Nutrition Went Off the Rails in 2025 (And That's Just a Start)

This week on Real Food Stories, Heather breaks down the wild world of midlife nutrition in 2025 — from microdosing GLP-1s, oral semaglutide, and high-protein everything to cottage-cheese coffee, weighted vests, and the fiber frenzy. If nutrition felt chaotic this year, you’re not imagining it.

We revisit my most downloaded episodes on HRT confusion and upgrading your midlife kitchen, and she shares her own experience navigating hormone therapy around surgery — a perfect example of why women remain overwhelmed by inconsistent guidance.

Underneath all the noise, one message stood out: women need clarity, strength, real food, and community.
I close the episode with an invitation to join The Well Nourished Woman, her supportive space for women 40+ who want evidence-based guidance without the overwhelm.

Chapters

• 2:00 Year-End Trend Roundup
• 4:22 The GLP-1 Microdosing Debate
• 7:05 Protein Mania Without The Hype
• 9:08 Weighted Vests Versus Real Strength
• 10:34 Women Lifting And Fiber’s Comeback
• 13:37 Hormone Therapy Confusion Exposed
• 16:50 Surgery, Mixed Advice, And Frustration
• 19:50 Why Women Need Real Community
• 22:10 Top Episodes And Kitchen Reset
• 24:34 What Actually Works For Midlife Health
• 26:11 Join The Well-Nourished Community

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:20

Hello, everyone. It's Heather, and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. I know everyone is crazy busy right now. I am about to get crazy busy, and I'll share what I'm up to in just a few minutes. And the holidays just seem to come out of nowhere, right? We had Thanksgiving, and then suddenly, boom, we're like well into the next round of holidays. So now today I am doing one of my favorite types of episodes, a year-end roundup. I love looking back on the year to see where the trends have come and gone, what made sense, what felt like total wackiness and total outright failure. And wow, 2025 gave us plenty to talk about. So if I could summarize this year in the nutrition and wellness world in one sentence, it would be we got louder, weirder, more extreme, and more confused than ever before. My clients felt it. I know many of you felt it, and I definitely felt it too. I just had a feeling of darkness over me when it came to food and nutrition and eating well and enjoying food. I did a whole episode on what happened to the food. Like, why aren't we talking just about food anymore? Food to me felt no longer like something we get to enjoy, but rather we took a giant leap back into crash diets of the 90s. Food is something to restrict. I hope this works itself out in the future. And I will definitely do my part to make sure that we can still enjoy eating real food. Now, if you're a woman in midlife, especially, it was like every algorithm on earth decided that you either needed to lose weight immediately, you should be microdosing medications, you must hit 40 grams of protein just before the sun even came up in the morning. And you had to wear a weighted vest just to simply walk your dog. So today I want to break down the biggest themes of 2025, the ones that mattered, the ones that absolutely did not, and the ones that I'm excited to expand on in 2026. So let's get into it. All right. One of the loudest trends of 2025 was the idea that microdosing GLP ones was an effective and smart way to use the medication of the year. I mean, if there was any other thing that we have been talking about, actually, I mean, I've been talking about this on this podcast for years now, a couple of years, are GLP ones. But this year, everyone started talking about just tiny doses, microdoses, like just a little. We don't have that much weight to lose, so we're just going to do a little tiny dose, quarter doses, just a little Ozempic to take the edge off of my appetite. It became almost like a supplement, which is honestly wild to me because GLP1s like Ozempic, Wagovi, these are not supplements to be bought on the internet. Okay? They are not supplements. These are very serious medications. And we do not want to mess with something that is a serious medication that you should be going to see your doctor about and to talk about further. I'm not judging, I'm not saying anyone should be on them or off them or anything like that. But to start microdosing or then the other thing I saw was taking oral versions or compounded versions or light versions of these medications. Now, I want to be very clear again, I'm not anti-medication. These drugs do have a place. But the fascination with using them as a casual tool for losing even the last five pounds, that's pure diet culture with a medical coat on. And we have to be really careful about that. That's where I, when I said before that I feel like we just have gone back into the 90s with the starvation. This is not about food anymore, but about how much weight can we lose. So it raises a bigger question for me. Why are women, especially midlife women, feeling so desperate for control right now? The obvious one is our bodies are changing, our metabolism is shifting, our hormones are unpredictable, and the internet is offering fixes from random wellness influencers who have no bad medical backgrounds whatsoever. And these fixes offer a sort of temporary clarity. So that's a theme that we're definitely going to be coming back to in the future because this is not going away. And it definitely peaked a lot in 2025. Okay, let's get just a little more down-to-earth now. The other trend that I saw booming out of control was protein. The cottage cheese takeover, high protein mania. Protein was like the Beyoncé of 2025. Everywhere, headlining everything, impossible to ignore. We had cottage cheese coffee, cottage cheese ice cream, cottage cheese everything. Protein water, protein cereal, protein cookies, and the 40 grams before breakfast challenge, which I had seen on the internet. I'm not against protein. Obviously, we definitely need protein. It is one of our macronutrients, and it is as important as anything else. And it is especially important when we start getting older and we are getting into midlife. We need to even bump up our protein a little bit more, but we don't need to be obsessive about it. Okay, I love teaching women why it's essential to eat protein in midlife, because a lot of us grew up in a very carb-heavy mindset, right? Eating a bagel for breakfast, a donut, right? And we want to switch this around because protein has so many good-for-you benefits. But somewhere along the way, we forgot that protein is a nutrient, not a personality. We don't need to blend cottage cheese into our coffee to get enough protein. We don't need to choke down three protein waters before 10 a.m. And we don't need to turn every single meal into a chemistry project, right? We just need to just add in some protein, learn about your food so you know what you are getting and get educated. Because here's the truth, right? Real food, I'm gonna keep going back to this over and over again. It all goes back to this: the real food, balanced meals, protein throughout your day. That's how we build muscle, that's how we manage hunger, and support our metabolism, not through hacks, but through habits, everyday habits. All right, the next one that I saw come and maybe start to drift away are weighted vests. Weighted vests became like the Stanley Cup of 2025. People were wearing them, walking the dog, doing dishes, going on hikes, folding laundry. Some were wearing them all day to burn more calories. Now listen, weighted vests have their place. And I had done a podcast on this. They're great for bone loading and strength work, but they are not a shortcut to replace strength training. Okay, I'm gonna repeat that. They are no shortcut to replace strength training and lifting weights. And they are definitely not the magic pill for midlife metabolism. So this was yet another example of the industry offering a quick fix instead of telling women the truth. Strength training in midlife is not negotiable. All right. It's not negotiable anymore. You have to lift heavy weights for your bone health, for your metabolism, for your strength to prevent falls. Okay, we need to get to a gym or you need to just buy some weights for your home. It's not glamorous, it's not hackable, but it can be really transformative. And that leads us into one of the big positive shifts for 2025, which is I saw the rise of women lifting weights finally. One of the best things I saw this year was more women 40 plus finally embracing strength training. I heard from so many of you say things to me like, I picked up weights for the first time in years, or I'm not afraid of the weight room anymore, or I'm getting stronger and it feels amazing. This is the direction we need to keep going. Muscle is metabolic currency. Okay, it is your insurance policy for weight. So, especially in midlife, as the older we get, we start to lose muscle and we want to maintain it. And that is through strength training. And this is something I'm really excited to expand on in 2026 because it ties in beautifully into one of my most downloaded episodes ever was talking about getting back into our midlife kitchen. I'm gonna talk about that a little further in a few minutes, but one thing I did talk about on that episode is the addition of fiber, right? We are so focused on protein, but we really also need to be focusing, more importantly, I think, on fiber. And fiber is finally starting to have its moment. It's definitely a trend. I saw getting more buzz. And I think 2025 just rediscovered fiber. It's not like it's some brand new nutrient. It was been around forever, and we absolutely positively need it in our diets. But 2025 was just was uh discovering it like it was a brand new invention in the market. Suddenly everyone was doing chia seeds and flax seeds and psyllium husks and fiber loading before meals, and and I saw 50 grams a day challenges, which you don't have to do 50 grams a day, but go at it if if that's what you want to be doing. And so listen, I love fiber. Fiber supports your gut, it supports your blood sugar, it keeps you satiated, it definitely supports your hormones, it does a million things in your body. And I've I have done past episodes on fiber and its benefits, and maybe I'll link it down in the show notes. But you don't need to do fiber like TikTok style, okay? You don't need to take three tablespoons of psyllium, husk in water, and hope for the best. Let's get back to our food: vegetables, beans, berries, whole grains. These are the foods that have fiber in them. Let's stick to our food first. These have always worked, right? This is why I promote plant-based diets. Not so you're just eating a bunch of lettuce. It's because they're full of fiber. And plants, again, beans, things that grow in the ground, fruits, vegetables, whole grains. So this was another moment where 2025 reminded us that we don't need extreme solutions to feel better. We just need consistency. All right, let's move into hormones because wow, this topic just did not calm down in 2025. I have been talking about hormones on this podcast since the beginning of time. The secrets around it, this the secrecy, the confusion around what kinds of hormones you should be using, that what what hormones you might want to use, the confusion from doctors. And it's just been relentless and it hasn't stopped. It's more confusing than ever. And I felt this year very disappointed and very let down by the whole medical industry around it because it just doesn't go away. Doctors need to get more educated and more on the same page. Now, at the beginning of the year, I recorded one of my most popular episodes ever called Unraveling the Confusion Around HRT. And honestly, here we are 12 months later, and the confusion just hasn't gotten any better. Because I think women still don't know which form of estrogen right, how much to take, whether testosterone is helpful or not, when do you take progesterone? Why one doctor says stop HRT before surgery and another says it's fine? And I'll talk about that in a second because that's just happened to me. What bioidentical hormones actually mean? Are those safer for us? Are they not? What are bioidentical hormones? Whether transdermal, like the patch, is that safer than taking an oral medication? And why research says one thing, but clinicians are always saying another? It's really maddening. And I lived this firsthand this year with my own surgery. So I am about to go into surgery tomorrow. When you listen to this, I will probably be about two weeks out of surgery. I'm having a hip replacement and a much-needed hip replacement. My very bad arthritis in my right hip. And so I made the decision to have a hip replacement. And the confusion that has gone on with my hormones, because I know all of you know this, if you've been listening to me for a while, I am very happily on hormone replacement therapy, which is also called menopause hormone therapy, by the way. I have been on a certain kind. I went and switched to the patch. I have asked three gynecologists, my surgeon, my regular general doctor, another doctor. I have gone on the internet to ask doctors, and I have gotten a different opinion from every single one of them. Should I be stopping my hormones? Because I think the old thinking was that hormones can raise the risk of blood clots in surgery. But there is a lot of information and a lot of scientific studies that says that hormones in a certain type, like transdermal, like the patch, does not raise your risk of blood clots. But my surgeon told me to stop my hormones a week prior to surgery. The doctor who did the preop told me to stop them for a month before surgery and a month after. My gynecologist told me that I don't need to stop them. Do you see what's going on here? It's so confusing. And so I just decided that I'm going to listen to my surgeon because I don't want to get in trouble with him and just follow his directions. So for the first time in about 10 years, I stopped my hormones. And very unhappily, I don't want to be stopping my hormones. Everyone talked to me about it like it was no big deal. But I've been on them for years and it's just a lot to just to think about stopping them. So anyway, I'm going to be going back on them soon enough after the surgery. But it was very frustrating for me to manage every all these doctors' confusing statements because they are uneducated as to what goes on with hormones and blood clot risk and surgery. So if I, someone who reads research and knows the physiology and works in women's health, feels confused about this and got so much confusion from doctors, I can't even imagine how the average woman woman is feeling right now. I mean, that is why I will always talk about hormones on this podcast in a grounded, evidence-based way, because women deserve clarity, not fear-based messaging or outdated advice. I've said this more than once, a million times on this podcast that my my original primary care doctor said she would rather be in jail than to take estrogen because she was stuck in the 2000s with the old outdated studies. And she still is. It's amazing. But anyway, the confusion around hormones is alive and well and has not gone away yet. And my hope for 2026 is that there can be some consensus with women and hormones. Even if you have five doctors who want to prescribe you hormones, why are you all getting different opinions from all these doctors? It just shouldn't be that way. All right, next. One of the undercurrents of 2025 that I really felt so strongly about, and one thing that just felt like came up for me again and again this year is that women need community. Women are lonely, women are overwhelmed, women think they're the only ones struggling with some of this stuff. This is why I talk about it out loud. And they're not. Okay. We women are dealing with changing bodies, changing hormones, changing roles as parents, as caregivers of our parents, our aging parents, emptiness, work stress, chronic pain, just the pressure to hold everything together and to do it right and to still feel young and vibrant and still alive. And we're trying to navigate all of this by scrolling social media sometimes to find our answers because we don't have clear answers from the medical community. I mean, that's not community. That's just a lot of noise. So back in the summer, I created the well-nourished woman community because I felt like women needed a space to talk honestly and openly about midlife and to get real evidence-based information about food, about nutrition, about hormones, about exercise, and to feel supported by other women who get it. Now, the community is alive and well. I'm going through a couple shifts around it, but I am so excited for 2026 and what I'm going to be offering there. We're going to get a little more intentional with goals. And before you even start to think about your New Year's resolutions, tune in with me. I'm going to be talking more about it because we're going to be using something really fun in the membership. And I want you to be a part of it. So stay tuned for that. But the takeaway, I think, from this year is that women are desperate for community because I we're getting a whole bunch of information from random sources off of Instagram, which is just crazy to me. I mean, I felt, you know, with my surgery coming up and all this hormone stuff, I'm very lonely. I had no one else to ask about this. I don't know anyone else who's had surgery who's also been on hormones, who was told to go off their hormones. No one. And I've had surgery before, and I've never been told to go off hormones. So this was very confusing and felt very lonely to me. So, community, even more than ever this year. Okay, so I want to just wrap up a little bit by telling. You about my two favorite episodes of the year and my most listened to episodes. Okay, so just to remind you of what I'm talking about. So these are the two episodes that rose to the top in 2025. One, the episode titled Your Midlife Kitchen Needs an Upgrade. This was my most downloaded episode of the entire year. And I get it. And I think it's a reflection of what I was talking about. What happened to the food? We're so focused on just losing weight, so focused on GLP ones and just getting the weight off at any cost. When you take a GLP one, it means you just stop eating food. You eat less food. You're just not hungry for food anymore. I understand it, but we do need to be in touch with our food. It's the one thing that we can enjoy in life. And it doesn't have to be caloric. I mean, it can be healthy and good for you and taste good. And so I was not surprised that this was one of my most downloaded episodes of the year. And our kitchens, you know, are shifting now that we're in midlife and getting a little older. We want to simplify things even more. I mean, my kids don't live in my house with me anymore. I mean, they come home to visit for holidays and stuff. So when they're home, we're that's a different way of eating. But for the most part, my kitchen in midlife is just a little more streamlined now. So our kitchens in midlife aren't just functional, they're emotional. They hold our habits, our history, and our identity around food. And we want to nurture that. So I'm so excited to dive into this topic even deeper in 2026. Cooking for your metabolism, cooking for energy, your hormones, your sanity, and making it super simple and easy and delicious. All right, the next episode that was one of the most downloaded of the year was, which I mentioned before, unraveling the confusion around HRT. Still one of the most shared, most talked-about episodes. It just tells me women want clarity, they want education, and they want to understand their options. And I promise this coming year, 2026, I will be bringing both the research and the real talk to this podcast about hormones and all the evidence that I can muster up. All right, so let's wrap things up about 2025 and say goodbye to 2025 and hello to a brand new year. I love a brand new year and starting fresh. And this is for me what 2025 actually, I think, showed us. I mean, 2025 was kind of wild. We tried microdosing meds. We put cottage cheese into our coffee. We wore weighted vests to clean the house. We chased protein like it was oxygen. We debated hormones endlessly, and we kept trying to biohack our way out of simply being human. But here's what actually helped women this year. Okay, let's keep it simple. Strength training, lift weights, just lift heavy weights, steady protein intake, okay? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, more fiber at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, reducing our stress and sleeping better. I mean, my sleep is everything to me right now. Moving consistently every single day. We don't have to get obsessive and crazy about 10,000 steps, but we do need to be moving every single day. Giving ourselves a break. Okay, we're doing our best. We're not here for perfection. Eating real food, eating food, okay, and enjoying it and being part of a supportive community. This is what works. I think this is what's real, and it's what lasts. And that's where we're headed, and that's where we're headed in 2026. If you are not already inside the well-nourished community, come and join us. It's where we talk about all of this in a deeper, more connected way, without the noise and without the pressure. And you don't have to navigate midlife alone. You really don't. So I am so excited to close this chapter of 2025 and walk into a brand new year, energized and ready to take on my health, my well being. And I hope you are too. So thank you so much for being here with me, and I'll see you next week.