Live your BIG life

On the subject of bringing joy back to eating, this is my favourite new breakfast. My cousin shared a YouTube video with me of Princess Diana’s private chef, Darren McGrady, demonstrating how to make the overnight oats he prepared for her. My cousin had started breakfasting like a Princess and thought it would make good Instagram fodder. Thank you Clare! This is the Princess Diana recipe (serves 2) from www.royalchef.com: 1 cup rolled oats 1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice 1 cup Greek yogurt 1 tbsp raw honey 1/4 tsp cinnamon (optional) 1/2 honey crisp apple 1 lemon, juice only 1 cup fresh blueberries 1/2 cup toasted walnuts Add the orange juice to the oats, stir and cover and refrigerate over night. Stir in the Greek yogurt, honey (to taste) and lemon juice. Grate the apple and add to the oats and fold in. Add half of the blueberries and stir. Spoon into a serving dish and decorate with the remaining blueberries and walnuts. My twist: I have been making the overnight oats with the absolutely delicious Ippolito Oranges from @waitrose which are in their short season at the moment. I scrape out the ruby flesh of both oranges and add it to the oats for some extra fibre (and also, waste not, want not). I use a whole Pink Lady apple (again, waste not, want not). I hope you enjoy as much as I do! #perimenopausehealth #midlifehealth #princessdiana (3rd photo is me with Princess Diana from the Birmingham Evening Mail).

I was so triggered by an article in the Times on Saturday entitled “We are in our Sixties – with the same size waist as we had in our twenties” that I could have screamed. I wonder how much of your one wild and precious life is occupied by thoughts about weight, exercise and food if this is your goal. This article was particularly confronting as I am coming to the end of my additional training in supporting clients with dysfunctional eating habits. I have chosen the phrase “dysfunctional eating habits” carefully. It is intended to convey the use of eating or not eating as a way to cope with difficult situations or feelings. Part of this picture is devoting so much time, head space and energy to food that life becomes small, rigid and joyless with your self-worth based on your perception of your physical appearance. Diet culture – valuing thinness over health – reinforces this unhelpful eating behaviour. Headlines like this add further fuel to the fire. This is a huge and important area and I cannot begin to do it justice in an Instagram post. But I’d like to ask you – what is normal eating? The second and third slides share the definition of normal eating which we used in our training. I think it reflects how I eat or at least how I try to eat. I don’t have a perfect diet (whatever that means) and I always join in wholeheartedly on any outing, especially afternoon tea. Does this definition of normal eating resonate with you? #perimenopause #midlifewomen #dysfunctionaleating #normaleating @ellyn_satter_institute

I don’t think I will ever progress beyond my toddler stage of asking “Why?”. I love my work as a nutritional therapist because I am in constant pursuit of the “why?”, and then, the “what can we do about it?”. There is no bigger “why?” than aiming to understand what creates the conditions in which cancer flourishes. There is much that still needs to be understood, but we can have some confidence that nutrition and lifestyle are important factors which deserve our careful attention. To drill down further into which nutrition and lifestyle factors can be leveraged to impact cancer, I recently took Dawn Waldron’s “Fluxable - turning cancer around” course. The concept at the heart of the Fluxable approach is that cancer starts and stops in the mitochondria and that restoring mitochondrial function is the foundation of cancer recovery. Dawn (@dawnewaldron) is one of the most impressive people I have ever come across. Dawn has spent 30 years working to transform breast cancer outcomes. As a nutritional therapist, she supported hundreds of cancer patients and she has now devoted herself to educating other health professionals so that many more cancer patients can benefit from the most comprehensive support. She has an absolutely magnificent Substack which you can find at https://dawnwaldron.substack.com/. Her message is quite simply: “Don’t let the complexity of cancer blind you to the simplicity of healing”. So, if restoring mitochondrial function is the foundation of cancer recovery, nurturing and respecting our mitochondria must have an important role in prevention. At the very least, if we nurture and respect our mitochondria, we will build our energy, resilience and overall feeling of well-being. One of the most powerful questions I ask my clients is “When did you last feel well?”. If the answer is not now, the very best advice I can give you is to go to the mitochondria. Comment below if you are interested in learning more. #cancerprevention #nutritionandcancer #midlifemanagement

This is my cardio plate. We build our resilience by eating enough and there is real joy in eating with purpose. I was thinking about a client’s heart health as I made my own lunch yesterday - I chose mackerel in olive oil, rocket, pomegranate seeds and beetroot. The dietary nitrates in the rocket, pomegranate seeds and beetroot are heart health superstars. We convert the nitrates to nitric oxide which is a potent vasodilator that improves endothelial function, lowers blood pressure and enhances exercise performance. A review published last year even highlighted the potential for beetroot juice as a supportive therapy for improving peripheral artery disease, a circulatory disorder caused by the narrowing or blockage of peripheral arteries, primarily affecting the lower limbs (reference in the comments). It’s so pleasing when eating something delicious makes us stronger. #hearthealth #foodasmedicine #perimenopausehealth

I am now qualified to use my skills as a nutritional therapist to support clients with a new or suspected diagnosis of cancer. Deepening my understanding of cancer growth factors and the epigenetic pathways involved in cancer onset and development has shown me how many possibilities there are for safe and effective diet, lifestyle and supplement interventions around a diagnosis of cancer. I am deeply committed to this careful, personalised and hugely important work supporting clients on their path towards long term health and recovery. If you’d like to read about the potential impact of nutritional therapy in cancer, head to my website www.midlifemanagement.com and select “Articles to Help You”. On 4th June I published an article called “Supporting clients with a cancer diagnosis”. I will link it in Stories. I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions, please reach out to me via DM or email me at hello@midlifemanagement.com. #cancersupport #nutritionaltherapy #integrativeoncology

Life is hard. We need our own personal inventory of coping strategies. We can make our list in the good times when we only have to cope with everyday annoyances. We can then deploy our tools when we are challenged by significant life stressors such as grief, financial insecurity and emotional trauma. If we have been using maladaptive coping strategies such as unwanted eating behaviour or dependence on alcohol, we need to practise replacing these habits with comforting and nourishing strategies which serve us well. Over time, these new emotionally nourishing habits will embed and become second nature to us. Join Caroline Sheldon, nutritional therapist specialising in midlife health, and Anna Gough, specialist in advanced breathwork and nervous system support, on Wednesday 15th June at 12pm on @midlife_management. All questions welcome. Please post them below. #midlifemanagement #disorderedeatingrecovery #mcas #nervoussystemsupport #perimenopausehealth