The Menopause Nutritionist, Dr. Jen Salib Huber
Kylie Larson:
Welcome back to Far From Perfect. I am your host Kylie Larson, and today I have Dr. Jenn Salib Huber on the podcast. Dr. Jenn is a Canadian registered dietician, naturopathic doctor, and intuitive eating coach, and she is on a mission to help women thrive in midlife. She helps women navigate the physical and emotional changes that happen in perimenopause and menopause, including their search for food freedom and body confidence.
Working from a healthy at every size approach, she teaches women to become intuitive eaters and build body confidence at any stage of midlife in addition to the one-on-one coaching that she does and group programs, she's also the host of The Midlife Feast Podcast, a community that helps women undiet their lives after 40 so they can nourish their relationship with food that helps them discover the magic of midlife. We had the best conversation, and you are going to want to listen to this in full. We talk all things premenopause, perimenopause, and then postmenopause in reference to eating and self image.
Jenn works with women recovering from a life of diet, like so many of you have experience with, and she's working really hard to change the default programming in regards to diets. In the beginning of our podcast, she breaks down what the diet cycle is and you're going to be like, "Oh, I can't believe I've fallen for that so many times. It's so obvious what I was doing," but we're in the thick of it, right? Sometimes it's hard to see what's going on when we're so close to the problem. We talk about the definition of peri, pre, and postmenopause and we talk about the ketogenic diet and fasting and if they are appropriate for women in midlife.
I'm sure you already know my opinion, but I wanted to get a doctor's perspective as well. This is one of those episodes that if you are in midlife, you're going to want to share it with all of your other midlife friends, whether you are just 40 or you are actually in perimenopause or your postmenopausal. Thanks again for tuning in and you're going to love this one.
Welcome back to Far From Perfect, everyone. You are in for a treat today because we have a perimenopause, among other experts with us. Dr. Jenn Huber is here with us. On Instagram, she is the Menopause Nutritionist. I was just telling her, this is one of those accounts on social media that I look for. I don't wait for you to show up in my feed, I'd go to your feed. I want to like and I want to share everything, because in this sea of misinformation, you to me are a solid foundation that we can all stand on and learn from. Thank you for being here.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Oh my goodness, thank you. That's a lovely introduction.
Kylie Larson:
Thank you. You have the name doctor in front of your name, but you don't really wear that doctor hat all the time. Can you talk about what kind of coaching do you do and who do you primarily work with?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
If I can, I'd love to just back up and just tell you and the listeners a little bit about how I get to this place. I'm 45. I have been studying nutrition, I joke since flannel was last in style. I have a teenage daughter who now also wears flannel, so it's all come back again. I've really been studying and working in the field of nutrition for almost 30 years now. What I've learned from that is what we realize as we get older is that you see that everything that's old is new again. You see that for the most part there are very few absolutes. You see how much things change. When I was studying nutrition in the '90s in university, vitamin D was considered the most toxic vitamin.
You should never supplement with it because it was fat soluble. It was toxic. We believed that fat was the devil. If it was 0% fat, that was fantastic, even though it tasted like garbage. What I've learned when I got into practice and when I started to really realize is that food and our relationship with food needs to be flexible and forgiving. I started out all gung-ho with all these rules that I was trying to teach people and all of these plans and all of these diets, and I realized that there's no life in that. When there's no life in that, there's no health in it. It's not healthy if you can't have a relationship with food that allows you to live your life.
Fast forward, I head into perimenopause in my kind of mid to late thirties, around 37, and all of it came crashing down. I was a professional chronic dieter, and I had been since I was 12 in many disordered ways. What happened is I think the experience that so many people have that they get to midlife and all the things that worked don't work anymore and life is crashing into that. They're now busy, whether or not they have kids, whether or not they're working. All the things are happening. For me, it was very much this crash landing of, okay, something's got to change because what I'm doing isn't sustainable personally, but it's also not feeling good professionally anymore to be prescribing weight loss.
I had this serendipitous, I can't even remember how, but introduction to intuitive eating, which I thought was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. This idea of not following a plan, not trying to lose weight, well, that's not healthy, that's just crazy talk. As I went through the process of learning about it and studying and becoming trained in it, it really became this aha moment for me because it made me feel safe and comfortable in my body. Even if my body was changing, I trusted it. I could feel safe and I could feel comfortable. I could really believe that I was doing the best that I could with the resources that I have, because food can't ever be perfect.
We have to make decisions about food every single day of our life, multiple times a day, often for other people. How can we ever expect something that is as variable as that to be perfect? Long story short, I'm now 45 in menopause and have really just loved being able to focus my work on helping women recover from a lifetime of dining, so that the next season of their life is a little bit more filled with food joy and body joy and just feels more safe and comfortable.
Kylie Larson:
I love that. Well, I was listening to a podcast of yours, a recent one, and you used the term, you are working so hard to change the default programming. I see that too. We have two groups that we run. One is for women basically under 40, one is for women 40 and over or they're in perimenopause. That's the biggest thing I see. That's the biggest difference. It's the same program basically, but it's that default programming. Can you talk about that, this default programming? What do you see just on this old programming that they're running?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Oh, I love this. I talk a lot about the diet cycle. For anybody who hasn't heard that term before, it is the predictable series of events that is triggered by feeling bad about or in your body. Something happens, you get dressed, you see a reflection in the mirror, you step on the scale, you try on a pair of pants that don't fit, whatever it is, you're prompted to feel like you need to change your body. You need to start a diet. You need to lose weight. You start to restrict. Initially that feels really good. It's like, okay, I was feeling really bad and now I'm going to do something about it and that's going to feel really good.
This time it's going to work because this time I really want it and this time is going to be different, and this, this, this. But the novelty of that wears off because our brains are programmed to avoid pain and seek pleasure and to find a way to do that with the least amount of energy possible. In other words, our old habits. When we're feeling uncomfortable in our body, the only thing we've ever done is start a diet. The only thing we've ever done with that is controlling, restricting, measuring, counting, trying to manage that calorie and calorie equation. Eventually we start to feel bad, right? We start to feel deprived.
We feel tired. We feel maybe just a little bit angry like, why me? Why do I have to do this? Why can't I look like this other person who eats the same thing and works out less? We have all of these reasons why we justify why it feels bad. Eventually we can't sustain that because we don't like feeling uncomfortable. It is not part of our programming. It's not part of the human behavior programming to sit with discomfort. What happens is that we then fall off the wagon, we stop, we quit whatever, we let go. Initially that feels good because it's relief. It's like, "Ah, I can have the thing. I can do this."
Then we're right back into feeling bad, and then the cycle starts all over again. The biggest parts of the programming are believing that if you don't feel comfortable in your body or about your body, that the only way to change that is to change your body. And that the only way to eat well is to follow a set of rules, because that's what we've been taught. We grew up with Oprah and Jenny Craig and all of the people telling us that, "Look, this is what you have to do." A lot of that is just calling that out, because when I say it like that, a lot of people say, "I've never thought about that, but you're right. That's exactly what I do every time."
Part of my undieting process, which is the reprogramming, is just to be able to help people see those moments of opportunity to insert new programming. The minute that you have something come up that makes you feel that your body isn't good enough, that your body is bad, that you've done something wrong, we pause and we reflect. We sit with that feeling for a little bit and we explore it. Then we just try and respond in self-compassionate ways that is kind, body kindness, body trust, body respect.Then we realize that, that feeling goes away when we're being kind to ourself. We don't have to control it, we just have to be kind.
Kylie Larson:
This is so amazing because I was just talking with a friend about self-compassion. We were recording a whole podcast on it, and I feel like self-compassion is one of those things that we must be practicing in perimenopause just to make it through. How could you not make it through with self-compassion?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Absolutely. I mean, we tend to be really hard on ourselves. I think as women in general, we're hard on our ourselves. We hold ourselves to really high expectations. Especially when we're trying to be our best selves in all the roles that we play, it can be very difficult for us to pause in those roles and say, "I need to press pause and I need to take care of me." I think being able to walk alongside people as they're doing that feels like a privilege because for many people, and I was one of them, I was the over doer.
I was the one who was never saying no, who was always saying yes, who felt like I needed to do all these things. Just to be able to see that is something that I really love seeing, but just also seeing how when you make space for it, it is welcome. It is so welcome. It feels good. It is hard.
Kylie Larson:
Yes. I think some people think they can let themselves off the hook, "Well, that means I'm weak, or I can't handle all things," but actually I think the self-compassion takes even more strength because it's so uncomfortable for so many people. Let's back up a second. Just in case someone does not know what perimenopause is, because this happens. Once we start talking about symptoms, people don't even realize that they are in this major transition of life.
To me, I'm like, how do we get here? I mean, I can't imagine getting my period in sixth grade or whenever that was and no one having shared any information, even if it was just a book I got on my bed from my parents, What's Happening to My Body? Where's that book for us now? Where's my What's Happening to My Body book about perimenopause? But talk to me about all the different symptoms of perimenopause.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Well, let's kind of define it first. We have these stages. Premenopausal is all the time from puberty up until you start to reach that threshold where you're starting to have fewer good eggs. For most people, that is going to start in their forties, but it can start as early as 35, mid to late thirties, depending on diet, lifestyle, genetics, family, all that kind of stuff. For most people, this is something that starts to happen let's say around 40, where they start to notice that maybe their cycles are starting to change, not in big ways. They're not missing any, but maybe they're heavier, maybe they're happening more frequently, maybe they're more painful and their PMS is getting worse.
They're not sleeping as well and their mood is a little off. It's all these little things that on their own don't really tell us much. When you look at them through the lens of perimenopause, you can start to see patterns. Now, until you start getting into a phase where your cycles are changing by more than seven days, it's often missed because it's very difficult when you're strictly looking at the criteria for perimenopause, which is a clinical diagnosis. We don't have a blood test. There's no magic wand that we can wave. But when you're just looking at the symptoms and there's no period changes, it's kind of hard.
That's why it really takes a hormone savvy practitioner, doctor, nurse practitioner, a naturopathic doctor, whoever, who can say, "Okay, based on your clinical picture, your signs, your symptoms, your family history, your medical history, this is probably what's happening." That validation alone I think has therapeutic value for people, because I think a lot of women are starting to tune in and say, "This feels different. This isn't just stress. This isn't just being busy. There's something that feels fundamentally different about me." That stage I think is really uncomfortable for people because it is hard to sometimes get that diagnosis. The diagnosis actually isn't all that important, because we treat symptoms.
We don't treat lab work. We don't treat labels. There's lots of things that you can access if you're working with a hormone savvy practitioner, regardless of what your actual diagnosis is. A lot of those things are actually better treated if we treat them as hormonal problems. That's the value in, I think, really trying to get that diagnosis, is being able to access the right treatments. Once you start skipping periods more than 60 days, regularly missing them, you're in the later stages of perimenopause still until you go 12 full months without a period, at which point you're now in menopause, which that's really actually a day. It marks 12 months since your last cycle.
Everything after that is postmenopause. Postmenopause for most people is a much more stable time. You're off the hormonal roller coaster. Everything is predictably low. The good news, especially for people who are having a lot of symptoms, especially related to brain fog and things like that, is that does usually get better. It's kind of a new normal. Having just recently landed there myself, it's a good place to be. I have to say, it's much, much better than perimenopause. I can say that now for sure.
Kylie Larson:
I know. I'm in the beginning stages of perimenopause. I'm 42 or three, I can't remember, but I've had some of the symptoms and started working with a naturopathic doctor, but I know this is going to last a while. I'm honestly looking forward to. I don't want to wish time away, but getting on that other side because that's what I hear. I hear you just feel so much better.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Oh yeah. I mean, for me, the last two years of perimenopause were a shit show. There's just no two ways to describe it. I'm very hormone therapy, but it was not for me. The side effects just weren't working for me. It was one of the reasons why I really started looking at what's the relationship with food and are there foods that we can start to have more often and what are the other options? Those are the conversations that I love having with people.
So many of the I think polarized conversations are either pro or against HRT. I have very much enjoyed being able to have the conversation of, if I could have taken it, I would have, 1000%, but I'm hormone sensitive. Any hormones that I've ever taken, including when I was pregnant, not taking hormones but being filled with them, just don't agree with me.
Kylie Larson:
You've had a rough ride there, sister.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
For me, it was really like I just need to find a way that allows me to live my best life while I wait for the end. I've really enjoyed being able to have those conversations with people too. There are lots of people out there who have that same kind of hormone sensitivity where they'd give their left leg to be able to take it, but they can't get out bed when they do because they feel like garbage.
Kylie Larson:
Well, that's the perfect segue into what I wanted to ask you about. Hormone, HRT aside, what are the best practices you use working with your clients, what foods to eat, when to eat, sleep, all of the lifestyle things? How can we feel better during this potential eight to 10 year time of transition?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
I think that it's really important to say that any time that you're pursuing medical treatment, you really should be working with someone one-on-one. I think that there are some big picture diet and lifestyle conversations that absolutely can apply to everyone. When you start getting into a treatment strategy, please don't take advice from social media or the internet, including me, because that is not going to give you best care. One of the things that has been really helpful for me is using phytoestrogen rich foods. Phytoestrogens are plant-based compounds that bind to our estrogen receptors and they bind to the one receptor that is less problematic.
It's less likely to cause some of the side effects or the increased risks, but they don't work for everyone. That's why the research has been really kind of meh over the last 10 years. It's like, well, there seems to be a trend, but sometimes it's significant and sometimes it's not. It works for some, but everyone agrees there's no harm. My personal experience with it has been, including these soy foods, most days has been a game changer. I really proved that so many times to myself, because we'd go away on vacation and everything would go out the window. By the end of the vacation, I was having 10 hot flashes a day.
Then I'd get back home and I'd just get back on my usual rhythm and routine of soy and flax, not vegetarian, but including beans and lentils a few times a week and things would get better. I like to teach people that because I think that, one, there's no harm in it. We know that very, very clearly. Also those are enjoyable foods and they are foods that when we include them in midlife, we can also benefit from the fact that they're high in protein and fiber and full of all these other things that can help us to feel better in midlife. That's one of my big ones is just let's try and explore that.
Again, it doesn't work for everyone, but I think that it's a great option for people. But the thing about nutrition that, again, it's like the more you know, the less you know.
Kylie Larson:
100%. Yes.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
There isn't one right way to do it, and that's where so many people are getting stuck. After a lifetime of dieting and following rules, they're so focused on finding the way that they have this inflexible relationship with food. If something doesn't work perfectly or doesn't work the way that they expect it to, they just stop. This undieting process is like, well, you don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water. You can keep some things in just like you don't have to do something perfectly. You don't have to have soy every day. You don't have to have fiber, 18,000 grams of it.
A lot of what I do is telling people that what they're eating is actually good enough and that what we want to do is we want to add to it. There's nothing wrong with what you're doing, but we're adding to it so that we can make it more enjoyable, more satisfying, and also maybe in line with your gentle nutrition goals that will help you to feel better in midlife.
Kylie Larson:
It's like we all just want to be told that we've been bad. You know what I mean? You're so naughty. Why are you eating that? But that's not the case. It's fine.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
You can't hate yourself into a body that you love.
Kylie Larson:
Yes, it is so true. What was I going to say about this episode? So glad you brought this up because I know you get a lot of questions about keto. We know that keto and fiber don't really work real well. It's hard to get enough fiber while you're in a keto diet. Why do you not recommend, and I'm not for the keto either, but I want the people to hear why you think keto is not a great idea beyond just the food. I was listening to your podcast on it. Let's start and then I'll keep asking.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Okay. The premise of keto is based on this carbohydrate-insulin model of weight regulation, that if you keep insulin levels low by avoiding carbohydrates, that you activate the fat burning metabolism. We know that that's not the case. Now, the other part of it is that ketones are the body's brake in case of emergency fuel system. Back in the day when we didn't have regular access to food in our hunter-gatherer days and we might go long periods of time without it and famines and droughts and all that kind of stuff, in order to survive, we have this system that essentially turns on this slow burning energy fuel system so that we can survive.
It is not how we're meant to thrive. All of our cells and especially our brain cells and especially our red blood cells require glucose. It is non-negotiable. They need it. That's why even people doing keto will get the bare minimum of carbohydrates. You can't have none. You'll have 10 grams, 15 grams, whatever it is. When you're only providing your body with the bare minimum of the fuel that it wants, you are not thriving, you are not feeling your best. You do not have the energy to do the things that you want to do. Any of the weight that you lose, for most people, it's water weight. Because water does follow carbohydrates.
As your carbs go down and as you're burning through your glycogen stores, which are your stores of carbohydrates, yeah, you probably do lose a ton, 10, 15 pounds in a week or two, but it's mostly water weight. For most people, what happens is that that slows down dramatically and often grinds to a halt. The result of it, even for people...I know that there are always people who say, "Hey, but I lost a hundred pounds or my friend lost a hundred pounds." Talk to me in five years.
Kylie Larson:
Amen. Yes.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
It is not about how you get there and if you get there, because the side effect of getting there is that your body's going to fight you every step of the way. This metabolic adaptation that happens, which is you lose five, you gain 10, you lose 10, you gain 15, you lose 15, is your body's reaction to being in this break in case of emergency fuel system. I always tell people that you have to think about whatever you do, it has to be playing the long game of nutrition. Keto is never the long game.
Kylie Larson:
You were talking about just living life. How can I enjoy a birthday cake at my son's birthday party? How can I eat Christmas cookies? How can I have pie at Thanksgiving? These are all things I actually look forward to. I can't do that in a ketogenic diet. Even if you could for a short period of time, you can't do it forever. I'm not about to be 80 and not eating cookies. Tell you that much.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Absolutely. I'm with you.
Kylie Larson:
Don't take my cookies away.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
On a really practical note, there's no evidence that it works. That's the thing. If there was a study that said, "Hey, look at this. People do this, they lose weight. They keep it off. They can go back to eating normally." It's like the magical fairytale that we think is going to happen every time we start a diet. I would be all for it, because the reality is that... I'm very much obviously for body acceptance and body neutrality, but I think it's also important to acknowledge that there is a reality that living in a smaller body has privilege.
Kylie Larson:
Yes.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
That privilege might be just being able to shop in stores more easily, but it might also be very practical in accessing healthcare without stigma and shame or feeling like you're not being judged. I don't ever fault someone for wishing their body was smaller, because there are so many realities that life is a lot easier for many, many reasons, but it doesn't mean that it's better. You don't have to be in a smaller body to feel good about your body or feel good in it or do the things that you want to do. Until there's a really long research study that says, without a doubt that there's benefit, no harm, and it works, I'm not for really any diet, but definitely not keto.
Kylie Larson:
It's like the whole vitamin D thing. I can't wait until we look back and see, "Oh, I can't believe we used to do that keto diet. How crazy."
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
I really finally feel like maybe in the last couple of years the tide has turned a bit because keto first became popular just about 10 years ago. I really think now that enough people have done it, been with people who are doing it and have seen that it's no different. It's just another diet. There's no magic in it. They can taste great, but not when it's the only thing you can eat.
Kylie Larson:
Seriously. Well, speaking of magic, let's talk about fasting. Another wand people love to twirl around. What is your opinion on fasting for the perimenopausal woman?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
I actually think that this one is probably more problematic from a hormone perspective. One of the things that we know is that low caloric diets and low carbohydrate diets and any kind of energy restricted eating actually can evoke a stress response. There's lots of data that shows that when we're not eating enough, that when we're not responding to hunger cues, which is what fasting is essentially, that that can provoke a stress response. Cortisol levels can go up. The interesting thing is that what people don't realize is that when you don't respond to your hunger cues, your brain's reaction is to be more interested in food.
Your appetite, which is the interest in eating, increases. People feel like this boundary that they create with a clock gives them a safe zone. They'll say, "If I can only eat during this time, but I don't have to control what I eat, great. That sounds like a dream. I can do that." But it means that you have to ignore your hunger for 18 hours of the day when you're not sleeping. There's been tons of research even published in the last couple of years that time restricted feeding really doesn't show any benefit again. To the people who say, "But I'm not hungry before lunch anyway," then fine. Just have the flexibility to eat when you are hungry and if that does happen before lunch.
Don't make it a rule. I really do believe that some people just are naturally not very hungry in the morning. My husband's one of them. He's not a breakfast person. Never has been. We've been together for 22 years. For him to force himself to have breakfast, that doesn't sound intuitive either, right? But for the most part, I think that when people are trying to get to this window of eating, what I often see is that they'll say, "Well, I'm doing 12 to six, but I'm actually trying to do one to five." They'll delay and push and they're trying to do 24 fat. It becomes just another set of rules. It's just another game. Again, there's no benefit to it.
Why stress yourself out? Because in perimenopause you're already having these crazy, fluctuating levels of hormones. If you don't have reliable access to food and your body perceives that to be a stress, it is going to prioritize survival over reproduction, and you are not going to do yourself any favors in perimenopause by stressing yourself out.
Kylie Larson:
No. To me, it is the mindset around the fasting that it just perpetuates the all in or all out and our relationship with food. I don't think it's helping our relationship with food, which I think is what we need the most help with. Not how many calories or any of that macros, it's the relationship with food, which is why I love talking about this flexible and forgiving way of eating. I was in Disney World last week. There's no way you could be perfect there, just like you were talking about. I have to be flexible. I have to have freedom, or else I would have been miserable there. I just think about how many women are probably miserable in so many things that could be so fun.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Totally.
Kylie Larson:
Oh man, we've got our work cut out for us.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
We definitely do.
Kylie Larson:
I mean, I don't want to trash talk a bunch of things, but every time I feel like we're making headway with this keto thing, then I hear another thing come up. There's this thing here, I don't know if you've ever heard of, it's called Optavia. It's just a diet. You pay a ton of money for it.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
It's meal replacement.
Kylie Larson:
Yes. Meal replacement. Definitely done slim class before. When will we learn, Jenn? Well, as we wrap up, are there any biggest mistakes that you see women making in perimenopause?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
I think the biggest one is believing that they have to control their diet more. I know that it feels like it's a safety net to tighten things up, to do it a little bit better, to be just a little bit watching things or to start tracking again or maybe have a little less of this. Again, it's part of that default programming. That's the only thing you've ever known. Instead of taking away, learn to add in. You want to have more protein, great, add it in. You want to have more vegetables, great, add them in. But don't take away the things that you enjoy. Don't put yourself in a pleasure deficit just to meet a set of rules.
What I really see is that, especially for women I think who have really struggled with their bodies and their body image, one of the things that I don't think is actually talked about enough is that there's quite a bit of data coming out that we have a second peak of body dysmorphia and body dissatisfaction in midlife. Thinking about it though, we know that the teenage brain is a ripe breeding ground for body dysmorphia, likely because of hormonal changes. Perimenopause is a bit of reverse puberty. There's a physiological theory that maybe some of these hormone changes actually increase our body dissatisfaction.
I'm a big believer that knowledge is power. I think that even just talking about it, normalizing it, telling women, "Hey, if you start to feel this way and nothing else has changed, it's okay. You can acknowledge it and you don't have to respond to it. You don't have to do that diet. You don't have to do that extra workout. You don't have to try and do more, do harder, but you do have to respond in a way that is self-compassionate." I always say that our body changes that happen in midlife are pre-programmed into our DNA.
80 plus percent of women experience body changes, most of them experience weight gain. But even if they don't experience weight gain, there's a redistribution of assets because of the hormonal changes. Let's normalize that. Let's talk about that from the time that kids are born. Let's talk about that human bodies change. I think that if we can just have some self-compassion around that, our experience of midlife will be completely different.
Kylie Larson:
I agree. I feel like if we could just be prepared. When you're 10, I don't know if we're talking to a 10 year old about this, okay, when you are 15, you're going to have hips then and we're going to prepare you for these hips. Then as we get into perrimenopause, your waistline might change and whatever else happens, but it's okay because it's what our body does. I agree with you, just understanding what's about to happen. We're just being blindsided.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Absolutely.
Kylie Larson:
The thing I see happening with women is they're expecting to look the way they did in their twenties when they're in their fifties. Even I know. I mean, I wear pretty rose colored glasses, but I'm very prepared for things to be different.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
I illustrate this, this way. If you imagine a linear scale, so I've got my fingers drawn out here, and zero is when we're born and 80 is when we die, average age, whatever, why do we consider 18 the peak? Because of the patriarchy? Because of sexism, ageism, unrealistic beauty standards? All those things. Let's shift the needle. Let's say that 18, we're just babies.
Kylie Larson:
Children. Yes.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Why hold ourself to that impossible standard? Nobody gets to be 50 looking like they're 18. Nobody.
Kylie Larson:
You are just setting yourself up to fail there. I mean, we need a major reframe.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
I say all the time, and I tell my girls this especially, but my son too, you couldn't pay me to go back to even my twenties.
Kylie Larson:
I am with you. No, thank you.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
I love midlife. I love menopause. I love the clarity, crystal clear, what do I want, what do I not want. I have no problem saying no to things that aren't interesting or don't feel right and just really, really clear that this is actually the best time of life. I really believe that I can experience that because my body image doesn't drive my self-image anymore. That's what women have to work towards is just having a more flexible sense of self so that they don't spiral and feel like their whole world is coming to an end because they've had to go up a clothing size.
Kylie Larson:
Which no one would even know except for them.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Even if they did, that's okay because it's happening to 80% of us, right?
Kylie Larson:
Oh, it's such a breath of fresh air hearing the way that you speak. I hope everyone listening feels better about this transition in case they're feeling a little rocky. Because I get it, it's hard. It means we're getting older for a lot of people. Not everyone has had that mindset shift yet. How can we work with you?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Well, the best place to find out what I have going on, because depending on the time of year, there sometimes are some different things happening, but is on Instagram, Menopause.Nutritionist. I will always have my latest offerings in the link of my bio, but essentially I have two main ways. One is a group program that runs a couple of times a year. It's called Beyond The Scale. It's 12 women, small group, over 12 weeks. We meet weekly modules. It's very much like a guided undieting program with a small group of women. I really love it. There's been five groups now who have gone through and it's a really fabulous program for women who need a little bit more support on that undieting path.
For women who finish that program or for anyone else who's just looking for a safe place to talk about food and nutrition and health and all things midlife, my membership community, The Midlife Feast community, is that place, a place for people to gather, grow, and nourish is kind of what I say. Gather with like-minded women and grow your relationship with food, but also nourish your health. Yes, we're going to talk about foods that are good for you in the traditional ways. We're just not going to talk about them in relation to weight. Those are my two things. That's just a monthly thing.
Every month has a different theme related to menopause nutrition. We talk about heart health and bone health, but also body image and also mood and food and all those fun things.
Kylie Larson:
I love the names of everything. I don't know if you came up with them yourself, but kudos to you. Those are fantastic.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Thanks.
Kylie Larson:
Well, it has been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for all that you do. Don't stop putting out all the great contents, okay?
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Thank you. I've loved this conversation. I always love talking with people who see eye to eye, and I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
Kylie Larson:
Anytime. Well, I look forward to talking to you again, Jenn. Thank you so much.
Dr. Jenn Salib Huber:
Thanks, Kylie.
Kylie Larson:
You can see, I was not kidding around when I said that was a great episode. You guys, make sure you check out Dr. Jenn. Her website is jennsalibhuber.ca. Of course, you could just link to her easily from her Instagram, which is Menopause.Nutritionist. She's got links to her website, or excuse me, her podcast on her website as well, Welcome to The Midlife Feast. She is a wonderful resource, and I am so glad that I could bring her to you. If you want help with this kind of stuff, of course, you can reach out to Dr. Jenn. You could also participate in our REVIVE program.
You can just go to my website, theelementalcoaching.com, to get more information on that. If you're not perimenopausal yet, sign up for our regular program, Lift to Get Lean. Either way, we're going to get you the tools that you need for whatever phase of life you are in. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll talk to you soon.
