That is a radical statement! Being well is something we all want. We follow the latest diet trends. We take the recommended supplements. We become “fat phobic,” telling ourselves we are not “good enough” if we are overweight.
Debra Benfield, founder and owner of Body in Mind Nutrition, told me that there is an ageist diet/wellness culture that leads to a lack of body respect in the Pro-Aging movement. Deb wants to blaze a path into elderhood without the scales!
Topics covered:
- Internal biases around eating, diet, weight and fitness, specifically focused on women over 50
- We have learned that in order to be loved, be worthy or be of value, we must be thin, This belief leads to disordered eating, feeling badly about ourselves.
- Intuitive eating – eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full. Stay out of your head, stop counting calories, stop tracking,
- We can feel overwhelmed by so many different diets and even may have forgotten how to eat a healthy diet.
- Research shows that it is not obesity that causes heart disease, diabetes or other diseases, it is actually the behaviors or genetics or trauma. You can be fat and fit.
- Being thin does not equal healthy.
Episode Takeaways:
1. Wrap your head around the idea that all bodies are worthy
2. These suggestions can help you age with vitality and protect you from disordered eating
- Move your body so it feels like play
- Be socially connected
- Manage your stress
- Use intuitive eating
Thanks so much for listening.
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How to reach us
You can email me with questions or comments at wendy@heyboomer.biz
Join the Hey, Boomer Walk to End Alzheimer’s Team at act.alz.org/go/HeyBoomer
– Wendy Green is a Certified Life Coach, working with people going through the sometimes uncomfortable life transition from full-time work to “what’s next.” Find out more about Wendy’s 6-week “What’s Next Transition” Coaching workshop
– You can find Debra Benfield at debrabenfield.com
– On Instagram at @agingbodyliberation
– or email her at deb@debrabenfield.com
Books mentioned in the show
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach
How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: Raising the Next Generation with Food and Body Confidence
Show transcript
Toxicity of the Wellness Culture.m4a
Hello. Welcome to the Hey Boomer Show, which is live each Monday on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube and then available the next day on your favorite podcast app. My name is Wendy Green and I am your host for Hey Boomer. And Hey, Boomer is for those of us who believe we are never too old to set another goal or dream, a new dream. It is for lifelong learners who have found meaning and are finding meaning and purpose in their lives and are living their best lives into this new chapter. We at hey boomer are on a push to grow our hey boomer Walk to end Alzheimer’s team and what I would like to do is welcome our newest walk member, Kathy McAfee. She joined our Greenville, South Carolina, team. We also have Melanie Whitlock, who is out in Clearlake, California. And you can join her team, her hey, boomer team or Bernadette Wagner. She’s having a team out in Hagerstown, Maryland. Everybody who joins the team is going to get a cute, hey, boomer hat that you can wear for the walk and you can wear afterwards with great pride because you are a boomer. So join our team, any of these teams by going to act.ALZ.org/goto/HeyBoomer and if you don’t want to walk with us or you feel like you can’t, you can still go ahead and contribute so that we can find a cure and end this disease and meanwhile help people that are still going through the disease. I also wanted to mention the What’s Next Group Coaching program.
This program helps answer the question Who am I now? Who do I want to be? Will I ever feel useful and productive in society again? And what is my value to my family, my community, my society now that I am no longer fully employed or following my career path? At the end of the six week program, you will have a six month plan and possibly a 12 month plan, and the next cohort begins on September the 20th. And let me show you how you can reach out. You can go to Calendly/heyboomer/20min and we can set up a free 20 minute consultation. Find out where you’re at, where you want to be. See if this makes sense to you or you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. You can just check out the program at HeyBoomer.biz/Coaching and learn all about it. It really can be a program that can move you into your next chapter with great comfort and ease. So let’s get to what we’re talking about today. And I’ve been struggling with this topic a little bit, the toxicity of the wellness culture. I mean, I mostly try to eat healthy. I take supplements. I exercise some most of the time. No, probably not as much as I should. And I have to admit, I am a fair weather walker and hiker when it is cold and rainy. I am not the one that’s out there, but I do get uncomfortable when the scale says I’ve gained a few pounds and all of these beliefs about weight and fitness and behaviors.
These all are reinforced by my family and by the media. You know, we all hear comments like, oh, she’s really put on some weight or, well, wouldn’t she be pretty if she just lost some weight? Advertisements and TV shows portray happy, slender people and not so happy larger people. And if they’re heavy older people, the images can be even more demeaning. So preparing for this show has shown me how much I’ve bought into these ideas that fat is bad and skinny is good. Did you know that we as a society spend over $35 billion on diet products annually? It is a lucrative industry. And diet culture is that collective set of social expectations telling us that there’s one way to be. And one way to look. And one way to eat. So that we are a better person. And we’re a more worthy person if our bodies are in that mold that we all hear about. So today we’re going to dissect what it is meant by the wellness culture, how it can be toxic and how it affects us as we age. And I really want you to join in and ask questions, because a lot of this is learning for me, and I’m sure it’s learning for you. So feel free to join us. And let me bring on our expert today. Her name is Deborah Benfield.
Hi, Deb. Wendy. Hey, everybody.
So Deborah invites you to join her on the intersection of pro aging and body liberation on her newest website. DebraBenfield.com. From her experience, she understands how aging creates vulnerability to the ageist, diet, wellness, culture, and how frustrating it is to find a profound lack of body respect in the pro aging movement. And I had to check with her on that quote because I was like, Wait, pro, aging? Aren’t we, like all about accepting where we are? Well, you’re going to hear about some of how it’s not accepting. Deb is a registered dietitian nutritionist with over 35 years of experience in that field. She’s also a registered yoga teacher. She is the founder and owner of Body and Mind Nutrition, a group practice of registered dietitians and nutritionists. And like I said, the founder of her newest site, which is more focused on the aging, she’ll tell us more about that. Deborah Benfield She’s passionate about preventing and treating disordered eating and eating disorders and supporting you in feeling more comfortable and confident in your relationship with food, eating and your body.
So, Deb.
Tell me how you got into this field in the first place and then kind of what your journey has been to move more into the aging space.
Well, I first want to thank you. I really appreciate your openness to this conversation, because I know it’s kind of tricky and surprising to think about how the pro aging movement may have some problems with how we look at bodies. And I think that may be more true for women’s bodies. I also want to say that my pronouns are she, her, hers. And I want to talk just a minute about my vocabulary. I you’ll hear me say obesity right now as a word that I will not be saying any further. I believe that the way we talk about bodies further stigmatizes pathologizing as bodies that are fat and fat, in my worldview is a descriptor just like you have red hair. Wendy I believe that it’s just a descriptor of who you are. I have brown eyes, so it’s a description of me. So fat in my worldview is not pejorative. It’s a description. So you’ll hear me say a fat and not the ugly words. And I’ll talk a lot more about that later, too. So I got into this because I really like talking to people as whole human beings. So when I started my career, I pretty quickly started referring clients to therapists to talk about issues outside of what was going on in their eating and their relationship with their bodies. And I happened to develop a relationship with a therapist. That was amazing. Her name is Joan Wilkins, and she was my supervisor, and her specialty was eating disorders. So I, very early in my career, started developing this curiosity and interest in learning more. And it’s just kind of become what I do. And I’m very passionate about the work. It’s very rewarding to watch and work with a woman who starts to become more powerful in her life and doesn’t kind of give her power away by wanting to shrink herself. So I hope that’s all well.
And so, you know, we talked about the early time we’re getting into the eating disorders, but now you’re moving into how it’s affecting us as we age. So what brought your interest there?
Well, I will be 64 in December. And when I turned 60, I also became a grandmother for the first time.
Oh, congratulations.
Thank you. So something happened in my head where I just wanted to do more research on what we know to be true about how to support aging with vitality and being who I am and understanding what I understand about diet and wellness culture. I was absolutely shocked by how the anti-aging messages hit me hard and fast that I had to get through what I consider to be a bunch of bullshit. I didn’t ask you if I can say those kinds of words on your show.
Of course, again, this is an adult show.
But it just felt like I had to wade through a lot of things that I knew were not based in science and I knew were very adjust and what I consider to be phobic. So I quickly saw that I had to dig a little deeper and I really couldn’t find what I was looking for. So I realized that I had to I wanted to create what I think people are needing, what I needed to start with. And it’s been it’s been fascinating to me to really look at how you can support aging with vitality without getting pulled into all of the you must lose weight. Yeah.
So I want to talk about those biases and I want to talk about internal biases because those certainly do hold us back. I mean, and we have more control over those than we do some of the external biases we hear from the media. So in my world, I talk about living an engaged, meaningful life and getting over that internal bias of I’m too old, I don’t have the energy anymore. I don’t learn as quickly. And shifting that message. In your world, it’s more about eating and diet and weight and fitness. And so what are some of the messages that you hear that are internal biases and how do we address those?
Yeah, I think that it’s I really love that we’re kind of focused on a particular group of people right now because coming of age, when we all came of age, I went back and looked at the timeline of how women’s bodies were portrayed in the media. The forties and fifties, women’s curvy and voluptuous bodies were heralded as the ideal, the beauty ideal. And as a matter of fact, there are there is evidence of, like ads for weight gain products.
Really?
Yes. I’ll show you. There are like you can’t be too skinny in the forties and fifties. That’s not appealing. Now, of course, all of this marketed to women. Right. And then guess what happened in the sixties?
Twiggy, twiggy.
Twiggy entered our lexicon and the diet industry took hold and just blew up. And women quickly believed they had to be like Twiggy and which, in my opinion, is unachievable and ridiculously thin and likely fragile. And if you pursue that kind of ideal, you have to diet. I mean, that’s what happened is the women believed that in order to be beautiful, in order to be valued, in order to have worth, they must diet. So I don’t know if you watched Mad Men.
I watch some of that, yeah.
I think the character Betty Draper is an amazing character to talk about when it comes to this, because that show took place when all of this happened and it’s set in that time period. They did a great job of showing what happened, especially with women in that time. And she joined Weight Watchers and that was the classic choice. And they show her in several shows going back into the kitchen and sneaking her food and actually bingeing the foods that she was deprived of. So it’s really interesting to look at how in the sixties. The dive industry took hold because women felt to be worthy, to be loved, to be valued, they must be thin. And I really feel like that’s where it really shifted in a in a big way. And also what you’re describing about the money that was to be made based on that. And there are a lot of people that believe that it’s not surprising that that’s also when the women’s movement was taking place and that perhaps there was kind of this interesting way to get women to be disempowered. If they’re really focused on dieting, they won’t have as much of a voice. They will have as much power. So Naomi Wolf’s book, The Beauty Myth, is a wonderful book to read if you want to dig into that concept.
Interesting.
She’s not the only one that believes that, but that book is very powerful.
And what’s interesting, Deborah, is that if that started in the sixties, here we are.
What.
60 years later and it’s still going on. I mean, you know, I can look in my in my cabinet, you know, I have the whole body diet. I have, you know, diet for a small planet. I have South Beach diet. I have like all these books because I’m like, oh, gosh, you know, I’ve got to lose a little weight. And every trend changes. You know, it’s like, Whoa, och, don’t eat carbs. Well, now you should eat carbs. Don’t eat fruit. Well, now you should eat fruit. You know, it’s like count calories don’t count calories. And it’s so confusing and no wonder it creates disordered eating. I don’t know about eating disorders, so maybe you can differentiate that for me because I don’t understand that.
Yeah, we’re definitely going to talk about that. I don’t know if you want to jump into that now, but I think we’re we need to talk. I know it’s way outside the scope of the show to get to details about eating disorders, but I think it is helpful to look at what is normal and what is disordered and what is an actual diagnosable eating disorder. Yeah. Do you want to do that now?
Well, first of all, Angela says, what was the name of that book you mentioned?
It is titled The Beauty Myth.
The Beauty Myth.
And the author is Naomi Woolf was written quite a while ago, but it’s exceptional when it when you look into the principle that we’re talking about.
So yeah, we can go one of two ways. Why don’t you describe the difference right now? And then we’ll talk a little bit more about the dieting and intuitive eating. How about that?
Okay. So perhaps I feel that eating occurs on a continuum and most of us kind of travel up and down that continuum, hopefully not too far toward disordered eating, but normal eating is. Easy. Normal eating is messy. It’s eating when you’re hungry. When your body says it’s time to eat. And stopping. When you’re full and. Even a variety of foods that satisfy you. So that you can actually notice when you’re satisfied and full. It is not being in your head, counting and calculating and tracking at all. It is only listening to your body and therefore not struggling with feeling guilty or even ashamed of what you’re doing. So there’s no reaction in your emotional life and there’s no space taken up in your head. You’re very simply easily eating when you’re hungry. Stop it when you’re satisfied. And disordered. Disordered eating is likely getting much more in your head with it. And much more rule based, much more tracking, and therefore more reaction. More in your head following rules, and therefore feeling like you’re being bad if you’ve eaten something that you’ve decided is bad. And eating disorders are. We have many we have anorexia nervosa. We have bulimia nervosa. We have binge eating disorder. We have arfid, which is a new diagnosis, relatively new ARFID stands for If I Get All This right, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder. And it’s really about having a negative experience like choking or vomiting, that’s created an anxiety about eating or a sensory issue where there are many foods that you feel like you can’t eat, that you can only eat a shorter list of foods. And there’s also something called Orlistat, which is basically a group of disorders that don’t fit into any other boxes. So it’s like a catchall phrase, but there is a disorder to the point of some debilitation in your lifestyle, so we can break each of these down. There’s a lot to talk about with you.
I know this is where I get hung up, because when you describe normal eating, just eat what you want, when you want until you’re full. I mean, I think I had mentioned this to you once, you know, like if I had a plate of chocolate chip cookies here, which is my go to dessert and I have a refrigerator with carrots, celery and lettuce, I’m going for the chocolate chip cookies every time. You know, it tastes good. It’s easier than putting together a salad. How is that normal eating? Of course, I’m probably going to beat myself up about it and say, Why did you do that? You know that’s not good for you.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I do want to say you mentioned before that, you know, there was this diet and that diet and sometimes they contradict each other. I do want to say that. Probably every single client that I work with comes to me with that particular feeling of overwhelm by all the different kinds of diets that have they’ve heard about feeling kind of lost and like, Which way do I go? Because they’re so contradictory. Also really noticing that they feel kind of like they have forgotten how to eat. Like, actually, like I forgot eat. I’ve lost my way because of all the diets that they’ve been on. And they may not have a full blown eating disorder, but they are feeling all of those things. They’re trying to find their way back. So the way that we find your way back is by trying to get out of your heads and starting to realize that your body carries innate wisdom that your body actually knows. When you need to be nourished and what even what foods would nourish you and when you’ve got enough. Now there’s a look on your face that is to look at people’s faces.
It’s like, I can’t believe that could possibly be true. But if you think about if you’ve been around a baby, you know that a baby cries a very distinct I’m hungry cry. It’s very distinct. And babies pull away when they’ve had enough, when they’re satisfied. We know that if children are allowed to eat with the structure of family meals, with some security around the fact that there will be food and those variety provided without a lot of food rules, without a lot of judgment, without pressure, that over time they will eat a variety of foods and their bodies will go where their bodies are genetically dictated to go. And sadly, nobody really allows that to happen. I think it’s more and more true because parents are being taught that this is the way to sorry, actually raise competent eaters to prevent children from getting eating disorders. Because eating disorders are very much on the increase right now, and we’re all born with that capacity. It’s the culture, the cultural messages, the diets, the millions, billions of dollars that market, those diets that make us no longer trust ourselves.
Yeah, I think you’re right about parents today. I know when I was raising my kids again, I went through all these different diets, tofu and vegetarian, and then know we’re having roast beef and whatever. And, you know, my daughter and this is where. You know, was it because I was putting the pressure on or not? But I mean, she didn’t want to eat what I was cooking. And I was like, this is healthy food.
You need.
To be eating.
This.
And she does not do that to her kids. And I mean, and we got into some battles over food, you know, which is unfortunate. And Martha makes the point that even when we were young moms, I mean, we had our babies on a schedule, you know, every 3 hours you need to eat at. And so we were raised with that belief that there is a right way and a wrong way to eat. How do we undo that?
Well, you know, boy, I don’t even know which way to go with this. There’s of talk about when I was a mom. Young mom. I was well, I was already a dietician, so I was reading certain things. And the reading that I was I mean, there were folks that were telling young moms to follow the baby. Baby led weaning there. There was that phenomenon that we should say up away. And I don’t know if you want to get into all this, but Ellen Satter is the woman’s name who wrote all of those books. Those books were available in the eighties and they’re still available. There’s also a new book called Intuitive Eating for Kids. So it’s like parenting with intuitive eating. So this can be prevented or we can develop a little bit more resilience in our children when they hit all the diet messages, when they get to school or when they go to grandmother’s house. Because I think that’s what you’re describing. I don’t know. I’ve heard so many clients talk about that rub in the family around what people say to the children about how they’re eating. If you if you think as the grandmother that there are certain rules or that you have concerns about the size of your grandchildren’s bodies, you know, you can get all into like, well, should you really do you really need that or like, don’t you? Should you eat your vegetables before you get your cookies? All the things you clean your plate or not clean your plate, all those things are not helpful. The children actually can be trusted to feed themselves well if we stay out away again. Very hard for people to believe. But the more you follow this intuitive eating way of feeding yourself and your family, the more you’ll prevent disordered eating and eating disorders. So that’s why I’m talking about it. And we haven’t gotten into aging bodies yet. That’s a whole nother.
Yeah. And I think I think June raises a good question here. You know, eating because we’re hungry or are we eating because we’re angry or bored or lonely or tired or.
Yeah, so discerning that you can’t discern that if you’re not slowing down and paying attention if you the principles of intuitive eating. We’re way into this really fast.
Yeah, let’s.
Go. The principles of intuitive eating. Start with ditching diet mentality. You have to get rid of the good bad list in your head first so that you can. Really listen to your body. If you’re still in your head with what? I shouldn’t have this or I should have that. It’s very hard to get the discernment to give yourself space for this discernment. So to slow down and eat as mindfully as you can. I know we’re all really distracted and moving really fast, so it’s not that easy to slow down and notice your body. I mean, I’m a yoga teacher, and the reason I’m a yoga teacher is because I think you have to have embodiment practices where you kind of ground yourself like perhaps if you say grace or if you try to have gratitude for the food in front of you to also notice your body. And I do this because this is what I do. I put my hands on my heart and my belly to notice my own body’s hunger first. And the principles of intuitive eating are to dismantle diet culture in your head, to notice your hunger sensation, to eat foods that are satisfying. And we can talk more about that so that you can stop when you’re full and emotional eating as the question that’s in front of us. That’s very real. Emotional eating is normal human behavior. Nobody likes to hear that either. Is actually that’s very normal. And can you develop some skills that help you manage your emotions in other ways as well so that you have choices like, I know I’m really angry, so I need to like. Go punch the pillows for a walk or call a friend or write in a journal, or just sit and let yourself feel. Let yourself ride the. Wave of anger because it does pass.
All right. So that’s a lot. That’s a lot. Not easy. I mean, you started by saying, yeah, yeah, okay, good. There’s a distinction because I’m going to say you started by saying normal eating is simple, but it’s not easy to be mindful to slow yourself down, you know, to be out in a group or to feel frustrated and not want to just go grab a chocolate bar or something. So let’s talk about aging, right? So, so easy for me to see how the anti aging movement is displaying perfect bodies and get rid of the wrinkles and all of that. And they’re trying to sell something just like the diet industry. But talk to me about how the pro aging industry is not respecting the way we look.
Well, what I am noticing on social media especially, is a lot of thin white bodies. So. My the person who taught me the most about all of these issues in our culture is Sonya Renee Taylor. She wrote a book called The Body is Not an Apology.
The Body Is Not An Apology.
And she talks about how we live in a culture that has a body hierarchy, the default body that’s at the top that everybody knows without knowing is thin. Young, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able bodied, white. Probably neuro normative, you know, all of those things, that kind of body people that live with that kind of body have power and easily belong in our culture. If you are. Anything other than that. And you may have one or more things that are not in that description. You’re more in the margins, therefore more marginalized. We marginalize people based on their bodies. And the more marginalized you are, the more marginalized your identity is, the more your risk of wanting to be thin. Because the feeling is, well, I can at least be thin if I am a woman, I can at least be fat. Then if I’m old, I can at least be thin. If I am disabled, I can at least be that great black or brown. I’m can be thin because it brings you into feeling like you may belong. You may have more of a sense of power. In our culture.
You’re not quite as invisible either.
Right. So there’s increased pressure and increased pressure to be thin as you age. And if you have any other marginalized identity, it’s even more so.
In fact, I noticed in the most recent AARP magazine talk about they’re all about pro aging right there. One of their articles was How to Stay Thin If You’re a Chef. It’s like I would not even have noticed that, Deb, if I hadn’t been talking to you. But, yeah, it’s like.
There’s a lot of pressure.
There is a lot of pressure. A lot of there’s a lot of pressure. But now I’m going to be devil’s advocate. But we hear that if you are overweight, it’s hard on your heart. You are at risk for diabetes. It’s harder on your joints and it’s not healthy. So how do you how do you deal with that image that we have, that belief that we’ve been told from the medical world and for years, I mean, even with COVID, oh, you’re more at risk if you’re overweight.
You know, I have so many references for what I’m about to say. It’s this is not my opinion. This is I try not to say anything. That’s my opinion because I am an old fashioned scientist. I really like to read and learn and speak with an expert, you know, kind of. Status and through that lens. So what I’m going to say is I can send you lots of like links to articles and podcasts, etc.. So all of the resource that talks about. I’m going to say that medical term obesity causes hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, even COVID, and not that it caused COVID. We can talk about that in just a minute. But all of that research is correlational. And not causal. We have no causal research that shows that being a certain way causes a disease process. What we have is certain activity patterns, certain particular dietary patterns. Definitely genetics. Definitely stress. There are many things that we actually do have research on that causes those diseases. And people assume people have assumed because of correlation that’s correlated, but it’s actually the behavior. I have worked with many folks that are fat, that have high levels of fitness, that have perfect labs. I’ve worked with very thin folks that are not at all fit and have high cholesterol, diabetes, hypertension. You cannot tell by looking at somebody that they’re healthy. Being thin does not equal healthy. Losing weight does not equal healthy. As a matter of fact, what we also know is that yo-yoing weight cycling actually does cause hypertension and other aspects of heart disease. So we also know that 95% of people who go on diets regain the weight plus. So dieting is not a solution.
So if I understand you right. What you’re saying is that. Being fat does not cause. Hypertension does not cause diabetes. It’s the lifestyle around that that’s causing those illnesses.
It’s the particular kinds of behaviors. And it may be genetic. It may be stress and anxiety. We also know that trauma having trauma experiences, especially early in life, is related to certain body sizes and diseases. So it’s much more complicated than we are, we assume. We make a lot of assumptions that make it very black and white and simplified. And there’s a lot of problems with that because then people who are in fat bodies are stigmatized. They especially are stigmatized in the health care setting so that that kind of stress and we also have research that weight stigma is a stressor that can contribute to disease process. So it’s such a mess.
Because you’re afraid to go to the doctor, because you’re going to be embarrassed.
And it’s how you treat it when you do go to the doctor. There’s shame. There’s fetching, there’s body shame that’s experienced. That’s very legit. So, yeah, it’s very, very messy. It’s not. I’m afraid in our culture we see it very simply that losing weight is good. Being thinner is good. Certain foods are superfoods and goods, and it’s so much more complicated. Then there’s also access. Access to food. I think that we actually believe that there is a moral value to food and a moral value to thinness, that people are better people if they’re thinner and that certain foods are good. I mean, if you listen to what people say, I’m being sinful. Yeah, I mean, it gets really convoluted pretty quickly.
I still need to learn a lot to shift my beliefs and to think that I’m not going to eat those chocolate chip cookies instead of the.
Well, something we should talk about with intuitive eating is that there is a psychological phenomenon called habituation. But if you have something that you’re deprived of, of course you want to eat it all. That’s a normal reaction to deprivation if you have permission to eat the food consistently. Like if you start to bring chocolate chip cookies in and you eat them, you know you can eat them and you know you can have them whenever you’re hungry again. You will start to lose interest in the chocolate chip cookies over time. You habituate to cookies and they have less and less and less power over you. Okay.
Well, we’re getting towards the end here. I mean, we could probably talk for another couple of hours.
There’s so much to talk about.
I know. But give me a couple of takeaways that those of us who are just learning about this for the first time, what we can do to take this into this next chapter of our lives as we are aging.
I think the first thing is to wrap your head around the fact that all bodies are worthy. I mean, we can’t. White knuckle and control. Our bodies into a particular size and shape. As a matter of fact, the more you try to do that, the more likely you are to get disordered in your eating. And you could you could end up with an eating disorder. And we didn’t really get into that very much today. But it’s a real problem with midlife and older women because you do feel like you can’t control your body. And the more you like knuckle, the more disordered you become. So trying to. Be a little bit more compassionate with yourself and understanding that all bodies are worthy. Number one. Number two, to try to in my research, what I found is the things that really contribute to aging with vitality and protective of getting disordered in your eating are moving your body so that it feels like play. So just like play, you have some joy in it. Trying to be socially connected, trying to actually manage your stress, which I know is easier said than done. And to eat with an intuitive eating mindset. All of that is protective and supports vital aging. So that’s enough take aways.
Yeah. Thanks. I’m going to learn more about this intuitive eating because I certainly. It can do the good, bad thing. So if you want to reach out to Deborah, you can email her at Deb at Deborah Benfield. Benfield. You can find her on Instagram at Aging Body Liberation. And check out her new website. In fact, Deb, you have some kind of coaching program that’s getting ready to start. Quickly, tell us about that.
I’m doing what I’ve been talking about today. I’m doing intuitive eating through the lens of pro aging. Yeah. It’s a it’s a. A group coaching cohort that begins the end of September. Okay.
All right. I’m sure.
We could all.
Use some help on understanding that. So her website is Debra. DebraBenfield,Com
Thanks. Thank you.
Yeah. And let me remind people about our walk to end Alzheimer’s. Please join our team at actor ALS dot org slash go to slash. Hey Boomer and check out also at the end of September, September 20th our hey boomer coaching the what’s next after your full time career and that’s it hey boomer dot biz slash coaching. So my guest for next week. Her name is Melanie Gordon and she’s the founder of Do.Love.Walk Collective. And one of the programs Melanie offers through the collective are Ubuntu circles. And I wrote a blog about Ubuntu probably a year ago and it’s just fascinates me. So in the Ubuntu circles they address empathy, social isolation, belongingness, compassion and reconciliation. And the groups gather for a weekend retreat or eight weekly sessions or extended experiences. So join me next week to learn more about Melanie Gordon and Ubuntu circles. And I’d like to leave you all with the belief that we can live with passion, live with relevance and live with courage. And remember, we are never too old to set another.
Goal.Or dream. A new dream. My name is Wendy Green, and this has been. Hey, Boomer.