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 46 Developing leaders and helping them to thrive in very uncertain times with Deborah Pascoe

It has become more important than ever that organisations focus on developing their leaders to cope with the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) times that we work in. We have been talking about VUCA for the last 15 years, it has arrived and to be honest it is more dysfunctional than ever as organisations struggle to deal with the many complex adaptive challenges that they are facing; coming off the back of the pandemic many organisations are simply drowning in these problems.

Today I talk to my friend and colleague Deborah Pascoe who is a leadership development expert about how we develop these leaders and why it is important. Deb began her career in the corporate sector where she worked in a range of business roles before quitting in her thirties to work out what she really wanted to do. She fell into consulting by accident really and realised very quickly that it was her great love. Now thirty years later she has worked with many organisations from all different sectors and has a deep and broad understanding of leadership and adult development.

This is a varied conversation where we talked about:

• why leadership development is so important and why organisations should invest in it,

• why collaborative problem solving is integral to solving adaptive challenges,

• How organisational purpose keeps us anchored in tough times and the ability to articulate our organisational purpose is the single biggest driver of employee engagement,

• How our individual north star helps us to navigate the intracacies of life when we lose our way,

• Why people get stuck in the personal development and how learning trauma stops us from pursuing growth on a personal and professional level,

• What the learning cycle of the brain is, the dopamine-opioid cycle and we we can hook into that we can keep on learning and growing throughout our life.

Deb talks about her own midlife journey and how it was transformational for her in many ways and now in her sixties she really feels she is in the prime of her life. There is a lot of wisdom and reflection in this conversation that is grounded in a deep understanding of what it means to be a human in these times we live in. You can find Deb at Phronesis Foundation.

Ep 42 Barbie and the bucket of frogs - Tales of Sisterhood

I recently went to see the Barbie movie and loved it. There were so many great messages in there, and they dealt with what are extremely complex cultural messages and phenomena, in a way that was digestible for even the youngest members of the audience.

So today I wanted to reflect on those messages and points and unpack the patriarchy a little bit and how it impacts all of us and share some stories of my own about how I have seen how patriarchy gets in the way of women mentoring and supporting each other. Of loving and complimenting each other, of being able to brag and cheer for each other. This is where the bucket of frogs story comes in.

Sisterhood wounding is a real thing and many women suffer from it. It is both collective and ancestral trauma that impacts us individually. Let’s face it, most of us have many wounds from our teenage years when it comes to the sisterhood. Patriarchy pits women against each other, we learn to not only hate each other but we hate ourselves. We hate the feminine aspects of ourself and this is what disconnects us from our bodies. In the long run, that wound causes signifiant damage. In stops us from speaking our truth, we lose our voice. It stops us from having deep, honest, vulnerable relationships with each other. We disconnect from ourselves and from each other. We disconnect from our hearts.

I offer some tips and guidance about where to start when it comes to sisterhood wounding and healing the collective trauma that lives within all of us.

If you want to join my Magnificent Midlife course click on the link and sign up, or you can go to my website www.kelliestirling.com