The Well Nourished Woman with Sue Ann Gleason

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have. Hello and welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson, and today we have an amazing guest, Sue Ann Gleason. And Sue Ann is a food lover, a food writer, a food based healer, heart centered marketing strategist, and the founder of Conscious Bites, Nutrition, well Nourished Woman and Chocolate for Breakfast. And I love suanne's message and her work and her energy. I mean, if you go to her website, you can just feel her authenticity and her passion for this and for women being nourished. So welcome, Sue Ann. Thank you.

I'm so happy to be here with you. Thanks, Alexandra. Beautiful introduction.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. I'm so excited to dive into this conversation because we have so much, so many extraordinary topics to explore. And I want to start off with a little bit about your personal journey with food. Like where. Yeah, just give us a little snapshot of how you've become who you are today.

Yeah. I always describe it in the context of a food paradox because really, this is like the second half of life for me, and it's also reclaiming food. So I grew up in an Italian American family, and I had a grandmother who, you know, made the most amazing homemade sauce for her spaghetti, and she made her own bread and she made her own pasta pies. I mean, she was just always cooking, right? And I had a father who just loved food and, you know, took me grocery shopping with him to all the markets. And so I was surrounded by this beautiful, rich, very rich cultural history around food. And then I had a mother who was on the perpetual diet, you know, a lot of restriction around food. I always joke that she had this lifetime membership to Weight Watchers, right? And in addition to that, she had this backup reinforcement to a program called Diet Workshop. So she was always counting something, right? Calories or points or fat grams. But as long as I can remember, she was always grossly overweight. You know, I mean, really overweight. And I think it was a function of the dieting. But as a young girl, you know, growing up in what I've now called the weight loss war zone, right? I grew up with this fear that I had the same body type and that unless I really, really started to watch what I ate, I too, would end up in this weight loss war zone with her. And so I had a really tortured relationship around food because on one hand, I wanted to be part of the celebration for my father. Every meal was a celebration for my grandmother too. And on the other hand, I was in this fear based model that my mother lived in where we had to watch everything we put into our mouths. And it really wasn't until I started doing this work that I realized in the mirroring, the looking at the women that I was working with that had all kinds of disordered eating, not even necessarily the women who had eating disorders, but just women in general and the way that we look at food. And I saw for the first time how much, how conflicted my whole life had been around food and how I was always living in the extremes, like either extreme pleasure or extreme deprivation, because they go, you know, they're flip sides of the same coin. So anyway, it's been a rather interesting paradox. And now, you know, what it is for me is that at one point I just decided, I don't want to live that way anymore. And it took being immersed in a culture of holistic health counselors, nutritionists, to really show me that even the choice of the second career was extreme. Does that make sense? So this is me reclaiming food. It's reclaiming my heritage.

That's beautiful. I love that too. The celebration of food. Like so many of us women, we don't experience food as celebration. It's. There is a war with it. And I feel like there's. I haven't met any woman who has not had a disordered relationship with food. There's just not that many of them.

Right. It's a culture. I mean, we are, it's our culture. It's our food culture. In this country especially, you know, we grow up fearing food. And also it so connected with this whole body image. You know, like, we don't really grow up honoring our bodies or loving our bodies. And we certainly don't grow up listening to our bodies. We listen to everything else, everyone's formula or prescription, but we don't check in with, does this make sense for me? Does this feel right? Am I happy? You know, at the table? And that for me is the. Well, it's the guidepost of everything I do. Am I happy? Am I loving what I eat? Is this something I can do for the rest of my life?

I love that and I love the reclaiming the food. I was just thinking with my husband the other day, I was talking about, I'm very much. I've been in nutrition for 15 years and food has been an amazing inspiration and amazing struggle for me. And I'm Like I feel like I want to just really revamp my relationship with food. And he looked at me and he was like, your relationship with food? What does that even mean? And I was talking to him about it and he had no, he just, he, you know, being the masculine, he's like, I don't. Relationship with food, you just eat or for fuel, right? Yeah, like you just eat when you're hungry and that's it. And I was like, no, I don't. I eat for other reasons. But I just thought it's so fascinating the difference between. And men have their own issues, but the difference between the masculine and feminine in this relationship with food. It is a relationship, right?

Yeah, it absolutely is a relationship with food.

Can you talk more about that of like how we have a nourishing relationship with our food?

You know, it's interesting because when I work with women, right, either in the well nourished women inner circle or individually, the last question I ask them because I have them fill out kind of like an anecdotal survey, like I want to really feel my way into their relationship with food. And the last question I ask them is, so how are you and food doing these days? And you know, almost always the response I get is, well, you know, we kind of have this love hate relationship, you know, so it is a relationship because we either view it as have to eat. I mean, so many say, I just wish I didn't have to eat, I wish I didn't have to eat. I wish I didn't have to put this food in my body. So for me, it's a relationship that is completely tied into your relationship. My relationship with myself. Because until I love myself, you know, as deeply and graciously as I love the people who I feed, my children, my husband, whoever I'm feeding, I am not going to have a relationship with food that is nurturing or nourishing. Does that make sense? So for me, it's like so directly tied into self love, you know, and deeply. So like I have to really deeply love myself enough to nourish myself. We would never think of not feeding our children our pets, right? We would never think of skipping a meal. Oh, you don't need to eat today, sweetie. We could never think of subjecting our pets or our children to a cleanse, right? But look at what we've done with cleansing in this health world of ours. Like, what are we cleaning? Are we clean yet? Right? Like, if we're eating beautiful food, why would we be cleansing that out of our bodies? To me, it's gotten so confusing and conflicting. The information out there is. It's anti nourishment. Right?

Yeah.

Okay.

So this is very interesting because there are so many diets, and I read on your website you're into the raw food and kind of just your journey of where, how you evolved. And I'm very, you know, I've done raw food, I've done bodybuilding, I've done Paleo, like, everything. I've experimented. And a lot of it was I had some skin issues, so I was figuring that out. And so how do we navigate finding our.

Right.

Nourishment plan or our right way of eating? And then also with the. There are so many challenges that people are having with their skin, with their digestive system, you know, with Candida, with a lot of things that.

Yeah.

What's your thought on that?

You know, it's interesting because I think you're right. You know, I think that we do have to find, you know, the nutritional system that works for us. But for me, the thing that I say to people is I don't want us to get too attached to a food identity because the minute we get attached to the food identity, and believe me, I was an extreme. You know, everything I do, I do in the extreme, right? So when I was a raw foodist, I was eating raw food in the middle of winter, and I joke, I had snowflakes on my eyelashes and I was making raw food. I was freezing. I was pining for my grandmother's soup, but I was going to do it, right? So what I saw in that mirror is that when my food life became attached to an identity, there was no room to change my mind. Because what might work for me today around clearing my skin or helping me feel more vital or helping me with my thyroid issue may not even be the food. For one thing, it might be a total coincidence that my skin cleared up when I was doing the raw food diet. Because you know what? I'm not doing a raw food diet right now. And I'm pretty. You know, I don't want to say. I don't want to use the word lenient, but I'm pretty flexible right now, you know, and my skin looks just as good now as it did when I was doing the raw food diet. Imagine that. Right? So we don't know. So I think it's like a constant place of going into what do we desire, you know, if it's real food, you know, for me, if it's real food, it serves me. So I had a really interesting Call last night. I'm doing a clueless in the kitchen course and I asked them to let me know if you are following a certain nutritional system. Let me know so that I can give you substitutions because we want to honor this. If someone has chosen to be dairy free, I want to teach them how to make brazil nut milk. If someone is experimenting with grains or they're gluten free, I want to know, are you celiac or are you gluten free because someone else told you you need to be? Because if that's the case, I want you to just experimen experiment with a wheat berry. I want to know if the mouth feel of a wheat berry satisfies you. And then I want you to check in with your body. How'd you feel after you ate it, right? If you felt great, then maybe you can eat wheat berries. And wouldn't that be wonderful to expand your repertoire rather than come from this place of fear where I can't eat that, I can't eat that because she said I can't eat that. He doesn't eat that. And how, you know, where's the joy in that, right? Where's the joy in eating? So can we approach nutrition and food with curiosity every single day, knowing that our body changes and that we can also change our mind? Like, I may decide to be vegan again. I doubt it. You know, I don't think I'll do that again because again, that's too rigid for me. But I may decide I don't want to eat meat again and then I give myself permission to not eat meat. But then maybe my hair is going to start falling out, you know, or my nails aren't going to feel good and I'm going to be thinking, well, maybe I need some animal protein so I can change my mind. I think we just have to give ourselves permission to experiment and then change our mind.

Yeah, I love that. And it's such, you know, I was pregnant, obviously, I have a child, 18 month old now. And when I was pregnant I was pretty much vegan for most of my pregnancy and I'd been vegan for seven years before that. And when I got pregnant I had some eggs and some goat's cheese, but that was pretty much it. Yeah, two weeks and I had. My skin was still breaking out and I was doing grains and, you know, dates and high sugar. Anyways, two weeks before my child was born, we named him Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And you know, all life is an experiment. I'm like, okay, if life is an Experiment. I haven't eaten meat in seven years. I'm gonna start eating meat. So I did it and my skin completely cleared up.

Amazing.

It was amazing. But like you said, I was very attached to kind of the raw food and the cleansing and the vegan dogma and there's many great things about it. But being willing to do that experiment literally changed me and my family's life. Like, it's amazing the benefits we've had of adding more animal products to our diet, which I'm like, oh, gosh. It's just, you know, it's a total like, the food identity, I think is so huge for so many, right.

Do you see it, like, always amused? Facebook is such an interesting social study, isn't it? So I'm always amused when I see in a thread, right, that instead of saying, oh, I made the most beautiful, whatever banana bread, I made the most beautiful vegan gluten free banana bread. It's like we wear it as a badge if we don't say it's gluten free or vegan, it's not a good banana bread.

Right?

And. And so I, you know, I chuckle because I was there. I was the same way. And you know, you asked me about my story and I think one of the biggest turning points for me was, and this is, this is one of the catalysts for going to school for nutrition. Many schools for nutrition was during the last couple years of my teaching career, my colleague and best friend fell into the abyss of anorexia. And this is, of course, when I'm embracing a raw food d clean can you get right? And as I'm watching her literally, literally starve herself to death, right? And no, she didn't die. But while I'm watching this horrible self deprivation cycle, I realized that nothing is bad. Nothing I can put in my mouth is wrong. It is food. Of course I'm going to get the most beautiful food I can. But the minute I start judging the food as being right or wrong, I'm going into a place of not being nourished, for one. And also I'm not being respectful of nourishment or the meaning of what it is to nourish the body. I think coming face to face with that and watching the degree to which someone will starve themselves because it's a brain disorder, right? Like once we get to that place where we have not eaten, you know, it becomes a mental illness. And I think witnessing that firsthand was such a powerful thing for me to see and then look at my own life. Around food, you know, and think, no extreme is good. Yet in those early stages, it was really difficult for me to see that because I would sit there very smugly too and I would look at someone giving a talk, say, in New York City on. I think it was a talk. I remember it was a talk on hypothyroid issues, which I had. I think she was following nourishing traditions, right? She was following the western Christ. And I was like raw vegan. Totally. And I was just sitting there. I could even see my body posture. I was like, really? But then I remember I would look at her. She had gorgeous skin. She was beautiful, right? And I can remember the conflicting thoughts. I wasn't letting them surface. But I kept thinking, how could she look so beautiful, right? Because she wasn't eating as cleanly as I was. So truly, I think we get just kind of warped when we get too close to our food identity or to the dogma. We have to just stop doing that. Like, for me, the whole reason that I do what I do is so we can just stop that now, right? Nobody wants to eat with a food evangelist or not. We do not want to go out to dinner with you, believe me. We do not want to go out to dinner, dinner with you because you're going to examine that menu and you're probably going to end up with the iceberg lettuce because you won't touch anything else on the menu, right?

Yeah, totally.

No fun to eat with you.

Yeah, it's so fascinating. It is no fun and it's no fun for us and I love that. And we have such similar stories and journeys. It's so awesome because I listened to Sally Fowin talk about butter and I was, you know, raw vegan, you know, whatever. And I was like, she has no idea what she's talking about. That is like ridiculous. Like butter. I mean, come on. She has no. She's just throwing her out the window now. This morning I had chocolate for breakfast. Butter and chocolate and chai tea blended up. I'm like, you never know, you know, you just gotta be open to. I mean. Yeah, it's so interesting, the judgment of other people, right? Because that comes back to the way you were saying, the judgment of ourselves, the lack of self, love and we want to have the answers and be perfect and that's it.

I mean, that's it. It's the projection, right? It's the projection of that shadow side that we're not willing to look at. So let's just judge everybody else. I said to somebody. You know, I really working on the copy on this website. And I said, you know, it wasn't until I faced the shadows and contradictions in my own story. And I don't think that that's easy to do, you know, like, maybe I wouldn't have done that had I not been faced with a friend who is starving herself, you know, to death. I don't know. But when we face our own shadows and contradictions, then we can kind of lighten up and laugh in the way that we're laughing now. You will never see a post from me saying I made a vegan sugar free, you know, whatever the villain is at the time. Paleo friendly, carbohydrate free. Like, you know, by the time you take all that stuff out, like, what do you have left? You know, we can't even eat a banana because it's got sugar in it. Like, really a banana? I just love bananas. I had a client, just a dear heart, she said something like, you know, having such a hard time because my kids, you know, like, I eat healthy and they don't want to eat healthy. And I'm thinking, you know, if we say to them, eat this, this is good for you. Right? They're not going to eat it. But if we make ourselves a chocolate smoothie for breakfast and we throw in an avocado and we throw in some delicious hemp seed and whatever, we make this rich, creamy, dreamy chocolate milkshake, right? We start drinking this and say, oh my God, this is amazing. What kid wouldn't say, give me some of that? But if we put that down and say, drink this, it's healthy. They probably won't even drink the chocolate milkshake.

No.

Love what we eat. Yeah.

And kids are great demonstrations of that, aren't they?

They are.

I mean, my kid is. He's a. I mean, he. I made my butter little concoction and he had like half a tablespoon of butter this morning because he likes to eat butter. I'm like, there's part of me that's like, I cannot give my kid butter. Oh my gosh, he's eating butter, but he knows what he wants. Like, he loves salmon and he loves spinach. I mean, he is so completely clear and loves it. And we haven't forced him to eat anything or not eat anything. We've just given him options. And it's so astonishing. And also for me, like a little saddening, like that we. Saddening is a word, but I've just felt it in my heart this morning of how we've lost that, of like, being able to trust our instincts, of what our body needs. Can you talk more about that? Of like, the. The brain and the mind telling us what we should eat and then really just like sinking into our body and saying, this is what my body needs. How do we make that embodiment happen?

I think that's the trickiest, most complex conversation we can have because we are being indoctrinated from the time we're eight or nine. Like, when you look at the statistics where our girls start dieting, like 8 years old, 9. Because they're listening to the conversations of their mothers, right? And their mothers have been indoctrinated their entire life about, you know, some expert somewhere telling them what to eat. So I think the conversation just keeps coming back to there's another way, you know, and that we lead by example and that we hope, you know, that when we have these conversations, they'll sound enticing enough that people will just be ready to give up the head place and start trusting the wisdom of the body and the example that I give. And this is so true. I mean, this is the truth that I'm telling. Like, I couldn't make this stuff up, right? All of my adult life, I was struggling to be this weight that I thought I should be given the charts, given my body size, my height, you know, and for some reason, I think it was like, for me, I really thought I should weigh 114 pounds. Who knows where I got that number, right? I'm five foot two. I have a small build. Always my body wanted to be like 120, 122 to me. That was huge, right? Well, when I finally stopped the battle, right, when I stepped out of the weight loss ward zone and said, okay, let's just see where it goes. When I eat beautiful food, right? Whole foods, I don't eat a lot of garbage. But I just watched the body over the course of maybe five or six years. Guess where it ended up?

114 pounds.

No, between 120 and 122. Now, if you look at me, like, I know you can't really see much of me here, but I'm in really good shape, you know, Like, I don't have a six pack ab. I am not. Like, you don't look at me and say, whoa, you know, hard body or whatever the word is, right? But I'm really at a healthy weight. My body found that weight and it fluctuates with the seasons impeccably. So, like, I can tell you winter, I'm probably, you know, that 120, 122, spring and summer, without anything except eating with the seasons, you know, and honoring my rhythm. It's usually, I don't know, it goes between 118, 120. So I'm always in that range that I fought against my whole life, thinking if I allowed myself to get to that range, it would continue to creep up and pretty soon I'd be my mother. Right. So it's trust. It's trust. It's the willingness to experiment. But even more so than that, it's the willingness to trust that the body has a deeper intelligence. You know, I don't think many women are ready to do that, at least not the women that I've met. But, oh, my goodness, do they want it? They want it. And so I see them trickling in, and then they come back. They move away, and they come back. And so I have great hope that by continuing this journey and just being an example of that, more and more women are finally going to, you know, I use that this phrase, take back their plates and say, enough. Just enough of this. I don't. I just simply don't want to live that way anymore. Right. Yes, totally.

And there's, like, such an allure. And I've had this, you know, there's the cleansing, you know, and I. I've done, like, every cleansing retreat out there. We care. Hippocrates, optimal health. I mean, like, I was, like, cleansing woman.

Yeah.

And little did I know that my body actually didn't handle wheat grass, which is hilarious. But there's this idea of the cleansing. I totally lost my train of thought.

Yeah, like, what are we cleaning? Is what I want to know. Yeah, like, what are we cleaning? And what does that do to, like, if we are supporting the organs of detoxification? Like, if we. If we look underneath the hood, so to speak, at what are the principles of good nutrition? What are the principles of detoxification? Like, if we want our bodies to detoxify, which they do very well on their own. Right. Then how do we support the organs of detoxification? Like, for me, if we're doing juice feasts, the body is not working in the way that it was structured to work in terms of taking the fiber and having the fiber. So what happens then when we return to food? You know, like, the things that I question are, oh, well, you're detoxing. You should feel miserable. Well, I don't know. Like, I don't think you should ever feel miserable. Right. Support health. And I'm not sure I want to feel miserable because I'm detoxing. Like, does that mean that I'm detoxing? There are too many chemicals rushing through my system. You know, they're detoxing at a speed that the body wasn't intending them to detox. So that's what I question, you know, like, are we supporting our organs of detoxification or are we following someone else's disordered. Right. Intention? Because who knows if just because someone is a celebrity or even a doctor, you know, that they really have the answer. They certainly don't have the answer for my body, particularly, you know, a man who's not lived in my body. Right.

Yeah.

It may work for you, but I don't know that it works for me. So part of this is courage. Part of it is being brave enough to take a stand and say, I so respect your decisions, especially if they're ethical decisions. I respect people who do not eat animal products. For years, I couldn't bring myself to. To eat animal products until my hair started falling out. I can't ignore that. You can't ignore that when your hair is in your hand. Like, well, okay, this is one of the signs that I might need some animal protein.

Right.

My nails were not firm. I've always had really good hard nails. My nails, you know, I mean, the signs were there. So even though ethically I didn't want to be eating animal products, you know, physically, my body was saying, but you do maybe need some. Right. So courage. That's what I say. It's the courage to take a stand for our body and to keep these conversations alive.

Yeah, I love that. The courage. And what you were saying, too, the cleansing. Because it is a very interesting thing, the cleansing. And why are you doing the cleansing? You know, for me, there was like, I wanted to cleanse and I wanted to feel amazing. But then there is maybe a thread or a bigger something that. It's about the weight.

Yes, it is about the weight.

Like you were saying.

Yeah, I said it. I wrote an article called the Real Dirt on Detox. And, you know, for me, it's no different than a diet. And what's so interesting about it is, you know, it's a cycle. It just sounds sexier, right? But think about these women who are doing things, cleanse. And this could have been you and me, right? Cleanse after cleanse after cleanse. So what do we do? It's a deprivation binge cycle. We cleanse. We kind of like really shock the body. The body's like, whoa, are you going to feed me? Like, when are you going to feed me real food again? And then we probably go off the other end, right? Because it is that kind of deprivation binge cycle. And so instead of learning how to eat beautifully for the rest of our lives in a way that supports our body, supports our skin, supports our hair, what we're doing is we're distracting ourselves by saying, oh, I'm going to eat all this now, because I'll be cleansing in the spring. It's almost time for the spring cleanse. And then we have the fall cleanse. And after that we have the winter cleanse. So it's a cycle of binging and purging, binging and purging. It is no different. We've just made it sound so much sexier. And we're making great money off it too, right? In the health industry. And if a doctor's running the cleanse, then it really must be right, Right? Yeah.

It's so interesting, like what happens. And this has been my practice of like not going back into the cleanse when I feel a little, a little lethargic or a little gained weight. Like there's that impulse in me to like, oh, I'll just go on a 30 day cleanse. Like, I'll just do that and I'll, I'll feel great. And like you said, and having the courage to say, you know what, I've done that enough. Like, I'm not gonna do that. And like you were saying, taking back your plate and just nourishing yourself when you're hungry and eating, when you're hungry and eating real food and not having this extreme diet or cleanse, like, it's so, it's so fascinating to me.

So the other thing I think about often, I had this conversation with someone the other night. I said to her, I said, can you find an anchor? And by that I meant, is there something in your life that will anchor you, that will bring you back when you start going into that place? Because we do, we get scared, right? I said, could your children be an anchor? Because children absorb, right? They absorb so much more than we. So if our children see us restricting food. And I watched this with my best friend, she had two small children, her. So started restricting food, son, you know, because they are, they're attuned to us, right? But you know, so there has to be some anchor, like, what model do I want it to live for my children? And that seems to be a pretty decent anchor for some. I like to Say it's an anchor for more. But I'm shocked to say even that is not an anchor, you know, and so it's kind of frightening that way, you know, it's really frightening. I think we need to put support structures around women. That's the work that I do, right? It's like I'm going to just keep inviting them into delicious and I'm going to try to find ways of building these communities that celebrate food rather than telling them how to eat or what to eat to stay in that place where they'll never age or never wr. I mean, this is part of aging, right? You can age gracefully and vibrantly, even with wrinkles and even with a bit of a belly, right? Embrace that body, even your belly. I mean, think about what that belly has done for you, right? It's given birth to your children, it digests your food, and sometimes it isn't completely flat. And then I just have to say, oh, how interesting, you know, a little bloated today. Oh, well, tomorrow will be different. Right? There's a. I pulled this poem out because, you know, I was looking at the things that we were going to discuss today and I just have to share this with you. May I share a poem? Absolutely. Okay. It's called Weathering and it's by Fleur Adcock. Literally thin skinned, I suppose. My face catches the wind off the snow line and flushes with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well, that was a metropolitan vanity. Wanting to look young forever to pass. Well, I was never a pre Raphaelite beauty, nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy men who need not be seen or who need only be seen with passable women. But now that I am in love with a place which doesn't care how I look or if I'm happy, happy is how I look and that is all. My hair will turn gray in any case. My nails chip and flake, my waist thicken and the years work all their usual changes. If my face is to be weather beaten as well, that's little enough. Lost a fair bargain for a year among lakes and fells when simply to look out of my window at the high pass makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what my soul may wear over its nude complexion. To me, and this was a woman who spent a year by the lakes, right? And to me, if we can shift this relationship to self, right? And to what we want our bodies and our faces to look like forever into this place of curiosity and again, just kind of wonder, you know, like I. I feel like it's that energy that radiates from our skin and from our eyes. Like, if I'm coming from a place of spaciousness and I look at myself with compassion, I really do love how I look. I'm so grateful that I think, how old am I? I'm 57, right? Like, I am not a yup, spring chicken, but I look in the mirror and I think, you know, 57, you're not bad.

Fabulous.

So, you know, like, who knows what I'll be at 67. But I hope I have that same, like, look in the mirror. I hope I have that same compassion to say, not bad for 67, you know, and loving what you eat. I love that.

Beautiful. So the as you were reading that poem, what came up for me too is this feeling that I think women, we have this hunger, like a deeper heart hunger, soul hunger. And we're trying to get the right image to not have the wrinkles to eat the right food. But there's. It's like we want more and we're trying to go for that. But can you talk about, like, what, what's going on for the women that you work with? Like, and I know I have this, like, when I go to food, there's a deeper hunger. Like it's a soul calling. So can you talk a little bit about that?

That's a multi layered question. So the hunger, what keeps coming up for me when I hear you ask this question is at least in the women that I'm working with is this. First of all, there is a hunger to be noticed and approved of and loved, right? And so we have somehow attached this being loved with being worthy of love. And somehow we're not worthy of love unless we're beautiful right now it gets really complex when we look in the mirror and we don't see ourselves as beautiful. Because if we don't see ourselves as beautiful, then we project that fear onto our partners, right? And then we live in this fear. Well, oh my gosh, if I age, if I get wrinkles, you know, or if my hair turns gray, he's not going to love me. My beloved will no longer love me. So to me, it's like this cycle of unloved, unloved. For me, that's what the hunger looks like. It's like we just want to be hungry to know that we're going to be okay, we're going to be loved. That this core need we have is to be loved and to be cherished, right? And who will cherish an aging woman? And yet when you look like I think back on this with such fondness. My first job, like I think I was 16, was in a retirement home and I worked in the kitchen and I served the same people my row, 30 people every night. I worked in this retirement home for a few years. And I remember this one couple, Ma and Pa Smith, and they were in their 90s, right? And they still held hands. And I used to watch them and think, this is just to witness this. They're 90 and they're in love, right? They're in love. And when I looked, you know, they had a birthday table each month. They would put the birthday people up in the front of the dining room and they would have steak, right? And Pa would be waving to Ma, and Ma Smith would be waving to Pa and he would bring her over a little piece of his steak or his apple pie. And what I'm struck by when I think back on that is that love is not about, I'm going to be beautiful forever, you know, But I think we have to trust our partners, you know, and if we are with a partner that cannot age with us and love us through this aging, we're with.

The wrong partner, right?

Like Pat, we're with the wrong partner. This is a natural process that we're going through, right? We're going to age. So when you speak of hunger, I just think it's just this hunger to be safe and to be loved and to be cherished. And we have somehow tangled that up with our vision of what beautiful is, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And do you think that we go for, potentially we go for food, whether it's craving or overeating or restriction or whatever kind of that disordered eating is in many ways because we're not being fulfilled in our life, like relationships or our career or whatever romance or deliciousness. Like, I think we as women, like, we want that celebration. So can you talk about that? Of.

Yeah, it's again, many layers here. So one, the more we restrict, right? There's going to be an equal and much greater binge at the other end of that. So that's a piece filling a void. That was me as an adolescent. So my most disordered eating occurred in adolescence when I was coming home to an empty house and a list, right? My mother left me the list. I remember this. I would binge on waffles. We had frozen waffles in the freezer and I would take those waffles out and it was like this out of body experience. I can remember watching myself gorgeous on frozen waffles, powdered sugar I say powdered sugar and chain, right? Like butter, layers of powdered sugar in these waffles. And I would just eat these, right? So it was filling that void. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be adolescence, right? Like, if there's any void. How do we fill voids? Right? We fill them with whatever we can to feel better. It's addictions, right? It could be food, it could be alcohol, it could be shopping. It doesn't matter. It's just like, you know, it's filling something that can't be filled. Right? And so beautifully tied into what are we doing in life? Are we happy with our work? Are we leaving space for our creative lives? Are we using up all of our creative energy in our work and not realizing that there's some creative energy to be found outside of work? And I hear this a lot with a lot of women that I work with are entrepreneurs who are indeed in love with their work. But the question for me then becomes, is that an excuse to be a workaholic? Because I have those tendencies. Right? For me, it's an, oh, I love my work. I love working 24 hours a day and on weekends, too.

Right.

Yes, I do love my work, but I need balance, you know, and so that can be, for me, like, not wanting to have spaces or silence. Like, I'm much, much better in service to others than I am in service to myself. So I keep myself very busy, and I'm not quite sure what to do when I have too much time on my hands. Like, what will I do? Right. So I don't know if that answers your question, but I do think that we turn to food in much the same way we turn to many creature comforts that don't serve us.

Yeah, I love that, too. You said the void, you know, like, looking at where. Because I think we all have those areas. Yeah. You know, and it's like, oh, okay. Like, let me look at that area of whether it's. You want a relationship, and instead you're going home, and instead of seeking the relationship, you're eating ice cream. You know, like, all the ways that we cope or fill that void, I think is a very fascinating.

Yeah. The question that we ask is, what am I really hungry for? So if I'm reaching for the ice cream or the chocolate chip cookies or whatever it is, the first question I have to say is, what am I really hungry for? For me, it was always connection. So even in relationships, I tend to attract very solitary, introverted men and, of course, polar opposites. Right. I'm pretty much extroverted. I love connection. I want to be talking to you. I want to talk about deep things. And so I attract men who'd much rather be watching March Madness on the television set. Right. And so what I've discovered in my own wisdom is that when I honor what it is I need, which is connection, but I don't expect it from my beloved, you know? And then I look at, where can I fill that need? Well, it might be that I hop on Facebook, you know, I mean, wow, is that a place to connect, Right. People in the space of 20 minutes, you know, and then you say, okay, that's enough. Right. You know, so it's just honoring, like, what do I need in this moment? And how else, you know, can I honor that need? And then if I still want the ice cream, what's the best ice cream I can have?

Right.

Can I eat it respectfully and joyfully and give myself permission? Someone in my class last night said, I think what I'm most getting from you is permission not to be perfect. Yes. Yeah. Boy, do we need permission not to be perfect. Right. We need permission to be enough. So it's that honoring again. Like, I wish we could be as compassionate and gentle towards self as we can be toward others.

Yeah, definitely. Okay, so I'm curious on this, honoring ourselves, how do we take back our plate? Like, what would be some tips that you have for, you know, a woman watching this and thinking, okay, you know, I want to do things differently. I want to take back my plate. I want to love what I eat. I want to celebrate. I want to do this. What would you recommend?

Okay, so I'll tell you what happened for me, true story. Okay. I attended quite a few different nutritional programs, and one of them was Mark David's Psychology of Eating in Colorado. And I was really fortunate with two of my programs that are now just online programs. I was actually in those programs at the time when they were live. Right. And there's something about a live experience which is pretty for me, it was like, pretty in your face. Right? So I had this colleague, his name was Joe, and he was a psychologist who worked with eating disordered individuals for many years. And so we're, you know, like, we're really getting into our eating relationships and.

Our relationship to food.

And at one point, he looked at me and he said, I think you still have some food rules. Right? And this was like, me post all of this craziness where I thought I'd given up the food rules. I said, you Think so, Joe? And he said, yeah. I said, well, how am I gonna get Give up those food rules? And he said, next time you go to a restaurant, a really good restaurant, ask them what their signature dish is and order it. Oh, okay. So my husband and I were taking a trip to the Southwest, and we went to this amazing restaurant. And so I said to the waiter, and I am a foodie, by the way, but I would find the best food, you know, the best food on the menu, not necessarily the signature dish. And I said, what's your signature dish? And he said, ugh, we have this lamb right now. This is, like, post raw vegan, right? We have this lamb that had been braised for 24 hours, and he's just describing this amazing lamb dish. And I said, great, I'll take it. My husband looked at me and he said, you don't eat lamb. I said, I do now. You know, Gulp. Right? Yeah. And the dish was amazing. Now. And for me, like, even as someone who will eat meat now, lamb is still not, like, at the top of my list because it kind of has this gamey flavor, but it was amazing. And so taking back a plate, right, both metaphorically and also physically, would be to walk into a restaurant and turn yourself over. A good restaurant. I'm not talking about, like, a McDonald's or saying, what is your signature dish? And then eating it. You know, that for me, was the entry point. And then it's a step by step thinking about, what is my decision? Am I deciding on the salad? You know, because that's the good choice, when really what I want to eat is the chicken or whatever, you know, and then making that decision that it's one meal at a time until we trust the body to make those decisions for us based on what it needs. Because if the body is asking for steak or chicken or a frittata, it may very well be that the body needs that much like our little ones. I went to dinner with a family, and the young girl was, oh, she might have been 16. We went to this amazing restaurant, and her dad said, sir, what are you having? And she said, I want the steak. I mean, she said it was so clearly she wanted that steak. And I was like, yes, here's a young girl who had none of those food conversations about, well, I rubbed the steak, it out of the salad, that steak. And she was listening to the body. And my guess is, and she didn't eat the whole steak. She ate what it was that filled her, and then she stopped, right? And that's the place we want to get back to that we're not counting out 10 almonds because 10 almonds is the number of almonds we're allowed, you know, in our portion control diet. We're putting a bowl of almonds, beautiful almonds, raw almonds in a bowl, and we're eating them until we're satisfied. And then maybe we're not going to finish them or maybe we will. Maybe we're going to go have a few more. Right. I think it's this one step at a time. Like, what does it mean for me today to take back my plate and can I do it in the most delicious way possible?

Now I'm interested. We take back our plate. Let's say that we've had maybe which most of us women have had a really restrictive food rules for ever since we were however old. For many of us it's just been in the culture and it's just part of who we are. What do we do about the trusting your body? But then there's the cravings of, you know, I haven't been able to eat butter or chocolate or almonds or whatever, but there's this feeling of like you just want to, like you've been restricting for so long. Is there. Do you see it? Sometimes women kind of swing the other way.

It's interesting. The first time I pondered that was Gabriel Roth, who's now quite well known. But this was before she was really well known. Her very first book, I can't remember.

The name of it.

Maybe you do.

Maps to Ecstasy.

Oh, before that.

Sweat yout Prayers.

No. Anyway, we'll think of the name of it. She gave this example of eating M and Ms. And I'm pretty sure it was M and Ms. And just eating them and eating them and eating them until she was sick of them, right? And I remember thinking about that years later as I was on this journey of taking my plate. And I realized that there would have been a time when indeed after so many years of such restricted eating that I would just gorge myself on all the things. But I think it's different for everyone. Like for me, the permission alone, you know, in knowing that I was going to give myself permission to eat those items was enough. And here's another piece that's really interesting. This was a woman who was in my most recent, well nourished woman inner circle and she called it the gas factor. Because a lot of the women that I attract are really savvy women, right? They're not eating the standard American diet. These are savvy Women. And of course she had all those conversations. I can't eat dairy, I can't eat wheat, I can't, you know. And she came in and I said, you know what, tonight we're going to make these amazing roasted beets. I just put a little goat cheese on them, sprinkle some amazing little salted pistachios. And, you know, so she started to eat some of these things and then she would, she would post on the page, she called it the gasp factor. Like, I ate cheese, I actually ate a piece of gluten, right? And what was interesting to watch her is that this was not. She never binged on any of this, right? She all of a sudden realized that she was eating less of these items once she gave herself permission. Because before she did that, when she wasn't allowing herself any gluten, when she'd go out to dinner with her husband like once a week, she would binge on the pizza. She would binge on whatever it was, the dairy, the cheese or whatever that she had restricted on all week. So being in the cycle of restriction created larger binges or secret eating, right? I heard a lot of this in the raw food community that, you know, like people were so attached to that. But in the side, you would find things in their suitcase that were not.

At all raw food things, right?

Snackers, bars or whatever. So I think that it's again going back to trusting that when I start to have more and more of these foods around, I start allowing myself to eat them. And there's always the freezer. I always say to women, there's always the freezer. If you make a chocolate cake, I have this amazing recipe that I found on one of the websites that I frequently for this beetroot chocolate cake. It's a beautiful cake. And I made this cake. And first of all, nutritionally speaking, if something is that dense nutritionally, we're not going to eat it in the same way we would eat a box of Girl Scout cookies, right? We're just not. Because it is so packed with nutrition, we eat it and that's enough. But I always say to people, if you don't trust that if you have emotional issues or there's something that may have you eat the rest of that cake, slice it up and put it in the freezer. Now some people will eat it frozen, right? Yeah. I think about, I'm a chocolate aficionado, right? I have a basket, literally it's this big, filled with these exotic single origin chocolate bars. And a chocolate bar might last me an Entire week or two days, it depends. But I'm not gorging and binging on that chocolate. Sometimes it will be a week, and I won't even think about chocolate. Other times, I'm eating a little chocolate sweet every day. It just depends on where my body is. So again, goes back to permission. And I think trusting. We can trust the deeper intelligence of our body. Look at the animals in nature. Right? Have you ever seen an obese deer? He gets really, really fat and waddles before winter. Right. They trust. Right? Okay.

So I'm curious on this chocolate. You know you have chocolate for breakfast.

Yeah.

I am not. And anybody who watches my interviews. I've talked about chocolate in numerous interviews. Just in general. I didn't find chocolate until probably about seven, eight years ago. I wasn't like a chocolate person. And then I found it, and I'm, like, obsessed. I'm not one of the people that can have a little piece of it. Like, if I get it, I eat the whole bar. And I've been giving myself permission to just, okay, I'm gonna eat the whole bar. But talk to us a little bit about the pleasure and having the discipline of being able to put it into the freezer or put it away. Like, where's that fine line of indulging? And then also, like, okay, do I need to eat the whole bar every time?

Yeah. So it's so interesting. What I would say is, first of all, my question, because I'm just curious. I want to know what the chocolate bar is like. I want to know. I'm not into the number. Like, you could only eat 85%. Because I'd much rather see you eating a single origin bar from Madagascar. So here's the thing. For me, if I'm buying a $10 chocolate bar, and I am. Right. A $20 chocolate bar in my thing, the good and evil bar. I'm saving it for our anniversary. But anyway, there's something. I'm looking at this bar, and I'm thinking, well, like, I can eat a $10 snack. I'm worth it. But really, you know, like, I think I should at least last me two days. A little bit more reasonable. So there is this piece for me where I'm not gonna eat the whole bar because it's a $10 bar, or I want it to last. So I would ask you, like, is it a bar that's easy for you to eat the whole bar? $2. Yeah. And then the other question I would have is, it could very well be that for you and for Your body, there is just a little too much sugar in that. Right. Because the sugar would be a trigger to eat more. And some people are highly sensitive. Totally. So then I would say, okay, move up to the 75% or the 85%. Even though my heart says, oh, it doesn't matter what the number is. But I would be interested. It would be an experiment for me. And then the other thing that's interesting for me around chocolate is, you know, I make my own truffles, right? The truffles, like, the thing that I got from the raw food world is the raw food dessert made of dates and prunes and whatever. Really, the whole food. Truffles in the freezer. They're in the freezer. But when I eat one or two of those, I just really am satisfied. I don't know if it's because they're also made with some nuts. You know, we know that physiologically, if we have some healthy fat with whatever we're eating, that there is that satiety factor. But there's also, and I call this my mouth feel, memory and mindset concept. Like, there's more than one layer. Like, I might want the mouthfeel and the flavor of chocolate, you know, but also I might believe that chocolate is my treat. Like, I might be eating the whole bar because I don't deserve to eat the whole. Or it might be that there's this memory that I have around chocolate and there's this deeper need that I have to feel closer to my grandmother or my father, who I associate chocolate with, and it brings me closer. And then I'm eating because I want to stay in that space of connection. So for me, just an inquiry, like, why do I want the whole bar today? Yeah, I love that.

The inquiry of like. And I think it's so important for all of us and around all of our little food rules or whatever to have that being willing to take the time for me, that's like being willing to take the time for myself to inquire into these things, you know, like.

Ask the questions, be willing. It was Carolyn. Mice. I never know if it's meest or mice. Anyway, one thing she said once that I remember, it rings in my ears, is to be willing to live in the mystery, you know, like, oh, that was so empowering for me. Like, you know what? I don't have to figure it out. I do want to inquire and get curious, but I don't have to figure it out. I can then say, that's, oh, isn't that interesting. You know, and I don't know what that was for me, but I may or may not eat the whole bar. But if I'm eating the whole bar every single day, you know, and I've lost that ability to say, this is enough, then I want to really inquire what am I really needing right now? And for me, me back to connection, that's just where it is for me. I need to be connected with my partner or I need to feel needed. You know, like, when I finish a program and I don't have, like, 25 or 30 women meeting me, I don't know what to do.

Yeah, totally. And for me, there's the. I need to take a nap. Like, sleep is good. Like, for me, I'll go to chocolate if I'm tired.

Like, a nap.

I need to take a nap. I lost you for a minute.

You're frozen. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Okay, there. I think we're back.

Okay, great. Okay. Yeah.

So I was just saying I need to take a nap sometimes. Like, that's for me.

Yeah. Because the body is. Is actually hungry. Like, for me, if I'm burning the candle at both ends, if I'm staying up till midnight working on something, I want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Like, what's that? Right? And there have been times I've come down here and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. My husband likes his white bread. Like, I don't eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I'm much better than that. And I'll make that sandwich. I'll think, well, what is this all about? Well, what it's all about is I'm exhausted.

Right?

Have gone to bed two hours ago because there have been so many hours between dinner. And this time, my body's saying, hey, feed me. And the comfort. There's something in the memory. Right. That has this comfort food being. Peanut butter and jelly. The nap. Take that nap. Right? Totally.

Totally. Okay, so on the napping and what we need, what does it look like? And I know it's different for every woman, but when does a woman know that she is well nourished? Like, what does it feel like? What does it look like? Or what are some ways that we can tap into that feeling of connection to ourself and, well, nourishment and deliciousness and fabulousness and celebration.

So if you were a client and you were asking me that, I would probably say to you right now, in this moment, just close your eyes and call up in your mind a time when you just felt just Completely, totally peaceful and content. Just either. When was that? Where were you? What was around you? Maybe you were on vacation. Maybe it's when you gave birth to your son. You know, like, what was that like for you? Maybe it was when you were pregnant and you were eating to nourish the baby, not to maintain a certain weight or structure. Right. And then, you know, to call on that felt sense of what that was like for you. Typically, if you were on vacation, you were rested, you were eating beautiful food. I mean, how many women come back to us after vacation center? With all the food I ate, I dropped three pounds or five. Isn't that interesting?

Right.

Guess there wasn't a lot of stress there.

Yes.

And imagine that you were eating gluten. How did that happen? That's what I would say is like for me, it's like this place of pure contentment. Like it's a place of permission. It's a place of. This is what my body needs, a place. One of the things that I. It's my barometer and I call it my mantra, really. Eat, play, sleep. So I feel nourished when I take the time to make a nourishing meal. And it doesn't have to be a three hour meal. I have the best 10 minute meals, you know, in my repertoire. So I'm eating beautifully. I'm closing the computer at least an hour before I'm ready to eat so that I can actually prepare something and not go out and get takeout or ask my husband to bring something home from Whole Foods. Right? So that's the eating, the play. That's the tough one for me. You know, I'm playing. My work is play. Yay, play. Am I taking play dates? You know, the play date might be in the kitchen or it might be in the garden, or it might be a play date with a friend, but play, right? And then the sleep, I think the sleep is the most underrated piece. You know, we are, we are coming from a society where we are rewarded to push through and be productive and make the six and seven figure, you know, who cares if we sleep, right? So I get really worried when I hear people say, well, I can get by on six hours of sleep. Really get what is get by to me? Or as long as I have my coffee, you know, in the morning, you know, like so to me it's like, can we get back to our baseline? And baseline might mean that we have to give up the morning coffee, go through that crazy, you know, detox. That's a detox for detox give up your coffee, right? Don't do the green juice for 30 days and then go drink your coffee. But yeah, that to me, like get back to that baseline. How much sleep do I need to wake up refreshed and rejuvenated so that we get in touch. To me, that's when we know that we're living that well nourished life. When we're so in touch with what we need and then we're giving ourselves permission to actually claim it.

That's beautiful. The permission. And I love that the eat, play, sleep. I mean so many women that I talk about to, they're exhausted, they're depleted, they're trying to make the seven figures, they're trying to be the mom. I mean there's just so much trying, improving and exhaustion. Yes. Grasping and it's like, what are we doing? Like sleep, play. I love that you said that. Of giving ourselves permission to have a well nourished life. And I know for me and for so many women, it is the sleep and it is the garden and it is hiking and it is being with our loved ones. And as much as we like to work, we're not men. Like we don't have the testosterone, right. We're just different and embracing that and it's okay.

Yes, it's okay.

And it's great. And it's needed, right? Like we need more happy, well nourished women.

We do. So much more fun. You know, people say to me, I just love going out to eat with you. I'm so glad you would not have loved to go out to eat with me seven years ago or six years ago, believe me, it would have been torture, right? Scrutinizing that menu, you know, but for me, reclaiming this, this is my one, it's my cultural identity, right? Like Italian roots, we love food, but it is, it's a reclamation.

Fantastic. Well, amen. I love it. Please share where people can find more about you. Sign up for your programs, read your blog. All that goodness.

Three places. You know, I've got three websites, Chronic and recovering overachievers. So the mothership is Conscious Bites Nutrition. And the second website is Chocolate for Breakfast that holds my luscious legacy. Project, of course, Facebook Chocolate for Breakfast. Very active fan page there. And then the third one is sueanglison.com which is just my name.com and that's my marketing strategy work. I call it a work of heart.

Fabulous. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. This was an absolute delight. And I personally am super inspired to take back my plate even more. And yeah, thank you so much.

You and I will have to share a meal someday.

Yes, definitely. I look forward to that. I just so appreciate your celebration and your. Yeah, just deliciousness and your commitment to having it be more playful and fantabulous. So it's super, super inspiring.

Thank you. So enjoyed spending time with you today.

Thank you. Thank you. Take care. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess.com until next time, keep rocking it and have an awes.