The Midlife Feast
The Midlife Feast
#166: What if “healthy” is a pattern, not a prescription? Redefining lifestyle medicine in menopause
The words “diet and exercise” often feel like a trap door into diet culture and the diet mentality. Given that the theme for this year's World Menopause Day is lifestyle medicine, I wanted to explore lifestyle medicine through a behavior-first lens and share compassionate, doable choices that actually fit your life. Starting with real stories—a cholesterol scare that triggered a Google spiral and a breast cancer survivor who felt she “failed” exercise—we'll explore why language carries weight and how reframing goals can lift the pressure without losing the science. I reframe lifestyle medicine as behavior change medicine and share practical ways to support menopause with flexible food patterns, mindful eating for satisfaction, and low-capacity day forecasting.
We'll cover:
• Why words matter
• Behavior change vs chasing an outcome
• Redefining healthy eating
• A plant-forward and fiber focused approach
• Persistence vs consistency as a food strategy
• Mindful eating to boost satisfaction and awareness
• Forecasting meals to reduce decision fatigue
• Capsule menus and targeting tough meal times
• Personalization over perfection in menopause care
• Community resources and ongoing support
Head to menopause nutritionist.ca to learn more about my one-to-one and group coaching programs, free resources, and where to get your copy of Eat to Thrive during menopause.
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Welcome to the Midlife Feast, the podcast that helps you make sense of your body, your health, and menopause in the messy middle of midlife. I'm Dr. Jen Salib Huber, intuitive eating dietitian and naturopathic doctor, and author of Eat to Thrive During Menopause. Around here, we don't see midlife and menopause as problems to solve, but as invitations to live with more freedom, trust, and joy. Each week you'll hear real conversations and practical strategies to help you feel like yourself again, eat without guilt, and turn midlife from a season of survival into a season of thriving. I'm so glad you're here. Let's dig in. Hey there. Welcome to this week's episode of the Midlife Feast. Before we get started, I have a question for you. Raise your hand if your brain hears diet and exercise whenever the term lifestyle medicine gets tossed around. And raise your hand again if you think that the goal of lifestyle medicine is usually weight less. For anyone who has spent a hot minute in diet and wellness culture, that term is often code or feels like it's code for eat less and move more. Or at least that's how many of us feel, and how many of the women that I work with interpret that advice, especially when it comes from a healthcare provider or in the context of a healthcare setting. And I'm gonna guess that maybe even a lot of you who are listening to this podcast might even feel triggered just by this whole discussion because of all the perceived shoulds that come along with diet and lifestyle. Just this week, I met with a couple of people who really got me thinking about the impact of why words matter. And I wanted to give you a couple of these examples and share bits of their story to show how sometimes the way that information is delivered isn't received in the way that it's intended, and why we really need to be clear about what we mean when we say lifestyle. So the first woman that I met with was meeting with her doctor. She's in menopause. She just kind of passed that one-year window, had some blood work done, and her cholesterol is up and her blood pressure is up. And her healthcare provider, her doctor, you know, said, Hey, why don't you try diet and lifestyle for a few months? Come back, we'll see how you're doing. Now, on the surface, that's very benign, even helpful advice, right? Well, the minute she left the office, she sat in her car for 20 minutes, Googling best diet, how to lose weight, because just that idea of I need to focus on diet and lifestyle really sent her down that rabbit hole of the diet mentality. The second person that I talked to is a breast cancer survivor, and she's having a lot of hot flashes, in part because of menopause, some because of the treatment. And again, her healthcare team suggested exercise because exercise and movement is one of the ways that, you know, can help us to manage hot flashes and some of those other vasomotor symptoms. And she did that for a couple of months. She hired a trainer, but there was no change in her hot flashes. And so she really felt like she had failed at the exercise part of the diet and exercise advice that she'd been given. So, why am I rambling on about all of this? Well, it's because October 18th in 2025 is World Menopause Day. And the theme this year is lifestyle medicine, which I think is great on the surface. But I also wanted to try and maybe break it down and undiet what lifestyle medicine really means. So I actually think that lifestyle medicine needs a rebrand as behavior change medicine. Because when we look at what falls under the umbrella of lifestyle medicine, it is a lot more than just what we eat and how we move. Of course, it includes food and movement, but it's also focused on things like mental health and well-being, reducing our exposure to things like smoking and alcohol, supporting healthy stress management and reducing our stress levels and supporting healthy sleep habits. In other words, behaviors that can support our health and even our symptoms and menopause. And as I always like to say about behaviors, we control, we have control over the behaviors that we choose, but we don't have control over the outcomes of those behaviors, which I think can be a combination of empowering advice, but maybe also frustrating. Because when you feel like you're doing everything right and you're not seeing the outcome or the results that you expect, I get it. It can feel really frustrating. But I also think it's one of the reasons why understanding how being maybe thoughtful, intentional, and even smart about the behaviors that we focus on can help us to feel more successful, maybe even achieve more success if you want to define it that way. But it really makes the process of behavior change just feel so much easier. So, like I mentioned, there are six sections that fall under this umbrella of lifestyle medicine. But I'm really going to mainly focus on some of the things that fall under that healthy eating umbrella that might help you if you're in perimenopause or menopause, if you're having symptoms or you're just trying to think about supporting your life in postmenopause, because we do have data and research that tells us that what we eat might help, especially with things like hot flashes or supporting our mood, energy, mental health, and certainly help to protect us against maybe some of the changes down the road, especially around heart health. But the first thing we need to do is to actually redefine what healthy even is, because it is so easy to get caught up in feeling like it has to meet a certain set of criteria. When in reality, we can't define healthy in one universal way. So I think it's much better described as patterns of eating that are associated with better health, or at least that's how I like to think of healthy eating, because it helps to keep me out of that all or nothing thinking that I know so many of you can relate to. So if we're talking about patterns and behaviors, here are a few things to think about that might be a little bit different than what you're used to seeing when somebody says, here are some things to try for menopause and nutrition or health and menopause. And I incorporate the nutrition and the behavior so that you can see how they work really well together. So one, I guess, kind of goal that a lot of people have is to eat more fruits and vegetables or to get more fiber, or maybe they're trying to be more plant forward. And it's really easy to say, I'm gonna have X amount of servings of something every day. But that can also be hard to maintain because it requires you to do the same thing or to meet that standard all the time. So one of the ways that I like to reframe that is to say, make a goal or make a behavior change goal to add more plants to your plate. Now, you've probably heard me say that before here or in the feaster community, and you'll definitely see it in my book, Eat to Thrive during menopause. But by focusing on the behavior of adding more plants to your plate, it helps you not to get caught up in what is the best plant, what is the healthiest, and it just makes it feel more doable. And especially if you lower the bar, because lowering the bar with the goal or the behavior of adding more plants to your plate makes it easy to be persistent, which is different than consistent. So if you're trying to be consistent with something, you're trying to do the same thing in the same way all the time. And that is impossible with food. But if we're being persistent, it means that we're just trying again, we're moving forward, we're flexible. We don't define what is the best way to add a plant to your plate, we just include this big umbrella of plants. So when you have a meal or a snack, ask yourself: can I throw some leafy greens on this, you know, on a sandwich? Can I add a fruit to my oatmeal? If you're the person who's trying to lower their cholesterol, then adding plants to any plate is going to add fiber. And that is one of the best evidence-based ways to support your health and menopause. So, or maybe you want to play around with adding some plant-based protein, like adding some lentils to a soup, or maybe trying, you know, a Mediterranean-inspired tuna salad with hummus instead of mayo. So that's kind of one of the ways that I like to try and define the what should I add in? Really trying to think of it as a behavior and focusing on the behavior, not the outcome. So another one that I think can fall under that umbrella of healthy eating and maybe a non-traditional way is mindful eating, which really helps us to enjoy the food and, you know, experience the food that we're eating. And, you know, you've probably heard me talk about satisfaction before and the satisfaction factor and how I think it is so important. I really do think that mindful eating is a tool that can help us notice and experience the satisfaction factor more easily. Now, that doesn't mean that you're sitting in silence like a monk watching the birds while you have your lunch. Um, and as somebody who struggles a lot with stillness, I've had to work on this one over time and even on my beliefs of what mindful eating is. So the purpose of mindful eating is really just to be present while we're eating. And it's not attached to any particular outcome. And so when I realized that, it made it much easier for me to ask what will make this snack or meal more satisfying, more pleasurable, more enjoyable. So I'm gonna give you an example. I try and have most, but not all, of my meals and snacks sitting down, not looking at a screen, because if I'm on my phone or my computer, chances are I'm distracted from what I'm eating. If I'm answering emails or if I'm doom scrolling, whatever it is. It's just really hard to be mindful. But I'm also not sitting in silence because I find that really hard. So I often read or I listen to a podcast or an audiobook, and that doesn't distract me in the same way. And I often find myself slowing down to listen to something or to read something. And that helps me to slow down and tune in. It helps me to be mindful. And because a lot of people are maybe trying to be more mindful about what they're eating, I think that mindful eating helps us to focus on how we're eating, which definitely is included in healthy eating in my definition. So the last thing that I want to talk about in regards to this healthy eating lifestyle medicine category is to think about behaviors that might make the process of deciding what to eat easier. Because when I talk to people anywhere in my community, um, on social media, or even just out for coffee, I so often hear things like, I know what I should be eating, but I find it really hard to do because I'm busy, because I'm tired, or I'm confused by all the different information out there. So I want to introduce this idea of forecasting as an alternative to meal planning. And I often say everybody knows what to eat. And it really is more about how do you reduce the decision fatigue around choosing what to eat, and how do you make that process a habit. That's kind of one of the things that I like to teach is nobody needs me to tell them that vegetables are good for them or that fiber is going to help them. But what we need help with is lowering the bar and finding a process that makes that decision making just feel more intuitive, really. So forecasting is something that I've found really helpful and have done for quite a few years now. And it's also something that I teach. But you can start with any day of the week. Sunday works for me, but just to kind of sit down and have a quick scan of what does your week look like? What are going to be the lowest capacity days? What days are going to be most challenging? When do you expect maybe to be most tired? And how can you plan for food to support you that day? Not how can you plan your life around meeting your food goals? Because that's how most people meal plan is they're putting their food goals or nutrition goals at the top of that list instead of thinking, how does food fit into my life? So if you know that you're going to have a busy day coming up, depending on your capacity, maybe you make something the day before so that you don't even have to think about cooking. Maybe you put something in a slow cooker in the morning. Maybe you plan to pull something out of the freezer. If it's a regular recurring low capacity day, maybe you try a meal prep service. But the idea is that you aren't putting food and nutrition at the top of your to-do list. You're including it as something that supports you. And that's the idea of forecasting, right? So just like with weather forecasting, you don't look at the forecast to control the weather, you look at the forecast to be prepared. And I like to use the idea of a capsule wardrobe as, you know, if as a way to think of meals and recipes to have on hand so that it's easy to choose and plan for low capacity days, and not just planning for nutrition, but also planning for satisfaction. Because chances are on a low capacity day, you're not just needing something easy, you also need something that you enjoy, that is pleasurable, that you want to eat, that you look forward to eating. And I see people make these really high standards for meal planning. And so I want to suggest this. Instead of trying to plan every meal, every snack, focus on the meals and meal times that you find most challenging. So if breakfast is the meal that you just never have time for, you're always trying to figure it out, maybe the behavior you try on is making something the night before and making a double batch if it works out. If lunch is the time that you struggle with, maybe you just plan your lunches. Maybe that's the forecast that you plan for. And if you're really kind of trying to keep this mindset of, I want to forecast to make my life easier. I want to forecast to reduce the amount of time and energy that I spend thinking about, worrying about, planning, I think it's a lot easier to want to build skills around that behavior. But I want to kind of end with this idea that there's no single right way to do anything. Any of these suggestions in any category, there's no single food or way of eating that's always going to be best. And that I think is really important because we are all individuals. And while there are patterns of behaviors that many people can agree are helpful, especially in midlife and menopause, don't fall into the comparison trap of comparing what you do to someone else. The saying you do you definitely applies here. So I hope that this kind of expanded, undieted description of lifestyle medicine has been helpful. I hope that it empowers you to see that it is so much more than just diet and exercise, and that there are so many ways that you can make these categories work for you and work with your capacity and your lifestyle. And just know that there's lots of support out there. Everything that I've talked about today is what I talk about in the Midlife Feast community. Like I said, you'll definitely find a lot of these concepts and including the idea of a capsule wardrobe, included in my book, Eat to Thrive During Menopause. But there's lots of support out there and lots of people who are ready to help you. So happy World Menopause Day, everyone. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Midlife Feast. If you're ready to take the next step towards thriving in midlife, head to menopause nutritionist.ca to learn more about my one-to-one and group coaching programs, free resources, and where to get your copy of Eat to Thrive during menopause. And if you've loved today's conversation and found it helpful, please share it with a friend who needs to hear this and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps so many more people just like you find their way to food freedom and midlife confidence. Until next time, remember midlife is not the end of the story, it's the feast. Let's savor it together.
