The Midlife Feast

If you've ever wondered whether your "healthy eating" has started to feel more like anxiety, this episode is for you. This week I'm joined by Jessica Thiefels, host of Nope, That's Not Normal, to talk about disordered eating. That's the wide, often invisible space between a relaxed relationship with food and eating disorders. Jess shares how a restrictive healing protocol in her twenties slowly turned into a decade of rigid eating, and the moment she said out loud, "I think I'm straddling the...

Most of us can still remember the diet ads from our youth. We can't remember why we walked into the kitchen, but we can remember the jingle. My guest this week is Lu Chekowsky, an Emmy Award winning creative director who spent her career inside the industry, spending time at MTV and Facebook, all while quietly struggling with her own body. Her memoir, Don't Buy What I'm Selling, traces the origin of how those messages shaped her, and how she found her way back out. We talk about the ads that ...

Welcome to a new season of The Midlife Feast! I'm kicking off this season by naming the mindset that might be making things harder: treating your body, midlife, and menopause like an ongoing project to manage. I walk through what that costs, how it shows up in real life, and how we can shift from obsessive optimization to a steadier partnership with our bodies, including: • the core question that changes everything: what if your body wasn’t a project to solve? • the moving finish line ...

Welcome to Day 5, the final episode of the Midlife & Menopause Un-Dieting Mini-Series! Over the last four days, we've explored four pillars that can help you build a more trusting, flexible relationship with food: understanding, self-compassion, attunement, and gentle nutrition. But what happens when you put them all together? In this episode, we're looking at the fear that stops many people from letting go of food rules: If I stop dieting, does that mean I stop caring about my health? Th...

Welcome back to Day 4 of my Midlife and Menopause Un-Dieting series. Yesterday I asked you to sit with one question: what do I want? It's sometimes easier to outsource "what should I eat?" than to honestly ask what you want. Today we add the other half: what do I need? And that's where gentle nutrition comes in. Un-dieting doesn't mean throwing nutrition out the window. It means bringing it in as information, not another set of rules. The trap is that diet culture has made weight loss a...