924: How to Discover Your Why and Your Unique Health Equation With Jill Foos

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama. com. And this episode is all about how to discover your deeper why and your unique health equation. And then from there, how to build a system and a team that is most supportive of that. And I’m here with Jill Foos, who is a national board certified health and wellness coach based in Chicago, who really works on evidence based strategies for behavior changes.

She holds certifications from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy. And she has specialized training in supplements and gut health, but her specialty is helping midlife women find their longevity equation, considering lifestyle interventions for sleep, nutrition, stress, and exercise.

She also has a podcast. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. As well, she is a mom of five, and we get to go deep on a lot of health topics related to all of the things I just mentioned, but especially navigating your health as a woman and in middle age and assembling a team that is most supportive of your goals.

So let’s join and learn from Jill. Jill, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Jill: Oh, well, thanks for having me, Katie. I’m so glad to be here today.

Katie I’m so glad to have you and I’m really excited to kind of get to dive into some nuance around discovering your own why and figuring out your own health equation. I think that’s a really valuable way to look at our health and also kind of stepping into the ownership of driving your own health outcomes and kind of being in the driver’s seat of your health. Before we get to jump into all that though, I have some fun notes from researching your bio. One being that you have five kids, so I don’t often have guests who have almost as many kids as I do, but also that you used to be an equestrian rider and as someone who always had dreams of having a horse and never got to live those dreams, I would love to hear a little bit about that.

Jill: Oh God. That was just like the greatest time of my life. I started riding horses when I was, I don’t know, six or seven. And I rode competitively through to the point where my dad said it’s either college or the horses. And actually I’m going to make that decision for you. So I went to college, but during that time, I basically grew up in a barn and just was always around horses and ponies and trainers and other young girls and boys who are riding. And it was such an amazing experience to have in terms of taking care of a living animal and being in a place where I had to have such deep dedication and commitment where I had to really give up a lot of normal childhood things.

I didn’t go to, you know, when I was in high school, I didn’t go to proms. I didn’t go to any of the, a lot of parties, the football games, the basketball games. I didn’t do a lot of those things because I was always on the road competing. But what that gave me was the sense of who I am and independence and really learn how to figure out things on my own, you know, not just at the barn, but outside in real life.

Katie: I love that. What a cool experience to get to have. And I bet like, if you could get on a horse now, you probably that all comes back and you can just pick it up seamlessly?

Jill: Absolutely. Well, I have my daughter when she was really young, we had her ride too. She didn’t last as long as I did, but when her and I go on a mom and a daughter vacations, we make sure there are horses involved at least one of the days and take a trail ride.

Katie: Oh, I love that. Well, I’m also excited to get to delve in some of your expertise related to what I think is a really important topic for women, which is kind of broadly how to develop your own wellness vision and kind of figure out your own unique health equation. And then I think kind of connected to that, stepping into the driver’s seat of your own health.

And I felt like I learned this lesson the hard way and felt very disillusioned with the medical system when I was looking for answers. But it was like I expected a doctor to be able to tell me both the right questions and the answers and just sort of like fix the problem for me. And what I learned slowly over time is that we each have to be our own primary health care provider, meaning that we take ownership for our health and that we still do have to find the partners and practitioners who can help us on that journey, but from a place of kind of our vision and our ownership of our health versus expecting someone else to be able to give that to us. And it sounds like this is something that you have done a lot of particular work with and have a lot of very specific advice on how to sort of develop that vision and then assemble your team. So maybe to start broad, can you talk about kind of developing our wellness vision for our own health and kind of figuring out what are the variables within our health equation?

Jill: Yeah, the first step is for you to really connect with your why and that’s different for everybody. And so I use this term, we all have a unique health equation. What works for me isn’t going to work for you and vice versa. And so what does that journey look like? And the first starting point is to figure out, well, why do we even want to figure this out anyway?

And that’s very personal. You know, for me, it changed and it will change for a lot of people out there. When I was younger in my, 16 through 20, I saw my dad become very sick. He, did not take care of himself. Every problem that he had health wise was something that he did to himself. You know, he was a smoker, he drank, he didn’t eat well, he didn’t move, he lived a sedentary lifestyle, he had bouts of depression. So he really didn’t take care of himself. And when you’re in a home like that, you really dial into, wow, what is going on here? And I decided early on in life, that was not what I wanted to do. That was not the journey that I wanted to take for myself. So by the time, when I was 16, I remember distinctly making a decision to pivot my lifestyle into a different direction.

And I became very interested in organic farming and organic foods and eating a certain way. And, you know, I grew up in a middle class home, Jewish background, you know,  my Jewish faith and you know, just a regular home. And my parents looked at me like, what is going on with this one?

You know, like we’re having to drive her to these farms to get organic eggs and organic milk. And, you know, there wasn’t the internet back then. So I had to do a lot of figuring out how I was going to live this vision that I had for myself back then when I was a teen. As I grew and as I aged and got married and had kids, that why also changed. My first why was, I don’t want to be like my dad.

I don’t want to go down that pathway. But then when I got married and had kids, it was, Oh, I want to help my kids understand this type of lifestyle too. I want to make sure I’m very healthy so I’m around for my kids. My father died in his early seventies and wasn’t able to spend as much time with me and my kids since early seventies, that’s still fairly young.

So for me, it’s always been a mission of how healthy of a lifestyle can I live to help me get to the point of where I feel vibrant, I feel strong, I feel connected to the people around me. And so it’s really important to connect with your why. For some people that why might be something athletic, it might be a marathon. It might be, I want to hike Mount Kilimanjaro. For other people, it might be there’s cancer in my family, you know? And so for me, it’s important to live a lifestyle so that I’m not going to end up like my aunts, my grandmother and my mother. So everybody has to connect with their why and health coaches can really help people connect with their why.

Now my five kids are out of the house. I have one that’s married. I’m going to be having grandchildren soon. And so my why has shifted even more to, I really want to make sure that I’m strong and vibrant. I’m post menopausal, I have a different set of needs in terms of taking care of myself and I want to be around for my grandchildren.

I  have a clear vision of what I want my life to be like when I have those grandchildren and that takes work. None of this is easy. If it was easy, we’d all be doing it. We’d all be on this path of health and wellness.

Katie: Yeah, that makes sense of having that why that is bigger than whatever an excuse might be or like something that might sway you in the little day to day small decisions. But that’s like your bigger picture. I feel like you finding that at 16, you are so ahead of the curve, but that brings up something I’m so curious about because you also have raised five kids. And I talk on here a lot about, you know, our kids are each their own infinite autonomous being as well. So I’m curious as a mom, were there things you did that were supportive of them finding their own why? And or how did that look for your kids as they each became adults and are now like on their own path?

Any tips for moms who are still, you know, with our kids in the house and kind of helping them on that path?

Jill: Well, you know, as well as I know with multiple kids is that you kind of wish they all came out the same because then you’d have this one template and they would just work across the board, but it doesn’t, they’re all different. They all have different personalities, different needs, and they all have different health and wellness goals.

And some of them have health issues, right? There might be autoimmune conditions. There might be emotional issues going on. You know, they’re all different. They all have different needs. And so for me, it was really helpful that I had already been on the journey for myself to see that they’re oh, there’s all these different ways of approaching our nutrition of approaching our mental health of approaching our emotional health.

And not all of my five kids are going to have the same equation. And so early on, you know, of course I expose them to my passion for eating nutritious food, a whole food based diet and making desserts that mimicked what they could have gotten maybe at the store or the restaurant or at their friend’s house, but I made it more of a wholesome way.

So I was definitely known in the community as sort of that, not a hippie mom, but sort of, you know, a little bit different in terms of how I approached nutrition, how I approached exercise. My kids all exercise. So now they’re all between 21 and 30 and they all have their own unique equations. There are common denominators there, but they really, you think they’re not listening, but they are listening because I am watching my five kids do it and their partners are also on board with it.

So my advice is, don’t think that they’re not paying attention, that they’re not watching it, that they’re not tapping into what you’re doing because they definitely are. And they’re going to take those skill sets on with them. Maybe not right away, but they will circle back to those skill sets because they’re going to see how they didn’t feel well, maybe in college because they didn’t do what they normally were doing.

And when they get out, they figure out, you know, it’s a long journey back once you sort of go through college and party, which is what most kids do. Right. But at the end of the day, my five kids are living these healthy lifestyles where they are all dialed into their unique health equation. And it’s not the same for, for each one of them.

Katie: That’s so true. I’ve thought that so often as a mom, it’s like when you figure out what helps one particular kid in one particular moment, it does not have any crossover almost ever to the rest because you’ve only actually figured out one thing for that kid at that time, and it’s always constantly in flux, but to your point, it seems like the modeling aspect and actually like prioritizing our own health and prioritizing our own health equation, it may be perhaps the most impactful thing we can do for them, even then try to get them to adopt it.

I do think that’s a common theme of motherhood is they do pay more attention to what we do than what we say. And like one thing I’ve noticed is the more I can give them the power in their own hands to make those decisions, I’m often blown away with how well they make those decisions and kind of even exceed my expectations. Or if I had made those decisions for them, I feel like they often outperformed what I would have even expected. So I loved this it seems like that was your approach and you have adult kids to kind of see that it plays out and that that does happen in reality. So that’s exciting for me with still a bunch of little ones.

I’d love to circle back to that concept of being our own primary health care provider, because I feel like this is going to be a great springboard into your expertise with assembling a team and a health coach and knowing where to look for answers when we kind of exhaust our own resources. Like I said, I had trouble getting answers from the medical community and then had to learn to shift my mindset into being like kind of insourcing versus outsourcing. And then still, once I had made that mindset shift, I did still need a specialist who understood thyroid health, for instance, to help me on that part of the journey, or I needed a deeper understanding of nutrition.

And then eventually I needed someone to help me build a foundation for strength training, things like that. But it still came from the lens of being in my own driver’s seat and building a team. And I think the two important mindset shifts there are one stepping into that driver’s seat and two, viewing hiring a team in that way of hiring a team, so not letting anybody on that team be the expert to take over being CEO of your health, but having them in a supportive role where you’re having a really solid partnership. So I would love for you to talk us through anything related to the mindset or the practicality of making those shifts and then especially navigating the relationship with your support team, because I know this can often be a source of friction for some people.

Jill: Yeah, I think that’s such a great question and topic to discuss, especially as a midlife woman. I think one of the first places that I really noticed, I was in the passive seat on a health journey was in my kids health journey, going to their pediatricians office where I was never… my questions or my suggestions or my input about my child’s health with the pediatrician were never really accepted.

They were sort of glossed over. You know, this is the way we do it. Your kid has X, and so we’re going to give him Y, and this is the direction you’re going to follow. And I really was so uncomfortable in that position because who knows your kid better than anyone? You do.

And sometimes the doctors would give information, or direction or medication that wasn’t helping solve the issue for my kid. And I really remember, you’re making me think about that time at these offices where I had no say in anything. And so I take that for myself. I use that same passion for health and wellness in my own journey for myself when I’m working with my providers. So I told you early on when I was 16 is really when I tackled this wellness vision of mine and what that meant to me. And that also meant how I was going to remain in the driver’s seat for my health. And so by the time I had had my kids, I had a thyroid issue.

And so I had a partial thyroidectomy, which was really, it was after my fourth kid and it was really the start of my health decline. I had so many health issues after that partial thyroidectomy. For starters, way back then, my physician only gave me a medication that helped support T4. And if you have, it sounds like you have a thyroid issue as well.

And so a lot of doctors back then only gave you one minute medication, it was synthroid that started a cascade of events for me that led to hair loss, weight loss, weight gain, low sexual libido, sleeplessness, mood swings. I had all of these things going on and my doctor, whether it was my OBGYN or whether it was my internist back then, you know, sort of brushed it off as, you have five kids.

I had another kid after that. You have five kids, you have a really busy life, you know, you’re just tired. And I was like, no, there’s something else going on here. Like I am not feeling like I used to feel and I use the word optimize, which is something, you know, kind of a buzzword out there, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel optimized.

It did not feel like myself. I didn’t feel like I was the person that back at 16 or back at 21, when I had these wellness visions changing. I didn’t feel like that person anymore. And so what could I do? I stopped going to my internist and I turned to functional medicine. I happen to be at this fair in a suburb of Chicago and run into a tent where there was a functional medicine MD in there and she was talking about her new practice.

And you know, this is many, many years ago when this was not the norm, which it still isn’t the norm, but it really wasn’t the norm back then. And I remember having a discussion with her and it just really connected with me on, in terms of my unique health equation is not what is necessarily in the guidelines of medicine.

It’s not necessarily in the ranges of medicine, and I need to have someone who’s more open minded, who’s going to listen to me, be a collaborative partner with me and help me figure out how to connect the dots. So I do feel better because I was, you know, a young mom. I was in my 30s. I didn’t want to, the thought of going through the next multiple decades of my life, not feeling good, just really scared me.

It reminded me of my father. So that was my first step in really understanding my health and wellness journey, connecting the dots for myself and also becoming more of an advocate for myself and looking through different lenses. So I would say my first stop was a functional medicine MD who really helped share with me.

And I worked with her for 15 years. She really helped open up my eyes to what else is out there and available for me. And that’s when I was exposed to more comprehensive blood work very early on, which is not something that a lot of people way back then we’re doing. So that was the beginning of my journey in terms of bringing on a different healthcare provider who started the journey for me building my health care team. And I think this is a really important aspect to especially the menopause transition, because so many women are in a passive seat when they go to their OBGYN or their internist and their symptoms are ignored, or maybe they’re not being handled the way they could be handled better.

But often women are leaving feeling more overwhelmed and more saddened by the thought of, am I going to be feeling this way for the next, you know, 10, 20 years?

Katie: Yeah, I would guess a lot of people can resonate with that experience. I know I had a similar experience of being told before I was even able to sort of get answers on thyroid stuff and then certainly before I resolved it, but being told this is normal, especially if you’re a mom, especially if you have that many kids, this is all normal and nevermind the whole distinction between normal and optimal on lab ranges. But many of those practitioners weren’t even doing the lab testing to see if there was a problem. They were just dismissing me. And I sadly hear from so many women who have similar experiences, especially to your point in that perimenopause and menopause journey and that they are kind of told like, oh, that’s normal for, you know, this phase of life for you or sort of just get used to it like this is kind of status quo. And thankfully that doesn’t seem actually to be the case, but it does seem often that women have to advocate for themselves like you did and to find the right, I love your term, collaborative partners, to find the right answers because I truly don’t believe that that is our fate in middle age is that we’re subject to just, you know, hormone decline and feeling terrible and not sleeping well and our hair falling out.

Like I don’t accept that as normal at all for middle age. And it sounds like in your way to, you learned how to not only navigate that, but now help other people navigate that as well. And I also really resonated with what you said about feeling that the most with your kids. I had my most extreme example of that was actually when I was pregnant with my fifth and she was breech at 37 weeks and the midwife I had hired in the hospital told me like, Oh, we’re not going to let you birth her naturally, you’ll have to have a C section. And so I said, okay, well, then you’re fired, because I was hiring them, and walked out and then realized, oh, I’m still having a baby in the next three weeks. I need to find someone who can catch it. Which thankfully I did, but just as a, like, extreme reminder, like, we’re hiring them, we can fire them at any point to find, I love that term, you know, you call it a collaborative partner who’s willing to work with us toward the health outcomes that we want. So on that note, who do we need, especially at the perimenopause and menopause kind of journeys of life, to have on our team? To be our collaborative partners, like how do we begin to assemble and even know who we need to know to have on that team?

Jill: I think the first and most obvious one to talk about is your OBGYN. And for so many women that I work with, they’ve been going to their OBGYN like myself, who’s for many, many decades, who’s delivered their babies. And I always say, just because this doctor delivered your babies doesn’t mean that that’s the doctor you need moving forward during this transition, especially if they aren’t trained in menopause therapy.

And a lot of them are not. A lot of the traditional OBGYNs will tell you that that’s not something that they studied. It’s not something that they’re really aware of. They don’t know the nuances about prescribing hormones or testing hormones and looking at those levels. And it’s not something that they’re comfortable with.

There are a lot of doctors who will tell their clients or their patients. You don’t need any of that. This is, you know, not something that I do, but don’t worry about that. Stop listening to the Internet. Here’s what I have to say, and I’ll use myself as an example. I still have my same OBGYN who is at the practice where I had all five of my babies delivered.

I utilize, and he’s a wonderful doctor. Is he a menopause expert, a specialist in terms of hormone therapy? No, he is not. And so I use him for my annuals. I use him if I have any issues going on, my pap smears, my mammograms, all of that kind of stuff. But I don’t use him for my menopause therapy. And I often have to help support my clients in finding a menopause specialist who might just do that part of it, who’s not doing the OB part. And so you might have to have two people, depending on your insurance, depending on where you live, depending on what you’re willing to do. A lot of people who are menopause specialists also might be just cash pay. It might be a different financial model than you’re used to. And is that something that’s that’s not available to everyone? But for some people it is available. My advice is to go on to resources such as the menopause society, which used to be NAMS and to go there and you can find a provider who is specifically trained in hormone therapy, who has a better understanding, who understands the nuances of listening to their patient, listening to the symptoms and also treating the symptoms. So you might have to have two people in this bucket of the menopause transition in terms of your sexual health and your vaginal health and mammograms and things of that nature. So that might be one approach. And that’s an approach that I often share with my clients that they do do that.

So the next one, I would say the next really big one for me is a preventive cardiologist or a cardiologist or an internist who is specialized in lipids.

And I just, I have my own podcast and on my podcast, I’ve done many episodes on preventive cardiology. And I’ve had on some of the leading global voices to talk about women’s health, the menopause transition and heart disease risk. So we know that going through menopause, your lipid panel is going to change adversely.

And especially if you have a family history of heart disease. If you have heart disease genetics that predispose you to a higher risk of heart disease. I do. My mom is the only living elder in our family on both sides. Everyone else died of heart disease, including my father. And so early on from my functional medicine MD from getting comprehensive labs, I learned a lot about my heart disease risk while I was still peri-menopausal.

And so my advice is don’t wait until you have an event, be proactive now. Get in to see, find the person who understands how to read lipids, how to order advanced lipids if necessary, which, you know, there are a few biomarkers that the doctors that I’ve had on talk about, you know, LP little a, APOB non HDLC, which is on a regular panel.

But these are biomarkers that really help put the story together on your heart disease risk. There’s other screenings as well, you can get a CAC scan. And a lot of doctors, I have a lab list that I give to each of my clients. It’s very comprehensive and we go over the lab list. We go over why you want to ask for certain labs.

And I have, you know, my clients very well educated on this and they will go to their internist or even their cardiologist sometimes, and they will come back and show me the lab list with red markers going across all the lab markers crossing them out. You don’t need this. You don’t need this. You don’t need this.

Well, here’s a perfect example of you being in the driver’s seat. If your physician is not willing to run the test, it’s no skin off their back. You might have to pay a little bit more out of your pocket if your insurance isn’t covering certain things. And some of these things you only have to look at once.

But it’s up to you to decide, is this the collaborative partner I want in terms of assessing my heart disease risk during midlife? It goes back to your why. My why is I want to live a very vibrant, healthy, long life. I don’t want the last 10 years of my life to be in a nursing home if I can help it.

And I do have osteoporosis and I do have a thyroid disorder and I do, I have other things going on. I have heart disease genes. I have obesity genes. I have diabetes genes. I have a really bad profile genetically, but I’m in the driver’s seat. And if my doctor isn’t going to support me and hear me and order the labs that I want, then I’m often finding another provider who will.

Katie: Yeah. And I know that can be very much an uphill battle, but thankfully I feel like we’re moving to a place where there is more availability of these resources, whether it be through telemedicine and being able to connect with people who are not even in your local area, but still be able to work with them. To being able to order lab testing without having to go through a doctor in some cases.

And I know this was something when I first started trying to figure this out, these resources really were hard to find or not available. So it makes me really excited that we as, you know, people, individuals now have access to so much more of our own health data without always having to go through a practitioner as a gatekeeper.

And then we can take that data to a practitioner to work on it. So I’ll put some links that I learned along the way to navigate that myself. But I’m also really curious, I know you do a lot of health coaching, so you actually get to be in the nitty gritty with someone and work with them on their own health. I can only imagine probably some pillars have emerged that while there is so much bio-individuality, there’s also kind of universal commonalities amongst humans. So I’m curious, especially for women in perimenopause or menopause or who are navigating this, are there pillars that you’ve identified that seemingly are beneficial kind of across the board and that you very often encourage people to focus on when they’re in the driver’s seat of their own health?

Jill: When we’re, when we’re talking about the pillars of health, we’re talking about nutrition, exercise, stress management, sleep, and having a sense of community. And so, yeah, you’re right. There are definitely some common denominators. When we look at nutrition, we know from the science and from the leading voices in this field, especially for menopausal women, is that we all need more fiber and we all need more protein.

And what does that look like? And everybody, you know, can’t get from point A to point B on the same way. So a health coach can be really instrumental on this journey in terms of helping that client figure out what the small steps are for them. You know, for one person, they might have to track their protein for a week and for another person tracking might be a trigger for them.

So what’s another creative way for someone to assess what their baseline of protein intake is? So health coaches have all these really science back nifty tools in, in their bag to pull out and use in terms of helping their client move forward on this journey. Fiber, for example, some people, some women might have IBS or colitis or other GI issues where too much fiber might be troublesome to them.

And so what’s another way that we can, you know, work on healing their gut and so that they can’t get to that point if possible? So everybody does not get from point A to point B the same way and health coaches bridge that gap. Health coaches are really amazing because when you leave your doctor’s office, if you have a poor diagnosis, if you have the doctor prescribing a certain diet for you and then you leave the office.

So many women leave the offices overwhelmed. By the time they get to their front door of their home they’re like, okay, great. I’ve been told this five times. I have no idea how to get here. I have no idea how to do this for more than, you know, a week or two weeks, right? Because for me, your health equation has to be something that’s portable. It has to be something that one brings you joy. And there might be a temporary health equation going on while you’re healing something like maybe you’re on a gut healing protocol for like three months. But whatever the end game is, whatever your unique health equation is that you figure out with your collaborative partners, whether it’s a health coach, preventive cardiologist, your OBGYN, your functional medicine MD and all these other team players we can talk about.

It has to be something that is long term and sustainable for you. That’s the whole point. No one wants to be on a diet. I hate that word diet anyway. So I kind of call it a nutrition plan, but even that doesn’t even sound that great, but whatever it is, it’s your way of life. It’s your way of nourishing yourself, it’s your way of fueling yourself, that’s going to last you into your eighth and ninth decade of life.

Katie: Oh, that’s such a good point. Like I love that it’s got to be portable and sustainable and also bring you joy. I feel like that’s the part that gets missed. And for me, that was an absolute paradigm shift was when I started doing the mindset work actually, and realized I couldn’t punish myself into being healthy.

I couldn’t shame myself into optimal wellness and thriving. I had to do that from a place of self love and in a way that was like joyful and pleasurable, not restrictive. Because to your point, you can only willpower that for so long before you truly will not be able to sustain it anymore. And I feel like slowly over time, it’s been learning how to find the most nourishing foods that are also bring me so much joy and they’re beautiful and they’re colorful. And I, you know, prepare slow meals for myself and for my kids and get to enjoy them. And that makes it sustainable because I look forward to it versus like, Oh no, I have to, this is a thing I have to do.

I think that shift alone, there’s so much value in what you just said around that. And I would also love for you to go a little deeper on the protein and fiber component because I do feel like these, I feel like can always be talked about more. And especially the protein piece for women, after years of getting more of the messaging of like calorie restriction and cardio I love that we’re hearing more about eating protein and strength training and maintaining our muscle mass as we age. I think it’s. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who says muscle is the organ of longevity, but I would just love your take on this because anytime I get to encourage women to eat more protein and really build strength as we get older, I love to take the chance to do that.

Jill: Yeah. Great point. So protein, I think it’s really important and you touched on a few of the things is why is increasing our protein more important? Going back to your why, you want to live a strong independent lifestyle. When we look at our grandmothers, when we look at our mothers, we see them shrinking.

We see them, you know, their fragility is increasing and possibly they break a hip. Possibly they can’t live independently anymore. That’s not the way that I want my life to be and I don’t think your viewers would want their life to end up that way either. So protein is one of these things that is one of the common denominators, but how we get there is very different.

So once you understand your why, once you understand how protein plays a role in achieving your why and your greater health vision it then now we have to come up with some strategies on how are we going to increase protein. Some of the things that I do, I do like the tracking. Like I mentioned, I think it’s really important whether it’s tracking on an app or whether it’s tracking manual that might be less triggering to see where are you at for the next week?

Are you in the 30 to 50 gram a day range or are you already knocking out, you know, 80 90 grams a day?  And so I think it’s really important to just connect with what is your baseline right now? And then where do you need to get to and how are we going to get there? I love, of course, a whole foods based diet to me is always number one, that might not be available to everybody three times a day.

You know, a lot of women don’t like that feeling of being full. A lot of women in midlife are also looking to change their body composition. So they’re thinking, I want to lose weight. Well, how did we all lose weight in the past? We all ate less calories. We all did the wrong things. And now we know from the current science and the leaders in this, that have that leading voice in this space are all about, you know, building our strength and building our lean muscle mass and losing our body fat by increasing our protein.

So how do we do this? So once we can capture a baseline, my strategy that I often use with my clients is now just pick one meal. And I love protein powder for this reason, because a lot of meals that women are missing is the first meal, the breakfast meal. I don’t want to get up and eat eggs. That just, it’s not going to make my stomach feel good.

I don’t have time to put together a meal. I need something really quick and on the go. So I think a really good place to start is a high quality protein powder. And here, again, knowing information on how to find the best protein powder that you can find, right? There’s a lot of junk out there and we don’t want to focus on that, but there are some brands out there who are really doing a great job in making a clean, even though it’s a processed product, cleaner than others.

So, you know, you could start with a protein shake. I’ve worked with so many women who tell me they make a smoothie in the morning. And when I asked them to break down the ingredients, there’s lots of fruit, there’s lots of greens, there’s lots of great ingredients in there, but there’s no protein.

They missed that. And so just adding in a double scoop of protein, which one scoop could be somewhere around 15 to 20 grams. But if you double that, you’re getting over 30 grams of protein. It’s going to help you feel satiated for longer. So there’s less snacking. You’re going to start your day off with that nice hit of protein.

So if you’re working out, whether you have your smoothie before you work out or whether you have it post workout, you’re getting that hit of protein in to send the message to your body that you have some energy to go do the workout and that you’re also going to be building that lean muscle mass. So it’s really important that first meal. And that is often where a lot of women start. You can put protein powder in your yogurt. You could put it in your cottage cheese, you know, how, whatever is going to be easy for that woman, pick a meal and start there. For some women it might be lunch and for some women, it might be dinner. And it might be just a matter of, are you someone who eats out all the time and you don’t enjoy cooking?

Well, I want that client to get used to asking the waiter, how many ounces of chicken or shrimp on are on my salad or in my meal, right? Don’t be afraid to ask these questions. A lot of people, women and men feel embarrassed having to ask certain questions. You know, this brings up a really funny story.

A little side story. My kids, when I go to a restaurant with them, they don’t do it anymore, but they used to get up and walk away from the table when it came to be my turn to order because I had so many questions. They would just get up and walk away and come back after I placed my order. So, you know, because they were embarrassed, but now my kids ordered the same way as me and ask all the questions.

So ask the questions. If you’re getting a salad and you’re out with your peers for lunch or it’s a work lunch and there’s three ounces of shrimp on the plate, that’s not going to be enough to sustain you for the next three, four or five hours until you eat dinner. It’s not going to be enough to send the message to your body to continue to build and repair lean muscle mass.

So, you know, it depends on what your goals are. Are you increasing your protein for an athletic endeavor? Are you increasing your protein to change your body composition, which most midlife women are. We’re gaining weight around our midsection. We haven’t changed anything. So we have to shift that plate in our mindset a little bit about how much protein to eat.

So I think protein is a great place to start for midlife women. It’s something that I work on myself every day. Eventually it becomes intuitive. In the beginning, it is hard work. And that’s another thing. All of this is hard work. It’s not easy, but eventually it does become more intuitive, like brushing your teeth.

Katie: Yeah, I think that’s such an important point is like, especially if you can baby step, build the habits slowly and to where they become true, like truly integrated in your life, then you get to eventually hand off the willpower aspect and they do get easier and you actually like do them sort of automatically and look forward to them.

But it’s just like knowing that going into it with the mindset of building until you get there. I feel like it helps to know there is a point at which it gets easier. And as we get close to the end of our time, a couple more that I would love to touch on that we haven’t talked too much about yet would be the importance of community and nature, like time in nature, time outside, natural light. That was what stood out to me, actually, when I’ve read the actual studies on blue zones was how much time they spend with other people that they love and also that they spent a lot more time outdoors, even just walking outdoors or being outside than we do in many places in the modern world. And it seems like these were also on your list of pillars that are at least important to be aware of.

So I would love to hear your take on how we can implement those pieces of community and kind of harmony with nature.

Jill: Well, community is such a great topic because when we talk about creating a support system for ourselves, perhaps the sense of community is really strong here. For example, if we go back to the protein conversation. If someone doesn’t like cooking, if they’re sort of confused about how to increase their protein, if they don’t enjoy being in the kitchen, your community probably offers cooking classes, right?

Where you are in a group of other like minded individuals. You’re there for the same type of goal to learn how to cook and find joy in your kitchen in an easy, practical way. So that sense of community to me, reaching out and seeing what are you curious about and what are you interested in and what is offered?

And like you said, we also have the community that’s virtual, right? We have access to telemedicine, but we also have access to group coaching. We have access to taking different courses online.  I’m in, you know, a handful of online community based groups with other health coaches. We’re all like minded.

We get to meet with each other once a month and have this sense of community that we’re there to support each other as health coaches. Because health coaches help take care of and collaborate with their clients as partners, but we don’t, you know, who do we have for us to collaborate with? And so I created a community of health coaches as a support group for health coaches.

And so we know that we can count on each other and we can bond with each other over business or personal issues. So that sense of community, whether it’s in person or whether it’s virtual, they are so incredibly important, especially during this mid lifetime. I just recorded a podcast with a woman who is a fitness professional, but her niche is helping women get ready for adventure travel. And the adventure travel is the sense of community. And it was a great conversation about showing up at this adventure, being prepared physically and mentally for the adventure, but being in this group of women who didn’t know each other, you know, moments ago, and now they’re going to go climb a mountain together for seven days. And so there’s a sense, there’s community out there for everybody, just like 31 flavors of ice cream. There are so many flavors of community out there and it is really important. And we know that loneliness leads to depression and we know that loneliness is also a killer for many people especially as we age and get older. How many elderly people do we know of that are living in assisted living and they’re not around their family because they can’t live a strong independent life and they become very lonely and depressed. So community is one of those things.

One of those pillars that to me is an absolute on the equation of everybody’s health journey. I forget what you asked the second. Oh, the sunlight. Yeah. So the sunlight. You know, one of the pillars of health is sleep. And the common denominator for midlife women is we don’t get enough sleep, right? Whether you’re choosing to go on menopause therapy or not, we still have to optimize our sleep somehow.

And so sunlight to me is the best way to start your sleep wake cycle. A lot of people talk about their bedtime routines. I talk about it in the opposite way. I talk about what’s your morning routine look like. Cause your morning routine is going to set you up for your evening routine and your body’s ability to fall asleep. And that early morning sunlight… That’s why I love dogs. I have two dogs and I have to go out every morning, early morning and walk them. And I walk along Lake Michigan and I let that natural low horizon sunlight hit my eyes. So I’m not wearing any of my glasses. And that helps reset my circadian rhythm by signaling the pineal gland, which is a gland in our brain.

And that is what controls our melatonin production. And melatonin is something that is produced with low light. And so when we wake up in the morning, we have cortisol waking us up or else we wouldn’t wake up. We would be dead, but the cortisol wakes us up. But what happens is people are waking up and looking at their phones, looking at their computers, getting on their tablets, getting text messages from their kids from college or out of college.

And, you know, things aren’t going so well. So there’s this heightened sense of cortisol going on throughout the day. Also skipping breakfast and not getting that hit of protein or that food to, that energy to help your brain, your hypothalamus say, Hey, there’s energy in here, we can go do our workout without stressing our ourselves out even more. A lot of like women like to work out in a fasted state. And we know through the science that that’s not very, that’s not optimal for everybody. So this is part of the journey that has to be really personal and really individualized to you, which is what a health coach can help you do and help you stay accountable and consistent and compliant with what you’re setting out to do.

But that early morning sun is so important in terms of your sleep wake cycle.

Katie: Yeah, I love that. And I think we are in a point like a place kind of to your point, like where you used to have much more built in proximal community in our neighborhoods or like local groups. And now it seems like we have to be a little bit more intentional about either finding or building those because they don’t necessarily just develop in our neighborhoods like they used to or with, you know, relatives living close by. But also to your point now with technology, we have access to broad communities almost everywhere. So it just requires that little bit of intentionality of either finding or building the community that you need. And like you, that’s a non negotiable part of my life is getting outside in the morning as soon as possible after waking up and getting that low angle light.

I feel like, you know, there’s this trend and I’m glad they exist, but these red light panels that I feel like can be very helpful. But we often forget that those same spectrums of light are available every sunrise and every sunset for free in nature. And maybe we could just go for more walks during sunrise and sunset also. Get that natural light exposure on our eyeballs and help our circadian rhythm and get some natural red light in the process. So I love all of your tips and for anyone who is looking for a health coach or would love to keep learning from you, where can people find you and learn from you online?

So on my website at,  jillfooswellness.com and on there, I have my podcast, even though you can find my podcast, which is called The Health Trip podcast, you can find that on all streaming platforms. It’s also on my website. I have a blog where I post a lot of different information on behavior change, I have a whole recipe section as well.

I love to cook. It brings a lot of joy to me. And so I share, all my recipes are gluten free, dairy free, and sugar free, which is the lifestyle that I follow that keeps me healthiest. And I also offer free 30 minute consultations via zoom for anyone who wants to talk to me. So that’s all on my website as well.

And my podcast features a lot of physicians, a lot of research scientists and physicians and every topic is connected to the midlife woman’s health journey.

Katie: Amazing. Well, I will make sure those are linked in the show notes. Jill, thank you so much for your time. This has been such a fun conversation. I love that we seem to have some little parallel parts of our journeys and both have a house full of kids and I’m so grateful for everything you shared today. Thank you for being here

Jill: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Katie: And thank you as always for listening and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of t