EP 51 Supporting your body with nutrition in Midlife with Annie Gaudreault

In midlife, we start to notice changes in how our body metabolises food, how we recover from exercise and how we are able to deal with stress in our life. No longer can we drink lots of alcohol and pull up OK the next morning. Maybe there are a few sneaky kilograms piling on. This is because as we enter perimenopause, our hormones start to shift how we metabolise food and this impacts on many areas of our health.

Annie Gaudreault, who is a Licenced Nutritionist and Health Coach from Toronto, CA, joins me in the podcast to talk about the impact of nutrition on our life as we move into our midlife. Annie specialises in working with women in midlife to make sense of all the wellness information out there and to make sustainable changes to their health and wellbeing.

Annie has her own interesting midlife transition story. She started running in her 30s and as she approached her midlife transition she really trained hard and found emotional and mental resilience expanded and she was able to deepen her running expertise to run marathons. From there she moved into competing in Iron Man Triathlons. For Annie her midlife transition was an awakening. An awakening to becoming her true self and pursuing a new career in nutrition that created more meaning in her life.

In the podcast we talked about:
The lack of education around menopause and how this impacts our lifestyle choices,
The impact of estrogen decline on other hormones in particular our metabolic health,
How estrogen decline impacts on how our body can process sugar and simple carbohydrates. The impact on insulin production and how this may cause insulin insensitivity and pre-diabetes health issues,
Strategies to deal with addiction to sugar and carbohydrates,
Fibre and Protein in our diet and how eating more of these in midlife supports our health,
How internalised cultural belief systems impact our perception of midlife and the impact of it on our life.

You can find Annie at www.veev.ca or on instagram @veev_wellness. Annie works globally online, so if you would like to book a time to talk to her about your nutrition needs at midlife you can book a call via her website.

Ep 32 How experiencing more pleasure in your body can be a pathway through pain

This week I’m talking about pleasure and how experiencing the expansive energy of pleasure in our body can be a pathway through pain. When we have trauma and stress stored in our body it has a very constrictive quality to it. You would know this be either a tight jaw or pelvis, or maybe tension in the shoulders and the back between your shoulder blades.

In this episode I talk about:

How it can be tricky when we start doing somatic healing work at first because we might be stuck in a constant state of constriction so to feel anything other than this can make us feel unsafe,
The different survival responses in our nervous system and what they are,
How some food and drinks can actually mimic the constricted state we are in,
How we all learn to push through the boundaries of our body and come to ignore its messages to us all the time,
How pleasure expands our capacity in our body and that gives us more choice and breadth in our nervous system and how this improves our ability to be with our emotions,
Why micro doing on pleasure is more effective at slowly building your orientation toward it,
What some pleasure practices are.

At the end I mention my free Feminine Embodiment course and my ReConnect course. Reconnect is on sale all through December 2022 for AU$149.50.

Ep 29 The power of Slow with Casey Hall

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Casey Hall, who is a sensuality coach, about the power of slowing down. Casey is both a sensuality coach and holistic wellness coach and has studied and worked in the wellness landscape for many years. She is the best person to talk to about this subject because not only is it the centre of her work but it is her life story also. She learned that slowing down was helped her heal and grow after many years of living a fast paced life.

In the podcast we discuss:

How Casey moved into corporate wellness and realised that 90% of the cases Doctors deal with are related to stress,
That sensuality is a key to helping us slow down and live a life with more presence,
That the emptiness and loneliness many of us feel is a disconnection from self and slowing down helps us to reconnect with ourselves,
How pleasure is a great tool to help us to slow down and be more present in our lives,
That many of us have internalised cultural belief systems around slowing down and pleasure that stop us from pursuing both and this lives largely in our unconscious so most of us are not aware of our blockages toward pursuing both,
Our bodies speak their own language and they are talking to us all the time, we just learned to ignore their messages,
Slowing down helps us to make better conscious choices and decisions in our life.

You can find Casey at her website www.sensualitycoach.com on instagram @sensuality_coaching. Casey does a podcast with her Business Partner Elizabeth Menzel called “Slow the F Down” you can find it on all major podcasting platforms.