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Love Your Life Show: Personal Growth, Mindset, + Habits for Busy Moms
5 Things I Stopped Doing at 50 to Feel Calmer, Healthier, and More Energetic
00:22:47
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Hi, this is the Love youe Life show with Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let's go, warriors.
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Why? Hello, warriors, and welcome to the Love youe Life show. I am Susie Pettit, your certified life, relationship and mental wellness coach. I'm wearing my mental wellness and mental health hack chat today. I'm super excited that you're here for this episode. It is both practical and personal, and I'm trying something new also. I'm also recording this so you could watch it on YouTube if you prefer that. So here we are. I love the audio. That's what I like. But I listen to you guys and some of you guys like watching the video, so I love connecting with you this way, too. And I'll see if I can do it to be real. I have adhd, and so it sometimes, like, gets distracting to me, but we'll see. I know that you are here to love me. And that is what part of this episode is about. And it is. The title of this episode is five things I stopped doing at age 50. And if I was going to have a parentheses to that title, it would be like. And that I wish I Stopped doing at age, I don't know, 15. Okay. Which is some of this. It's like just accepting myself and right here. Let's try it. Let's not be so perfection. This isn't one of those five things. But just being a little more flexible and, you know, easygoing in my.
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Let's. Let's.
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Okay, let's try to video.
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Let's go.
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Let's do it. So that's what we're doing. And that does bring me to the first thing on my list, which is straight up, I stopped doing it right around age 50. And I really wish I had stopped doing it age 15. And it is beating myself up for things that I used to do, being that inner critic, not speaking nicely to myself in my head. One thing I know for sure is that any version of me, okay, past Susie, two minutes ago, two months ago, two years ago, two decades ago. She has always tried doing the best that she could. She's always doing the best that she could. There was never a point in my life where I consciously thought, like, I'm going to really try to screw this up. I'm really going to mess up my parenting or I'm really going to mess up my life or I'm really going to mess up my health. No, I was always trying to do things that felt helpful for me and following, also following along with what everyone else was doing around me because that's what was normal for my age and my environment. And what I know now is that many of the things that were acceptable or normal that everyone else is doing is not in my best interest. Like think about it. Complaining is normal. Burnout is normal. Exhaustion because we're doing too much of the work for everyone else instead of letting them live their lives. Exhaustion is normal. Loneliness is normal. And what's not normal is great. Mental health. Great emotional regulation. Deep fulfilling marriages are not normal. Exceptional health as we age is not normal. Emotionally intimate relationships, we can really share ourselves, whether it's with our romantic partner or a friend, really get deep and vulnerable. That's not normal. And so there's a very real part of me that knows. Some of the things I'm going to go on to mention today might sound extreme to you, starting with this first one. Stop criticizing yourself in your head, okay? Or you might wonder how you could possibly do it when everyone around you is doing different things. Everyone around you is still doing things that same way. And I beg you, my dear listener, to keep listening, to keep asking and suggesting with yourself that maybe you could do something a little less normal. Maybe you could go out on a limb a bit because mental wellness isn't normal. Midlife thriving isn't normal. Bone addiction is normal. Eating and drinking to avoid making healthy changes in our lives is normal. And yet if you're a listener of the show, I'm going to argue that you're not normal. I call you a warrior for a reason. Right now. Other people are not stopping and listening to self development in their free time. You are. And so as you begin to look at where you might make a shift or maybe follow along with Susie's joy of like, let's stop doing these five things no matter your age. I ask you that looking at the criticism and the way you're speaking to yourself in your head might be at the top of your list that maybe you could do this without criticizing or judging yourself. We don't know what we don't know. I didn't know back when I was 18 that you know what's coming out of my head is that my eating disorder would affect my dental health. I didn't know that my people pleasing with my then boyfriend would lead me into a 20 year marriage where I was like suffocating my soul. No. I love the beautifully wise Maya Angelou where she says once we know Better. We do better. So the first thing on this list, the first thing I want to highlight that I stopped doing at 50, was beating past Susie up for not being perfect. I'm not perfect. You aren't perfect. Nobody is perfect. And so accepting our past imperfections, learning from them and moving on is maturity and something I love to step into, no matter your age, Criticizing past us when we were doing the best we could, even if our best sucked. Okay? Criticizing ourselves keeps us stuck. It keeps us in shame. So let's try moving forward. You can grow without being cruel to yourself, you, compassion is more useful than criticism. I've done the research. Just listen in. All right? And at 54 now, and it's not my birthday, I just decided to do this episode now in March. Random. I know, but I'm now 54, and I would say it is a rare, rare day that I criticize or talk meanly to myself in my head or out loud. Meanwhile, I remember many years ago that one of the exercises my coach gave me was to say, why don't you write down the negative things you think about yourself on paper? And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, Coach, there isn't enough paper in the world for one day. And I'm here at 54 telling you that with the small shifts that I coach and that I teach in the Love youe Life, this podcast, and also this, the school that I run in one on one coaching, it is 100% possible I didn't have enough paper there to fill up all the negative thoughts in my head. I couldn't write them all down fast enough. And now I can't think. If I had a piece of paper, if I had a small sticky note like this, like square little pad of sticky notes, I might be able to write one negative thing that I'm thinking about myself in the past year. So it's possible. Small shifts make big changes. So starting with that, it's a really good headway into the next four things, because if you can be kind and compassionate with yourself, to think of these things and just sort of questioning whether quitting them or stopping at whatever age you are now might be helpful and wonderful for you, goes a long way. So thing number two, that I stopped in my 50s, actually a little before I was 50, that I wish I had stopped earlier, was drinking alcohol at first, it was just for the time being. It was December 5, 2019. I remember the date because my husband's birthday, and I thought, you know, I'll stop for now. There's a combination of reasons. I've actually been interviewed on Annie Grace's Naked Mind podcast, which is all about sobriety. So if anyone wants to listen to that, email me and I'll send you the link. That was a fun conversation, but ultimately, it was a lot of little reasons that added up to the big change of me just drawing a line in the sand and saying, no more. This drinking is one of the things that is so normalized in our society that I didn't look too hard at my drinking. Okay? It was like, everyone else is doing it. What harm is a beer or two on a Friday night out with my spouse or a glass of wine at book club? Well, the main first thing that changed for me was learning how big government and business wants me to think like that. They want me to think, what's the big deal? What's the big deal that you're increasing your risk of seven cancers? What's the big deal that we're numbing you out? We're encouraging you to numb out from your life so we don't really see what's going on in your life, so you don't really speak up. I'm sorry. From a feminist lens, that definitely inspired me. Lots of people meeting in their office rooms. Don't want us talking about this. Don't want us talking about the studies that are buried. The post that I've done on Instagram about stopping drinking alcohol that have been muted and disappeared, Messaging being softened, and women in particular. We are targeted because this society is well served if we numb out from what is actually going on in our lives, making us much more tolerant of things like the wage gap, the mental load we carry in the house, et cetera. And I am done with that nonsense. And I drew the line of the sand back then, and I continued to draw it there. Once I did that, once I sort of came out and, like, looked at it from that way, I was like, wait a minute. I could see more clearly to what it was doing to me and all my friends. How we metabolize alcohol slower as we age, how our skin looks after drinking, how we hold on to weight differently, how in drinking we're making things harder for ourselves. Did you know that one drink can stay in our system for up to 72 hours? So that one glass of wine, that industry is telling us it's not a big deal that we have on Friday night is still impacting our sleep, our metabolism, raising our anxiety, raising our depression, marinating our organs on Sunday? I know, right? And so, anyhow, I have episodes on that, and I can help people with that for sure. But over five years ago now, I stopped and I'm not going back. Another thing I stopped was eating sugar. Fake sugar, processed sugar, really any sugar not found in fresh foods. I eat my share of fresh sugar, like I apples and all that sort of stuff. But I gave up candy. I gave up fake sugar like the I used to drink Crystal Light or Mio, or like all the fake alcohol drinks with sugar in it, like, you name it. I also gave up pretending that I wasn't addicted to sugar and that those things that I was drinking during the day weren't impacting my moods, my cravings, my anxiety, my GI tract, and my energy. I gave up pretending that it didn't impact me. I gave up pretending that I wasn't addicted to eating something sweet at the end of every meal. I won't get into the specifics of how I gave up because since I was in my 50s and not 15, I had decades of a habit to emotionally eat, like, to really, like, look forward to that bowl of ice cream at the end of the night. And decades of addiction to sugar. That's another thing the government isn't telling us that the standard American diet controls a whole lot of fake food and addictive substances. Okay, since I'm sounding a bit like a crazy person on here with, like, government theory, like, conspiracy theories, I. I won't get more into it, but read your labels, warriors. Okay? I don't want to allow some company to put something in my body that makes me feel worse or out of control. And no matter where you are, I'm in Australia now. They do it here, too. They do it like, look, it's less. Like, dyes and stuff are less in food in Australia, but it's. Sugar is just as prevalent. It's in the salsa. It's in the ketchup. It's hard, too. It's in the chicken broth. It's hard to find it without it. So just pay some attention because similar to alcohol, sugar left me feeling cruddy. And it took me getting it out of my system to realize how cruddy and how, like, driven to that next hit I was. And similar to how I quit alcohol, which I can help you with in individual coaching and my specific strategies. I didn't say I was going to quit eating sugar forever for the rest of my life. I said for now. All right? I did say I need to stop for a month, like, cold turkey. And it was hard. But hard or not, I'm not going back because now again, as I said now that I'm not addicted, I see how much it was impacting my mood and my health. All right, so let me just say after quitting those two things, drinking alcohol and sugar, the next one was super easy for me. But you could do this one alone with that and still keep drinking and having sugar. You can do any of these five things on their own. The fourth thing I stopped doing was eating after dinner. This has had a massive impact on my health and how I feel in perimenopause and in how I sleep. I wear a ring that can monitor my sleep. And so different on the off day that I do eat after dinner, which I'm thinking I don't even. Yeah, I can't think of when I've done that in the last two or three years. Whereas I used to do it every single day since probably age 10, I don't know. But it is one of the most effective things we can do for our long term health is to stop eating after dinner for many reasons. One, when we eat late at night, our body is still busy digesting when it should be focusing on sleep. Digestion is work. Sleep is work. Your body can't do both well at the same time. Okay. Also, when you stop eating after dinner, it is easier for you to get that 12 window, 12 hour fasting window, which is incredibly supportive for female health. Like if you stop eating by seven, you can start eating at seven and you've done a lot to decrease the inflammation in your body.
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Okay?
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And what I know is most late night snacking isn't hunger, it's emotional, it's habitual. Sometimes it's because we didn't eat enough during the day. But none of those things are solved long term by eating at night. So as I said earlier, and I want you to hear this clearly, I ate dinner every. I ate after dinner, I ate sugar and I drank for decades. So stopping these things wasn't easy. I wouldn't have been able to do it without the support that I give in the Love youe Life School. But it's totally doable and something you could do, you could get started on today. Okay. In the Love youe Life School, we have a whole course on emotional eating. This part in particular, which comes up when we're trying to stop eating after dinner. And I coach on it all the time. So you can learn more about that@smbwell.com lifeschool or click on the link in the show notes to schedule a free 15 minute consult with me. Can get you the support you need. These things make a difference. For now, ask yourself, okay, how often do you go to bed after eating and think, wow, I'm so glad I ate all of that. After dinner, just ponder that. All right, the final thing, the fifth thing I stopped doing was comparing my body to other people's bodies. And as I stopped doing that, I stopped criticizing my own body aloud or in my head, right? So I stopped comparing myself with other women, and then I stopped criticizing my own body. I stopped being critical of my body. At some point, I realized how much energy I was spending judging my body that has carried me through pregnancies, stress, joy, grief, healing, illness, life. I was criticizing a body that for decades I had fed sugar and inflammatory substance, alcohol, skimped on sleep, over exercised, wasn't kind to. And I chose to stop the nonsense of criticizing it like it's something that's doing something to me and instead choose two things. Gratitude and neutrality. Gratitude to see and say things like, hey, thighs, you've done a lot of work carrying me where I want to go in life, or, wow, arms, you lift so many things. Focusing more on feeling grateful for what they've done for me, even though I haven't treated them best and certainly haven't talked to them in the best. And then paired with gratitude, neutralizing my thoughts about my body instead of neutralizing means you don't have a judgment about them. You're just observing. Okay. Instead of like, my butt is saggy or my skin is wrinkly, it's like, this is what my butt looks like. This is what my chest looks like. This is what my knee looks like. Like, this is what a human knee looks like. On me, it's not good or bad. It just is. I did a funny reel a while back on, and I'll try to find it to repost. It was about encouraging us to think of our bodies and. And other people's bodies like we're dogs. Okay, hang with me here, but think of how we think about dogs. We don't see golden retrievers and have this thought that we're like, oh, that golden retriever should have a smaller midsection like that chihuahua. No. Or are we thinking that German shepherd's a bit heavy on the front? It should be more like the greyhound. I'm not. And I'm gonna bet you aren't either. We are probably kind observers here. It's neutral. We're just like, that's what the dog's leg looks like. That's what the dog's neck looks like. And so try that the next time you're looking at other women's bodies on spring break or around town. That's what her body looks like. This is what my body looks like. My lips, my neck, my arms. Neutral, neutral, Neutral. And grateful. Grateful. Grateful. Grateful my neck doesn't have a crook in it. Grateful my arms can lift what they can. Grateful my legs carry me where I want to go. Grateful I have legs, for goodness sake. And then neutral. These are the legs I have. This is what my legs look like. Like a dog. Lately I've noticed I have sunspots on my legs. So freaking what? I also noticed a dog with black patches on the path today. It's a white dog and I have these like random black patches all over it. Was I like, oh my God, go fix your dog. Oh, same, same. Maybe this is a good time for you to stop comparing your body to others. A good time to spend more time feeling the warm feeling of gratitude and appreciation to your wonderful body that's gotten you this far over judgment and shame. I know it's made a big difference in me. It's also like allowed me so my brain can spend time on more important things. This is the me I have. My leg has these sunspots like frickin fine. What do I want to get to in my life? All right. Before I get off on too much of a soapbox. So those were five things that I'd just like to offer up to you and call out to. Maybe something you'd like to experiment with. Okay. To get back in that new year energy. We're not even a third of the way through the year. Get back to that zing and think like these five things. Is there an area there that's calling to me? What would it be like if in like a month I'm less critical to myself in my head? Or in a month I haven't drink an alcohol? Or in a month I haven't eaten sugar. Or for a day I didn't eat dinner after, I didn't eat after dinner. Or I haven't been comparing myself to other ladies bodies. Next week on the podcast, I'm going to talk all about habits and give you tools on how to follow through and do the things we want to do for sure. And for today, I just want today to be a reminder that every day is a fresh day. One we won't get back. Why not start today? Start caring for yourself better today in a small way. You're not behind, you're not broken. If you're 65. This isn't something you should have started at 50. Just get started. Your life is happening now and you, my dear wonderful listener, are worth paying attention to. All right. If you want to learn specific small steps, bring it to Coaching. Sign up for one on one coaching or join the Love youe Life School. You can do that easily at my website SMB well.com and go to the Work With Me tab. What are you waiting for? Seriously, why wouldn't you start now? Why wait another week, another year, another decade to take care of your wonderful human self here? You matter deeply to me and I am so proud and happy that you're the type of person who listens to podcasts like this. You are truly extraordinary and I find it an honor that I get to spend time.
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Thank you for listening to the Love youe Life show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on itunes. Also, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Go get em warriors.
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Hey, can you do me a favor? This is a great episode to share with one or 100 other people. Seriously, talk about making a difference and how every little thing matters. The more of us out here taking care of ourselves, the better. There's a lot going on in the world right now and the things that I mentioned today are all about taking care of yourself and optimizing your mental health. Thank you. If you're able to share this with one or a hundred other people, you are awesome and I love that you're part of the Love youe Life family.