After years of practicing traditional dietetics, Pia and I found ourselves on a liberating journey—stepping away from diet culture and embracing a weight-neutral, intuitive eating approach. In this episode, we share our experiences, from joyful food-filled retreats in Italy to the challenges of being non-diet dietitians in a weight-obsessed world.

What if health wasn’t measured by the scale? We unpack common misconceptions about weight and wellness, highlighting biases in healthcare and the importance of focusing on behaviors over BMI. We explore what it means to truly accept and care for our bodies through personal stories—like the humbling changes of menopause and the surprising freedom of midlife. 

Join us for a compassionate conversation about redefining health, unlearning diet culture, and making space for joy at every stage of life.

TRANSCRIPT

Jenn Salib Huber: 0:45

Hi and welcome to the Midlife Feast, the podcast for women who are hungry for more in this season of life. I'm your host, Dr Jenn Salib-Huber. I'm an intuitive eating dietitian and naturopathic doctor and I help women manage menopause without dieting and food rules. Come to my table, listen and learn from me trusted guest experts in women's health and interviews with women just like you. Each episode brings to the table juicy conversations designed to help you feast on midlife.

And if you're looking for more information about menopause, nutrition and intuitive eating, check out the midlife feast community, my monthly membership that combines my no nonsense approach that you all love to nutrition with community, so that you can learn from me and others who can relate to the cheers and challenges of midlife.

What is Intuitive Eating for Midlife Women?

Jenn Salib Huber: 1:34

People often ask me how I got into intuitive eating, or they want to know kind of the story of my career, of how I started out as a dietician and naturopathic doctor and with a very kind of standard practice, and when and how did that merge into or become a weight neutral, health at every size, aligned, intuitive eating focused but still health focused practice, and I've shared bits of my story, but I wanted to invite my friend, Pia to share her story of being a dietitian for 30 years in Australia and what she has learned along the way and some of kind of those moments that prompted, sparked inspired change for her, some of her aha moments around how much does weight actually matter, and one of the kind of really poignant things that she shares is, you know, talking to people in their 80s or 90s who are still worried about weight gain or want to lose weight, and so I really I thank Pia for sharing this, and I really hope that if you're a dietitian and you're kind of wondering what this transition in your career could look like, or if you're just somebody who wants to hear somebody with 30 years of experience talk about what really matters with health, I think that you're going to love this conversation with my friend Pia.

Jenn Salib Huber: 3:04

Hi Pia, Welcome to the Midlife Feast. Hi Jen, how are you Good to see you again? I know If I look and sound really excited, it's because I haven't seen Pia since. Well, I guess since we were in Spain last year, but we first met two years ago when you joined the first Food Joy and Body Joy retreat in Italy.

Pia : 3:27

And how good was that.

Jenn Salib Huber: 3:28

Food joy and body joy retreat in Italy, and how good was that he had the nickname of the troublesome Aussie dietitian, or the Aussie the troublesome Aussie, because you had some of the most hilarious photo bombs on both of our trips that I can't not smile every time that I think about them.

Pia : 3:47

So I'm really, really excited to see you today time that I think about them, so I'm really, really excited to see you today. I loved how, yeah, I could go on that trip and not be a dietitian, so I just went there for enjoyment and it's like yay.

Jenn Salib Huber: 4:02

And you know, one of the questions that people it's kind of like a sidetrack, but people will often ask oh, but isn't a retreat with a dietitian going to be all about food and health? And that is intentionally why I called it the food joy and body joy midlife and menopause retreat, because while we have amazing conversations about food and about health and about nutrition, these trips are vacations and there's no food shaming, body shaming. And one of the things that I loved about them, and one of the things I loved about having another non-diet dietitian on the trip, was that there was no diet talk.

Jenn Salib Huber: 4:43

Nobody was talking about oh, I've been so bad. I have to make up for this, or I really shouldn't, or I'm gonna get back on track.

Pia : 4:51

It was just experiencing italy and all the amazing food, joy and body joy, and then, and you don't get that with a group of women it's very rare to get a group of eight or ten women and they don't talk about diets and their bodies and yeah, it's just so relaxing. And then when they hear you're a dietitian, it's like um, sometimes it's like no, I'm just a barista working a coffee shop I have joked with people.

Jenn Salib Huber: 5:25

Um well, it's not a joke, I have actually actually said this. I've actually said that like I'm a bookkeeper or like I'm an actuary or something that nobody wants to hear about. Because if I say I'm a dietician or I'm a naturopath or I'm, you know, working in midlife for menopause, it's not that I don't love answering questions. Obviously, I love talking about what I do and I'm really, really passionate and I do love answering questions. But sometimes you just want to be on vacation, right? Sometimes you just want to relax.

Pia : 5:56

Or you're at a party.

Jenn Salib Huber: 5:58

Yeah, at a party. That's definitely a time when I might consider not telling people what I do for sure. But one of the things that you and I really connected over during our couple of trips together and really just over the last couple of years, as we've continued to stay in touch is how we know as dietitians. So I've been a dietitian for 25 years, you've been a dietitian for 30 years, so we're over half a century of experience between us.

Pia : 6:28

I was going to say we started when we were two, weren't we? But no, no, I tell everybody to embrace your age. You know, enjoy it. Yeah, I'm 56. Yay, exactly, it's worth celebrating. It is worth celebrating.

Why Diets Don’t Work—A Dietitian’s Perspective

Jenn Salib Huber: 6:46

But one of the things we connected over and what we're going to talk about today, it's just that we know that diets don't work, but as dietitians we're often kind of forced to carve out our space as non-diet dietitians in a world that is extremely weight centric. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your 30 year career and kind of how it started and how you ended up here, with 30 years of experience and, as you know, a non diet dietitian Well it was talked a little bit about at university but it was very new and that you know it was.

Pia : 7:28

That was about it, that it was said, and I did my usual training and no one else talked about it. So it's like, okay, shut up. Just, you know, learn and learn. And I did a lot of learning. I went even to private practice and in private practice it suited my lifestyle with my kids, but I would get a lot of referrals for women in midlife.

Pia : 7:57

I've tried everything. Nothing works anymore. I can't shove the kilo, get rid of the kilos as well as I used to. I'm exercising harder and I'm eating less and it's the, you know, the weight's not coming off. Quite a common situation. So it's okay, let's look at your diet.

Pia : 8:18

And they were, these women were eating hardly anything. And I would be saying let's add some more quality to your food. And I'd actually be putting more food into their choices and surprisingly, they'd lose a little bit of weight. But you never saw them, for you saw them at max six months and then they went off and you had new patients. So you'd already be. You know it's just a circle of patients that you'd be seeing. So you'd already be. You know it's just a circle of patients that you'd be seeing, so you'd never really follow up it. You know, sometimes in your mind you'd say I wonder what happened, you know, to that lady two years, four years down the track and I must admit I feel really I've got had to come to peace with that. You know I might have been pushing the diet, the weight loss situation, um, and I'm doing my own damage, but recognizing that you know I've been.

Pia : 9:19

I mean, that was all we knew really um and it wasn't really um until uh, well, life serves us curveballs.

Pia : 9:31

And it wasn't until, really, like, cancer came along for me and that really changed my perspective. So I thought I was pretty immune, like, in some ways, I thought that I had the answers. I was lucky to be born in a thin body. There was certainly no very little chance that I you know I would get cancer not the preventable types, and I was almost because and I don't like to use the BMI, but you know I was within that healthy weight range. So it was like I was immune. You know, it's like I had it all worked out. And it was very humbling, one of the whole body image. I never really had experience with body image and now I see, I mean I was in the plastic surgeon's office where they were actually trying to find enough fat on my body to make a breast and I did not have enough fat on my body, so I adopted for an implant instead, and that whole experience, as I said, you know, it's quite humbling. And now I see, then you get put on drugs. It was all hormone driven, so you put on drugs, I was forced into menopause like la-di-da-di-da-da, and all of a sudden bang.

The Impact of Menopause on Weight and Health

Pia : 11:07

I went through chemotherapy and I went. It was called, you know, chemo, uh, chemopause, they call it medical induced. And then when it was like, holy moly, I don't know anything about menopause, I don't know anything about menopause nutrition, and that's how I found you, jen type in menopause nutritionist, yeah.

So it's like I've got to find out about this menopause, all these hot flushes and and weight gain. I knew that, um, weight gain was a part of menopause, but I didn't realize that. I guess, yeah, I it was, and all the other of course. So that's how I found you. And when I started looking about it, well, one of them when you go through trauma, of course you have to go through grief, and one of the you know the signs of grief, why me? And you know I realised why not me.

How a Cancer Diagnosis Changed My View on Health

Pia : 12:13

But it made me question what is health? You know, I exercised, I ate. Well, that's that was health to me. And there's this whole mental side of health that was never really taught at dietetic school, yeah, and and learning about the mental side of it, and just when you see if you're in the healthy weight range, you don't actually know what that person has been experiencing and our ability. You know, I had a lot of friends, of course, that would say, oh you look great, have you lost weight? And as a dietician too, I always got that. You know what you're talking about. Look at you. Patients would actually say that to you. So there was all this.

Pia : 13:08

My identity was caught up with. You know the size that I was. I have, since yep, gained a lot of weight. I guess in that way I don't get those comments anymore. So that's, I've turned sort of midlife too. I don't get. You know, we're getting, we're aging. Even when we were going to Italy, jen, it was a big step for me to go out by myself, travel to Italy and that whole. Oh my gosh, I'm a female travelling by myself. But you know what, in Rome, no one gave me a second look, I'm just an old lady. So that was a bonus actually.

Jenn Salib Huber: 13:58

There is actually a lot of people who are talking about the upside of I guess some people call it the invisibility of you know midlife, in that there is some freedom from feeling like you're no longer as subject to the gazes of others, or as subject to the judgment of others.

Jenn Salib Huber: 14:20

So it's interesting that you kind of noticed that when you were in Rome too. So one of the things that I love about what you shared was you know your experience of having thin privilege through genetics, through luck, you know, not through any choices, but just that you know experiencing that thin privilege, going through most of your life having the experience of a cancer diagnosis, which I surprised to anybody. But you know, to your point of you felt like you had all the all the right things in the right columns to to shield yourself from that. And yet, because we don't control our health in the way that we believe, shit happens. You know, things happen that you can't control, and so I think that that I think that's a really relatable thing for anybody who's experienced thin privilege and then, on the flip side, anybody who's lived in a larger body. It's very easy for them to go into the shame spiral of well, I did this to myself.

Jenn Salib Huber: 15:18

I know this is my fault. I should have done differently, and so I'm highlighting this to say that, you know, we don't control health in the way that we've been led to believe. There are risk factors, there are behaviors that we may have, you know, be able to choose more often than others, but health and health outcomes are related to things like access to healthcare, income, genetics and a lot of those things.

Most of those aren't behaviors, right, and so the weight neutrality comes into this conversation, because weight is not what we think it is when it comes to influencing our health. So, you know, aggressively pursuing weight loss isn't going to give somebody the kind of free pass for the rest of their life if they're able to achieve and maintain it, which we'll talk about in a sec. Most people can't.

Why Weight Loss Shouldn’t Be the Goal for Midlife Health

Jenn Salib Huber: 16:16

But there are behaviors that we can choose, which is where I feel like the weight neutral conversation, especially with dietitians, especially with nutrition, can sometimes be confusing, and because people expect a dietician to give you a diet, they expect a dietician to give you a list of good and bad foods, but that's not what we're doing. So I'd love to know how do you explain weight neutrality to somebody? So, if somebody comes to you and you mentioned that you know you work with people in all ages and stages but have seen people through their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, still wanting to lose weight and maybe actually are in positions or ages sometimes in their 90s I'm getting 90s nobody's trying to lose weight.

Jenn Salib Huber: 17:01

I know in their 90s like let's just say that.

Pia : 17:04

But it's actually more that they're scared of putting on weight, because there is a that you actually tend to lose weight when you're 90. Anyway, you know the weight sort of we don't know why, but it tends to fall off right.

Jenn Salib Huber: 17:20

I mean, if you look at muscle mass across the, you know the aging spectrum, um, it increases that we lose. We start losing muscle from our 30s. There's a bit of like an increase in the rate around menopause, and then it stabilizes a little bit until about the mid 70s, um, and then sometimes that lean muscle can decrease by 10 or 15 percent and that that's not a good thing.

Pia : 17:48

That's not, especially if you are at that age, then you know studies have shown that you're, if you've got a little bit of weight on you and a bit of muscle, that you're having a better outcome in the ICU, in intensive care unit.

Pia : 18:05

So you know it's actually I tell patients that it's actually good to have some weight on. I call it superannuation. So we have it, we put it on, so if we need it we can use it later. Or if you fall it's good to have a little bit of padding and you're more likely to fall if there's no muscle as well. So we've really got to try and keep that muscle.

So I guess your point is you know, sometimes people can be I actually don't even mention our screening tool will say have you lost our weight unintentionally? And if there is an unintentional weight loss, then usually a dietician will um, will be uh, seen with that, hopefully, fingers crossed, um, but most of the time that's another point of view that if they're people in a larger body and they've lost some weight unintentionally, it's still counted as good.

Jenn Salib Huber: 19:11

Sometimes, you know, and does that refer or get to us is can be quite scary and that's examples of, um you know, weight bias, that we assume that weight loss in a larger body is a good thing, but studies have shown that unintentional weight loss in a larger body is a good thing. But studies have shown that unintentional weight loss is a risk factor regardless of the size of someone's body.

The Truth About Weight and Aging—What Really Matters 

Jenn Salib Huber: 19:34

And so we, you know that is a really important point to drive home, that you know, when you're looking at weight as a marker for health, weight loss is far more concerning if it's unintentional than unintentional weight gain right right.

Pia : 19:50

So when people come to see me, I can't, I'm not. I guess we're not against weight loss, because I feel um really upset for people that the doctors are saying, like sometimes there's BMI cutoffs, like for fertility treatment, for I've had patients come in for my renal specialist who says they won't give me, you know, a transplant until I lose some weight. It's really difficult. You know that. They're even um some of the the breast cancer communities.

They they after all their treatment. They're told if they're not under a certain weight, we're not going to um operate on you. And it's like, well, you operate them if they're a, you know, for a stomach, gastric sleeve, a bariatric patient. So please learn how to operate on larger bodies. It's just so you can't blame people for trying, you know.

Jenn Salib Huber: 21:01

For losing the weight.

Pia : 21:03

And I've seen patients that have desperately lost weight and when you desperately, you know when you're losing weight really quickly, any sort of weight loss you're losing muscle, so of course they're going to have a worse outcome in in the hospital situation. But their weight is blamed. It's not them, it's what they've done, that you know. You've been made to lose weight, so it's really quite sad.

Jenn Salib Huber: 21:30

I mean the medical and the health care gatekeeping. You know, using bmi as a marker of who's allowed to receive treatment or not is a whole other conversation, because that is um, that is awful.

Jenn Salib Huber: 21:46

It happens everywhere, unfortunately, but yeah, that's awful. So how do you approach those conversations? You know how do you start to shift people? Because I agree, you know, I always say intuitive eating isn't anti-weight loss, but we don't want to make weight a proxy for health and we don't want to make pursuing intentional weight loss the only goal, or even the goal, because it's the least achievable and sustainable of all the other things.

So you know, the way I describe it to people is, if you want to eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and put protein on your plate and all those good things, great, let's work on that. But let's not make what happens on the scale the measure of whether or not you want to continue doing those things or whether they're working at all, because your health may improve, you may feel better, you may have more energy, you may build muscle, you may have better digestion All of those things can improve and the scale may do nothing.

Pia : 22:48

Right, absolutely. And if I have a patient that wants to lose weight, my first question is why? Yep, and that will determine where I go. You know, if it's health-related, like you just said, there's all these other. You know. Know, showing them, um, I do sort of cardiac rehab, sort of sessions. So showing the studies, that's saying that it's actually all the other factors. So it's actually increasing your exercise not that I like that word um, increasing your, your body's movement, or um your diet, you know, giving up smoking, getting your blood pressure under control, it's all those measures. And you know, there's a couple of great little studies to show that it's not the weight itself that is the problem.

Jenn Salib Huber: 23:43

There are two great studies, one from 2012 and one from just this year. That is the problem. There are two great studies, one from 2012 and one from just this year.

Jenn Salib Huber: 23:52

That I always like to point out as examples of behaviors versus weight. And one it looked at people across various BMI spectrums, which, again, we don't love BMI, but it's a way to categorize people in research, so it is what it is. So, but you know, if we look at people across different BMIs and look at their health outcomes and I think this first one was looking at mortality risk of dying the things that were most protective were not smoking, limiting alcohol or having no alcohol, having five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, which a serving? Most people get intimidated when we talk about like five servings, but like a serving is half a cup of most and then of either fruits or vegetables or a cup of leafy greens. Is it the same in Australia?

Jenn Salib Huber: 24:41

Uh yeah, two foot five each, right, so for most people it's actually they're doing better. You're probably doing better than you think you are, is what I'm trying to say. If you hear that number five and you think, oh gosh, I can never do that, I would bet there's a good chance you're probably doing better than you think you are but that and moving your body regularly. I think in this particular study it was a cross section and they looked at people who had three kind of workouts or exercise sessions a week and when those things were looked at, weight was really not significant at all.

Jenn Salib Huber: 25:15

When you look at it.

Pia : 25:16

Even the postcode will tell you more about your health, where you live, than your weight, and I tell patients that your weight is the least interesting thing about you. You've got so much other information and the studies. It's an association, it's not causation. So you know, sometimes I will get the patients to say, you know, if their doctors are really pushing back, saying, do thin people get their knees looked at or do thin people get cancer? You know, yeah, can you treat me like I'm a thin person?

How to Talk to Your Doctor About Weight-Neutral Health 

Jenn Salib Huber: 25:58

so one question yeah, so another way to phrase that question is to ask your doctor. If you're being told weight loss is the only answer is, what advice would you give to a thin person? How would you treat a person who is in a smaller body and that sometimes, um and it's not meant to be confrontational I think it can be said with a very respectful, inquisitive, just, honest question. Tone is my weight or a person's body is never going to be 100% the cause of anything, and so that's where, again, the weight neutrality is so hard to reinforce.

But when we look at outcomes for health, it really isn't the most important factor most of the time Because, like you said, postcode, which comes down to income, access to health care, public health resources, like all of those things, right? So when you see people in their 80s or 90s, pia, and they're still focused on weight, are you able to get them to kind of shift their perspective.

Pia : 27:21

Not in the consultation that we have, unfortunately, but we talk. Talk about muscle. I don't even talk about weight and I will say we're here to increase your muscle. You know, it's like I'm I pretend I'm a sports dietitian, so we've got the physios working on your muscle and then I'm I'm the dietitian coming in to make sure that your body's at its best performance. I think that's the only like it is so complex and nuanced. We don't have the. What do you mean? Weight doesn't, weight's not important.

Jenn Salib Huber: 27:58

And I wanted to bring that up because so often people will come to me and say I don't even know where to start with all of this. But I see my mother, my aunt, my whatever, still dieting in their 80s or 90s, and I've shared this story before and I'm going to share it again because I think it really drives home the point.

Jenn Salib Huber: 28:17

And I've shared this story before and I'm going to share it again because I think it really drives home the point. I was working with somebody last year and her mother passed away and on her mother's bedside table were all of these diet books. But that wasn't the and her mother was in her 80s or 90s, I can't remember now, but that wasn't. What really kind of struck home for her was that a couple of days after her mother died, a new diet book was delivered. Her mother had been literally dieting until the day she died, looking for the next best diet, looking for the one that would work. And you know diets are a perfect example of same shit different day.

Breaking Free from Diet Culture in Midlife

Jenn Salib Huber: 28:53

You and I have been doing this long enough to know that there is nothing unique about any diet. It's either low carb, low cal, low fat, like it's high protein there is. They call it calories. Yeah, yep, you know, they just put a different spin on it. But they're all diets and we both have enough experience and if you talk to any dietitian who has done this long enough, we have literally decades of experience to say diets don't work. You cannot force yourself to follow a plan to cut out foods that you love, to only eat certain foods and never eat other foods for more than a few days, weeks, maybe months at best. Then, and then, as soon as that stops, the relief that your brain and your body experience will make it harder to ever do again.

Pia : 29:48

And it's so hard for people, I think, to believe that, even though they know it's true I think you've got a bit of better chance with your family, because you're seeing them often and little snippets, you know. If they start talking about a diet it's like oh boring, have we got another subject? You know, how is this diet going to be any different? You know mum, sort of thing, or yeah, it's like how you know. Sometimes, if I do get that chance, it's how do you want people to feel about you? That's why I love your. The values work. What people remember you more about how you've made them feel you know.

Pia : 30:32

So if you're sprouting on off your latest diet and that person doesn't really want to hear about it, you know you're not making that or commenting on their body. That's not making someone feel good. You may comment. I love that, you may. You know, like if you comment on somebody's body that they've lost weight, they know that if they've gained weight, they don't say anything. So it's like I know if you, if I hear someone commenting on somebody's body when they've lost weight, it means I'm watching you. I've noticed that you lose weight, but I also know when you gain weight, but I won't say anything because that's impolite an interesting thing happened to me as I was like undieting.

Jenn Salib Huber: 31:19

So it's been a little over 10 years now since I really kind of dived into, you know, the intuitive eating space. But in my own work of unlearning, you know, what I thought I knew about health and bodies and things like that was tackling my own internalized fat phobia. You know, for a long time there was this. It's okay for everyone else, but it still doesn't feel okay for me, and I always talk about that because I think it's important to know that your own body acceptance journey has to be happening in parallel to what you believe about bodies in general, and so the interesting thing that happened to me was that I actually stopped noticing people's bodies, so it was part of our programming.

Pia : 32:04

Because you've taken the worth of their appearance in their body. They're much more than that.

The Mental Side of Health—Beyond Diet and Exercise

Jenn Salib Huber: 32:10

Yeah, so I don't notice people's bodies anymore in the way that I used to. I notice if somebody has a lot of joy, if somebody is having a lot of fun, if somebody is clearly living their best life. You know, I notice that. I notice when people feel sad, obviously, but I don't notice what their body looks like.

Jenn Salib Huber: 32:33

And this was really striking to me a couple of years ago, because I ran into somebody that I hadn't seen in a long time and their body had changed significantly. They had lost a lot of weight, and I actually didn't notice. And she called me out on it and she said don't you notice anything different about me? And when, at force with the question, I could see it, but it was no longer my default. And so it is so important, I think, for all of us to realize that the world that we live in really, you know, implants this fat phobia into us, this fear of larger bodies, this fear of having a larger body, becoming a larger body, and that means that we value thinness as a society and as a culture. So when we are choosing to step out of that framework, that narrative, that paradigm, we need to do work on really unraveling that and, you know, forming this new belief system that does not equate weight and worth and weight and health.

Pia : 33:41

And I have seen so many patients that tell me that they were the sickest they've ever been in their life, with some, you know, gut issues and they've been the thinnest but they got the most compliments. And it's just when society is just so wrong.

Pia : 33:59

Yeah, absolutely, and it's just when society is just so wrong. Yeah, absolutely my sister-in-law. When I tried to explain the health at every size to my sister-in-law, she said you know, you're right. I commented on a lady that had lost some weight and told her she looked amazing and then found out three weeks later she committed suicide. So you really do not know what's going on in a person's body if they've lost weight, but we always assume that they've been trying to lose weight. I mean, how, what do you? Sometimes, if I see somebody and I've, you know whether they're either expecting a compliment or something about their weight I think the first thing I'd say is how are you, how do you feel? What are you feeling, engaging in an idea, and if they start talking about oh yes, this new diet, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay, that's good for you.

Jenn Salib Huber: 34:58

We talk about diets like the weather, right. Yes, especially when a group of women get together and women's bodies it is, and it's crazy. It's just crazy to me, because what we look like, it's truly the least interesting thing about it. Yes, absolutely.

Pia : 35:16

And I don't think it's as much for men. I don't think, no, I don't think it's as much for men. I don't think. No, I don't think so. You probably would have seen that um kanye with and bianca uh dress at the oh gosh, yeah, I think I saw bits of it imagine if that was role.

Pia : 35:34

I mean, I'm not going to go into that's another topic, but imagine if that was the other way around. Imagine if it was the male. They'd get arrested, wouldn't they? But society thinks it's okay to comment on people's bodies. Pick it apart.

Jenn Salib Huber: 35:50

The objectification of women's bodies is definitely another episode, but it's definitely part of the weight-centric conversation.

Pia : 36:01

Yeah, the pressure that we need to lose weight, you know to be attractive, I mean, sometimes it's connection too. You've got to look at if everyone else is doing. I feel connected.

Jenn Salib Huber: 36:16

Yeah, belonging right. We feel like this is what we want to do to fit in. But, as Brene Brown says, the opposite of fitting in is belonging. So if you are trying to change yourself to fit into a group, you're never going to belong. Belonging is being able to show up as you are and be accepted for who you are, and all bodies should be able to do that. We shouldn't have to change our body to feel comfortable.

How to Embrace Body Acceptance and Find Joy in Midlife

Pia : 36:43

And that pressure of you've let yourself go. Yeah, I often and I think no, you've let yourself be.

Jenn Salib Huber: 36:53

Yes, yes.

Jenn Salib Huber: 36:57

This has been amazing, pia, thank you. Thank you for sharing. Well, that went quick. I was so scared to come and talk. I love having conversations and I always say I love story sessions because this is the real life experience and whether it's an individual, whether it's a healthcare practitioner or somebody who can really relate to both our stories are how we learn from each other, and I'm such a big believer in storytelling as a really a tool for change because we need to be able to see and recognize ourself in other stories and also, you know, see where people are going in their own story, to feel, maybe, inspired to change our own.

So thank you for sharing your, your personal experience, your professional experience, and I'm very excited to hear your answer to what do you think is the missing ingredient in midlife Fun, fun, oh my gosh.

Pia : 37:58

I've been serious way toolife Fun, oh my gosh. And I've been serious way too long.

Jenn Salib Huber: 38:03

When this episode comes out, I want to share the picture, the silly picture, of you and I in front of the Coliseum in Italy. I think it was like the first photo bomb, the first of many photo bombs, because when I think of fun, pia, you definitely are, you come to mind, and because you're a lot of fun, it's another one of my values. Awesome, Well, you live it very well, thank you. Thanks for joining me, pia, you bring the fun out of me.

Jenn Salib Huber: 38:37

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the midlife feast. For more non-diet, health, hormone and general midlife support, click the link in the show notes to learn how you can work and learn from me. And if you enjoyed this episode and found it helpful, please consider leaving a review or subscribing, because it helps other women just like you find us and feel supported in midlife.