Grace & Grit Podcast

When you start doing the work of regulating your nervous system, something interesting happens. You feel better. You make clearer decisions. You stop absorbing other people's chaos quite so readily. And some of the people around you find that deeply unsettling. In this episode I explain why the friction that comes with growing into a more regulated version of yourself is not a sign that you are do...

We spend enormous amounts of time and energy managing what we eat. Very few of us have been taught to ask why we are eating. In this episode I explore the critical distinction between physical hunger, which builds gradually, is satisfied by food, and stays satisfied, and emotional hunger, which arrives suddenly, is often specific to a particular food, and is not resolved by eating. I share the emo...

The wellness market is full of tools designed to hold you accountable. And most of them are genuinely useful. But there is something none of them can do. And understanding that distinction might be the most important thing about using them well. In this episode I make the case that tools are multipliers, not foundations. A food tracking app cannot tell you why you are eating. A recovery monitor ca...

Dolly Parton once said: find out who you are and do it on purpose. In a world that constantly invites us to be something other than ourselves, doing it on purpose is a radical act. In this episode I use Dolly's life as a masterclass in self-leadership. She was told early in her career to change the way she dressed to appeal to a wider audience. She did not. She was pressured repeatedly to use her...

Every year, millions of women arrive in January exhausted, depleted, and vowing to start over. And every year, the same pattern produced that outcome: a slow unraveling that began somewhere in October. In this episode I make a direct challenge to the fourth-quarter slide, the quiet permission most women give themselves to let their health practices slip in the name of seasonal busyness. The habits...

There is a decision that a growing number of women are making quietly, usually without telling many people, because they are not sure how it will be received. They are choosing to sleep apart from their partners. Not as a statement about their relationship. As a statement about their health. In this episode I make the case for the sleep divorce as a practical, loving, intelligent choice for midlif...

We talk about nutrition almost exclusively in terms of food. But there is another kind of nourishment that rarely gets discussed: the kind that becomes available when you release an identity that no longer fits who you are becoming. In this episode I explore the identities many midlife women carry past their expiration date: the caretaker, the overachiever, the one who never asks for help. These i...

There is a story we tell about boundaries that sounds like this: some people just have them and some people do not. Today I want to dismantle that story completely. In this episode I make the case that boundaries are a skill, not a fixed character trait, and that the women who appear effortlessly confident at setting them have simply practiced more. I also speak directly to the guilt that arrives...

What if you thought about your body the way a smart investor thinks about a financial portfolio? Some assets are highly liquid and relatively easy to adjust. Others take years, even decades, to build, and are worth protecting above almost everything else. In this episode I use my own recent DEXA scan results to illustrate the portfolio analogy in a way that is concrete and personal. My body fat ca...

If you do not define what enough means for yourself, you will spend your entire life chasing it. And here is the cruelest part: you will never catch it. In this episode I challenge the wellness industry's infinite improvement loop, the idea that there will always be another five pounds, more muscle, better biomarkers, another protocol, and make the case that defining enough is not settling. It is...

The fourth quarter of the year has a particular quality to it. Demands increase. Schedules fill. Other people's needs multiply. And if you have not decided in advance who you want to be through all of it, the season will make that decision for you. In this episode I introduce one of the most powerful self-leadership strategies available for navigating a demanding season: pre-deciding. Before the p...

Before you follow anyone else's food rules, do you even know what your own are? And where did the beliefs you are currently living by actually come from? In this episode I make the case that most women are living by a food philosophy they never consciously chose, assembled from family messages, diet culture, and whatever the wellness trend of the season happens to be. I share my own food philosoph...

There is a version of commitment that has nothing to do with integrity. It is the stubborn adherence to a decision you made in a different season of your life, with different information, as a different version of yourself. In this episode I make the case that changing your mind is not weakness. It is wisdom accumulated through experience. I share my own journey with juice fasting, something I was...

You would not expect a professional athlete to train at peak intensity fifty-two weeks a year. Their coach would never allow it. In this episode I make the case that your life operates on the same principle as athletic training: periods of high demand require recovery on the other side, and applying expansion-season expectations during a recovery season is one of the most common and costly mistake...

There are two sentences I use in coaching that have the power to completely shift how someone moves through a difficult relationship. They are not complicated. But sitting with them honestly requires a particular kind of courage. In this episode I share those two sentences and the story behind why I started using them: my own experience caring for my father through a complex and sometimes heartbre...

There is a voice that shows up every time you step in front of the mirror. It has opinions. It compares, it critiques, it comments on everything. And most of us have been so immersed in it for so long that we have stopped noticing it is even there. In this episode I make the case that the internal narrative running in your head while you get dressed is not neutral. It is a health variable. The bod...

Most people spend their lives chasing success without ever stopping to define what that word means to them. And the cost of that oversight is enormous. In this episode I make the case that if you do not define success, you will never reach it. You will just keep running. I share what success means to me in this season of my life, which has nothing to do with accolades or external validation and ev...

Resentment has a bad reputation. We treat it like something to be ashamed of, pushed through, or managed away as quickly as possible. But resentment is not the problem. It is a message. In this episode I make the case that resentment almost always has the same origin story: you gave something without asking for what you needed in return, or you kept saying yes when you meant no, and the feeling is...

Most of us make decisions reactively. Something comes up and we respond based on how we feel in that moment, what someone else needs, or what seems like the path of least resistance. A power statement changes that entirely. In this episode I introduce one of the most useful self-leadership tools I know: a personal declaration of who you are when you are operating at your best. I share my own power...

We have a lot of metrics for health. Steps, sleep scores, bloodwork, body composition, VO2 max. And I am not dismissing any of them. But there is a question underneath all of them that rarely gets asked directly: are you becoming more alive? In this episode I explore aliveness as a measure of health, not just physiological health but the quality of your engagement with your own experience. You can...

Your body is sending you signals constantly. Hunger. Fullness. Fatigue. Tension. Overstimulation. The need to move. The need to stop. And most of us have spent years overriding those signals so consistently that we can no longer reliably read them. In this episode I introduce the concept of interoception, the body's ability to sense its own internal state, and make the case that rebuilding this re...

It is too hot. It is too cold. There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood. I do not have the right shoes. I do not have enough time. We have become extraordinarily creative at making one of the most basic and universally available health practices feel inaccessible. In this episode I gently dismantle the excuse taxonomy: weather excuses, infrastructure excuses, and time excuses. I make the case tha...

In the Blue Zones, the regions of the world where people consistently live past 100 in good health, researchers kept finding the same things. And one of the most consistent was communal eating. In this episode I draw on Dan Buettner's Blue Zones research to make the case that eating with other people is not just pleasant. It is protective. Shared meals slow us down, almost automatically. They impr...

It is not a privilege that our bodies change. It is a privilege that we lived long enough to change. In this episode I challenge the assumption that a past version of your body was the standard against which all future versions should be judged. Bodies change because life happens. Because hormones shift, experiences accumulate, and time passes in a living system that is always responding to its en...

In 2012, Google noticed its employees were eating too much candy. Rather than lecturing them about nutrition or appealing to their willpower, a team of behavioral scientists did something much more interesting. They moved the M&Ms. In this episode I use Google's Project M&M, in which simply placing candy in opaque containers led to 3.1 million fewer calories consumed in seven weeks with nothing fo...