September Reset for Menopause: Nourish Your Body
A September Reset That Nourishes My Whole Self.
What does a September Reset Look like in Menopause? This episode shares my version of an Autumn Reset, that focuses on Nourishment.
What on earth does nourishment really mean?
This is something that I've decided to ask myself this September, and put the word NOURISH out there in a September reset for menopause.
For years to me, nourishment was synonymous with like nutrition.
It meant what I ate. Maybe this is you.
Really, we can’t negate the part of nutrition that belongs in nourishment. But, I want to break this word down today, and how I'm applying it, (or should I say reapplying it) to being in the third chapter of life.
What is whole body nourishment in menopause?
To me. nourishing myself at this stage is all abut figuring out how I can lead a rich full life, with however many days I've got.
It involves being more tuned in to myself and what I need this fall and winter. The word nourishment meant nutrition to me all in my 20’s as a fitness instructor, through to my 40’s as I kept on focusing on weight and food.
It wasn't until I started working on my food relationship that the bigger picture of nourishment hit me in the head.
Have you ever felt physically full but longed for something more, and you thought that that was food?
You may have felt physically full from your broccoli, but longed for something more. (Maybe you needed some protein.)
Have you ever felt physically full, longed for something more, and you just had this intuition, this nudge, that it wasn't food?
Have you ALSO ever felt unfulfilled in certain areas of your life?
I think many of us do. I actually wonder if it's a myth that we're going to feel completely filled up. Life ebbs and flows.
Overall, I'm asking myself what do I need?
What do I need for me?
What does a rich, full life mean?
At times, I still feel unfulfilled in certain areas of my life. I realized as I worked on my food relationship that nourishment really was more than macros, or micros, or calories. It applied to my whole life.
All areas. The messy, the shiny, ugly, the nice, all of it.
When I feel that things are not going well, I can turn to food if I'm not really tuned in to what is happening with me. I can really go into a state of overeating, if I'm not tuned in. When I'm way too tuned in to things, I won't eat.
Over the summer, I really needed to get back to this place of, for lack of a better word, BALANCE.
I'm not here to tell you that we all should feel balanced all the time.
In fact, I think that balance thing is a myth. We like to find places of balance, but to have full on constant balance? Life's going to inevitably throw a rock at us.
We do want to find a general feeling of being contented overall
I like to think of this as more like course correction, because life's always going to throw us off balance and we constantly are course correcting.
When it comes to nourishment, if we are just thinking of is in a food way, we might use language like, I slipped up, or I need to get back on track.
This can be dieter language. I think this language is applicable to me, where I have spent quite a few years being a rebellious eater, and realizing now that this isn't quite serving me in this season of life.
Rebellious eating served me to work on my relationship to food. When I say that little phrase like, “I slipped up” or “I need to get back on track” I do not mean in targeting my weight.
I do mean as a whole person.
I want to nourish myself and get back on track to feeling more contented and centered with the things that I'm doing.
The things don't have to be perfect. I want to feel aligned with how I'm living my life. I noticed that as I was either overeating and binging or not nourishing myself with nutrition at all.
I do have a series of food freedom videos on YouTube on your food relationship.
I was getting triggered when a friend would talk about their weight loss journey, and it had nothing to do with them! It's all to do with me because I feel these food rules kind of looming in front of my face.
Recently I was with someone who was talking a lot about their weight loss journey and I respect this person for wanting to go on a weight loss journey. It's what they needed to feel good about themselves. They were really spending a long time sharing with me how good they felt, and I know this person needed space.
But about 10 percent of me was getting super triggered on the success they were having in this journey.
I had to sit back and say:
What does this mean to me?
What am I feeling?
Why do I miss this?
I realized that I was missing out on tending to certain aspects of my health by being an overeater or overeating. When I was stressed this summer I was under eating because I was not giving myself what I EMOTIONALLY needed.
Nourishment foes beyond the body. It can mean self esteem, finding the core of you true being, and for me, the rebellious stage of overeating was getting in the way.
I needed to get back to my core values.
I needed to see where certain areas in my life were not balanced.
I used my Overwhelm Toolkit to help me do that.
In the kit, there is a core values list and a life balance wheel. With this toolkit, I looked at financial health, and personal growth, and even my friendships. When we feel like things aren't balanced, when we're not nourishing certain areas of our life, then we can feel off balance.We can feel like we aren't getting something or giving ourselves something. d nothing to do with her.
You can create your own life areas to assess. I made my own section called joy.
I feel like I am missing joy from my life.
And because of that, I turned to food.
Now, instead of turning to rebellious eating, or restricted eating, I'm looking for the middle road. I'm looking to find the joy and flexibility again. A space where I can eat for cycling performance and energy. That middle of the road where I'm not feeling restricted, and I'm not feeling like I am a complete rebellious eater.
That's why I am looking at WHOLE BODY NOURISHMENT for a FAll RESET. Reassessing areas by asking questions like:
How am I sleeping?
How am I feeling in my career?
How do I feel in my friendships?
How do I feel as a parent?
Create you own September reset: here’s how.
Take a pen to paper, or go out for a walk after this episode and think about the areas in your life that you don't feel fulfilled, that you don't feel are working well.
If you need help, grab my guide. 😉 There's some nudges in there.
Do a brain dump and put all your thoughts on papet.You don't need my guide to do that!
Write down all the areas that you feel are unbalanced in. Where do you need nourishment?
It's September 2023, and very soon we're going to be into the end of 2023! Can you believe that? Every time a year goes by, I celebrate having another one, but I also am in awe that it's gone so fast.
Now I know this was a really short episode, and we could really go deep into nourish and the word nourish and what it means, but, but I aim to keep this short and sweet today.
Do a brain dump, write down all the areas you feel like you want to give yourself attention.
We don't give ourselves enough attention at this age.
Sometimes we can get so stressed in midlife that our brains can't think anymore. We get frozen.
We aren’t living in an aligned way.
Now is the time to correct that.