"Balancing" A Healthy Lifestyle

Hi friends! Today we are jumping into the topic of “balancing” a healthy lifestyle and how I believe this idea of “balance” is leading a lot of us to burn out and or leaving us feeling stuck. Let’s get into it! 

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I think we’ve gotten too attached to the idea of balance, especially when it comes to living a healthy lifestyle or maintaining healthy habits. So often when I ask people what they’re most frustrated with or what they’re struggling with in regards to their health, I get a lot of responses about frustration with inconsistency with working out or how they’re eating as well as a lot of frustration with not being able to balance it all. The question - “how do I do all of this” comes up a lot. Sometimes a “healthy lifestyle” can feel like a whole lot of boxes to check, which really feels like a whole lot of work! Right? 

I mean, that’s why so many of the fad diets become so popular, even though they often aren’t actually good for your health long-term, but they promise a result without all the work. 

I think we have made the ideal “healthy lifestyle” into something that is actually not realistically attainable. In reality, who can get 8 hours of sleep (2 of those being deep sleep, at the optimal time of night) every night, wake before the sun, drink 32 oz of perfectly filtered, lemon water, eat a nutritious large breakfast with the optimal amounts of carbohydrates, protein, and fat within an hour of waking + 15 different vitamins/supplements; practice complete mindfulness while getting completely ready for the day; spend time outside; space perfectly portioned and balanced meals out all throughout the day the day; stand for 10 minutes every hour; get 10k+ steps; get an hour workout in; be totally present and accessible for your family; feed your kids a beautiful, nutritious dinner; avoid too much caffeine or screen time; keep your home completely clean and laundry caught up; get everyone to bed at the ideal time of evening…. And then turn around and do it all the next day! Oh and did you notice I didn’t even mention anything about actually working a job or having any obligations or responsibilities… 

You hear me say all of this and think it sounds ridiculous - and it does! But how often do we subconsciously hold ourselves to this kind of standard and then feel like we just can’t “balance” it all when we don’t measure up. I have 100% felt this way and tried so hard attain this kind of “balance”. 

So what do we do? If we aren’t looking for balance, what are we looking for? 

I think that living a healthy lifestyle, and maintaining healthy behaviors/habits, looks a lot like a balanced scale and a lot more like juggling. 

Do we want to build a solid foundation for our health? Yes. Do we need to focus on all the different areas of a healthy lifestyle - sleep, stress, exercise, nourishment, relationships… yes - but not all at the same time. And I think that shift in mindset is what makes the difference between someone who is able to settle into participating in healthy behaviors, steadily making progress in their health, and someone who sets a goal, is all “into it” for about two weeks or a month, and then burns out. 

Think of someone who is juggling 5 bowling pins -  is he aware that all 5 are there? Yes. Is he focusing on all 5 of them at the same time? No! Just the ones in his hand at that moment and then his focus shifts as it needs to in order to keep all of the pins in the air. 

It’s just not possible for us to focus on all aspects of our health at the same time. I kind of wish that it were! My personality’s bend toward perfectionism wishes that I could master all of these areas of health and check off every box, but the thing is that I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t work! 

When we allow ourselves to focus on 1-2 areas of our health or 1-2 healthy habits at a time, it prevents us from becoming overwhelmed and burnt out so quickly. Then when we feel confident in one area, we can move onto another. This allows us to actually feel successful and to make real forward progress - it may be slower than we want to go, but it greatly increases the odds of us actually achieving our goals.  

So think about the most pressing or needed change that you need to make for your health. Is it sleep? Is it hydration? Is it eating more plants and veggies? Maybe it’s cutting out processed, chemical-full foods? 

I asked you guys on Instagram earlier in the week to give me an example of just one thing you feel like you need to focus on for your health and I would walk through what this practically looks like in the episode. Several of you said exercising consistently or being more active - something like that.

That’s a great one and super common. So let’s talk through some ideas of what that may look like practically:

• Make an appropriate goal - to move your body 5 days a week (not to work out every single day and lose 10 lbs.). The goal is simply to move your body. 

• Make it work for you:

  • Figure out what activity/exercise you actually enjoy

  • Decide if you do better alone or do you need someone to keep you accountable? Would you enjoy a group activity more than a solo workout? 

  • Brainstorm your usual excuses - time, energy, soreness? What has prevented you from being consistent in the past?

  • Schedule it ,but be flexible. Your week won’t go exactly as planned, so you need to be able to not be completely thrown off. (This may look like planning to walk M,W,F and do Barre or Pilates on T/R but it is 12 degrees outside or it’s raining all week, so you do a quick youtube workout or stick to pilates/barre every day instead.) You have to be able to pivot or you’ll never stick with it.

  • Track your activity with an app or watch to give yourself a little extra accountability. 

Do you see how changing your focus from 5 goals or areas of focus to just this 1 could lead to more successful progress? It’s like a snowball effect. A little change and progress leads to another change, which leads to another, and another. Before you know it, you look back and things look completely different. 

Here’s the thing - consistency and success in one behavior or habit usually crosses over into another. For example, when you’re feeling good about how you’re moving your body, you will likely naturally be more intentional about what you are eating and if you’re hydrated. Or maybe you’ll notice that your sleep starts to naturally improve and you start to pay more attention to the quality of your sleep overall. Success usually breeds success leaving you feeling more confident in how you’re caring for your health. Which is really the goal at the end of the day anyway. 

So I hope that you will try adjusting how you approach living a healthy lifestyle and choose to focus on 1-2 things at a time. I believe it will be a game-changer for you. 

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Intermittent Fasting: Helpful or Harmful?

Hi friends! Today we are talking about Intermittent Fasting (IF). It’s been a buzzphrase in the health and wellness industry for a while and there are wildly different perspectives and opinions on it. In this episode, I want to look at exactly what IF is and what are the ways it can be helpful, as well as how it can be harmful and who may not benefit from it.  I’m also going to throw my own opinion into the mix and share why I haven’t adopted this practice for myself. Let’s get into it! 

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What is Intermittent Fasting (IF)?

Intermittent fasting is a term used to describe a certain approach to eating that includes abstaining from food for short periods of time. Time-restricted eating Is the most common method of intermittent fasting. For this type of in a minute fasting you eat during a shortened window of time during the day, which extends the amount of time you’re not eating overnight. This can be anywhere from a 12 hour fast to a 16 - 18 hour fast, and often includes skipping a meal either breakfast or dinner. You can choose to eat three meals while using this method but they will be closer together than usual. 

How it can be helpful:

A quick search on Google or Pinterest will list out multiple health benefits from intermittent fasting. Things such as helping with weight loss, burning fat for energy instead of glucose, lowering insulin levels, improving insulin sensitivity, benefiting cognitive abilities, and supporting the circadian rhythm and leading to better sleep.

Sounds amazing, huh? Well, before you decide to skip breakfast forever, let’s look at some of the ways IF can be harmful. 

How it can be harmful:

While it’s true that some people to do well with intermittent fasting, it’s also true that certain people may not do well with it, particularly women. Fasting, while possibly having short term benefits, can also lead to long-term ramifications. IF leads to higher amounts of cortisol to be produced in the body, which again can be good short term (like as in exercise), but in the long-term can lead to chronic inflammation (just as in exercising too much). This spike in stress hormones can cause the body to feel unsafe. Our bodies thrive and function their best when they feel safe. Food is a signal of safety to our bodies - that’s the way we are wired. So when we go longer amounts of time, or even days, without eating that can signal to our bodies that something is wrong and that we aren’t safe enough to eat. Again, this can lead to chronic inflammation in the long term, which is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to achieve. 

For this reason, IF can have negative effects on women’s hormone health and fertility. When a woman’s body does not feel safe, having a well functioning reproductive system is not a high priority. Some studies have shown that by simply extending the fasting window to 14 to 16 hours, or quickly reducing the amount of food that someone takes in during the day, the body can start to shut down some of the communication between the brain and the reproductive system. 

Also, while some say intermittent fasting can help with insulin resistance and blood sugar issues, the flipside to that is that it can also lead to blood sugar dysregulation in the long term. 

An increase in stress hormones can lower  insulin levels, but also increase blood sugar (glucose) levels. Insulin is the hormone that allows our body to use up glucose or blood sugar, so having an increase in glucose while also having a decrease in insulin can lead to having higher blood sugar levels overall - which again is the opposite of what we are wanting. 

The other issue that can sometimes happen with intermittent fasting is that because you’re eating your meals closer together, in a shorter window of time, this can sometimes lead to not having enough space in between meals for proper digestion and good gut health. 

In a healthy gut, the MMC (migrating motor complex) - sometimes also called the housekeeper of the gut - sweeps through the small intestine, moving any food or waste along into the large intestine for further digestion about every 90 minutes (Think of it as our gut’s clean up crew). The problem Is that any eating or drinking of something that has calories (even a cup of coffee) can interrupt that process. Ideally we would be spacing our meals apart about every 4 hours, but that becomes very difficult to do in an 8-hr or shorter window. 

When this mechanisms can operate as it should, it can create an environment for Dysbiosis, SIBO, and overall poor gut health. 

So as you can see, there are both possible pros and cons to intermittent fasting.

Why I don’t practice IF, personally: 

Personally, I’ve chosen not to practice structured IF. As a woman who has an inflammatory condition- an inflammatory hormonal condition, at that, the risks outweigh the possible benefits for me. I also don’t recommend it to most of my clients, as most are women also dealing with underlying chronic inflammation, gut issues, and hormonal imbalances.

Also, an Interesting note - an ISSA article states that most of the studies done on Intermittent Fasting have been done on men. It states that *“Out of seventy-one studies found in Harvard’s database for intermittent fasting, only thirteen include women at all. Beyond that, absolutely none of the controlled studies focus on the female population in general. There are no controlled studies that allow us to draw intelligent conclusions about how intermittent fasting affects the female population.” 

The article goes on to say that women are less likely to lose weight or experience positive health benefits from IF and seem to experience the best health when they maintain an unchanging flow of nutrient intake throughout the day. 

This is what I recommend to my clients and implement in my own life as well. I think a 12:12 model can work really well for women - a 12 hour eating window and a 12 hour fasting window at night. That pretty much follows our natural circadian rhythm of eating while it’s daylight. I advise my clients to eat a balanced meal that includes carbs/fiber, protein, and fat within an hour of waking - and then ideally eating balanced meals every 4 hours. I also think it’s important to listen to your body and follow your hunger cues. Again, it’s important to make your body feel safe, and restricting food will likely have the opposite effect. 

At the end of the day, remember that food is nourishment and fuel for the body. It’s not something to restrict and/or reward yourself with.

*https://www.issaonline.com/blog/index.cfm/2018/this-hot-diet-trend-is-not-recommended-for-women

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003 - Which Diet Is Best For You?

Hey friends! Welcome to episode 3 of the HF podcast! Today we are going to be talking all about food! So, grab yourself a healthy snack, and let’s get into it!

Have you ever thought to yourself… “What am I supposed to eat?”, “ Which diet is best? Low carb, Paleo, Keto, Zone, Mediterranean, Vegan?”, “Why are there so many choices?” 

I think most of us have had those questions - I know I have! When I was first starting out in my health journey, I was constantly searching for the “best” this and that. This especially seems to be an issue for those of us who are a little more “type A” and need to know the exact list of dos and don’ts to achieve the perfect results!  I also think it’s natural to look at what other people are doing and assume that if it works for them, then surely it will work for me too! 

Well, today I want to talk to you about why I think that there isn’t a “perfect, one-size-fits-all” diet out there and why I actually believe that trying to have everyone eat the exact same way could do more harm than good. 

Now, having said that, let me be clear - there are general guidelines that are helpful for most people (find my free Kitchen Makeover Guide here). Things like eating leafy greens, drinking water, reducing inflammatory foods like sugar and processed junk foods - most everyone benefits from those types of things. What I’m really talking about today is the more specific kind of guidelines, like “everyone should eat this many grams of carbs, but only after 10 am” or “all women would feel better if they eat very low carbs and high protein”. 

Bio-individuality

We are all INDIVIDUALS! We have different blood types, different activity levels, different stress levels, different ethnic backgrounds, different levels of emotional health. We are all different and these differences have an effect on how our bodies function optimally! This is called Bio-individuality. 

There can’t be a healthy “perfect, one-size-fits-all” diet for everyone, because each individual person has a genetic makeup, specific to them and therefore will respond to a “diet” or way of eating differently than someone else. We are all far to individualistic to all thrive by eating the exact same foods! 

Let me give you an example: two women, about the same age and size, decide to try a raw food, vegan diet. They meet up after a few weeks to check in with each other and realize that they are responding to the exact same way of eating and the exact same kinds of foods completely differently! One of them is feeling great, with a clear mind and high energy, and losing weight, but the other is feeling awful, with a major case of brain fog, low energy, she has a continual dull headache, and hasn’t lost any weight at all! How could this be? Isn’t eating vegan healthy? Shouldn’t they both feel great? 

If we look a little closer at each of these women, we then see that while they may have a lot of similarities, they also have major differences! They have different blood types - one is A+ and the other O-. They also have different ethnic backgrounds - one has Indian ancestors and the other European.  These factors (plus many more) play a huge role in how their bodies are digesting and metabolizing food and as a result, how they feel after eating certain foods or going without certain foods, like meat and other animal products.

I’m sure a lot of you have had this same experience! You go on a new diet with a friend of yours and one of you does amazing, loses weight, feels awesome and the other… not so much! 

This concept of bio-individuality can actually provide us with a lot of freedom! I believe that our bodies were created with a God-given intelligence to know how to function optimally. Think about it - you don’t need to remind your heart to pump or your lungs to breathe, and you don’t have to guide your body through the process of digesting your lunch - it just does it! It was created to know how! I think the same can be true when it comes to knowing how we should be eating for our unique bodies. Unfortunately, I think this innate understanding often gets silenced and crowded out by things like marketing and let’s be honest… by the comparison game! How many times have you scrolled through Instagram or Facebook, seen that someone has lost weight or gotten really fit by using the latest trendy diet or weight loss product and thought, “that’s what I need!”? (By the way, those things aren’t all bad! Sometimes they provide the tools and motivation that a person needs to start to make changes in their health!). The issue is that without taking the time to educate yourself on what is actually healthy versus just trendy, and even more than that, what is healthy FOR YOU, you may be unknowingly sabotaging yourself!

TIPS 

So, now that I’ve burst your bubble and said that there is no “one-size-fits-all, perfect” way to eat, I want to leave you with a few simple tips for discovering what is best for your body!

• Start with the basics 

  Those general guidelines that I referred to earlier. Things like not eating artificial and processed junk foods, eating more whole fruits and vegetables, clean protein sources and drinking more water. As I mentioned, I have a fun little freebie download for you guys that outlines what kinds of foods we should have in our kitchen and the ones we need to just go ahead and get out of there! 

• Consider your unique circumstances

  • Blood Type and Ancestry

    Your blood type and ancestry can give you an idea of how your body can handle certain types of foods like meat. For example, Blood Type O has shorter intestines better designed to digest meat faster – they do better with red meat. Those with Blood Type B don't process chicken well and should choose other types of protein when possible. And then Blood Type A folks extract protein much better out of vegetarian sources than the other blood types. (If you want to know more about eating for your blood type, here is a cool 5-min video by Food As Medicine TV (What Our Blood Types Can Tell Us.)

  • Stress Levels

    The more stress we have, the less digestive work our bodies can do. So for example, eating well-cooked, balanced meals we need with clean animal protein and complex carbohydrates like root vegetables can be used stabilizing anchor. During times of extreme stress, raw food diets and juice cleanses can further exacerbate health issues and delay healing. Stress has a huge effect on our health and we need to do everything we can to reduce it but to also support our bodies during times that it’s unavoidable. 

  • Medical Issues 

    If you are struggling with a specific medical diagnosis or a complex health issue, for example diabetes, hormonal imbalance diseases, thyroid diseases,  you need to work with a professional that is experienced and trained in how different foods affect the body and are knowledgeable about how to safely do an elimination diet or change your way of eating (this is in addition to your PCP). You will save yourself a lot of time and effort by reaching out for support and not trying to just take a shot in the dark. 

• Keep a food journal for 30 days 

  Please hear me say this! I am not talking about a calorie tracking journal or tracking macros. Those things have their place, but that’s not where I want to focus for now. What I would like for you to do is to keep a journal/log of what you eat and how you feel - both while you were eating and how you feel in the hour after you ate. This practice will not only shed a lot of light on how specific foods make you feel but will also help you to get in the practice of listening to your body! Remember that everyone will respond differently, even to healthy foods!. You are the only one who can listen to your body and know how it makes you feel. 

Friends, there is no easy button or hack when it comes to our health. It is a process and it takes time and intentionality, but it is so worth it and you will feel so much better for it! 

Thank you so much for being here with me today and taking the time to listen. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or feel like you need some extra support in this area! I’d love to help!