Day 3: What Do You Actually Want? How to Stop Overthinking What to Eat

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 not the same thing, plus a simple 10-second practice to try before your next meal.

Free support to get you started:

• Un-Diet Your Mindset → https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/undietyourmindset
• Food Guilt Decoder → https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/FoodGuiltDecoder

Want more support?

• Try the Midlife Feast Community free for 7 days → https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/7daytrial
• Book a no-strings connection call (virtual coffee with me) → https://p.bttr.to/3DQX9SF

Related episodes:

• Day 1 — How to Un-Diet in Midlife and Menopause → https://www.buzzsprout.com/1851576/episodes/19715276
• Day 2 → https://www.buzzsprout.com/1851576/episodes/19720938

📚 I wrote a book! Eat To Thrive During Menopause is out now!  Order your copy today and start thriving in midlife.

Transcript

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Welcome To The Midlife Feast

Jenn Salib Huber 0:00

Welcome to the Midlife Feast, the podcast that helps you make sense of your body, your health, and menopause in the messy middle of midlife. I'm Dr. Jen Salib Huber, intuitive eating dietitian, a naturopathic doctor, and author of Eat to Thrive During Menopause. Around here, we don't see midlife and menopause as problems to solve, but as invitations to live with more freedom, trust, and joy. Each week you'll hear real conversations and practical strategies to help you feel like yourself again, eat without guilt, and turn midlife from a season of survival into a season of thriving. I'm so glad you're here. Let's dig in.

The Nourishment Question Without Weight Loss

Jenn Salib Huber 0:40

Hey everyone, welcome back to day three of this Midlife and Menopause on Dieting Series. We're still working on answering the question: how would I nourish and take care of myself if I didn't require my body to get smaller in return? So yesterday, which was day two, we talked about how to shift from blaming yourself to getting curious and through this self-compassionate lens. So instead of why can't I do this, to why was this

A Simple Walk Goal With Compassion

Jenn Salib Huber 1:07

so hard? So I want to start today with a recent conversation from the Feaster community. So we've been talking about all the things that we want to carry forward from summer into fall, and maybe some of the things that we're excited to bring back about September. I love September. So things like rhythms and routines, just like knowing the predictable schedule and flow of your day. And I said that one of my intentions was to get outside for a walk as often as I could. And now that might sound like a really simple goal to some of you, but I work from home and I live in a country where it is dark and rainy for a good chunk of the year. I don't always have things that naturally pull me outside, but I also know that I feel better when I get outside. So I set this intention and this week I got outside once. Now, the old version of me would have been really hard on myself about that. I would have said, You made this goal, you said it out loud, what's wrong with you? It's just a simple walk. But this version of me said, Why was this so hard this week? And so instead of judging myself, I just got curious and I came at it with self-compassion. I haven't slept well this week. I don't know why, but I've had a really bad stretch of insomnia. So I am running on much less sleep than I like to have. My kids are also still home. So that throws our morning routines off. And morning is when I'm most likely to get out for a walk. I'm very much a creature of habit. And so while I can do things at different times, it is definitely more challenging. And I also knew that this was the last full week of summer break. And if I'm being completely honest, I was leaning into that. So slower days, quieter days, just more time on the couch, more reading. I was listening to what I wanted and needed, and I just gave myself permission to lean into that.

Attunement And Capacity Aligned Choices

Jenn Salib Huber 2:55

And that's kind of what we're talking about today. So day three is all about attunement. And if I had looked at this week through the old lens, I would have only seen that I'd failed. I set a goal and I didn't hit it. But instead, because I was getting curious and I was looking at it through this different lens, I was able to see a bigger picture that I could make decisions based on what I wanted and needed, not through this what should I be able to do kind of lens. In other words, capacity-aligned choices, not capability-based ones. And I think that a lot of people have lost touch with what they want and need when it comes to food, because for anybody who has spent time dieting or following rules or following a plan, we get really good at listening to what other people tell us we should do instead of listening to ourselves. And I was reminded of this recently on a call when somebody said to me, it's not a question of whether I'm allowed to have cake, because I know that I am, but I want to know exactly how much I'm allowed to have gin. She wanted me to tell her how much was too much. So she was practicing permission, but she had not developed the self-trust yet. And I know that lots of you can relate to that. Because if you've, you know, spent any amount of time trying to eat, quote, better by following or outsourcing the rules, then having to trust yourself is pretty much impossible or feels like the most alien foreign concept ever. So don't feel like you're doing anything wrong if this idea of trusting yourself just sounds like a completely foreign language. Because your hunger cues might feel really loud, um, or not at all, or you might have a lot of food noise. Maybe you're so used to just looking at the clock and saying, is it lunchtime that you have no idea when you're hungry? Maybe you can't tell the difference between physical hunger, emotional hunger, taste hunger, or whether or not your snack is real hunger, or whether you're just bored. All of that is okay because the goal with attunement isn't to become somebody who just magically knows the right thing to eat in every moment. So this isn't like a crystal ball that I'm giving you. Now, what we're doing is starting to rebuild attunement. And maybe it's for the first time. Now, I want to be really clear about what I mean by that and what I don't mean by that.

Observing Your Body Without Bias

Jenn Salib Huber 5:24

And I'm gonna use this example from a friend of mine. So she loves reading a horoscope and she often sends me these snippets and says, Oh my gosh, this happened exactly like it said it would, or look how true this is. And so one day I said, Do you actually find that these are often true? And she said, Of course. I just keep looking for one until I find one that I like. We've all done that. But attunement doesn't work like a horoscope. You can't be hunting for evidence to confirm what you've already decided is true. So you can't be clocking all the bloating or, you know, symptoms or sensations that you experience after eating bread, for example, and you know, say, oh, I knew carbs were the problem. Attunement is observing what is happening without judgment or expectation. Now, it can also be called introsceptive awareness, and that's a fancy word to describe your ability to notice and make sense of the signals that are coming from your body, whether this is hunger or fullness or thirst or fatigue or pain. And like a lot of things, it is shaped by our experience. So if you have spent time overriding your hunger and fullness cues, following a diet or a set of rules, or being told that you can't trust yourself around food or that you're addicted to food, reconnecting with those signals is going to take a little bit of practice. And that really is the work. It's practice, right? So that's kind of what we're working on. We're not looking to find a new rule. We're not swapping calorie counting for hunger and fullness scoring. We're just getting curious. What do I notice? How hungry am I? How satisfied am I? How does my body feel? What happens if I go too long without eating? What happens if I eat something and then find myself in the kitchen an hour later? What happens if I eat something that I really enjoy? And this is where this loops back to the pressure to lose weight because it's really, really hard to listen to your body and respond in an attuned way when you're spending all of your energy trying to control it. So if you're hungry, but you're saving your calories for dinner, if you want more food, but you've already had as much as you think you're allowed to have, or if you want a piece of cake, but you spend too much time trying to calculate exactly how much is enough and how much is too much. In all of those, the rules are going to be louder than the attunement kind of signals that are coming from your body. So your brain can kind of override that connection.

The 10 Second Question Before Eating

Jenn Salib Huber 8:03

So here is your practice for today. It's one question, it takes about 10 seconds. Before your next meal or snack or just eating opportunity, pause and ask, what do I actually want right now? Not what's the best choice, not what's the smart choice, not what you're allowed, not what you'd order if somebody else was watching, because that can also influence satisfaction. I want you to ask what sounds good to you right now. Maybe it's something warm, maybe it's something crunchy or cold or salty, or maybe it's the thing that you've been trying to talk yourself out of for weeks. Maybe you have no idea because it's been so long since anybody has asked you that question. That's okay too. But that's how satisfaction comes back. Not from eating perfectly, but from actually giving yourself the food that you want instead of what you're settling for all the time. Now, we're gonna be talking about balance tomorrow. But because satisfaction is the thing that gets left out of all the conversations about food and diet culture, that's why I think it's so important that we start there today. So tomorrow we're gonna bring in the other half of the question, which is what do I need? So today is what do I want? Tomorrow is what do I need? And when those two things start working together instead of fighting each other, that's when eating just starts to feel easy and enjoyable. Because undieting doesn't mean the conversation about nutrition disappears. You can still care about nutrition, but it's not the only voice in the room now. So I hope that you're enjoying this mini-series and I hope that it helps you answer this question: how do I nourish and take care of myself if I don't require my body to get smaller in return? Because that is where you will find food peace and body peace, especially if you have spent a lifetime in diet culture. So I hope that you're gonna join me for day four.

Balance Next And Ways To Get Support

Jenn Salib Huber 10:02

And if listening to this episode has made you wonder what kind of support is out there, check the show notes. There's a link to try the Midlife Feast community free for seven days, and a link to book a call if you want to learn more about how I can support you. So I will see you tomorrow. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Midlife Feast. If you're ready to take the next step towards thriving in midlife, head to menopausenutritionist.ca to learn more about my one-to-one and group coaching programs, free resources, and where to get your copy of Eat to Thrive during menopause. And if you've loved today's conversation and found it helpful, please share it with a friend who needs to hear this and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps so many more people just like you find their way to food freedom and midlife confidence. Until next time, remember, midlife is not the end of the story, it's the feast. Let's savor it together.