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The Work IN is for fitness professionals and refugees from the body brand nation who are ready to make trauma informed instruction the gold standard of professionalism across the industry. You'll find mentorship and professional perspectives to help fitness professionals and wellness educators who want to set themselves apart using a creative, trauma sensitive approach so that they can get lasting results for their clients and avoid burnout for themselves.

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The Work IN to move out of stress, tension & anxiety

Uncommon sense on your plate

September 23, 2024 • Ericka Thomas • Season 4 • Episode 188

Eating “right” is a hard thing but not because it’s actually hard to do. Experts keep changing their minds, making unsupported nutrition recommendations that are riddled with conflicts of interest and have resulted in the exact opposite of health in the real world. That’s confusing and annoying and challenging but that’s not really what makes it hard either. Eating right is hard because we have outsourced our common sense when it comes to basic biology of nourishment for the bodies we live in. That’s our work IN today. We’re looking at 5 simple ways to reclaim the uncommon sense around nutrition in order to nourish the body, mind and nervous system.

As a part of my mission to bring a legacy of resilience through movement, each month you can join me for a hike on the bike trail followed by a free trauma informed vinyasa class back at the studio on Main Street. Go to savagegracecoaching.com to see the calendar and join my newsletter, Yoga Life on Main Street, to stay up to date on all the latest studio news, events and gossip. And now… on to this week’s episode.

It’s time to stop working out and start working IN. You found the Work IN podcast for fit-preneurs and their health conscious clients. This podcast is for resilient wellness professionals who want to expand their professional credibility, shake off stress and thrive in a burnout-proof career with conversations on the fitness industry, movement, nutrition, sleep, mindset, nervous system health, yoga, business and so much more.

I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.

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Ep 188 Hard things: Uncommon sense on your plate

First of all, I’m going to set the stage for this conversation. It is a fact that the USDA recommendations for what is healthy is not accurate. The usda recommendations for all things nutrition are the minimum nutrients that are required to NOT DIE. We assume that when we get these recommendations the “science is settled” I believed that for years. But it’s not true. In fact what we know now is that everything that we were told about balanced nutrition, (a calorie is a calorie), low cholesterol and heart disease is categorically false. And yet the same incorrect nutrition guidelines persist. If you want to learn more about this I encourage you to read the book Blind Spots by Dr Marty Makary or you can hear an interview with him on the Dhru Purohit Show links to those will be in the show notes. Dr. Makary cites the major studies that prove or should I say disprove the lipid heart hypothesis. You can find other sources as well in the book Metabolical by Robert Lustig. And many many others. It’s a deep rabbit hole.

Suffice it to say that this is why getting our own nourishment right to optimize our own long term health is so hard. Optimization is a far cry from survival. It takes years for intellectual honesty to leak out to the public zeitgeist. But you don’t have to depend completely on the so called experts who, like fashionable lemmings, follow those recommendations right over the cliff and then label their confused patients as non-compliant, science deniers when their results don’t pan out.

If I sound a little salty about it it’s because I am one of those patients. I did all the “right things” for a majority of my life and sat in the dr’s offices frustrated with chronic gut dysbiosis when all they could offer was the trite “lower your fat intake, eat more fiber and exercise” bullshit. When that was the exact thing that put me there. Turns out the gut needs saturated fat in order to heal and maintain the lining of the gut. No wonder I felt so much better on a paleo diet. But I digress.

The number one hard thing when it comes to getting your nutrition “right”. The number one thing that you can do right now today to course correct is to reclaim a common sense approach to your plate. To literally listen to your gut. Now I know that for most of us it’s been a really long time since we’ve been in biology class and back then they weren’t even talking about the gut microbiome. So this is newer and the research is ongoing, they learn new things all the time and it will take a lot more time for science and the medical community to fully understand how this complex ecosystem contributes to our health. But the good news is we don’t have to wait for them to figure it out. We can take back control, the control we’ve always had, over how we nourish this incredible body of ours and what we nourish it with. It should be common sense but it isn’t thanks to shady big food marketing. That’s not our fault unless we choose to stay unaware. So let’s look at the uncommon sense approach to nourishment.

Uncommon sense # 1

Think nourishment not nutrition. We are complex human bodies not petri dishes in a lab. We cannot approach our plate like a simple single nutrient math problem where 1 + 1= 2 because in the human body sometimes 1 + 1 = -3 . Nothing in the body acts or exists in isolation. We are a network of systems that are interdependent on each other. So when one goes haywire it can and does affect all the others in some way.

We live in a modern world of food abundance concurrent with nutrient deficiency. However, we can’t take a multivitamin and eat a standard american diet and get away with it. At least not for very long. And trying to concoct a kitchen chemistry cocktail of single nutrient supplementation requires an advanced degree in biochemistry and endocrinology.

SO the uncommon sense here is to focus on whole foods. The ones around the outside edges of the grocery store. The things that don’t come with labels. If it grows out of the ground or had a mother it’s good for you. These are the things that are the most bioavailable to our gut and that are naturally already balanced. Ideally these foods are minimally interfered with. But we know that modern food production can lower the quality of even whole foods. Don’t get hung up on this at first. Whole foods are better than packaged any day of the week no matter what. Then if you want to go further you can start looking at grass fed and organic. But shifting from this idea of nutrition to nourishment as a standard of care for ourselves is the first step and can take a bit of time.

There’s a lot of false perceptions about the expense of a clean whole food diet. I would challenge that notion. Even with higher prices at the grocery store if you stay out of the middle aisles you will spend less overall on your bill. Even with meat. What is crazy expensive is anything labeled as healthy, organic, gluten free, natural that comes in a box or bag. Labeling like that doesn’t always mean what you think it means and is rarely worth the extra. For example: It’s illegal to give poultry antibiotics and chickens are omnivores.. If you are looking at 2 packages and one is twice as expensive and the only difference is the label of “No antibiotics, and vegetarian fed” that’s basically meaningless.

I think labeling translation requires its own episode so I’ll leave that here for now.

Uncommon Sense #2

Start with the building blocks. You wouldn’t start building a house with a roof would you? No, you start with the foundation. And in nourishment and human biology the foundation is protein, specifically essential amino acids. So let's build our meals around protein. This shouldn’t be as hard as it is. But for some reason we and when I say we I mean especially women, rarely get enough protein in our daily nutrition. Maybe because the usda rda is .36 grams of protein per pound of body weight. For context let's do some quick math. The serving size for chicken is 4 oz. and in that there is 31 g of protein. If you follow that guideline and you’re 140 pounds you should try to get 50 g of protein per day according to the usda. Eggs contain 5 g of protein each. And if you’re lucky you might get 5-10 grams in yogurt. Remember this is the amount you need to NOT DIE. The current recommendations (from people who actually know about things like muscle maintenance and synthesis like Dr. Gabriel Lyon) is 1 g of protein per pound of ideal body weight per day. Take a day or 2 and track that for yourself. See where you are. I think you’ll be surprised.

Last week we talked about the hard exercise required to build muscle. Going beyond what you can already do to stimulate muscle synthesis. In order for that to happen we have to give the body the building blocks the nourishment to support that process. If you are lifting heavy, exercising hard and not seeing results it could be because you are undernourished yourself.

We need those building blocks for muscle bone and cell metabolism.

If you’re getting your protein from animal sources you will most likely naturally be getting the essential fatty acids that go with them. Omega 3’s in particular. If you are eating mostly a whole food diet with little or no ultra processed foods then the excessive Omega 6’s from seed oils shouldn’t be a problem. (3 & 6 work together to support a healthy cardiovascular system) If you get your protein from plant sources it’s a little harder in my opinion to get enough protein number one and two you may also need to supplement with B12 and make sure to include extra virgin olive oil to get the essential fatty acids.

Uncommon Sense # 3

Let go of the dietary cholesterol myth. Unless you were literally born with genetic hypercholesterolemia (400 +) very rare.

Your body requires cholesterol for every cell and to make all your hormones. It’s so important the liver makes 90% of it. Dietary cholesterol as a molecule is too big to be absorbed. It isn’t dietary cholesterol that causes high cholesterol, it's SUGAR.

There needs to be more actual work done in this area. For too long medical researchers have been discouraged from even asking questions about this. If you want to learn more about it check out the book The Great Cholesterol Myth by Jonny Bowden, PhD,CNS and Stephen Sinatra, MD, FACC.

But even if you don’t want to look into the research let’s just look at this issue logically. The recommendations for a low fat/high carbohydrate diet came out in the 50’s. One would think that that would have lowered the incidence of heart attacks. Actually the opposite happened. People were having more heart attacks and now there was an obesity epidemic. So in the early 2000’s they (the powers that be, NIH panel 8 of 9 who had ties to Pharmaceutical companies) changed the total cholesterol guidelines from 250 down to 200. Surely that would improve the incidence of heart attacks. But no, it hasn’t. In fact the lower your cholesterol the risk actually increases. Could it be that they aren’t looking at the right numbers? Or maybe they are misinterpreting the science. Or maybe haven't actually done the science? I don’t know, I’m not a doctor but it seems shady to me. Let’s do some of the things that actually make a difference. Like reducing our consumption of sugars. This will take care of itself if you are eating a whole food diet. Uncommon sense people.

Uncommon Sense #4

Nourish your gut microbiome. We are learning how important the gut microbiome is to nearly every other system in our body including the immune system, metabolism, cardiovascular system, endocrine system and even our mental health. So how do we protect it when we still don’t really know that much about it? Well, there are some things we do know that are important. We know it’s an ecosystem and in any good ecosystem some things support it and some things disrupt it.

Variety is very supportive. We know the more different kinds of gut bacteria the better. As they seem to keep each other in check. How do we get that? By eating a wide variety of different types of foods. Lots of different kinds of foods. Basically when we eat we're actually feeding those gut bacteria too. We also get our bacteria from our environment.

Babies have no gut bacteria. Our original gut microbiome came from our mother if we were born vaginally. People who were born via c section acquire their microbiome first from their hospital environment. Not ideal. But as adults we can influence our gut ecosystem with how we eat. As well as getting out in nature. That’s probably why it feels so good to go dig in the dirt.

The other piece to a healthy gut is to avoid the things that disrupt that delicate balance of bacteria. You can probably guess what those things are.

Ultra processed, highly palatable, highly preserved foods. Frankenfoods. Sugar in all its forms. Fake sugar. Alcohol. Eating too close to bedtime. Stress.

This is where all this uncommon sense gets hard. We are addicted to convenience. Convenience foods are no exception. Some processing is necessary to preserve food long enough to get to the grocery store. But if you look at the label on the package and you can’t pronounce the ingredients you should probably put it back. Franken foods are notorious for this. The labeling makes it seem healthy but they don’t exist in nature. Like vegan cheese.Gross. White table sugar is half glucose and half fructose. The body can’t metabolize fructose for energy and will get stuck in the liver as fat. This is the cause of Non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Fake sugar even 0 calorie can still trigger an insulin response and further confuse the metabolism. And all of it disrupts the gut microbiome, over feeding yeast and other bacteria and killing off other species.

Alcohol kills off gut bacteria as does stress. The gut also has it’s own circadian rhythm and needs a period of rest to do the hard work of immunity and digestion so eating too close to bedtime will disrupt that process.

If we build out our plate with good quality protein and healthy fats supported with a variety of fiber, from natural sources of carbohydrates, pre and probiotic vegetables and fruits a lot of this will take care of itself because we aren’t then eating those toxic ultra processed foods that disrupt the gut.

The good news is, if this is a new way to eat for you it only takes 28 days to shift the microbiome. That's fast in the world of health

Just like with exercise, the gut microbiome adjusts to exactly what we give it and no more. I know I eat some of the same things every single day. It’s easier to shop that way. My breakfast is the exact same every day during the week. I have the same kind of apple every day. That’s not wrong but it would be better if I got more of a variety of vegetables and other fruits too. That’s something I’m working on.

A note here on supplementation. It’s outside of my scope to recommend particular supplements. I’m not a doctor. If you suspect some kind of deficiency ask your health care provider to do a blood test and if they won’t do it there are some outside independent companies who will give you a more complete work up that includes all the nutrients they know how to test.

There are some very common deficiencies these days that you might want to think about supplementing. Vit D is one especially during the winter or if you work indoors or are religious about sunscreen, Omega 3 especially if you don’t eat fish regularly, and fiber. Fiber is a critical support for the gut microbiome.

Uncommon sense # 5

You can do this. What you put on your plate is an act of love, compassion and nourishment not just for your body but your mind and nervous system as well. The nervous system is our innate security system and anything can set it off including a lack of nourishment, a lack of essential amino acids from protein, a lack of essential fatty acids from healthy fats which are required to maintain healthy mitochondria and cell structure at the most basic level. If we want to lower our stress level we can start from the inside out by giving the body what it needs to do the hard things we’re asking it to do.

Making the hard shift that it takes to change how you nourish yourself with whole foods, protein, healthy fats and gut support can make getting healthy so much easier. There’s no punishment, there’s no deprivation, there’s no calorie restriction. Just metabolic health beyond what the eyes can see.

Next week we’re looking at our next hard thing in our series: sleep!

Thanks for listening today!

If you're looking for ways to handle the effects of stress, physically, mentally and emotionally through the body head over to savagegracecoaching.com/theworkin you’ll find all the show notes for this and other episodes plus lots of free resources. And if you’re in a place where you are ready for more and you live in the Dayton Ohio area I’m taking private clients for trauma informed yoga and trauma release exercise in person and online. So you can book a discovery call and we can have a real life conversation. And of course I’d be ever so grateful if you would take a moment to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening.

Thanks again everyone and as always stop working out and start working IN.

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