to this? Well, if you’re drinking alcohol every Friday night and you have a dull headache every Saturday morning, probably a connection there, right? Or maybe it is eating gluten for you, or maybe it is not drinking enough water, but start paying attention to how you are eating and how your body responds, not just in terms of weight loss or weight gain, but what messages is your body giving you that could be giving you a lot of intel about how Your diet is or is not working for you.

Courtney Townley 31:03
I’ll close this episode out by just saying the journey to improving your relationship with food is not about perfection, right? It’s really about progress. It’s about paying attention. It’s about staying awake to what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. It’s about developing the wisdom to recognize what your body really needs in this season of life, and the courage to provide yourself with that and hear me out that you may need a little guidance to figure out what that is. I’m not saying go this alone, but whether you do this with help at your side or on your own, you are going to have to pay closer attention.

Courtney Townley 31:52
And above all, I would say that your relationship with food at midlife should definitely not be about deprivation. It should be more about deep nourishment, like, how can I really, truly nourish my body at this stage of life? And sometimes nourishment does look like changing food choices and occasionally going into a calorie deficit, but at other times it looks like fueling yourself well and adding some things in.

Courtney Townley 32:29
I hope this was helpful. I hope something in that was useful to you, like I said at the start of this episode, I hope you take good care of yourself. I hope you take good care of your families. I know it’s a wild time right now, and it’s all the more reason for us to do what needs to be done to make sure that we are showing up as solid, grounded, resilient humans and health on all fronts, physical, mental, emotional and otherwise, is a part of that. All right, my friends, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and I will talk to you again soon. Take care.

Courtney Townley 33:19
Thank you for listening to the grace and grit podcast, it is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self-care. You are worth the effort, and with a little grace and grit, anything is possible you.