Finding Peace With Food and Aging: Featuring Ruth Harper, RD

Today Heather and her guest, Ruth Harper, a registered dietitian, and nutrition therapist talk about Ruth’s journey to making peace with both food and aging. Ruth struggled with body-consciousness and a strong perfectionist mentality as a teenager, as a result of her involvement in track and field. She tried to control her eating habits by eating less and running more, but ended up feeling devastated when she couldn’t maintain control over her body. Ruth shares what helped her overcome her struggles, how her journey with food, control, and body image issues has gone, and what has happened as she’s added aging to the mix.

Heather and Ruth discuss the fear and terror that arises when undergoing body changes and how to approach aging and menopause while dealing with unexpected complications. They reference Ruth’s personal struggles with emotional regulation, body image, and appearance expectations. Ruth offers tips on intuitive eating and relaxing for those going through perimenopause or menopause, and explains how the right mindset can help navigate this difficult period. This episode is perfect for anyone seeking body image freedom while struggling with the pressures of aging. 

Learn more about Ruth Harper here: https://nourishmentor.com/

Learn more about Classical Conversations, today’s sponsor, here: www.classicalconversations.com

Learn more about Christian body image coaching with Heather Creekmore, here: www.improvebodyimage.com

Topics Covered in this Episode on Aging, Body Image, and Making Peace with Food

1. The Fear of Body Changes- Heather Creekmore shares her experiences and emphasizes the importance of the Lord’s peace.

2. The Struggles of Aging and Perimenopause- Ruth Harper’s story of emotional regulation in menopause transition.- Studying Nutrition as a tool for body control and the pressure to maintain a certain appearance.- Connecting with God to overcome fear of eating and a new approach to body relationship.

3. Ruth Harper’s Work and Personal Journey- Her private practice and study on intuitive eating and sensitive work.- Emphasizing the role of emotional connections with body and food.

4. Heather and Ruth’s Conversation about Aging- Coaching on aging challenges and body image pressure in collegiate sport

Full Transcript

Heather Creekmore [00:00:39]:

Thanks for listening to the compare to who show. I’m Heather Creekmore, your host, and today we’re talking about aging. Oh, my. I didn’t know Martha Stewart was going to be on the COVID of Sports Illustrated when I recorded the show with my guest, Ruth Harper, and I’ll tell you more about her in just a second. But aging is an interesting thing in our culture, right? We’re all about antiaging. And then sports illustrator puts Martha Stewart on the COVID So maybe things are changing. I don’t know. But what I do know personally is that aging is harder than I ever.

Heather Creekmore [00:01:17]:

Expected it to be.

Heather Creekmore [00:01:19]:

Can you feel me? Do you relate? Oh, it’s shocking, in fact. And today, my guest, Ruth Harper is going to tell her story. She’s a registered dietitian. She does nutrition therapy and healing for women with eating disorders and coaching clients around intuitive eating. She does a lot of things. She works with a lot of women who are struggling in the perimenopause menopause years. Another interesting aspect to Ruth’s story is that she’s a former division one collegiate athlete in track and cross country, so she’s experienced body image issues from that perspective as well. And I know some of you can relate to the pressure around body in collegiate sports. And I invited Ruth on today to first tell her story and talk about what she does. But in part two of this episode, ruth is going to coach me a little bit around aging. I’m going to talk to her about some of the things I’m facing, some of the things that some of my clients have told me they’re facing, and she’s going to give us a little coaching on that. So if this is you, if you relate to all this aging stuff, then I hope you listen to that episode, too. I think you’re going to get a lot out of today’s episode no matter. How old you are.

Ruth Harper [00:04:37]:

Thanks for having me, Heather. I’m so happy to be here.

Heather Creekmore [00:04:40]:

I’m just excited that we’re going to talk about all things aging today. Aging is a real struggle for a lot of us, and yet it’s part of life, right? I mean, there’s no other option?

Ruth Harper [00:04:55]:

There are other options, but yes.

Heather Creekmore [00:04:58]:

No other viable option, right? But yeah. So I’d love to just get started. Will you just tell us you do a lot of work with women around eating disorders, disordered eating, which just kind of tell us your story. A lot of times those of us who work in this have a story of struggling with this. Will you share yours with us today?

Ruth Harper [00:05:19]:

I’d be happy to. Thanks for asking, Heather. Yeah, so I grew up as a body conscious teen and I was a runner. I ran track and cross country. And as I think about that experience and in hindsight, I was even embarrassed to have a body at all, never mind to have a body running around a track in skimpy clothing. And then I had this strong perfectionist inside saying to look more presentable on the track like all the other tiny little girls running around, because I wasn’t one of those tiny little girls. I wasn’t in a large body, but I felt large in my body and I wanted to figure out how to feel better, and so I did. I tried, but then, so I did this try to eat less and then run as much as possible. And I was so dang hungry that the eating just took over and I had to eat and eat because I was so hungry. And then I felt devastated that I couldn’t control the eating, that I needed to run more. And it was this cycle of figuring out what in the world is wrong with me and why can I not control this body and this eating? And so, lo and behold, I thought, I’ll decide to study nutrition, let’s learn about it so that I can control it for myself. And so sorry I didn’t learn nutrition to help people. I was very selfish.

Heather Creekmore [00:06:48]:

I don’t think you’re alone in that at all.

Ruth Harper [00:06:50]:

I’m sure I’m not, but it feels yucky. I thought I could figure it out if I knew more about it, and boy, was I wrong. I learned through studying nutrition the body is crazy smart and amazing and that the body doesn’t require exactness as much as we think that it should, or as people say we should. But it didn’t even help to know that I still couldn’t control it, no matter what I knew. And I was angry and upset and still stuck in this cycle of over exercising and trying to restrict and feeling like a failure all the time, even with the knowledge and oh, that’s like a double whammy, right? And not only did I have this negative view of my body and this embarrassment to have a body, now I was a dietitian in this body and play that was more pressure than I wanted. Like now I have to keep my body looking presentable because people expect me to, because now I have all the knowledge and if I’m going to think I have a voice that matters, I better keep this body looking the way people think it should look. It’s pretty heavy.

Heather Creekmore [00:08:11]:

Yeah, I love that word, exactness. That’s an interesting word, I think, especially as we think about aging, right? Because there is this belief, maybe promulgated by instagram ads, right, that there’s a formula. If you just figure out the exact formula, then you can solve all your body problems, but then carrying that one step forward, you can solve all your aging problems. So I love how you pointed out that quest for the exactness. That’s such a good word. So Ruth, did you figure it all out? Have you mastered this all?

Ruth Harper [00:08:56]:

Well, we’ll just tell the rest of the story. Yeah, I took time off from working after I worked for a few years. I had kids and wanted to raise them at home and in that time, I sort of was separated from this world of nutrition and everything. I didn’t even want to tell anybody I was a dietitian. And I just was diving right into God’s word and learning and growing spiritually, and it was an amazing time. And I knew after a while that there was something that didn’t line up inside of me with my relationship with food and my body and my relationship with God, it just didn’t mesh. There were two separate worlds. I almost had this dual personality going on, and it was uncomfortable, and I didn’t have the power to do anything about it. It was really big and strong inside. And so now I had a lot of shame and guilt that I had this going on. And wow, I had to act like the spiritual Bible study leader on one hand and then try to figure out how to keep my body right on the other hand. And then one year, we took a vacation in the summer to the Smoky Mountains, and I decided it would be a really fun exercise to run down the mountain and back up again. Running down the mountain that day, I hurt my knee because all that pounding going down, the gravity wasn’t great for it, and I couldn’t run anymore. I couldn’t even ride a bike. I couldn’t take a walk. I had to actually just sit and be. And it was terrifying. Thank the Lord. Like I had been doing all this work of connecting with Him and growing spiritually. That when I felt that terror inside. It was really bigger than anything I’d ever felt before. And I knew that I needed to go to Him, and I did. And honestly, I have to say that was probably the first time I’d ever honestly gone to God with a problem that I didn’t know what to do with, because I was always pretty resourceful. I could figure things out. I went to Him and I just said, Lord, what am I going to do? And he came so close to me with this piece that just didn’t make any sense to me. And I got the sense that if I gained weight, it was going to be okay, because I had this relationship with God that was bigger and more important than a body that felt safe to me. And he calmed me in that. And it’s that peace that I was able to have and keep that then it just brought down that urge and that fear around eating that I could connect with my body like I’d never done before. And I could sense when I needed to eat and how much and even what was interesting. And it wasn’t scary at all. In fact, it was more peaceful than I had ever experienced anything, ever. And I was just flabbergasted that this could be my reality. And it was. God’s, he gave it to me.

Heather Creekmore [00:12:13]:

Ruth, this is so good. Let’s talk more about it right after this break.

Ruth Harper [00:12:17]:

That’s then how I started navigating my relationship with food and my body was this connectedness that was so unlike anything I had experienced before, and it just wasn’t scary anymore. Then fast forward many years when my kids were old enough to not need me much at all. I’m like, oh, maybe I should get a job. And I decided that I didn’t want to get a real job. I decided to open up a private practice, which, fun facts, it is a real job. And I wanted to figure out what to do in that private practice. And I learned about intuitive eating. And I was just in awe of God for how he created this and he taught it to me. And then he set me up to be able to see that that’s a real area of science and practice where people are learning to connect with their bodies, to be able to eat intuitively and have peace with food and body. And that’s exactly what he walked me through years prior.

Heather Creekmore [00:13:22]:

Yeah, I love that. And I just want to point out the word you used, terror that you felt when you were injured. And I know everyone listening today. Well, I shouldn’t speak for everyone, but I would say most people listening today do not think that’s the wrong word. Right. That is so relatable. It is terrifying to think about your body changing or the flip side of that. Think about the reality that your body may never change. Right. I love how you point out the truth that it wasn’t really about your body, it was about the Lord ministering to you in that, and that’s where the peace came from. So I love that. Thank you for sharing that. So aging. So did you find any extra complications or unexpected complications? Did any of the things that you thought you kind of worked through resurface as you started entering the paramenopause years? The right?

Ruth Harper [00:14:37]:

That’s a good question. Yes, for sure. And I’m so grateful for the work that I did prior because if I hadn’t have done that, I would have been in the same place. And so just if I could prelim a little bit of that, I had something happened just prior to the menopause transition for me in my life that through my emotional health for a loop, and it brought to light that I was not that emotionally regulated at all. I had a lot of internal strategies going on to try to act like I was okay, and I really believed I was okay. And this one thing happened that it just showed me that I was not as okay as I thought. And it was pretty heavy and I was falling apart, to be honest. And I decided to enter into some work in therapy and I realized that I had been disconnected with my emotions my whole life. I didn’t know I thought I was strong because I didn’t have so many emotions.

Heather Creekmore [00:15:39]:

Yeah, I hear that.

Ruth Harper [00:15:41]:

I’m like, I’m great. I’m not tossed to and fro with my emotions.

Heather Creekmore [00:15:45]:

I hear you. I get it.

Ruth Harper [00:15:47]:

I can just do the right and I can look like I’m great all the time, but I so was not great. And then it’s so interesting. Years ago when this was going on, god brought me connected to a dietitian who you’ve had on your podcast. Tracy Brown, who’s my friend now, and we did some work together, and she taught me about trauma informed work and just understanding the nervous system and understanding how that relates to the way we connect in our bodies with our emotions and how that relates to food and all these things. And it was just amazing because not only because of my practice and how it affected the way I related to my clients, but I was experiencing in myself firsthand, right then, that connecting with my body through this emotional connection was amazingly important. Wow. So I’m in this process of learning about all this and then I enter into the menopause transition. Right. That’s awesome.

Heather Creekmore [00:16:52]:

Good timing.

Ruth Harper [00:16:53]:

Well, maybe. I don’t know. It was a lot. And so if you can imagine, I’m in this emotional awakening, and then my hormones start changing like crazy and I am just overwhelmed with emotion, and my body is also changing. And on top of that, I had major ankle surgery, which I was laid up for months and months and months.

Heather Creekmore [00:17:18]:

Wow.

Ruth Harper [00:17:19]:

And so all this just came together at the same time. And so I was dealing with emotions. I was dealing with hot flashes. And this is a very fun fact. When I had stitches in my ankle and I came home from the hospital, hot flashes came upon me like I had never had hot flashes before. And it was like my body said, no, thank you. I hate stitches. I’m going to flash you constantly. And it did. And then when the stitches were removed, the hot flashes settled back down again until later anyway. Isn’t that fascinating? That’s interesting. Yeah. So anyway, I was going through all this and then so I was sedentary again, and so I’m gaining weight related to being sedentary and related to menopause, and I had to sit with the distress of, wow, my body’s really aging here. And it was a lot to feel. And I had to do a lot of work with the Lord and in my own emotional state to be able to ground myself and offer myself compassion for what I was experiencing and seek the Lord for what is true and how I can still know who I am in the midst of all of that. Upheaval.

Heather Creekmore [00:18:43]:

Yeah, that’s good.

Ruth Harper [00:18:45]:

Yeah.

Heather Creekmore [00:18:45]:

I love how you said it was a lot to feel. That’s really the key, isn’t it? We’d rather not feel it. Just make it go away. I don’t want to feel it well.

Heather Creekmore [00:18:58]:

Ruth, I’m so excited that you’re going to come back and be with us next time we’re going to do some coaching. I think it’ll be super fun to hear how you guide me through these aging issues. So thanks for being here today. And thank you for listening. I hope something today has helped you stop comparing and start living.