🥨 Assessing Your Eating Pattern and Naming Emotions with the Regular Eating Guide

Ever looked at the clock and realized, omg. I forgot to eat?

It happens. And the impacts on energy, focus, and well-being are real. 

I’m excited to share the first episode in a three-part series on regular eating, with a closer look at a free training I’m offering: The Regular Eating Guide.

This process is designed to help you assess your eating patterns and provide tools to create a gentle schedule that nourishes both your body and mind.

Tune in to hear:

• Why beginning with an assessment is an essential step to starting behavior change

• How concepts like Intuitive Eating and Mindful Eating don’t always connect if you’re neurodivergent

• An exploration of alexithymia, or difficulty naming our emotions, as an important piece of neurodivergent eating

• How to mark the beginning of this new phase with some ritual or magic

• The assessment and journaling prompts to begin the Regular Eating process

🍝 Download the FREE Regular Eating Guide

📮 Sign up for the Departure Menopause EMAIL LIST for Future Episode & Updates

Episode References & Resources:

More on alexithymia from Neurodivergent Insights and Embrace Autism

• Transcript

  [Melinda Staehling]

  Welcome to Departure Menopause, a podcast about weight-inclusive and neurodivergent-affirming care in the menopause transition. I'm your host, Melinda Staehling. On this podcast we discuss making compassionate health and positive body image change through practical steps and gentle care. To stay connected and go deeper, head to the show notes to subscribe and download the Regular Eating Guide.

  Hi friends. Welcome, or welcome back, Melinda here. Welcome to Departure Menopause, a podcast about a more neurodivergent-affirming and weight-inclusive, positive body image menopause. I'm enjoying kicking these episodes off with my own personal perimeno updates. And this week, this week it's a Weiriod week. My BFF, Jen and I are all in our chat about Weiriods or weird periods, and we want you in on the action.

  Uh, weiriod is one of those perimenopause periods or like in this case, an, in- betweener. Is it ovulation? Is it not ovulation? Did I mess up my hormone therapy? It's a Weiriod. What can I say? In my Menopause Society book, they say, quote, any abnormal uterine bleeding needs to be evaluated. So call my nurse practitioner is on my list. I'm using the podcast as some gentle accountability. I will do this.

  Our last two episodes have been a bit more on the education side, and I wanted to spin things a little this week and have some more conversational chats with you. So for these next three episodes, we're going to do a play-by-play along with a training that's on my website.

  It's available for free. You've heard me intro it in the first couple episodes, and it's called the Regular Eating Guide. If you're finding yourself caught in a cycle of daytime restriction and then feel challenged with evening eating, this is a free training for you. The guide includes a list of prompts to help you dig deeper into why your eating might be irregular, assessments to work through, and tools to gently assist you in planning your specific, yet flexible eating structure going forward.

  Link to the guide is in the show notes and at departure menopause club slash regular dash eating dash guide. As always, we do mention eating disorders, disordered eating and body image distress in this show, take good care of yourselves, check in with your body and listen when it's the right time for you.

  I've talked in the last couple episodes about the Regular Eating Guide, and here's where we're going to get into it. So you can listen along, but for my visual folks, you can also follow along if you like and download the guide.

  [00:03:00]

  And the guide is a Notion document, and you can either view the guide as a static webpage or you can set up a Notion account, which is super easy and free to do. You can copy the guide into your notion workspace, and then you'll be able to make your own notes on it and personalize it and take it from there.

  So we're going to take our time over the next month or so to go over this idea of regular eating, and if you're coming along with me in real time and not listening from the future, this pace makes a lot of sense. This isn't just something that happens for most of us overnight because there's some learning and unlearning and practicing to do.

  Our ultimate outcome with this guide is for you to select a structure for eating each day, and then we also have another goal, and that's for an emotional shift to take place around how you're feeling about your eating. So we're going to do some excavating and start out, instead of just diving in and me handing you a cookie cutter program, and here's three meals and three snacks, we are going to think about where we're at now and what the challenges and obstacles are at this point in our menopause journey with eating, and then we're going to develop this structure for ourselves and try it out.

  You also might do this, you know, rinse, repeat going forward, like if you change jobs or have a life shift, which so many of us do right now in these midlife years, we can come back to these ideas and recalibrate for some of us. I wonder if it's been a while since we really thought through our eating and how that tracks for present day life.

  So let's take a look at where we're situated right now in time and space, and develop some ideas for how we might do more of what I'm calling regular eating.

  My first disclaimer today, because you know that's how I wanna start, is that there's no morality around eating regularly or not. We're not placing moral judgment like this is a good or better way to do it, and whatever is happening now is not. We're not here placing moral judgment around what we eat, and we're not doing it with how often we eat either, especially now when the world is wild and every week is some new, fresh chaos. Let's not place moral judgment and think this is a right, wrong, good, bad kind of thing.

  I made this guide because I saw a specific challenge that my mostly neurodivergent clients are working with in midlife, but that's not going to mean that everyone is on the same timeline or that this is the method for you.

  Also here to mention, of course, that there are frameworks out there like intuitive eating, there's mindful eating. This is not new to come up with these concepts, but I want to talk a little more specifically to a perimenopausal neurodivergent group.

  [00:06:00]

  Intuitive eating encompasses a lot, and part of that is hunger and fullness cues, and sometimes those aren't so accessible if you're neurodivergent, mindful eating can feel out of reach for people that might feel more grounded with having support during eating, like watching YouTube or chatting with a friend.

  So I made this guide that helps us create a basic structure for eating each day. You might ultimately end up with having a few different structures for work days or off days, or you might have different structures for low spoons and higher spoons days if you connect with spoon theory. Going into this discussion around regular eating with the knowing that if this hasn't been the case for you, regular eating for the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years, I wanna emphasize and say it can be challenging to work on. I would not be surprised if you feel some sort of resistance, which is totally usual to making any sort of change, and we're gonna get into that.

  I also want to be upfront with this process I'm about to describe. It's not going to be as straightforward if you have or have experienced food insecurity, food insecurity, if it's in present day or also in the past. It can lead people to more binge and restriction type, eating, and a more challenging relationship with food.

  We're going to consider a lot of things that make eating more challenging, like weight focus, history of restriction, binge eating, chronic dieting, neurodivergent eating differences, disability, race access, but food insecurity is there, and I don't wanna gloss over that.

  First, I wanna get your beginning assessment about where you're at with eating and what you've tried and what you're doing now.

  I think it's in the general culture to jump into something new and skip this step of sort of locating ourselves and where we're at and saying, here's what I'm thinking and feeling about this subject right now, not 10 years ago me, but in the life that I'm living today. So this step is the assessment phase, and we're thinking about our relationship with eating in a more usual ish pattern and how that's going to go both literally throughout the day from maybe a more quantitative lens like did I eat four to six-ish times today?

  And also more of an emotional state. Am I feeling grounded and confident and creative and connected with my choices, or are they feeling more towards the range of anxiety or overwhelm or stress? I took all of these emotions right off the feelings wheel, which is linked in the guide, and here's where I'm going to bring up the subject of alexithymia and being able to name your emotions.

  [00:09:00]

  That word alexithymia stems from the Greek translation of without words for emotions. Alexithymia is difficulty with getting in touch with and naming your emotions, and more specifically, not really being able to distinguish emotions from body sensations.

  And I know that this piece of the assessment can bring up some feelings and for some of us, those are harder to describe. I know I'm Alexithymic, and it's only been through therapy and looking at the feelings wheel and practice that this has improved for me and really understanding more about what this is.

  And it's important here because the stats are in general population around one in 10 people are alexithymic. However, with the neurodivergent population, around half of autistic people are alexithymic and something like 20% of a ADHDers. So this is not a small part of the population that struggles with identifying emotions.

  I'm going to link a couple of references for that in the show notes, which I'm taking from Neurodivergent Insights and Embrace Autism.

  And I don't want this to stop you from trying out some regular eating. So if we're beginning with our assessment and accessing feelings isn't the easiest, it's okay. I have trouble with this, and it's something we can develop if and when we want.

  And the last thing I'm going to talk to you about here today before we actually get into our assessment, is marking the beginning of your regular eating. If you want to engage in your regular eating process and wanna go for it with this assessment, that's cool. If you want to ignore everything I'm saying and you've made it this far, also fine.

  However, I do think it's kind of nice to mark this as a new phase, like to iterate a new idea and become this next version of your eater. So I can suggest that if you'd like to go light some candles or pull out your tarot cards, this is the time if you're into them, yeah. Get out those cards, whether they're dusty or they're well used.

  You could pull a single card and keep it close to announce your passage into this next phase. Or you could do a nice past, present, future spread, which is a classic.

  If you're not a card person, maybe add a little magic here. Another way you might light a candle while you're doing some journaling or have a nice snack and beverage with a crystal, or make a regular eating altar in the kitchen. I'm all for adding a little woo in the hope that in time you can help make this special and make it yours.

  So I'm going to go into my prompts for the assessment, which I've kept pretty simple. These are more, I would say, the quantitative assessment prompts. We're going to use a scale of one to five, with one being disagree, not satisfied, and five being strongly agree, very satisfied.

  [00:12:00]

  Number one, how satisfied am I with my morning and afternoon eating? Not satisfied to, very satisfied. Number two, I know how to eat pretty consistently in the morning and afternoon to support my mind and body, and number three. I am confident that I can mostly follow through on a meal schedule I set for myself.

  Okay, and so now we have a few journaling prompts where you can choose your own adventure. What are the current challenges I'm facing with eating regularly? What have I already tried to address these challenges? How will I feel differently when my eating day goes mostly according to plan. Here's where you might want to access your feelings wheel, and what drives my interest around eating more regularly.

  So this was the first step in our regular eating journey, and I like to think that we have a couple more weeks to go forth and assess, and then we will reconvene and talk more about what we've learned, more of the nutrition education and psychoeducation around eating.

  And then we're going to get into perimenopause and neurodivergent specifics of why this can feel more challenging. So thank you for joining me today. I appreciate you for listening as always, and taking your time to tune in here, keep departing from the usual and menopause podcast. Art is by Barb Burwell.

  Thanks so much for listening. You can find show notes and links in our episodes and on Departure Menopause Club. If you enjoyed this show, I'd appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. Be sure to subscribe and download the regular eating guide. I'll see you next time on Departure Menopause.