Hot topic: Rethinking Your Relationship with Food
Many of us have a complicated relationship with food during menopause, thanks in part to the negative messaging about diet culture we have absorbed over decades, often beginning when we were very young. Women spend an average of 17 years of their lives trying to lose weight. Diet culture has become so prevalent that 90% of women have tried at least one diet.
Here is a brief overview of the most popular diets by decade. Did you give any of these a try?
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It's not just our own encounter with negative messaging about food and our bodies that we have to contend with; it's also how those messages got absorbed by parents, coaches, teachers, our social group, and even medical professionals. Maybe one of your parents commented on their body or yours that has stuck with you for many years? Perhaps it was an off-hand comment by a distant relative or teacher that shaped your sense of your body and how you feel about food.
You may have grown up in the era of Fit For Life and the 'Fat-Free' craze, which cut many of us off from getting essential fats in our diet for years. The current generation of perimenopausal and menopausal women will recall the era of 'Supermodels' whose impossible-for-most physiques espoused the value of being as thin as possible.
All of this is deeply rooted in how we think about ourselves, our bodies, and how we engage with food.
With the New Year here, it is time to reflect on your relationship with food. During perimenopause, many body systems are in a state where you are vulnerable to health risks like osteoporosis, sarcopenia, and cardiometabolic disease. Seize the opportunity of perimenopause as an ideal time to transform what you eat and how you nourish your body.
The first and second steps are awareness and education, and the third is the food we put into our mouths. The second step is perhaps the least discussed and the key to unlocking your approach to nourishing your body. This step is your relationship and mindset about food. Good thing you are never alone with PAUZ Health. We are sharing stories and tools to help!
Read Next: Why You're Gaining Weight in Menopause (and What to Eat About It)
She only consumes low-calorie and low-fat options. She continues the habit she developed in her early 20s of drinking vast quantities of diet soda and black coffee (at one time with aspartame, then Splenda) to stave off hunger and fill her up before meals. She still stresses out about social gatherings that might showcase her habits, which she fears will be judged by those who eat “normally.”
She couldn’t tell you what “normal” eating really means, but it’s a concept she thinks of often and with a vague and confusing sense of longing.
If you recognize yourself in any part of Anne’s story, now is the time to change the script and start dismantling the false beliefs about nutrition and body image many of us have been carrying since our youth!
Take some time and consider the questions below:
If you answered ‘yes’ to one or more of these questions, let’s begin the process of re-writing your internal script.
Food should never be part of a morality-based judgment about ourselves or our diet. Diet, food marketing, and the ‘clean eating’ fad have falsely taught us that food is a reflection of who we are as people. Many experts use heavily judgement-laden terms when describing food, such as ‘clean,’ ‘bad,’ ‘good,’ ‘sinful’ and ‘guilt-free’, and they do so with religious zeal. This language is problematic for many reasons, but particularly because it gets generalized and projected onto people themselves, not just their food choices, creating unnecessary and harmful guilt and shame.
If you have conflict around food and eating, figuring out where that conflict originated can go a long way in helping you neutralize it. As mentioned earlier, many of us engage in unhealthy behaviours, habits, and thought patterns whose seeds were planted when we were very young. This is not our fault. When we’re young and impressionable and we observe people who are close to us engaging in these same behaviours, we tend to internalize them.
Read Next: I’m Not Doing Anything Different. Why Am I Gaining Weight?
Most of us have a running commentary that judges us for what we eat and how we look playing on repeat in our minds. Often, this script also tells us what type of person we are. The script's content may be entirely untrue or irrational, but it's become so internalized that we don't even realize we're listening to it! Unfortunately, negative self-talk can destroy our self-esteem and throw up a barrier to change and the capacity to recognize our self-worth.
Menopause is too big an adventure to go it alone.
Book a 1-1 consultation with one of our nutrition experts today!