142. Why I’m Choosing Human Guidance Over Trends And What Women Actually Need In 2026

Happy New Year and welcome back! 

Today I am exploring why so many women feel overloaded by wellness noise and how to find steadiness through community, clarity, and the simple act of real food. I am sharing my candid update story about my surgery and hormone experience shows why nuance and self-advocacy matter more than one-size-fits-all rules.

I am also talking about:

• re-entry to 2026 with a focus on orientation rather than resolutions
• the case for community as an antidote to isolation and confusion
• why I will never create an AI version of myself
• the pitfalls of certainty, urgency and extreme wellness claims
• the hip surgery hormone debate, my withdrawal experience and what I learned from it
• how to ask better questions and advocate with your clinicians
• redefining goals around sustainability, sleep, and real food
• the practice of wintering and giving yourself permission to rest right now rather than charge out of the gate

Join the Well-Nourished Woman community—real women, real questions, real context. I’ll leave all the info in the show notes, and reach me by email with questions

WANT IN ON THE COMMUNITY? The Well Nourished Woman Community is where I am brining together women over 50+ who are navigating the messy reality of midlife changes, to nourish ourselves simply, talk honestly about our bodies and health, and take gentle steps forward together, so that we can feel more content, at peace, and even find moments of joy and humor along the way. Come gather, cook, learn the real deal on hormones, food and not being afraid to talk out loud about all of it. JOIN HERE.

Chapters

• 1:20 Reentry To 2026 And Recovery
• 2:43 What Women Really Need Now
• 5:29 Choosing Community Over Noise
• 9:33 Letting Go And Rest As Practice
• 13:24 Why No AI Version Of Me
• 16:11 Calling Out Wellness Certainty
• 19:03 The Surgery And Hormone Debate
• 24:40 Lessons On Advocacy And Nuance
• 28:59 Redefining Goals For Sustainability
• 32:44 Wintering And The Power Of Community
• 35:48 Closing Hopes For The Year

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:40

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast, and I guess to real life in 2026. I know this was a hard week to re-enter, right? Because we had so many holidays and a very long break. And but wow, it's 2026, and where is the time going? I don't know about you, but time is moving so fast, isn't it? It just shocks me sometimes. I feel like life is feeling short. All of a sudden we're in a new year, and it gives us a lot to think about. So if you listen to my last podcast of 2025, you might have heard that I had a hip replacement surgery. I've been recovering from that for the past few weeks. That's sort of what's been taking up a little bit of my time. This is something that was a little long overdue, and I knew I was going to eventually have to have it done. So I thought December might be a good time to do it. It turned out to be one of the snowiest and coldest couple weeks that I've seen in a long time where I live, but that's okay. I am getting well past it and looking forward to all of the possibilities and explorations of 2026. Now, more importantly, I wanted to just bring up that episode because in that episode, I talked about the debate about my hormones and the urgency from some pretty clueless doctors for me to get off of them before, during, and after surgery. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later, but I wanted to give you an update and just tell you I'm going to give you an update because on that podcast, I had said, I'm about to walk into surgery. They want me to go off of them and I'll let you know what happens. And it was definitely an experience. I learned a lot and I want to share my story about that with you. Now, I've been thinking a lot about 2026 and not in a planning way or a goal setting kind of way. It's more like it keeps coming up when I'm walking the dog or just doing dishes or lying awake at night. I just keep asking myself, what do women actually need right now? Not what they're being told they need because the internet is so noisy right now. Not what's trending because that's noisy too, but what's genuinely missing? It's really giving me a big pause, and I've had a lot of time to think over the past few weeks. I haven't done a lot of work. I mean, it's been the holidays and everything, but I've had a lot of time to just really sit with my thoughts and think. And as much as you know, AI is around and Ozempic and all the things that I really, as a nutritionist, was not totally prepared for. How it affects then my business, my career, and what people and women mostly want from their health and well-being. Now, the more conversations I have with clients, with women in my community, with my friends, the clearer it becomes that it's not just another plan or protocol that you're looking for. It's not more discipline and it's not even more education, although I do believe that there is so much mis-education and misinformation right now out in social media that it is just dizzine. And I think that actually we do need a little more real evidence-based education. But most importantly, I think what I'm feeling like a lot of women need is orientation. It's perspective. It's someone saying, let's slow this down and think together for a minute. So that's really what this episode today is all about. How I'm thinking about my work as we move into 2026, why I'm putting so much emphasis on my community that I'm starting, and why I'm intentionally staying very human in the middle of all of this wellness noise. And what I want women to be paying attention to, and maybe not paying attention to in the year ahead. So before I go any further, I do want to say this up front because it connects directly to everything I'm about to talk about. Inside the well-nourished woman community that I started a couple of months ago as a free membership. This is exactly the kind of conversation we're having. It's not rushed, it's not extreme. It's just real women, real questions, real context. So I'm going to come back to that a little later because I'm refiguring things in the community and I'm really excited about it. I'm super excited about it. So I wanted to just let you know what's happening, and I would love for you to join. But I'll talk about that more at the end of this episode. So I wanted to just say this now because this episode really comes from that same place. All right, I wanted to talk a little bit just about how I'm thinking about 2026, this new year. Now, New Year's always give me like a lot of excitement. I mean, I think for a lot of people, right? All of a sudden we are turning the calendar, we have a new planner, it's resolution time, and you know, it's it feels like new beginnings, right? A new chance to start over and to really get serious about some goals. And but let's hold on a second, okay, because we are still just coming off of holidays, and we don't have to rush out of the gate so quickly because we know, and I've talked about this every single January, 90% of resolutions end up failing. Okay, so I want to just talk about the beginning of 2026. What feels different right now compared to even a few years ago is the level of mental overload that women are carrying. Okay, I think that we are overwhelmed and overloaded with information. I don't hear women saying, I don't know anything about health, right? We're not clueless, but I hear them saying, I know too much. There's too much information, and I don't know what to do with it. They know the language, you know the buzzwords, you've heard the podcasts and the social media wellness influencers, you have followed the quote unquote experts, and you've tried to do things thoughtfully, right? And yet there's this constant background noise of self-doubt. Like no matter what you're doing, there's a voice whispering, is this enough? Is this right? Should I be doing something else? And that's exhausting. I understand that. That is totally exhausting. And I think part of what's happening is that wellness has become very performative and very absolute. There's always a quote, right way of being presented. And it's usually framed as urgent or you're not doing enough if you don't buy my product. Like if you don't act now, you're gonna miss the window, right? It's like sales 101. So as I think about 2026, I'm not really asking what should women add in as far as products and supplements and peptides and ozempic. And I'm not asking that. I'm asking, what can we take off of the table? How do we simplify? Go back to just simple guidelines for living, okay, and not beat ourselves up because we're not doing enough. What if we didn't treat health like a constant project? And what if we stopped assuming the answer is always more, more tracking, more diets, more supplements, more rules. So I want 2026 to be about helping women feel steadier again, less reactive, less panicked, more able to trust their own judgment. I mean, there's a few ground rules that we just absolutely cannot ignore. We have to be eating our very best. We need to be eating real food. That at the if the if you only do one thing in life, that's it right there. Okay. Eat your best, okay, pick your best foods because that affects everything. If you're on hormones or not on hormones, if you're you're getting older, okay, health issues crop up, but the one thing that can have such a huge influence is the food we eat. Okay, and then exercising and our stress and of but the one thing we can have a lot of control over is how we eat and what we eat. Okay, so I want to talk about why community I feel is becoming central to our way of living. Okay, with all the noise out there, I feel like community is going to become more important than ever in 2026. And this is where community just starts to become non-negotiable to me. Because so much of the confusion women experience doesn't come from lack of intelligence, it comes from isolation. You're scrolling on Instagram, it's 11 o'clock at night, and you click on one midlife woman who is selling her peptides and her microdosing Ozempic, and that just starts a fire, right? You then you get a hundred of them, and they're all selling you something, and they all look amazing, and they all lost 30 pounds. They couldn't do it without their microdosing, and you feel alone because do you know anyone else who's doing it? Should I do it? Then you maybe pay the money, it fails, and it feels very lonely. Now, most of the hardest questions I think women are carrying around never get spoken out loud. They live in that space between appointments, between posts, between late-night Google searches, and then everything stays in your head. It gets louder and it just gets more distorted. So I think community interrupts that. If you have a safe space to go and talk things out and set the record straight, that's everything these days. Because we can go on AI, right? I'm on AI through all my whole surgery. I was just checking in, talking to it. It's like my best friend for a couple of weeks. Are you gonna get the real information though from a non-human like that? And this is why community, again, with with real people together counts for everything. Not because everyone agrees, but because you can hear yourself reflected back. You can hear another woman articulate something you haven't had the words for yet. And you can feel like, oh, this isn't just me, and I'm not alone in this. I think that we live in a very lonely society now. And the older we get, I think the worse it gets. And loneliness is definitely a detriment to our health. So inside my community, what I see over and over is just relief. Relief when someone says, I thought I was the only one, or relief when someone realizes they're not failing. They're just navigating something genuinely complex. Life is complicated. We don't know where to turn sometimes. And that's why I'm doubling down on community in 2026. Not as a motivational space, not as a place to push people, but as a place where women can think out loud and set goals that make sense and be supported and not feel like they're constantly being evaluated. Okay, I want to pause for a minute and talk about something that feels really alive for me right now. And honestly, it's influencing how I'm thinking about everything going into 2026. Now, I've been asking myself this very simple but surprisingly uncomfortable question. What is actually serving me right now and what isn't anymore? That feels so up for me right now. What do I need to let go of going into this new year? Because it is just dragging me down. So it's not what should be serving me, it's not what used to work, but what feels true in the truest sense to me right now. And part of that question has been giving me real permission to take a step back, to choose rest over overdoing, to stop assuming that the answer is always to push harder or figure out the next move. I mean, there's nothing like having a surgery and having to sit for a couple of weeks to make yourself think about these things, because I could get myself slipped into some comparison about other people are healing faster than me. How come I'm not doing this? I should be working on my membership more. And my intuition was saying, just rest. It's not worth it. Now, this has been a huge shift for me because I'm a doer, I'm an overdoer sometimes. So just resting for a couple of weeks and just letting myself think has been really important. Now, I've also noticed something interesting happening lately because I've been hearing from people I follow and people I respect who are quietly letting things go. It's been sort of interesting actually. I follow just a couple significant people in the digital wellness space or the digital online marketing space. And I've been watching them let go of things in their business and not in a dramatic, burn it all down kind of way, but in a very intentional, grounded way. So people are walking away from businesses that no longer fit or careers they'd built for years and places they thought they'd live in forever. And what strikes me about this isn't fear or chaos, it's clarity. Now I'm sure some of these decisions haven't been easy for people, but they sound very clear and very thoughtful about it. They're listening to their inner knowing, they're trusting their intuition, and they're saying, this isn't wrong. It's just not mine to hold anymore. So I've been thinking a lot about my career and how things are playing out, and it's definitely not the same as it was 10 years ago because there's new things now. There's AI and social media and all of that stuff is just clouding the nutrition and wellness space. So this has been landing with me in a big way, and things are coming and things are shifting with my career and my business and how I run things. And because if I'm being honest, I want to slow down a little bit. Life, like I said before, feels really short in a way that it didn't feel like when I was younger, not in a scary way, more in a clarifying way. Like I'm less interested in hustling towards some future version of myself and more interested in actually being here for the life I'm living. So my word for the year, I don't know if you if you think of a word for the year, but I always like to do this. And sometimes it stays with me for the whole the whole year and sometimes not, but my word for this year is exploration. So not in a productivity way or growth or optimization, just exploring the possibilities of what my life is as a woman in squarely head-on in midlife, going through menopause, having had a career for a very, very long time. And for me, that means just staying open. Exploration means I am open to new directions, open to things changing, open to whatever shows up without needing to label it immediately or turn it into a plan. So that mindset is shaping how I think about my work, this membership I have, and honestly, how I want to move through the new year with less force and more listening and less assuming I need to know the answer right now. And I think this matters for women listening because so many of us feel pressure to constantly justify our choices, to explain why we're resting, why we're slowing down, why we're not chasing the next thing. I know you all are doers too, just like me, right? We don't like to sit still. And I'm just trying to practice sitting still a little bit and listening to my inner intuition, inner knowing, higher power, whatever you want to call it. It's okay. So you don't need permission, but sometimes it helps to hear someone else say it out loud. Okay. If you're having those feelings, you're not alone. And it's okay to step back and just take a rest. And it's okay to let go of things that once made sense but don't anymore. So that's not quitting, right? That's just discernment. So one other thing that I've seen quite a bit in the last year that I'm not walking into 2026 with is having an AI version of myself. Have you seen this? You know, like some of like the experts have like an AI, yeah, it's like an AI version of themselves, right? You can call in there on their websites and ask the ask questions and an AI Heather will, you know, answer the question. I want to spend some real time here because this matters to me. Because I've been asked a few times if I'll ever create this AI version of myself. I mean, it would be kind of easy, right? And then I don't know, I don't even know where that would go, but you know, something that gives you nutrition advice and meal plans and hormone guidance or whatever. And the answer is a flat out no, okay, because I'm not anti-technology. I love AI. I mean, I I love the I love the possibility of AI. I use AI, I find it useful sometimes. I think it has a place. But this work, the work of helping women make sense of their bodies and their health during menopause in midlife, this is not transactional. Women don't come to me asking for perfect answers. They come with context. They come with histories, with fears, with frustrations, with grief, with conflicting advice for professionals they trusted. I believe that we still need someone to say to us, okay, I hear you. I'm listening, and let's unpack this. Okay, or here's what matters for you, not for the general population. They need someone who understands that health decisions. Aren't made in a vacuum. So AI doesn't understand nuance. It doesn't understand what it feels like to be dismissed by a doctor, or to have your hormones brushed off, or to be told different things by different experts. And I actually think that as AI becomes more widespread, human guidance will become more valuable, not less. Because women are going to need help filtering, interpreting, and contextualizing all of this information because we are drowning in it right now. And that's what I love to do. I love nothing more than setting the record straight about influencers and phony nutrition advice and it's just social media, people who just are going off the rails. So I want to talk honestly then about the wellness space because it's intense right now and it's getting more intense. Everywhere you look, someone is speaking with certainty. This is the answer. This is the missing piece. This is what no one is telling you. And the underlying message is almost always the same. If you're struggling, if you're still struggling, you're not doing enough. And not doing enough is like for me, one of the worst things that I can hear. I don't want to hear that any more than I have to, that I'm not doing enough as a woman. That message creates a constant sense of inadequacy. Like health is something you should be able to master if you just tried harder, if you just did better. So what worries me most is how little room there is for uncertainty or individuality or life context. I mean, in 2026, I want women to be especially cautious around advice that feels urgent and promises control or frames aging as a problem to solve. We are getting older, like it or not. You cannot put reins on your aging. I mean, we can do our best to make ourselves feel great and eat healthy, and but we can't stop the bus from rolling. Because real health doesn't come from fear, it comes from understanding, it comes from consistency and support. Okay, I want to talk about what happened during my surgery now, because this was, I think, really interesting and a big learning experience. And if you are someone who's ever going to have a surgery, this is important to know, especially if if you are on hormone replacement therapy or menopause hormone therapy. I don't know which one it is being called more now, but either one is fine. Okay, so I just want to slow down here for a minute and talk about my surgery, my experience, because it really crystallized so much of this for me. So a couple weeks ago, I went to was having hip replacement surgery, and I went to the pre-op doctor a full month before the surgery, and they said, Oh, you're on hor you're on hormone replacement, you're on estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, you need to go off of all of that right now. There wasn't a conversation that I just needed to go off of it immediately. And I was shocked because, first of all, this is not my first surgery. There, I've had surgeries before, and I've never had anyone tell me that I needed to go off my hormones, and I have been on my hormones for a very, very long time. I've been on them for almost 10 years. So there wasn't any gray, there wasn't nuance, there wasn't a discussion of the risks versus the benefits, there was nothing. Just this random pre-op doctor who I've never met just told me that I needed to go off of them immediately. So I, of course, went into action and I called my gynecologist. I look, I referred to a couple of experts that I know who I trust implicitly, and not one of them said that I needed to go off of my hormones. Now, the reason why they talk about going off of hormones is the risk of blood clots. And when you have a joint replacement surgery, like a hip or a knee or a shoulder, your risk for blood clots can go up significantly. But that's just because of the surgery. Okay, that's not because of your hormones. But they just look at estrogen under just it's just estrogen. And so that there are certain times and reasons why estrogen can raise your risk a little bit for blood clots. If you're taking oral estrogen, that is one reason. So I was not taking oral estrogen, I was on the patch, or I'm on the patch, and so that's transdermal estrogen, and there is no risk when you are on transdermal estrogen. So what became immediately clear to me is how uncomfortable and how clueless many doctors are still with hormones, especially for women in midlife. Even now, even with all the research we have, even with people, women going on hormones at a huge rate right now. So I ended up messaging my surgeon and I said, I have had a couple doctors tell me that it's perfectly safe to be in my hormones. And I I didn't want to go against what he had said. You know, I didn't want to be wheeled into surgery and then have him say, Oh, you're on hormones? Forget it, we can't do the surgery. I wanted to really defer to him. So he told me to go off the my hormones a week before, which I said, okay, that's a that's an okay compromise. And we didn't really talk about the after. I had the surgery, I went off it the week before. Everything felt okay for that time. I didn't, I was, didn't notice any side effects from being off of them. I got out of surgery. They told me they wanted me off my hormones for a whole other month afterwards, which I to myself was thinking, I don't know if that's going to really happen. But I'll, you know, if I'm feeling okay, if I'm not noticing any side effects, I guess I'll just, you know, I wanted to listen to my surgeon. And a week in to my recovery, I went through the most horrific withdrawal from medication that I have ever had because I had been on these hormones for almost 10 years. You know, so for any medical doctor to just tell you to go off of a medication abruptly like that without considering the side effects is kind of unethical to me. So a weekend I had a migraine-level headache that I could not get rid of. Just 24-7. So I'm recovering from surgery and I'm now I have to manage this migraine-level headache. Hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, all of it just came barreling back to me. And I, after a week, told my doctor, or first asked him, can I if I could just get back on my hormones, because and I would have gone on my hormones anyway, because I had a surge, I had a gynecologist. I'm sorry. I had a gynecologist who was totally in favor of the safety and being on these hormones. But I wanted to get, but it took another two weeks for me then to get back on my hormones and get them evened out again and regulated. So my point here is that listen to your doctors, but understand that there are some really clueless medical professionals out there still. And you do not need to be off of hormones. I'm not giving you medical advice here, but just understand if you are about to have surgery and you are on hormone replacement, that you're going to get a lot of different opinions about it. And I would hopefully you have a doctor, a gynecologist who is well versed in this. But I think that more women are on hormones. A lot of people have joint replacements. And so there's really a disconnect here. So I also think, you know, women are often expected to just comply quietly, deal with the fallout. Who cares about the side effects? You'll get over it, and not ask too many questions. The whole experience just reminded me how vulnerable women are when they don't have support outside of an exam room, when they don't have someone helping them interpret medical advice and decide what questions to ask. So that's not a failure on women's part. You know, like it wasn't my, I was just listening to my surgeon out of fear, I guess. Even though my gynecologist thought it would, it was pretty, but even she said, I just want you to defer to your surgeon's advice because she didn't want to get in trouble either. So it's it's it was just an interesting experience and just one to think about if you are are having a surgery and you are on hormones. I'd be curious to see what they said. I went on chat rooms, everything. I mean, I'd say, like the people who I talked to, half of them said, My doctor never told me to go off my hormones. Half of them did, half, I mean, it just was all over the map. And that is just overall how hormones are. I talk to women all the time about what hormones they're on, what their doctor says about it. Some doctors tell you to go, you need to stop when you're 60. I have friends who are going on hormones when they're 60. I mean, I personally am not going off of my hormones unless something absolutely huge changes with my health. But I after this experience, I could see how much my hormones are helping me. And I definitely will not be going off of them for a while. So that's my story about my surgery. And if you ever want to talk about it, I'm here to to uh to discuss it. And definitely in the community, I'll be discussing that a lot more. Okay, so as I look ahead, there's a few things I keep wanting women to hear. You don't need to do everything, right? We're not trying to do everything right now. I mean, life is short, but it's not like ending tomorrow. You don't need to try everything. Okay, let's get rid of the weighted vests and the and the in the peptide talk. Okay, please, seriously, and the vibrating plates and like, I mean, there's so much garbage out on the internet. And you don't need to keep escalating your efforts to be healthy. I want you to be cautious of certainty. I want you to be cautious of extremes and cautious of anyone who makes it sound simple. Your body isn't a problem to solve, it's a system to support, right? That's all we're trying to do. We're trying to feel our best. So, this is how I'm thinking about goals now. This has completely changed how I think about goals, both for myself and for the women I work with. I am far less interested in those outrageous transformation stories, and I'm much more interested in sustainability. Goals don't need to be dramatic to be meaningful. They need to be livable. Sometimes the goal is just getting better sleep. I know that's certainly one for me right now, because I'm not sleeping great post-surgery at the moment. Sometimes it's just fewer food rules and restrictions that you are putting on yourself, enjoying food more. Sometimes it's simply not being at war with your body anymore. These goals matter. Okay, body kindness, compassion, these add up. This is what we need to be doing. So as I look ahead to 2026, my intention is simple. I want to stay human, I want to stay grounded, and I want to stay in conversation. So there will be no AI version of me, no chasing every trend, and no pretending women's health is simple. If this episode resonated with you and you want a place where these conversations continue, the well-nourished woman community is where it is happening. Okay, I'm starting off this year with a bang. I mean, we're not starting with a bang, though, okay. I want to just be very clear about my thoughts on resolutions and everything. We're not going to start where like we got to get to back to the gym six days a week and we have to get on some radical diet, right? Actually, the theme for January in the membership is wintering. Okay. I want to just ease in. We are in winter right now. Where I live, it's freezing cold. It's cloudy, it's been snowing like crazy. That's just my sign to just rest. Okay, just take a breath. It's okay. Spring is really our time to start growing and being outdoors and and getting more sun and our energy gets up. So this is where this all happens. Not because you need fixing, but because none of us are meant to navigate our lives in this journey that we're on alone. You don't have to have it all figured out and you don't have to rush. This is not about falling behind. This is just about being a woman in a very complicated time of our lives. So I'm gonna leave all the information about the well-nourished woman community in the show notes. And if you have any questions about it, you are always welcome to reach out to me at my email, and I am happy to chat more about it. And I look forward to seeing you in the community. Happy New Year, everybody! I hope something in today's podcast just resonated with you a little bit. And I look forward to seeing how this year unfolds. Have a great day.