In this episode we talk to Haley Cox, registered dietician and co-founder of Beloved Coaching and Nutrition about nourishing your body when you've got a busy schedule. Haley talks about the importance of staying nourished and gives some tips and tricks for dinners and snacks for busy art business owners.

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Hello, and welcome to cowgirl artist of America's podcast, a podcast dedicated to cowgirl artists, I'm CA's founder and your host, Megan Wimberley. I am a working artist myself, and I know personally the level of work and commitment that goes into this business. CA's podcast is all about bringing you resources, information, and encouragement to help you on your journey. In today's episode, we're talking to my good friend, Hailey Cox about nourishing your body. When you are a busy business owner, Hailey is a registered dietician and the co-founder of beloved coaching and nutrition based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. Before we begin, I want to tell you about cowgirl artists of America's next virtual meetup on March 9th. If you feel anxious, shy, or even skeezy for talking about your artwork, that's a problem. This is a meetup you won't wanna miss. We will be discussing how to speak about your work with confidence. Make sure to go to cowgirl artists of america.org and RSVP under the events tab. This meeting is free to attend.

So Haley, what degrees or licensure do you have?

Yeah, so I am a registered dietician. I had to have four years of undergraduate in nutrition and then go through an internship process. After that I had to pass a national board exam and then I have to be licensed in, you know, most states require licensure. In order for me to practice,

You are not a nutritionist, right?

I'm technically a dietician and a nutritionist, but there is a difference. So a dietician is someone who has gone through everything that I just mentioned and a nutritionist be you, for example, you don't have to have any qualifications at all.

And so what, what got you interested in studying food and nutrition? Cause you actually started out in culinary arts, right?

Yeah, that's correct. So I originally graduated high school and wanted to be a chef. So I went down you Dallas, Texas, and started culinary school. I got six months in and realized, this is not for me. I am not a morning person. So those 4:00 AM making donuts or whatever it is, that is not my jam. So I took a nutrition class and absolutely fell in love with it. I ended up moving back to Oklahoma, got my degree. And ever since then, I love nutrition. I love to talk about it. I love food. I like to eat good food.

Yeah. I think actually before you and I ever even met, I had had surgery and you helped really make a week worth of food for me while I was recovering. And I was like, what? This person just made me all this food and they've never even met me.

I do remember that we had a lot of fun and it was so sweet, especially when I got your thank you card.

That's so funny. I'm glad that I was polite. So most of cowgirl artists of America's followers and listeners are female Western artists. So as artists, they are business owners and you know, because you're in the midst of star starting a new business, you have started a new business. Yes. It can be really hard to keep up with everything. And so like we have artists who maybe they have families, sometimes they're taking care of their ranches as well. And they're just really, really busy and food can sometimes get pushed aside or a hassle and be hard to keep up with. So do you have any suggestions for, you know, staying nourished when you're, when you're real busy?

Yeah. I have lots of suggestions, but first I wanna say that even though I am a dietician, I am not immune to accidentally you know, delaying a meal or snack and next thing know it's the next meal or snack time. So I do wanna say that, you know, this is really common. It's not your fault. You're not a bad person. It just happens. So the first thing I would suggest would be to think about what your top meals and snacks are from there. You can create some kind of a standard grocery list or something like that. That way you don't have to think about it each week. I highly suggest prepping snacks ahead of time. I like to do this on a day off. Or if you're a business owner, guess what? You probably aren't taking those days off.

But you know, if you're watching TV or listening to a podcast like this one, you can make a snack at the same time. You can make it a family activity, prep in little baggies or containers. I recommend keeping them beside the door. So whenever you're on the go, you just can grab one and go you can keep it in your car purse. If you have a studio space, you can keep it within grabbing distance for those times, whenever you're just really in the zone. But you know, you need some nutrition to keep going.

Yeah, I know with myself, especially either if I'm at an event or I have a deadline, or if I'm running errands in town, as you saw yesterday, I don't love being in town. And so I'm like, I just wanna get in and out as fast as I can, but I have pretty immediate and strong results of not eating. Like I will get a headache and I will get really light headed. And so I try to keep snacks like you're talking about, and I've gotten a lot better at it. But when you are busy and say, you have reached that point where you're like, oh my gosh, I, I feel really faint or lightheaded. Are there certain foods that are really good to eat in that moment that are helpful for getting you back to kind of baseline pretty quickly?

Mm, great question. Yeah. So carbohydrates are what regulate our blood sugar, which is usually that physical sign of, oh my goodness, I need food. And so you're going to want some simple carbohydrates. So you can absorb that glucose quickly into your system and it can start fueling your cells and your brain and the rest of your body. So foods like juice, fruit, M and Ms. Candy, anything that's going to be kind of starchy quick to digest. It could be a granola bar. Lots of those things are pretty easy, your body to quickly digest, and you can get back to doing what you're doing.

I've noticed for me a lot of times like French fries help. Does that make sense? It seems like something about fat, the fat and like maybe a car. I don't know. Is there anything to that?

Yeah. So French fries are a pretty simple carbohydrate of that will absorb pretty quickly into your bloodstream. Break down into that glucose. Fat is a really, really great option for people who are busy because it takes a long time to kind of like digest. It's like if you compare it to a fire, it's that slow burn. So it can take as long, you know, four hours to digest that fat. So you're getting that consistent energy kind of throughout that time, the carbohydrates kick in first to get you feeling a little bit better. And then that fat will continue to provide energy to you for the next few hours. Typically we do need to eat about every four hours.

So with fats, like I know fats have kind of been like the scapegoat for a while and we're seeing, and now that maybe some of that research was not quite as good as they thought it was. But there are different types of fats and like our body needs different types of fats. Can you kind of explain, maybe explain that in like an example of that fat, are there any of those that you do wanna eat more of and maybe some that you wanna like eat more thoughtfully?

Yeah, absolutely. So typically we would say to eat, you know, a little bit less saturated fats, however really the most important thing over, you know, trying to balance mono saturated and poly saturated and all these different names that I'll be honest. Sometimes I can even get confused looking at all of the different things. The most important thing is to get enough. So you can get fats from, you know, meat products. You can get fats from nuts, From some carbohydrate, even fruit has a little bit of fat in the seeds of it, and we need fat in order to process our fat soluble vitamins. Those vitamins are vitamin a D and E and K.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's important to eat fats with your vegetables because that is what's going to help you get the most vitamins out of that food and be able to absorb.

And some fats actually help our mental clarity too, right?

Yes. So there are, you know, certain acids like DHA, linoleic acid, there's several different acids that can kind of help with your brain. Your brain is made up of the majority by fat. So if you're not getting enough fat in your diet, then it's likely that your body is going to say, Hey, we need fats. And so you might be craving certain things. Your body is really wonderful and it's amazing the things that it can tell you whenever you're listening to it.

So let's say like snack wise, what are maybe three snacks that you, you feel like are good to have on hand? Like on the go, like these are your go-to, you're gonna have them at your house.

Yeah, absolutely. My three favorite snacks are probably any kind of granola bar. Truly. They're so easy. This is not sponsored. I, I do love LA bars. I think they're really yummy. My second snack would probably be some type of granola and nut mixture. I'm not a huge fan of just like a mix of nuts on their own. So I like it to be mixed with something, especially if it has some chocolate in it. And then my third favorite snack, if I'm at home, I usually grab like cutie or something that, you know, I can put into my bag and it's not gonna super get demolished like something else.

Yeah. I used to, when I was still teaching, I would have to prep my snacks for the whole week because I started noticing that I would not have snacks. And then I would be starving in the middle of class, or maybe I didn't have time to go to the teacher's lounge and grab a snack. And I would, if you have access to a fridge, like I would make a little container with like tomatoes, cucumbers, I think broccoli. And I think maybe there was something else and then I'd put hummus on the side. And like, I just thought that was such a delicious, like refreshing snack. And I always just, it was so nice to just know that I could reach in the fridge and that snack is right there, ready to go. And I really prepping it. Doesn't take that long cuz you could buy like the precut vegetables and, and you buy the little containers and prepping is so fast. But when you're trying to do it each day separately, it can get really hard to keep up. Cuz you might get busy. And it's the same as we've talked on the podcast before about like batch batching, your work. So like maybe you do your Instagram posts all on the same day of the week or the month and it helps your brain to just have that time for that task and get it done. And I think food often works really well that way too. Especially if you're busy.

Yeah. I completely agree.

What about dinners? Like do you have any tips for making dinner easier?

Yes I do. I really like the idea having some standard dinners and writing it on the note card, you don't have to write the whole recipe, even if it's just this, the name of it like crockpot chicken tacos or whatever it is. And so you can go through and kind of say like, yep, this is what I'm going to have for dinner this week. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's all laid out. It can be visual for you if you're a visual person, if it's more fun for you to make it artistic and like draw all over the note cards, do it. There's no rules around it. So whatever is going to motivate you to be able to nourish yourself and kind of escape that trap for from five minutes before dinner time and you're starving and you're like, oh my gosh, what can I eat? And you're like just going through the pantry, trying to find something to eat until you can make dinner. That can be really helpful to have, you know, your staples, your go-tos and definitely including like a few things on there that you don't have to cook that are, you know, something that you can make in for sure. Less than 10 minutes.

So do you pre prep the food itself or are you just doing the note cards and that way, you know, like what am I gonna make? Oh, I see that right there. I'm gonna make that whatever's on that card.

Yep. Just like that. Okay. Yep. That's and I suggest, you know, kind of keeping a standard pantry item, so to speak that way, you know, you don't have to look each time. You just kind of know. I know that I always keep beans and shreded cheese and tortilla chip, so I know that I can make nachos no matter what.

Yeah. And so also something that I find helpful and I wonder how you feel about it, but I, I love so much. I love leftovers. Yes. Right.

I, I love leftovers too.

And you can like purposefully make a ton of dinner that, you know, you're not going to eat and you could freeze it and then you could use it the next month or the next week, or it's like lunches for the rest of your week. And you don't have to think about it.

I definitely agree. One way if you're like, oh my gosh, I hate leftovers. I cannot stand eating leftovers. Some people are like that or don't wanna eat the same thing day after day. So one way you can do that is by kind of think like, okay, maybe I'll have a pretty quote unquote plain meal. So maybe you just make, you know, rice and you make a meat or some type of protein and a veggie or a fruit or something. And then, you know, throughout the week you can take all those ingredients and you can mix them up in different ways. So it's leftover. So to speak that idea, batch, cooking some things, but you know, you can do so many things with rice. You can put it in a soup, you can make a casserole out of it. You can put it in and Chi lots, you can make fried rice out of it. There's a lot of different ways you can go with that.

That's such a good idea.

So one thing that I love doing is a lot of times I go to a restaurant and I can't eat all the food, you know, at the time it's cold and I'm like, man, am I really gonna eat this? But I take it home anyways. And I always reheat it either in the oven, in the toaster oven or in an air fryer. And it gets that like nice crispiness back to it.

Yeah. Air fryer is, I feel like the air fryer is a game changer just for like texture and then the crop pot. And I have not used my Insta, but I know the pressure cookers can like beans and cornbread are such, that's like such a simple, like Southern staple and you don't have to soak the beans. And I am just still, like, I don't believe that, but you can just put them in the pressure cooker and you have beans and you haven't had to think about it.

Yep. It is amazing. So just exactly you talked about Megan, I have experienced the same thing of having a pressure cooker and just being like, wow, but I know how to make it in the crock pot on the stove for X, Y, Z. You know, I don't know if I wanna look up a recipe on how to make it in this new contraption, but I will tell you, after a couple of years of an instant type thing sitting in my pantry, I finally looked up some recipes and it has changed my life. I have gone from some frozen everything to a fully cooked, absolutely amazing tender, delicious dish in under 30 minutes.

That's awesome. So why don't you tell everybody, cuz you're where you are right now is a specific niche in the dietician world. And so you approach a lot of your practice that way. What is it that you're currently doing and what is your philosophy on food?

Yeah. So throughout my time, starting in culinary school, I obviously loved food and throughout my internship and becoming a dietician, I interned at a residential eating disorder facility. And that was absolutely not on my radar at all. I just got placed there and kind of decided like, wow, these people, they need a lot of help. So through lots of different ways, I worked in an ICU, I worked at a skilled nursing facility. I worked lots of different places. And eventually I ended up at working at a residential eating disorder facility for children. And now I am running my own business. It's mostly eating disorder focused, but we also provide nutrition education and things like that. So through that lens, I have done a ton of research. And through that research, I have really discovered that, you know, food is not good or bad or healthy or unhealthy. All of it is food at the end of the day, our digestive system. Unless you have an allergy or something like that, you know, it processes it the exact same way. So whether you are eating M and Ms or French fries, both of those have carbohydrates and fats in them. So your body is digesting them and absorbing them the same exact way.

So do you think that there's, there needs to be balance with the variety of food? Like you don't wanna just eat like one food over and over all the time?

Absolutely. Yep. There has to be that balance. So we approach nutrition through an all food fits mentality. If you, you know, just going with that example, if you overeat on M and M you're probably going to be sick. And if you overeat on broccoli, you're also probably also going to be sick. Probably through a lot of diarrhea, but I think also, you know, it's so great that we do have technology and are able to look up recipes for different things, but don't get too complicated with it. All right. If that recipe has like 20 ingredients, Skip it,

So on the, on the train of thought with like people being very busy and food can feel complicated sometimes. And we've talked about food prepping and having snacks. Are there any other pieces of advice that you would want to give or any bread flags or warning signs that maybe you are not taking enough time to nourish yourself? Cause before you answer that, I just want to remind everyone that it is so important to make sure you're getting food. Be especially as you're busy and you were telling me about when you go to sleep and your body is repairing itself and sometimes you need even more calories. And so whenever we're like not eating enough because we're so busy, it's actually really making it hard for our body and our brain to keep up with everything and to actually do all the stuff that we want and need to do.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, just some kind of like physical signs of hunger, hunger, isn't always physical. But some physical signs of hunger, like Megan's said it could be, you know, headache or migraine, your stomach growling. Okay. Look, my friends call me hangry Hailey, because I get hangry. It could be a lack of focus or energy shakiness or weakness. Eventually if you don't like, I don't know if you've ever been like, oh shoot, I'm late, accidentally skipped breakfast. And then next thing you know, it's almost lunchtime and you're feeling nauseous or you're like, oh, I'm not even hungry now. Well that's because you denied your body's hunger cues. So the more we can listen to our body's initial hunger cues the more we can trust our body and be able to nourish it consistently and it will say, oh, Hey, whenever I signal this, they feed me

One last question too. What about supplements that claim like that they're gonna do X, Y are there any supplements or foods that really are like powerhouses of like, this is actually like a, really, this is a great thing to have and eat. Like, are there any things like that?

I would say unfortunately there is not just like one certain food that will absolutely cure everything. I wish that there was but it does not work that way. I think really getting like a lot of balance. So talking about your fruits and vegetables earlier this week, Megan and I we were talking about tomatoes and why they're so yummy and important. So tomatoes have like APEN in them and lycopene is a, is the strongest antioxidant that we know of. So if you're all you cowgirls of America, if you're on a farm like Megan and I kind of grew up in Oklahoma get those farm fresh, you know, ride tomatoes right off of the vine.

Is there anything else that you want to talk about before in this interview?

So even though I currently work mostly with eating disorders, I do offer, you know, nutrition education to anyone virtually regardless of disordered eating. If you happen to suspect yourself or someone else to have disordered eating, you can absolutely re out to me. Or if you have any questions about what we discussed today you can ask me directly@haleydotcoxbelovedcn.com, or you can find me on Instagram at beloved recovery.

Cool. And I'll include all of that in the show. So everybody can take a look at that. Thank you, Hailey.