THIS WILL CHANGE THE WAY HOW YOU THINK ABOUT FOOD

Last nights talk with Dr. Libby was amazing, loads of great info and inspiration and for me personally, REASSURANCE.

***If you ever get a chance to watch her live I would say DO IT. And if you have never watched her TEDX Talk then you must.

IMPORTANT POINT NUMBER 1 : VIEWING OUR BODY FROM THE INSIDE OUT

I view my body and every body as the most incredible thing to exist. Once you have a deep appreciation of the inner workings of the human body, right down to it’s cellular level, it makes decision making easy. I am so grateful I chose to explore this whole world of hormones and how systems function and how they all integrate together through my studies at Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and now with the Kresser Institute. It totally does my head in somedays but I think this information is really the missing link that people absolutely need to feel freakin amazing.

Having an appreciation that nutrients; these only come from the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breath, the sunlight, power every reaction in our body, including hormone synthesis, you understand the importance of your choices.

“If you could only see the miraculousness of your inner workings, you would be in absolute awe of yourself”. 

Dr. Libby

Our bodies know exactly how to function, it’s up to us to give it the right information in order to carry out those functions.

That is really what my work is about – making sure things are functioning as they should! And if they aren’t (if you have symptoms I can tell you they aren’t) finding ways to feed your body with the right informations to restore function.

Let look at an example.

Thyroid hormone needs several nutrients in order for it to function properly (iodine, selenium, iron, zinc, B12, B2, Vit C, Vit A, Vit D, Magnesium). Being deficient in any of these can impact on thyroid production. Hence, why I am always harping on about eating nutrient dense food (learn to love a little liver friends, it is THE most nutrient dense food on the planet).

Hypothyroidism (hypo meaning low thyroid function) can also be caused by immune dysfunction as is the case for Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (an autoimmune condition), gut dysfunction (conversion of T4 to T3 takes place in the gut), inflammation, a calorie restrictive diet and high cortisol (stress hormone).

From this little example you can see that eating nutrient rich food, having great gut health, a balanced immune system, reducing stress, and avoiding things that drive inflammation are ALL important for functions. This isn’t even an exhaustive list, many other factors affect how the thyroid is functioning…

So just know that there is a little more going on than meets the eye when it comes to hormone health. It’s never as simple as a result on a piece of paper. This is a real life classic example:  You go to the doctor complaining of every thyroid symptom under the sun (reduced mood, fatigue, constipation, outer third of your eyebrow missing) and things are only getting worse and they check your TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) and say, “Nope nothing wrong, it’s in the normal range your good to go! Just do a little more exercise, eat a little less and here’s an antidepressant for that mood” and send you on your merry way.

You walk out feeling like a big piece of poo because your been exercising your butt off, eating next to nothing and putting on more weight and you feel like shit because of it all! I am telling you; in this scenerio you may very well have a thyroid problem but your TSH in this moment may be in the so called normal range.

I would say, trust yourself and do a little more digging and investigate what is going on. As women, we have somewhere along the way of being busy, feeling under appreciated and darkened by a deep cloud of worthlessness lost touch of our own intuition (which by the way is an actual thing). If you feel and know in your heart something is not right, don’t let someone even those with a white coat, make you doubt yourself. Find someone who is willing to listen to you that isn’t going to just treat or not treat a test result but rather treat you as a person.

IMPORTANT POINT NUMBER 2 : LET’S REASSESS THE LANGUAGE WE USE AROUND FOOD

Food is not:

• Clean. You don’t eat “dirty” food when you eat a cake. Cake isn’t “dirty!”
• Healthy. This is a tricky one because it’s so common. Health refers to a physical or mental state of a person. Humans are healthy or unhealthy but food is not healthy or unhealthy.
• Good. We can make good or bad decisions around food choices but food itself isn’t good or bad.

I know this might seem really picky but different people create meaning from the words we use. If you are constantly taking about eating “clean” this week and all you have been consuming is green juices and you have an impressionable young teenage daughter that doesn’t have the same life experience or rationale as you, she can interpret that as anything other than “green smoothies” is dirty food. And who wants to eat dirty food right?

So instead of saying, I ate “clean” this week. . Or even I ate “healthy” this week.

Let’s try a new world out and see how it feels for you….

Food is nutritious or not nutritious. The definition of nutritious is:  “efficient as food, nourishing.” 

Nourishing yourself with food is the name of the game! When you sit down to beautiful meal you have made from real living (or previously real living) produce, say to yourself, I am eating nutritious food that will nourish my the inner workings of my body. You want to eat it, don’t you? Ok let’s try the reverse. You sit down and open the bag of Doritos. You say, this food is NOT nutritious at all and it provides nothing for the inner workings of my body. Did it work? Did it make you feel a little less like eating the whole pack? Or make you want to still go and eat something nutritious on top?

Non-nutritious food is still ok to eat but it’s not going to nourish your body. Just know that. And sometimes that’s really ok. If it’s going to nourish your soul and connection then I say go ahead and enjoy that glass of wine and pizza with a girlfriend. In this case it’s not about the food. What you do 80% of the time is what impacts you not what you do “on occasion”.

There are sometimes when I think consuming non nutritious food is not ok. Children – children need nourishment. They are growing and developing. Yet children are the most targeted and most likely to consume junk “food” (we can lose the food word here and say just “junk”).  Junk is not nutritious and will not nourish a child. This is super important as we as adults are responsible. Today is the first generation of kids in modern history that’s expected to live shorter lifespans than their parents. YIKES that is scary!

IMPORTANT POINT NUMBER 3 : REMOVING FEAR FROM FOOD

We need to take the “fear” factor out of eating.   There are just as many health conscious people with hormone disruption and sub optimal health as there are non-health conscious people. I wrote about this here.  This is often due to the rigidity and rules that are place around what we “should” and “shouldn’t” eat.

We need to eat from a place of nourishment and focus on supplying our body with all the little nutrients it needs to do it’s super important jobs. When this is achieved you can enjoy:

• boundless energy
• beautiful hair, skin and nails
• a menstrual cycles that visits and goes every month with ease
• a natural amount of healthy body fat (not over or under, just right for you)
•  a clear, sharp mind
• a natural sex drive
• And the best thing ENJOYMENT

But we also need to relax a little around food too. That piece of cake isn’t toxic, it isn’t going straight to your thighs, your body will not explode from consuming some not so healthy vegetable oil, and staying at home instead of joining friends out of fear of not being able to eat at the party is not serving you any health favours.

Hope this helps to shift your thoughts a little around food, hormones, and achieving a healthy vibrant YOU.

Love Chantel

P.S If you are feeling a little stuck in a rut and thinking things just aint right, feel free to check out my page here for how I can help.

8 MOST IMPORTANT HEALTH LESSONS LEARNT SO FAR

I am here to share with you the most significant health related lessons I’ve discovered so far. I say so far as I am only 26 so in some ways I guess the significance is yet to be determined but in other ways I feel really lucky that I have found out these lessons so early on. Hence why I want to share with you all. So what exactly have I learnt after being at university for 4 years, working with health professionals and being introduced to a world of fitness and nutrition? Well quite a lot – I started out with 10 points however by the time I had written the first three I realised that this was going to be a BIG one. So I settled for eight.

1. The “experts” are not always experts

I find this statement sad but true most of the time. We place a huge amount of trust and confidence in people practising a professional service be it a doctor, a pharmacist, personal trainer, dietician or naturopath. We usually go to these people with the confidence they have more knowledge than ourselves and wikipaedia and that they can fix us. But don’t be fooled; just because someone has a title and a profession it doesn’t give them the ability to know more about you than YOU. Trust what you feel and seek answers. But be educated and equipped to identify the good from the bad. Like any profession, a degree does not define the persons entire ability and expertise. There is a spectrum of poor, average and excellent in each field. If you are lucky enough to find excellence, expect results. Don’t settle for poor, no results misinformation. Remember why you went there in the first place. And for the “experts”, myself included, we are in a position of power. People come to us for advice or a service in an attempt to improve their current state. This takes courage. And we have a huge responsibility to deliver current and results based information and services. This is only achieved through continued education and a genuine interest in your field and an acknowledgment that every client and every situation is unique. What a gratifying, rewarding job we have!!!

2. Evidence and studies do not over power living results

Evidence and studies can be flawed. Companies who have a vested interest in the results can manipulate what information makes it into the headlines. Take for example this Ancel Key fellow that found some population groups who ate a diet high in saturated fat had more heart disease. However he forgot to include the other populations that actually ate saturated fat and had better overall health. Decades later and we are still demonising saturated fat based on some pretty flawed studies and so called evidence. Its the promotion and careful selection of evidence and studies presented to the general population by certain bureaucracies that has largely contributed to our overall poor health.

The best example I can think of is this guy….. Mark Sisson… Look at his body below.

If you don’t know this man look him up he has a wealth of knowledge and experience. Would you say this man is at risk of heart disease, diabetes, is suffering from arthritis or any other “old age” symptoms. Well what if I tell you he is 60, he is eating loads of saturated fat, loads of eggs (high in cholesterol), he doesn’t eat grains, vegetables oils or refined sugars. He enjoys sprinting on the beach, lifting some weights and paddle boarding and tight rope walking. Pain and medication free at 60- this is an absolute rarity!

The physical evidence of this man standing before me is enough for me to want to read his blog and listen to what he has to say about health. Does he look like he is at risk of dying of a heart attack?

The medical world is completely controlled and driven by studies, which of course I get, but maybe they need to consider the whole picture and revisit some of the evidence that now have new, better designed studies. Saturated fat does not lead to heart disease- this theory has been disproven. But what about the living results? The evidence that half of all heart attack patients actually have below normal cholesterol levels or that cholesterol is actually sent to repair damage in vessels walls but at times there is so much oxidation and inflammation presents (due to refined carbs and “heart healthy” vegetable oils) that it cant do its jobs and gets wrongly accused of clogging up the arteries. And that cholesterol is synthesised in the body as a natural process dependent on our intake, thats is, if you don’t eat enough our body produces more . Do you honestly think that our body would produce something that would kill us?
 

3. Education is never ending and ever changing

As I mentioned above there is a huge importance on committing to a continuous, life long journey of self education if you want to stay at the top of your field and healthy. There is so much information available and accessible on the internet. I think the secret is to find a few people you believe in and trust and follow their sites otherwise things can get really overwhelming and confusing.

The problem with nutrition and healthy eating is there is very little or no education given to you during school or university (pharmacy degree/medicine degree). So unless you have a reason to start educating yourself most people have NO idea what good nutrition is.

I felt quite betrayed when I realised that a lot of what I had been told, been taught had practised was not entirely true or wrong. I still do feel this.

Our current health crisis will not improve until bigger corporations are willing to admit that they got their nutritional advice wrong.
Thankfully people like you and me don’t need to wait for this – we can admit to ourselves when we are wrong and continue to educate ourselves and make our own changes to achieve overall health.

4. Food is the most powerful and inexpensive medicine

I never thought to look at my food and consider that it could be causing my rash, my pimples, my moodiness, my cellulite, my diarrhoea, my tiredness. I spent hundreds of dollars trying to address these things not even knowing the influence food can have on our bodies. Thank god I found out or I could be seriously broke and still fat and ugly (kidding I wasn’t so bad). I am not alone with this story.

The theme behind, “An apple a day, keeps the doctor away,” may need to be given more weight and maybe a revamp, maybe we could consider “a cup of bone broth, keeps the doctor away.”

The point is, I like many didn’t even consider the fact that the food I was eating could cause or contribute to so many health issues. People today still look to medicine and supplements before addressing nutrition problems.

Why is this? Lack of education? People like an easy option? People have been mislead? A combination of all of these factors I think. I feel the role of the dietician or nutritionist is going to be BIG in the not to distant future as people are beginning to seek more answers as frustrations build with the lack of result in current treatments.

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine; instead he will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, nutrition and the cause and prevention of disease.”

Hmmm, wouldn’t that be a nice prescription.

5. The sun is not the devil we make it out to be

I don’t know about you but there is something unique about feeling the suns rays shine through you that is energising and soothing for one’s soul (most of my blogs are written when I’m outside feeling energised from nature). A morning walk along the beach with fresh ocean breeze and sunshine is definitely a big part of what people are missing in their quest for health and happiness.

The campaigning of slip, slop, slap in Australia along with the busy nature of our society has meant our time spent in the sun is almost non existent. And much to our healths detriment. We are now a nation that is experiencing vitamin D deficiencies, which in itself is a precursor for a host of medical conditions and higher rates of cancers.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not promoting you lie out in the sun for hours until you look like a prune or a tomato as I’m sure you would all agree that this doesn’t look or feel healthy.  

But yes I am promoting some healthy sun exposure. And by healthy I mean choose the times of the day that are less intense, like early morning or late afternoons and a duration that doesn’t expose yourself to visible UV damage.

6. Sacrifice is hard but worth it

In this context when I am referring to sacrifice, I’m not referring to sacrificing your bread or pasta (although I acknowledge that this is hard and job well done for doing this) I’m talking about making sacrifices for a healthier more enjoyable life.

For some this may mean leaving an unfulfilled relationship or a meaningless job and for others it could be up and leaving all that is familiar for greener pastures. Whatever the situation, when the driving force for the decision centres around following your heart, your health is bound to be thankful.

Too often people stay in unhealthy environments out of fear of what well come of their decision. I’m confident that if this is you, making the sacrifice to leave what is familiar and comfortable for something that “just feels right” will be worth it.

7. Stress will kill you

If you think this is a exaggerated title then think again. Because chronic stress can lead to adrenal fatigue and this is not a fun place to be in and unless you can turn it around this can kill you.

Life itself is such a beautiful gift. Living it seems to be the problem. We all have responsibilities in our lives be it work, money, relationships, family. These responsibilities will influence us negatively or positively. For some it might be the daily worry of not having enough money to pay the phone bill and for others it may be facing up to work everyday doing something that you hate. I get that there are so many different situations that challenge and pressure people everyday. So you need to have some coping mechanisms to deal with stress:

Recognise what is causing it, then make the steps to eliminate it day by day.

Take time out to do something that you enjoy or that relaxes you. Be kind to yourself there is so much pressure out there, so you deserve a 40 minute massage/walk/coffee break.

Be nice to people especially your loved ones (you might find they will be nicer back to you)
Be grateful for what you have, there are always situations worse than yours.
Don’t take everything so seriously…
So unless you plan on escaping to a beautiful tropical island where work and traffic are not a part of the vocabulary, I suggest you get a coping strategy in place for managing your stress. This is so important for your health.
Last but not least…

8. Love conquers all… oh and is good for our health

What does love have to do with health you ask?
Love is hard to find.. Love makes you do things you didn’t believe you could. Love reveals the real you. And love fills your heart so big you want to be the best you, you can be.
So don’t give up on it, its out there and worth waiting for.

With love
Your Chantel