60. Rethink Everything You Thought You Knew About Nutrition | Taryn Perry

Welcome back to the School of Midlife podcast, where we're diving into the world of nutrition with the incredible Taryn Perry, a holistic nutritionist with over 16 years of experience in wellness. Taryn graces us with her extensive knowledge and personal journey, shedding light on the critical role of nutrition in midlife and how it can profoundly impact our health, mood, and overall well-being.

🎙️ Let's start by embracing a holistic approach to nutrition, as Taryn advocates. She guides us on understanding the root causes of health issues, emphasizing the importance of balancing macronutrients to support hormone health and metabolism during midlife.

🔍 Get ready to rethink your plate as we delve into the importance of protein, sugar management, and making incremental changes for sustainable health. Taryn's practical advice empowers us to make informed dietary choices that nourish our bodies and minds throughout midlife and beyond.

Ready to fuel your midlife journey with vitality and vibrancy? 🌟 Tune in and let's make midlife your healthiest and happiest chapter yet with Taryn Perry's expert guidance! 🎧✨

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Transcript

SPEAKER00: Welcome to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. This is the podcast for the midlife woman who's starting to ask herself big life questions like, what do I want? Is it too late for me? And what's my legacy beyond my family and my work? Each week, we're answering these questions and more. At the School of Midlife, we're learning all of the life lessons they didn't teach us in school. And we're figuring out, finally, what it is we want to be when we grow up. Let's make midlife your best life.

Raise your hand if your go-to workout in your 20s and 30s used to be cardio. Sweating it out on the Stairmaster, or in a step aerobics class, or running on the treadmill. We all did it, right? And then we'd reward ourselves with snack-like snack wells in the green box or Entemann's in the white box. So long as it said fat-free on the label, we were good to go. Because in our 20s, we were taught that fat was the enemy. And then, in our 30s, carbs were the enemy. And have you noticed in your 40s that it doesn't seem to matter what you eat, it all ends up on your belly? And for those cardio-for-hour workouts, those also aren't doing the trick anymore. In today's episode of the School of Midlife podcast, I'm joined by Taryn Perry, a holistic nutritionist, and we're talking about the importance of nutrition for the midlife woman. Why nutrition matters. The importance of eating a diet comprised of whole foods. How you can break the sugar and snacking habits by properly nourishing your body with adequate amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. And the one thing I was surprised to learn about drinking water, plus so much more. This is literally the information they should have taught us in health class. That's why at the School of Midlife, we're all learning lessons they didn't teach us in school. I know you're going to love this episode.

Hi, Taryn. I am so excited to have you here today to talk about all things nutrition relating to midlife and how what we eat and drink influence how we feel. Will you please introduce yourself to the audience and tell them a little bit about what you do? Maybe even share a little bit about your background and expertise in nutrition, particularly as it relates to the midlife stage for women.

SPEAKER01: Oh, I could go on for days about that. Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Laurie. My name is Taryn Perry. I am a holistic nutritionist. I have been in this wellness industry, particularly working in the fitness and nutrition category for the past 16 years. I can't believe I've actually hit the 16 year mark. And I know that because my son turned 16 at the beginning of this month. All sorts of things to celebrate. I know, gosh, and it has been such a treat to do this. It's been a journey. It actually started out as a journey for myself. I've got four kids. So just to give you the background, the big picture here, I've got four kids. My oldest is 18 and my youngest is eight. So a wide range of age. And I started my journey when my son, he was about three months and he's now 16. I needed to get my body back. Mom, I hate saying that. That's not really what I meant, but most people resonate with that. I wanted to feel like myself again, rewinding years before having kids. We all know in our twenties, we go to the gym, we could work out and just eat whatever we wanted and everything would be hunky dory. And then my son, I had him when I was 29. And things just took a little bit more time. But that's not to say that I wasn't super diligent with my diet at the time, but I was introduced to a home workout program called P90X, which that'll hopefully just bring an uprising in our generation because everybody was like, There's some like avid Tony Horton fans and that might be falling into the category of Shalee Johnson, the Turbo Jam fans. So I went down that path and then fast forward a couple years later, I had my other two later in life. So entering into 36 years old, I had my third. I was an avid CrossFitter. I was competing. I was a CrossFit trainer, and then my fourth one came at 38, almost 39 years old. Actually, I had passed 39 years old. And anybody that's had a kid in their late 30s, you guys all know that we're geriatric, right?

SPEAKER_00: I feel like people are having children later. Like, we should come up with a new name for that. There has to be a better moniker for that.

SPEAKER_01: I literally laughed in her face. I'm like, what? I was dumbfounded when she said I was a geriatric mother, and I was like, I feel like I might be in the best shape of my life right now, and you're calling me a geriatric? I have a whole different perspective of what geriatrics are. But having kids later on in life, my whole body composition changed, and not necessarily for the worst, but it was really just interesting. Hormones were much more of a factor. I nursed both my third and fourth daughters until they were 17 months. And somehow, because obviously social media was on the rise when I had my first two, social media wasn't quite what it is now. And across the social media pages, you saw all of these beautiful mothers having babies and losing all their baby weight in eight weeks by breastfeeding only. And I was like, oh, my God, that is not working for me, despite being in the industry that I am. So it prompted me to just say, hey, I've got to just pull back the onion and really understand what's going on. Hormones were obviously a major factor I took into consideration. OK, now my youngest or my third at the time, she was nine, 10, 11 months. My body still really funky, if you will. And so I went back to school. I went back to understand holistically. I really wanted root cause. I really wanted historically to understand our various nutrition strategies and diets that were designed and were out there in public consumption. I wanted to understand them better and really come up with a treatment plan, if you will, for myself that really fell in line with my core values. I'm not one to cut calories or to cut food groups or follow trends, but I wanted to learn those trends and more particularly how they impacted women's hormones in relating to nutrition specifically, but also maybe I had to change the way I was working out if I wanted to shake things up a little bit. So that was like Pandora's box that I opened when I went down that path.

SPEAKER_00: I really like that you talk about this holistic approach and getting to the root cause of things, because I think so often we just want to put a Band-Aid on it or fix the symptom without actually figuring out, diving below the surface and figuring out what caused this to begin with. So because you mentioned hormones and strategies and diets, thank God, I will say this first, that we're actually studying this now. It seems like for so long, there really, there were no scientists or doctors that were really throwing any money at trying to figure out the root cause of what it is that we're going through. We're learning now that our brains are literally rewiring themselves during perimenopause. So this research is way overdue, but maybe you can help us understand how our nutritional needs change during the menopausal transition.

SPEAKER_01: It's not necessarily that it changes, it's more of that we need to be more intentional. A lot of our generation, right, this middle-aged generation, we grew up with the sugar-free, low-fat, counting calories, right? Weight Watchers was huge when we were in our 20s, maybe even our late teens, and we're way into our 30s, right?

SPEAKER_00: Those Entenmann's pastries, fat-free, so you can just eat them all. Like, I'll have a bagel for breakfast because it's fat-free.

SPEAKER_01: Totally. And Snackwells, I don't know if anyone remembers Snackwells, the green box. I've had that stamped into my brain. My dad used to love them and bring them home. Tastes like cardboard, but it was the proper snack to have because it was fit into this calorie bracket that you had to stay within. So I don't know if it's necessarily that new information, it's more of just relevant information came to the surface. People started to dissect this whole process and recognized that our macro nutrition was way off. We were focused on calories. We were focused on the wrong things. And instead of understanding what our bodies truly need to thrive and to be metabolically successful in our middle age, we needed to truly dissect what macronutrients our bodies required. because a lot of us do want to stay physically active. A lot of us still are charging at the gym, want to go out and run races or maybe doing CrossFit, whatever our thing is, hiking, biking, yoga, but we weren't nourishing ourselves. At least we weren't aware of what we were supposed to nourish ourselves with. We just were eating and eating clean. And so that was like a buzzword that I really found when I would talk to clients and I'm like, talk to me about what you eat, what's your diet. And majority of them would say, I eat clean. And I'm like, okay, what does that mean to you? My interpretation of eating clean might be way different than yours, so let me understand. Are you just scrubbing your food? What does that mean? So we had to almost re-educate ourselves and our generation started to go through it a little bit differently than I think our parents did. Right, because our parents weren't necessarily lifting weights or like my mom wasn't. She was doing jazzercise. Right. And my mom didn't even go through perimenopause. She had a hysterectomy after I was born. I was like going through this on my own accord and trying to figure it out as I went. diving into this holistic nutrition and looking at it from a root cause and recognizing that a lot of our deficiencies were a result of the miscalculation of our macronutrients. And those are our protein, fats, and our carbohydrates. And I think primarily we were focused on fats, probably very little protein because how many people are like, oh, I should do keto? I should eat all fat, very little protein, and cut out the carbs because they're evil." So we all had this different interpretation of what was the right way to eat based on what we were exposed to, and 9 times out of 10, it was whatever came through on Instagram or Facebook or what our cousin's best friend's coworker was doing. Like it was so weight loss oriented that it wasn't about what your body needed. Because you and me, Laurie, like we might be around the same age, but we require different macronutrients. We require different kind of structures as how we eat our food or what foods are of interest to us, because we might have different goals. We have different genetics. We have different relationship with food. All of that has to be considered. including our lifestyle that leads into where we're at in our middle, in our midlife, right?

SPEAKER_00: When you break down the macronutrients like that, it's interesting because when I was in college, I feel like the focus was on not eating fat. And then in my, say, 30s, it was cutting out carbs. There was a little bit of a focus on protein when the Atkins diet was all the rage. But I feel like protein has always been associated with men and like ordering a steak at dinner. So let's if we could dive in a little bit more on the macro nutrition and how like, we all need protein, we all need fat, we all need carbohydrates, but maybe help us understand how they work together, particularly to support our health through this menopausal transition.

SPEAKER_01: Every food that we eat is attached to a macronutrient, right? Every food that we consume, most of them have a calorie, right? And most of them, of those calories, they're going to either be attached to a protein calorie, a fat calorie, or a carbohydrate. So particularly, and I would even say having a 16 and an 18 year old, and even my 10 and 8 year old, all they hear me talk about is protein. If you want a snack, you're going to go have protein first. Because protein is really the foundational macronutrient. We need protein. It's a building block for us to have muscle, to carry muscle, maintain muscle, and reduce muscle loss. So what happens as we get older is we start losing muscle at a higher rate than when we were in our 20s. And obviously, as we hit 25, and even as we got older, we started to see a decline in our hormones. So we have hormones declining, right, at a relatively young age. Because I think 25, I'm like, dude, that is young. And I wasn't even done having kids yet. I wasn't even having kids then. But our hormones start to, on average, decline at 25, right? And then as we get older and our lifestyles change, so we might be sitting more because we have a desk job, we have something that requires us hours on end sitting behind a computer working. And so we're moving less than we were years and years ago when we were in college, when we were young and maybe working in our downtown location. There was just more movement, and our metabolism worked differently. So now, fast forward into our midlife, we need to understand why macronutrients are so imperative, particularly proteins, because again, they're the building block to muscle retention, muscle gain, and also to minimize muscle loss. Fat, we need, and not an exorbitant amount of fat that the keto mentality tends to have, and I know that's going to piss off a lot of people. I personally think that keto is not for a lifestyle and it was medically, when you dive into the history and I'll keep this really short, but keto was designed for severely obese individuals and it was a medical prescribed diet. It was not intended for the average person, the average American, because quite like the Americans are really the ones that take charge of all these different diets, was not intended for us to take it and run with it. But we do require a certain amount of fats. We need fats for brain function, for vitamin absorption, and also to sustain and maintain hormone balancing. So everybody's hormones are obviously going to be at a different rate depending on whether you had a hysterectomy, what hormones you have naturally flowing through your system if you still have your period, or if you're like on the brink of menopause and you have a period every other month or maybe not one for six months, whatever, right? Everybody's got a different hormone structure running through their body. So we need fat. It's imperative we have fat. And then carbohydrates bring up the rear. They're an immediate energy source. I think that it is our duty as middle-aged women to be physically active, to be lifting weights, to be strong not only for our children or to be the grandparent or the older person that we want to be, but we do need to have a certain amount of carbohydrates to Now, does it need to be sandwiches and breads and doughnuts and chips? No. It can be definitely whole foods, right? And that's what I think people move away from is that we've gotten into this kind of healthy convenience I'm going to having a clear understanding of why I need them. Every meal that I sit down has to have a protein, fat, and carbohydrate. That is my goal. That's why I feel healthier probably now at almost 46 than I did even 10 years ago, that I was still lean, but my body maybe wasn't feeling as healthy as it is today.

SPEAKER_00: You mentioned when one of your children says they want a snack, it's protein first. Because when I think a snack, I think chips or maybe an apple. But what are some of your favorite ways to help your clients add more protein to their diet?

SPEAKER_01: So many different options. I usually will say snacks are optional. Because if you're fueling yourself appropriately at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you shouldn't really require a snack. Actually, historically, it was created by these big food manufacturers. Kellogg, these big food manufacturers created snacks. And so now, and I'm not saying I'm perfect, my kids want snacks. sports, whatever, they do require more calories because their metabolism is obviously firing at all cylinders. But adults, we're not metabolizing food like a toddler or even a teenager is, so we don't necessarily require a snack. Snacks definitely come in handy if we're running five different directions and don't get to sit down and have a proper meal. But in an ideal world, having three square meals and being able to get as much of your macronutrient needs met at each meal is really the perfect order, if you will. And so how do we get there? Somebody that might be like, OK, geez, if I did my macro calculations and I need, say, 120 grams of protein, How the heck am I going to get that in three meals? That might be just like, no way am I going to eat. Can I even fathom getting 40 grams at each sit down meal that I have?

SPEAKER_00: So with that in perspective, and sorry to cut you off there, if we're going to have, say, two eggs at breakfast, how much protein is that? How many grams? 12. 12? Yeah. And we need 40. Okay. So keep going. I just wanted to make sure that we were on the same page here that we feel like, Oh, I had my two hard boiled eggs. It must be great. But it sounds like we probably need a little bit more than that.

SPEAKER_01: 100%. And that's just because what we don't know, we don't know. I talk about this day in, day out. This comes natural to me. But somebody that wants to understand nutrition and unfortunately has been clouded by all of the other influences and also can't detach themselves from I'm just go back to what worked when I lost weight for my wedding or whatever. Okay, that was 20, 25 years ago. Your body's changed. So we need to change your approach to understanding how your body composition can be adjusted. But so when you talk about, I'm so glad you brought that up because a lot of people do. I had two eggs, so I'm good to go. Two eggs are 12 grams of protein, which is about 120 calories. That's it. You've gone from whenever your last meal is, say you finished eating dinner at seven o'clock the day before, seven o'clock at night. You go to bed and then you get up, say six o'clock. You're ambitious. Maybe you go to the gym and you go work out or maybe you just get up to get your kids breakfast and lunch is packed and made whatever. And then you sit down to have your first meal at, say, seven, eight, maybe even nine o'clock. And your only thing that you consume from seven o'clock until that eight o'clock, your first sit down, is 120 calories. Your body's—is that all? No wonder I want a snack. Yeah. You know what? I'm so hungry after that, I'm going to go have a snack. So then they get a granola bar. And so when I'm working with my middle-aged female clientele, because that's primarily who I work with, We're working to reverse engineer. Obviously, there's a lot that goes into understanding their lifestyle. Like, I have to get the big picture. I can't just be like, Oh, hey, you want to lose weight? Great. This is what you're going to do. Here's the meals plans you're going to follow. Like, I don't operate like that. It's more of let's figure out your lifestyle. And then we're going to figure out how to add calories to your meals. So you're not feeling like you're eating so much that you want to throw up. And the way I approach it with most people that aren't used to eating a high volume of food and maybe are used to eating five, six smaller meals a day. And there's research on both sides of the coin, whether eating smaller meals is better. I do think that if you have insulin challenges, type 2, pre-diabetic, sometimes when you have that drop in blood sugar, you might have to eat smaller meals a little bit more frequently. But for the rest of the population, you can generally sustain your energy by having three square meals and maybe having a snack on the back end just as a buffer if needed. But it's like training for a marathon. So that's how I think about adding volume, adding protein and adding extra calories at every meal is you have to train for it. So your body's been used to whatever you've been feeding it. So if you've been eating only two hard-boiled eggs for breakfast and then going about your day and you're having half a gallon of coffee with creamer and God knows what else, your body's like, whew, there's a lot of havoc being wreaked on your system right now because it's severely undernourished and then it's got lighter fluid added on top of it with all the caffeine and then, hey, I'm gonna throw in a granola bar or I'm gonna have an apple, right, which is great. Apples are amazing, but there's no protein to support that you're going to get from eating that apple, right? So going back to training your body to learn how to eat more volume is you slowly and incrementally are adding calories in every single week. I'll set somebody's macros. I'll use a client as an example. They're working out three times a week, lifting weights. They're walking about 7,000 steps a day, and their goal is to lose about 20 pounds. So I'll set their macros and whatever that number is, and they're eating very little right now. So my number one priority is to train their body to eat more calories. So we start by, OK, hey, this week we're going to add an extra 200 calories. That's it. to your day. 200 calories, you can come up with that. And chances are, extra bites of stuff here and there can easily add on calories. But we're really intentional. And I'm going to get those calories first out of protein. So if they're having two hard boiled eggs at breakfast, awesome. Okay, you know what else we're going to do? We're going to add about maybe a third of a cup or a couple tablespoons of egg whites, and you're going to make a little omelet, right? All of a sudden, that bumps that meal up to about 25 grams of protein just added. And it's not a lot of calories, so there's not a lot of density for fullness to make anyone feel like, oh, God, I just can't eat anymore. So it's just an incremental your stomach has to train itself. to accept that volume, to go, oh, I'm consistently getting all of this food. This is great. Now I have these energy stores that I can take this and I can start distributing to where it needs to go. And I can start taking that energy store, that body fat that's been harboring and sitting for as long as it has. I can start burning that off because I don't need it. I'm getting this instead. And this is what I've been waiting for a long time, as long as it's going to keep coming. And your body's really smart. If it knows that it's going to keep coming, then it knows what to start doing it. The moment we start cutting back and we are under consuming, we're basically under nourishing ourselves. Then it starts to freak out and hold on to whatever food it gets. It makes it harder to burn body fat and build muscle. So that's why we have to do it really incrementally. So then we can be it could be a sustainable approach because we want this to work for the rest of your life. And you could be really comfortable with the process. So, hey, you know what, an extra 200 calories a day is not that much. Some people could probably stand 300 to 400 a day. And then we add over four to six weeks even to get to where they should be eating for what their goals are, their physical goals, and help support their hormones. And that's not to be, that's to team up with their naturopath or functional medical practitioner, their GP, whatever. that might be doing more under the hood, as I call it, work, but I'm helping them learn how to prioritize their protein at every meal, which even could be, hey, I'm having chicken for dinner. OK, get out a food scale or go get a cheap one at Amazon or Walmart, whatever. Measure what you would generally put on your plate. Does it come up to three ounces? Great. Add one more ounce. That's not going to put you over the edge. That extra ounce is going to add about 12 more grams of protein. That's huge for a lot of people. I mean, not 12, maybe six. That's huge. So you can slowly build up to four ounces of chicken or having a few more eggs or if you could tolerate dairy. Greek yogurt's amazing. Protein shakes tend to come into play. So there's so many ways just to add a little bit more volume. that is real food that can limit the need for snacking. Protein bars, granola bars, which are great in a pinch, but aren't really wanting to be the desirable driver from a nutrition standpoint. That answer your question?

SPEAKER_00: There is so much that you just said that needs Just to underscore a couple of things. One, you said we need to oftentimes start adding in more calories because it sounds like a lot of us are undernourished. We're looking at, say, this belly fat that we've never had before and we think, OK, I've got I just have to cut down calories. It's not that we maybe need to do that. We just need to focus on making sure that we are getting the right foods in our body. You also mentioned this process of adding additional calories in over four to six weeks. So I think that the mindset should be more about how do I want to be now? How do I want to be healthy for not only right now, but for the rest of my life? Like you said, this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. And we're heading into bikini season or swimsuit season. If you don't wear bikinis anymore, which is cool, whatever. But we have this mindset that, OK, because summer's coming, I have to slim down and then then winter will be here again and I can wear the sweaters and eat whatever I want. And I feel like we need to flip the script and say we are we're not just trying to look good or eat for a season, but This is really our life and this is what we need to be mindful of for the rest of our life from this point forward.

SPEAKER_01: 100%. I really am trying to flip exactly the term that I use, flip the script to women and say, listen, Get your life in order, if you will, as far as your nutritional foundations, your lifestyle. Change some things, your bedtime routine, your sleep matters, your hydration, the people you influence yourself with, the stressors in your life. Let's get those foundational things intact as we start focusing on your nutrition. And guess what? The byproduct of all of that will be weight loss. If we do it right, and it's going to take time, and we are, our generation in particular, are so conditioned to expect results like that. We want, yes, we want the 10 day cleanse to lose 20 pounds. We want, if we don't see a gone down a pant size in three days, we're pissed. Like, we're so warped with reality.

SPEAKER_00: Which you guys do, but it's not sustainable. No, it's not.

SPEAKER_01: And people are losing that weight so quickly, which there's, I know that, you know, there's a lot of information out there about tools, and I'll call them tools, that are helping people lose weight really fast, which is great. It's a start, but we need people to Get healthy. And in order to be healthy, you need to have an appropriate body composition. So I really remove the term weight from any of my conversations with clients. I don't give two shits what their weight is on the scale. I said, you know what? When you step on the scale, that scale is measuring a mass. It doesn't matter. It doesn't know if it's a human with feelings or if it's a watermelon. on that scale. It's measuring a mass. And of course a lot of the scales are a little more sophisticated these days and it can articulate what the makeup is of that mass. How much body fat, how much water, and how much skeletal muscle mass it has. Those are great because that's data. And so we need to start leveraging data in order to build upon a nutrition strategy that is going to last us a lifetime. Because I want my clients to be training as that 70, 80-year-old grandparent that they want to be. And I don't have that as an example. My dad passed away at a young age. My mom's not very active just due to her health. I don't want to be like them. I love her to death, but I don't want to be like that. And I see women that come into my gym that I work at, I work here locally at F45, and there's an older generation and they are badass, like lifting weights and strong. And I'm like, I love seeing women in their 60s and 70s coming and lifting weights or mountain biking, they're bowling, they're playing tennis and pickleball. I want to be that person. So we have to put the work in now. And I even tell the younger generation, I do work with a couple with some young athletes saying, you have to train now to be the person you want to be at my age. Like, I have friends that aren't nearly in the shape that I am, and I don't want to be the older parent or the grandparent that can't get themselves off the floor. Right. We cannot get off the floor.

SPEAKER_00: And you want to be able to get up from a chair. You want to be able to carry a grocery sack. These are simple, everyday things that don't even get into quality of life. You just want to be able to not be injured, right? Right, yeah.

I have a question for you. When was the last time you spent a day focused completely on yourself, away from the daily grind, the constant emails and text messages, the never-ending question of what is for dinner? Well, if a day sounds good to you, what about an entire weekend away? And before you start thinking that sounds a little too indulgent, let me remind you that you can't take care of everyone else in your life if you don't take care of yourself first. I am thrilled to personally invite you to join me at the next Best Life Retreat in world-famous Sun Valley, Idaho. with more than 15 hours of group coaching to figure out what you actually want in life, how you define success and help you lay the groundwork for you to create a life that not only makes you happy, but also makes you feel personally fulfilled. There will be incredible group activities like happy hour paint and sips, morning walks, a sunrise hike, your choice of spa appointments at an award-winning spa. All of this wrapped up in luxury accommodations, gourmet meals, premium drinks, and the best gift bag you have ever seen. I'm telling you, this will be one of the very best weekends of your entire life. To keep the retreat intimate, there are only 10 spots available and when they're gone, they're gone. So go right now, click the link in the show notes and get yourself on the priority list so that you'll be the first to know when we open up registration. I cannot wait to see you in Sun Valley. 

What about fiber? I'm hearing a lot of, so I don't actually even know where does fiber fit into macro nutrition, but I've hear a lot of doctors on the internet, which is where a lot of us get our information these days, but talk about the importance of fiber for midlife women. Is it actually a thing in your opinion or is it a little overdone?

SPEAKER_01: No, I think it is for sure. We all require a different amount of fiber and you should be getting naturally fiber from the foods that you eat as long as you're intentional about the foods that you choose. And I'm not one to buy the marketing based foods like fiber rich this or fiber cereal, fiber one. How many times have we looked at that in the cereal aisle, right? It's terrible.

SPEAKER_00: I don't know. I've never tried it. Maybe it's delicious, but… Now, like cardboard.

SPEAKER_01: My grandmother used to have it because she needed more fiber in her diet. And I'm like, just eat some food. There's so many fiber-rich foods. But it's also a really great marketing opportunity for these food manufacturers. So, yes, we do need fiber. Do we need an exorbitant amount? No. On average, maybe like 20 grams. average, right? And so I'm not saying that is the best for you, for me, for anyone else listening, but, and I don't spend my time sitting there going, how much fiber did I get today at lunch? As long as I'm eating vegetables and I'm really intentional about the whole foods I'm consuming, then I think I'm going to be okay. Consuming enough water, but the moment you really shop to those targeted terms, fiber, gluten-free, gluten-free is the worst. A lot of people have gluten intolerance. I'm not saying that's the worst. I mean, it would be really miserable to have that. But buying food that is just marketed to that category of people, I think has been the biggest downfall of our food manufacturers. And that's honestly what's making so many people like just crazy with what do I follow? What do I do? And also sick because our food's junk. When you think about ingredients, your ingredients matter. The less the better. But most of these gluten free, fiber rich, they're not even really real food. They're manufacturing these ingredients in a lab. to make this gluten-free, fiber-rich, whatever. So, and that's a rabbit hole that I'll spare everybody, because I can go down a lot of them.SPEAKER_00: I'll put on my tin hat sometime. No, I appreciate that. Thank you. OK, let's talk sugar. I think I know where you're going to take us when we talk about sugar. It seems to me that if we're getting enough protein, we're getting enough fat, we're getting enough carbohydrate, and we're being intentional about our macronutrients, that we probably won't have the sugar cravings, but how can we kick the sugar habit? And I'm calling it a habit because I feel like it's something that we can actually change, like we can unlearn it, but how can we kick the sugar habit?

SPEAKER_01: I'm a rip the bandaid off type of person. If you are having a Danish or you're having a dessert or you're having pastries, often, like daily, or even just starting with your coffee. What do you put in your coffee? A lot of people have to have their coffee so sweet that they've released any like amount of actual coffee from it because it's so clouded with a bunch of garbage, right? So that's a start, but really just taking a look at what you're eating. And most people know that they're over consuming sugar. Most people are gonna be like, yeah, I have a couple sodas a day. I do like to have something at night. I need a treat. I'm like, no, you don't need a treat. Like you want to go celebrate a birthday. You want to enjoy something because it's an experience. That's one thing like attaching food to experiences is really what people should focus on versus Now I have to. I'm in this routine. I have to have a treat at night. I have to have dark chocolate. I have to have ice cream. You don't because it's ruining your health and wouldn't take much to go figure out how bad sugar is for our system. The unfortunate thing is there's so much sugar embedded in our food that a lot of people aren't aware of. Dressings, marinades, sauces of any sort. You probably go through your pantry and go take a look at half the stuff in your pantry or even in your fridge. Ketchup. There's so much sugar in hidden in those little kind of accessories that we add to our foods. That's a really great start, too, because then your brain is addicted. Like sugar was designed for us to want more. Right? Like they wanted us, they want to trick our brains to want more. And the same happens when we only eat carbohydrates or we eat the wrong type of carbohydrates or we don't necessarily pair it with a fat and a protein. Because if we just eat something like a carbohydrate without a fat or a protein, it's going to spike our blood sugar and then it's going to drop quickly. And then we're going to get into this crash and crave. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of this crash and crave cycle. And then, oh, I'm hungry. It's been an hour. I'm going to go reach for something sugary or the carbohydrate that's going to convert into sugar in my body because I didn't have a protein or fat to really feel satiated. That's going to take me through to my next meal because I was really intentional about the whole food that I consumed versus the snack and these protein bars and even some of our protein shakes, a lot of them have a lot of sugar in them. So it's, I don't want to sound like a jerk, but it's really not that hard to take sugar. Like we have to pull up our big girl pants and we are unhappy with the way we feel and we know we have to make some changes. I'm sorry, but you've got to take a look and you've got to reflect on what's in front of you, what you bring into your household. If you're buying cookies and brownies and ice cream, and, oh, I buy it because my kids like it, or I buy it because of my husband, or, God, my husband brings in this, cut the crap, have a conversation, have a family meeting, and say, listen, like, your kids don't need to be eating the sugar. You don't need to be buying it because your kids like it. Like, you don't need to be putting down a sleeve of Oreos because your husband brought it into your house and you don't have willpower. There needs to be a meeting of the minds and be realistic to, hey, you know what? You're an adult. You have to start making choices because you're the only one responsible for yourself. You get to choose everything you're consuming. Pretty sure no one is pinning you down and force feeding you. droves of ice cream and cookies and pastries. You're choosing to go through the drive-thru and get your extra sugary grande super mocha with whip, right? So we have to be reflective of that, of ownership of that first, and then go, okay, time to put my big girl pants on. I got to cut the crap. And then literally The body goes through a detox process and sometimes it takes up to two weeks of releasing sugar out of your system. And it's miserable. It's… Have you ever gone a couple… Are you a coffee drinker, Laurie? I'm not. Oh. I mean that. I know. Good for you. The only one that goes off coffee for, oh, I'm going to go on a cleanse, so you have to ditch coffee. You're miserable because your body's detoxifying the caffeine. And sometimes that could be, like, tough. And usually it's only like a day or two. But sugar is super potent. And your body is trying to detoxify that. And you're lethargic. You're crabby. So you're going to hate the world and everyone around you. Your body's going to be pissed off as it detoxes. If you're patient and you're hydrated and you focus on eating appropriate foods and distracting yourself, it's really not, it's not, it doesn't have to be that terrible, but getting sugar out of your system, you'll add years to your life, years to your life. And that's not to say you never have sugar again. Again, like I, I attach any, anytime I want to have a treat. It's got to be worth it. Is this experience worth it? Yeah. If I'm going to go out to dinner with my husband and they're going to fancy dessert, like I'm going to have a couple of bites of it. And that's about it, because that's about all I can tolerate, because I've now trained my palate to understand, like, I don't do well and I don't want that much sugar. I don't feel good having that much sugar. But you've got to train your body, just like we were talking about with adding volume and calories. We've got to train ourselves and train our palate to crave other foods. And then all of a sudden, We recognize, oh, my symptoms aren't as terrible. I'm actually sleeping better. I don't have those night sweats that I had. I was having migraines. I had a client that we changed just a few things and she and it was mostly sugar. We focused on her water. We actually had her start including an electrolyte in her water consumption and rerouted her carbohydrate intake and her migraines went away and she lived with migraines for 20 years and we changed a couple things in her diet and her migraines literally dissipated. I've had one every so random time and we recognized the timing of it and it was right around her cycle so we changed some things there. But it was amazing the impact just changing some small things in her diet released. Like your body's reacting and it's a Signal when you have a symptom, it's a signal to a root cause of something that's going on and misfiring that needs to be adjusted. We shouldn't be living with stomach pain, heartburn, migraines, massive bloat, achy joints like we shouldn't live like that. But we do have to reflect on our lifestyle, the things that we have done up until this point and make the decide the choice. All right. I'm going to be starting to train differently because I want to train for my 70 year old self.

SPEAKER_00: Amen. What's interesting, too, is because I was going to ask you about the role that nutrition plays in managing hot flashes and mood swings and sleep issues. And you just touched on that a bit. But it's interesting to me that we tend to tolerate those symptoms in ourselves. to a much greater extent than we ever would with, say, our kids or our partner who comes to us and says, oh, God, I'm so bloated, or I've got such a terrible stomach ache, or… But for us, we seem to think, okay, we'll just keep doing what we're doing, and then when things settle down, or when the time is right, or when I have more time, then I will actually focus on myself. But, gosh, let's wait that long before we go to the doctor and we're facing some terrible… diagnosis or something. I think it's important to start making these changes now and just understanding that this isn't just for a couple of years. It's this is for the rest of our life. Have you read the book Relentless? Yeah, Relentless by Tim Grover.

SPEAKER_01: Oh, so good. So yes.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So for those of the listeners who maybe haven't heard of it, Tim Grover was a he is a personal trainer, like physically and mentally for very high level athletes. So he got to start with Michael Jordan. And I love how when he's got a new athlete that's coming to work with him, he takes him off, he says, no sugar for the entire weekend. This is getting back to your detox idea. And then if they come back and after the weekend and he'll say, how was your weekend? And they say, oh, it was great. It's so good to be off sugar. Then he will say, we're not going to work together anymore because I told you no more sugar. And you would your body should be headaches or lethargy or something you because of the amount of sugar that you have been consuming, you should have a physical. reaction to what happened. And he's anyway, that's an aside. But OK.

SPEAKER_01: Can we go? Can I just highlight or bring it back to the surface? Especially those of us like we'll live with it. But yet, like you said, a spouse or a family member or children would be like, oh, I have a stomach ache or kind of getting these headaches. We want to solve the issue right for them. We want to get to the root cause. And often means we run them into the doctor or whatever. But yet we're not willing to reflect on what we are doing and what lifestyle changes we need to do because it's hard. Recognizing that we need to make lifestyle changes or we need to change our diet, excuse me, is hard. And the process is long and we are really impatient. It goes back to we want instant gratification. And I think a lot of women, too, don't want to own that, gosh, you know what, if I need to just wipe the slate clean and really truly see what I'm capable of doing. That means cutting out alcohol, sugar, some of the kind of the big contenders in unhealthy people. A lot of people don't want to do it because that takes away the fun in their life. And that's hard, right? Because it's hard to go through life with a little bit of a change or be the person that might not be drinking right now or removing sugar because you know that it's going to suck for two weeks. Right. So. We can help other people as moms or women all day long, but we have to take a look at ourselves and go, why am I feeling this way? It can't be anything I'm doing. It just must be something that I need to go get a pill for at the doctor and I'll just have them fix it. And it's just like putting a Band-Aid right on top of it. Whereas, and I feel like we're so lucky here in the Treasure Valley, there's so many amazing functional medical practitioners even physicians that really strive on getting to the root cause. And regardless of what part of the country my clients live in, I'll say, you need to find a functional medical practitioner or somebody that will help you get to the root cause. If they're going to start slapping prescription medication on you first, run. If they're not going to ask you questions about your lifestyle, what you're eating, and they're just going to say, oh, you should exercise more and cut calories out, run. If they're not going to ask you questions, take a look at your lab work from your hormone blood panel, because I highly recommend women at least every six months to a year get their hormone blood panels done, because it can change. And a lot of women get pushback from their doctors, like, you don't need it. It's fine. You don't need it. I'm like, why would they care if you're asking for it? So you have to be an advocate. Go get these done, because you're physician or your medical practitioner should look at those labs. And even if they might be within normal range, but you don't feel normal, they should help you peel the onion back and go, OK, what part of you doesn't feel normal? And let's take a look at that and isolate it. Let's get to that root cause. And they really should be a partnership, an advocate with you versus giving you pushback or saying, hey, you know what, I'm going to prescribe you this and that should take care of it.

SPEAKER_00: She just drops them right there. I love it. I love it. Ruffle some feathers. You mentioned water a couple of times. Is there a benchmark for hydration that we should be like a minimum?

SPEAKER_01: A minimum? Half your body weight in ounces. Okay. And then you add for any sort of physical activity. So if you go to the gym for an hour or 45 minute class where you're sweating, you need to replenish some of the water that you lose. But it's not so much as drinking like a hundred ounces of water, but it's making sure your electrolytes are replenished. So there's a lot of information that's starting to surface about water. Yes, it's great, but just slamming four bottles of water without any sort of electrolyte to it isn't really going to do the trick. I love Element. I don't have any sort of affiliation with them. It's an electrolyte packet. Everybody's heard of them. LMNT. Get them on Amazon. But even Himalayan salt or Celtic salt sprinkled in your water, then you don't have to be consuming 100 ounces of water just to fit it to drink water, because, you know, a lot of it, it'll just flush right through your system. But the goal, the priority should be replenishing your electrolytes, especially if you're physically active, which, again, should be a non-negotiable. Everybody should be physically active. You should be in the gym lifting weights. You should be walking, moving your feet. Even if you're doing yoga, like something that's going to get the heart rate up, something that's going to challenge your body, getting your mobility in check and replenishing your electrolytes to keep your pH balance. That way you can keep yourself healthier. It's easier for your immune system. It supports your immune system to have an abundant of or to have enough electrolytes in your system. When we just drink water, we're just not getting that. But also be mindful of the type of electrolytes, too, because it's become a big marketing opportunity as well, like Gatorade. No. Talk about sugar and artificial ingredients and food coloring, which I know this is not the call for, but really look at what electrolyte drink you pick up off the shelf. And usually if it is by way of a drink, I would put it back. I would just drink water, get a packet, powder, dump it in. Or Celtic salt is your best aid in electrolyte replenishment and natural. because it's a mineral. 

SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad I asked that question personally, because I am today years old when I actually figured out that I need to make sure that I am getting some electrolytes in with because I don't drink coffee. All I drink is water all day long, water. And it's funny that I have only ever thought about electrolytes and what I'm consuming if I'm running a marathon or doing endurance hiking event or something, but every day, probably. So I've made a note to myself to check into that. We talked about it briefly at the beginning. I know you're a huge proponent for strength training in midlife women. Can you explain to us why resistance training is so important for this stage in our lives?

SPEAKER_01: Because we start losing muscle at a rapid rate, especially in our midlife. It's called sarcopenia. And it's just because we are moving less. When we were younger, maybe we were collegiate athletes, maybe we were high school athletes, and we were moving more and muscle was a little bit easier to produce. But also our generation was doing cardio constantly. We were doing step aerobics, jazzercise, that kind of thing. for hours, right? Let's sweat out all the partying. I need to lose weight, so I need to sweat and I need to be on this thing for an hour thinking I'm going to drop weight, right? Dropping water weight. But when we shift and we think about body composition and a healthy body composition, again, like your number on the scale might be actually a healthy number for you, but your body composition is probably what needs to be manipulated. So, building lean muscle as a midlife female, even males, is so imperative because it is going to protect our joints, our tendons. It's going to help us get up off the floor. It's just going to help us function. When you have muscle, not only that, when you have muscle, you walk into a room with a completely different energy about you. You just have more confidence. You're naturally more successful. It's just, you can't deny it when people, when you see somebody walking that is in good shape or is healthy and takes care of themselves, do you not naturally go, dude, they got their shit together? Yeah, absolutely. You know, who cares what their bank account looks like, but you think that they've got their shit together and that's powerful. And so people are attracted to people that take care of themselves. They will do more business with people that are healthy and that are because you're just you're more with it. You're more dialed into the function of life and you've got your health in order. And so everything else falls into place. So gaining muscle, building muscle isn't about getting bulky that a lot of us feared we would by eating protein. And we had said that mostly it was men, right, because they were bodybuilders eating steak. Right. Like women, should be lifting weights to build lean muscle not to go get bulky. You would have to eat and you'd have to train enough and eat enough to get bulky and most average women are not doing that. You can go into the gym 20, 30, 40 minutes get the job done and build lean adequate muscle for the rest of your life if you kept doing that and building upon it.

SPEAKER_00: And I think it bears mentioning, too, that when you talk about strength training and lifting, you're not talking about three or five pound weights.

SPEAKER_01: I'm not, not that's not a good, that's a great place to start, but like doing little tiny pulses with three and five pound weights, it's great, but it's not what you, that's not going to build you lean muscle, right? There's the talk of why I want to get toned. I don't want to get bulky, right? Again, you're only going to get bulky by eating to get bulky. You have to physically eat to get bulky. And most of the times that's, you're going to be taking some testosterone. Testosterone, right. And if you run high with testosterone, guess how you're going to find that out? getting your hormone blood panel done, but most women are really low in testosterone in our age, right? They're not running high. So they're running low and we're not gonna get bulky. And so having those smaller weights and just doing small movements, it's great for mobility, it's great for just overall movement, but picking up 10, 20s, 30 pound weights for lower body stuff, curling, lifting overhead, you've gotta think about the functional component, right? Your grocery bags are not gonna be five pounds most times. You might have a grocery bag that might be 8, 10 pounds. You might have a box on your front step that you need to get in the door. Or, heaven forbid, you get into an accident and you can get out unscathed and you notice somebody's pinned to something heavy, right? Like me, if my kids were ever in a car accident and I come hell or high water, I'm getting that car off of them. Sure. So I trained thinking like that. It's not because I want to look, I don't want to have an aesthetic of, oh, I want to be this bikini figure. No, I could give two rips about that. I want to be strong. I want to be toned, but because I want to be healthy. And I also want to set an example for our generation of women to go, hey, you know what? Like she took care of herself. Shit. I also want my 18 year old daughter to have a healthy relationship with her body and not be looking at TikTok or Instagram thinking she's got to have the size zero frame and she's only going to get that by doing the Stare Master and eating 100 calories a day. Fortunately, she knows better, but. Why would it influence her friends? I want them to know because that generation is going to be in charge of our world and we want them to be healthy. We want them to have a whole different influence, a healthy influence on what it means to be healthy. as they age. And we get that opportunity, that platform right now, to lead by example.

SPEAKER_00: Which is great, because so many of us did not have that example set for us. It was a much different era that preceded us. One last question. If you could boil it down to, say, your top three nutrition tips or hacks or whatever for thriving during the midlife years, what would they be?

SPEAKER_01: Top three, I would say if you don't know what to do and you know that you need to make a change, hire somebody. Absolutely. Hire somebody that knows what they're doing and help you get started on a path. And that doesn't have to be me, but don't leave it to the internet to go and figure it out because it'll be really hard. Be accountable. And have a goal attached to it, like an emotional need as to why this matters, why you're doing it. And be something substantial, not a, oh, I want to get back into my size six dress or my size four pants. Like, maybe that could be the byproduct, but what goal can you attach to that? So really truly living and thinking about it from a lifestyle orientation and a sustainable orientation. And if you don't know how to get there or how to even establish that, again, go hire somebody. Have somebody teach you, show you, be accountable to so you can have a plan and something that you can go, oh, I learned this 10 years ago and it is still relevant. Because this should still be relevant 10, 20, 30 years from now.

SPEAKER_00: Absolutely. I think so many of us think, I'm smart. I can just figure this out if I just, if I spend more time doing it. But the truth is, if you could figure it out on your own, you would already be doing it and you wouldn't, you wouldn't need help. So I think hiring someone, huge proponent for that. For our listeners who want to learn more about working with you, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_01: You can find me on my website, tarynperry.com, or on Instagram. I'm at tarynperry on Instagram as well. And fair warning, I'm a little cheeky on there. I don't hold back on a lot, but I really try and be relatable. I work with mostly middle-aged women and corporate women as well. I do some corporate wellness programming for those that want to get their employees healthy. So that's always an option and a feature that I provide as well.

SPEAKER_00: Fantastic. We will include clickable links to both of her website and Instagram accounts in the show notes. Taryn, we end every episode with the same two questions. So if you're ready, I'll fire away. Please. Question one is if you could go back to your 30-year-old self, knowing all of the things that you know now, with all of your life experiences and the lessons that you have learned along the way, what advice would you give to her?

SPEAKER_01: appreciate your body right now. Appreciate it. You don't know what it's going to go through, what, how hard it's going to be when you're older to lose a pound. Just appreciate what you have and take care of it now.

SPEAKER_00: I love that because it seems like every time I feel like, Oh, before, Oh, I don't take a picture of me right now. I just don't look great. And then you look back on those pictures 10, 15 years ago, later and you're like, damn, I looked great. What was I worried about? Exactly. Yeah. Question two. What have you loved most about being a midlife woman?

SPEAKER_01: I have so much more confidence in myself. I don't really give two shits about what other people think about me if they aren't an important asset in my life, and that is my spouse, those are my children, and those are my close circle of friends. I don't put any weight on people on social media that don't know me at my core and I don't know them at my core. So I have more confidence as a midlife woman than ever before. I can walk into a room and not know anybody and feel really confident. And I do think that's because I've gotten myself to a point of feeling healthy, feeling strong, like physically strong. So I carry myself a lot differently versus in my 30s. I I thought I was confident, but I wouldn't walk into a room feeling like, I can do this. I'd be like, I'm going to go to the outskirts and I'm going to just keep to myself. So confidence is huge midlife.

SPEAKER_00: Love that. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. I have really enjoyed this conversation with you.

SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Laurie. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00: Do you ever wish you had a community of midlife women you could go talk to about those big life questions that seem to pop up in midlife? Like, what do I want? What's my legacy? What's next for me? A community of women to have candid conversations with about all the things that come at us in midlife that no one else seems to be talking about. Changes in our bodies related to menopause, sure, but also changes in our relationships and family life and careers. Well, great news. The School of Midlife has launched a book club called Your Next Chapter. Each month, we'll be reading and discussing books that relate to the unique experiences of midlife women. It's absolutely free to join, and we'd love to have you meet up with us and add your voice to these important discussions. And this isn't like other book clubs, because if you didn't have time to finish the book, but you're still interested in the conversation, absolutely join us anyway because you'll still get so much out of the conversation. The book club is free to join, but you'll need to sign up. Click the sign up link in the show notes and you'll automatically receive your invitation to join us. Get signed up, grab this month's book, and start reading. And we'll look forward to seeing you at the next book club discussion, where together, we're helping each other make midlife our best life.