The Happy Belly Kitchen
Transcript
I’m working on something new!
The Happy Belly Kitchen.
Some of you know I love food. But it hasn’t always loved me. It was my own extreme gut issues that triggered my interest in how stress affects the body and physical health and the connections that affect mental and emotional health as well. It would make sense as a personal trainer and health coach that I would be interested in nutrition and on top of all the latest greatest and most accurate recommendations for a healthy diet. And I was. But I also had a very adversarial relationship with my own body.
I was always trying to force it to look a certain way, be a certain weight, certain size, perform at the peak all the time. Couple that with the “common” calorie is a calorie principle that all trainers were force fed and you get a pretty twisted view of what healthy is.
And I knew it wasn’t right, because I saw client after client coming in who would follow their calorie plan to a T and nothing would change. Or clients who had changed nothing about their diet and suddenly started packing on the pounds or started noticing their body composition change. Or clients who were desperate to avoid a family history of diabetes and heart disease but following conventional diet wisdom yielded no results. And I felt so frustrated.
Here I was trying to stay in my scope of practice - not a dietitian or nutritionist - restricted to counting calories and trying to balance macros while at the same time knowing those same practices while they may be a good place to start, were only scratching the surface. And being undermined by our modern food production practices.
I knew that because I lived that. Being my own personal guinea pig for all things, exercise, supplements,eating plans, everything. I did all of those things and still felt like crap. Physically exhausted but unable to sleep, constant, debilitating gut pain, living on ibuprofen, emotionally dysregulated with violent mood swings that were off the charts, weird hormone symptoms that didn’t match my age at all.
The pain in my gut finally got so bad that I had to get to a doctor. 2 actually. Before I tell you this story, chronic pain should take you to the doctor. For me this didn’t start in the extreme. It started small and slowly over years of neglect ended up in a place where I couldn’t stand to be in my skin. Pain isn’t normal. Pain is a message.
The first GI I saw took one look at me, fit, normal weight female. Poked me in the stomach once, ordered an ultrasound and declared that I would probably need my gallbladder removed but that was no big deal, “we” could deal with that quite nicely with that and gall bladders weren’t necessary to the body. So that wasn’t disturbing at all. But, and it’s a big but...the ultrasound was normal. So I got a second opinion. Because what the hell!
Second doc actually took the time to have a conversation, walked me through the xrays and reports which I appreciated and then asked a key question, he asked “why do you take a probiotic?”
OK, so back up a bit, remember when I told you that I’m my own guinea pig? Well 10 years before in my quest to become invincible, I tested a combination of supplements for energy, weight loss and fat burning. One of those was a probiotic that I was still taking because in the beginning my gut always felt like it wasn’t able to fully digest food. ( guess what guys, that’s leaky gut syndrome) Knowing that, this doctor prescribed a protocol to completely clean out the gut ( like what people do before a colonoscopy, it was not fun) then prescribed a drug which I don’t remember the name of now that was supposed to do something but honestly I was never sure exactly what it was supposed to do because the only things I felt were the list of side effects. But I tried to be a good patient and gave it 2 weeks before I finally called the office and talked to the PA. And I called because the pain was still exactly the same. Supposedly I had nothing in my gut but the pain was still there. How could that be? Fun fact, did you know the only sensation that gut and intestines can feel is pain? Now you know…
Anyway, that PA suggested I change the brand of probiotic. I also stopped that prescription. Having your insides liquified isn’t on anyone’s to do list. ( always discuss stopping meds with your doctor, some of the crap they put us on needs to be carefully removed).
Did the new probiotic help? Yes. Did it fix the problem? No.
What did? My husband read an article he found in Outdoor Magazine on food cleanses. One of the cleanses mentioned in that article was from Alejandro Junger who wrote the book Clean. It outlined a 40 day food cleanse for the purpose of resting, healing and resetting your gut and balancing the Ph in the body. Honestly, at the time I didn’t really care much about the theory or science behind it, I was ready to try anything. I was desperate really because the pain was starting to interfere with my work, teaching classes and with my overall mental and emotional state.
I will say food cleanses are less hard than a flat out fast, but there’s definitely a learning curve and 40 days is a long time to stick to anything. But like I said, I was desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.
It helped that my husband did it with me which made it easier to purge the pantry and flip our entire eating pattern on it’s head. It was hard. Excruciating at moments because I learned first hand what being a sugar addict really means. I had to learn all new recipes using foods I’d never heard of before and far more vegetables than I’d eaten in my life. Some of those recipes I still use today, one of which is the star of the Happy Belly Breakfast Challenge.
By the end of the 40 days I DID feel better. Was it a quick fix cure? No. (nothing about a 40 day food cleanse is quick!) But there was definite improvement. I slept better. I had way more energy during the day. After the first few days, there were no more cravings for carbs and no hypoglycemia. Even though I didn’t lose a single pound. So I kept all the recommendations in place and many of the recipes and applied the nutrition principles from that book to my real life eating pattern.
And then one morning about 9 months after I started that food cleanse I woke up with no gut pain. Literally none. For the first time I don’t know how long, it just wasn’t there. At first I thought something was wrong, it felt like I was forgetting something then I realized that the pain was missing and it was like the skies opened up and the angels sang. because all of a sudden I could relax. I didn’t have to brace for the pain.
9 months. Its like giving birth and why wouldn’t it take that long when you have to basically rebirth your gut microbiota.
I tell you this story this way because neither of the GI docs I saw talked to me about what or how I was eating. And they didn’t because I didn’t LOOK like I was eating unhealthy. I was a “healthy weight” My cholesterol and BP numbers that are supposed to be health markers were all normal. On the surface here was nothing wrong with me. But underneath there was nothing right with me either.
Not only did I have these gut issues but I didn’t sleep, had no energy that wasn’t caffeinated, had random anxiety, panic attacks and mood swings. After that shift in my diet, several things happened. First I slept like a baby. Literally like one of those baby dolls that closes their eyes when you lay them down. That was me. It was fantastic.
Second and this took a lot longer the anxiety and hypervigilance that I lived with around food started to drop off. Food is my love language but I rarely used it as a love letter to myself. For me food was a way to control my body, it was a way to celebrate events, reward myself but never as a way to take care of myself. And that mindset was something that has taken a long time to shift but it’s at the core of what I want to bring you with the Happy Belly Kitchen.
Because ultimately our health and wellness is on our plate, in our behavior and in our thoughts. It doesn’t and can’t come from a prescription bottle. Medicine and Health is NOT the same thing. Every so called chronic disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, POCS IBD -is actually just a symptom. Symptoms that aren’t druggable but as Dr. Robert Lustig says they are Foodable.
Someone please tell me why we would purposely do things every single day that make it harder to live in the body we’re given? Why would we choose to swallow handfuls of pills instead of fork fulls of nutrient dense whole food? Why would we choose to become permanent patients and slaves to pharmaceuticals that have questionable efficacy side effects that are worse than the condition they’re trying to treat? Why are we satisfied with this wackamole approach to wellness disguised as healthcare?
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a place for medicine. Sometimes you need to put out the fire first and modern medicine can perform miracles, there’s no doubt. But there’s something very wrong when bank accounts of big pharma and big food get healthier and healthier while our population gets sicker and sicker.
Back to the kitchen. Did you know I never once had a client sit down with me and say, “My diet is terrible, I eat crap all the time.” Nope after talking about how they have weight that won’t budge, their high BP meds and pre diabetes, when I ask them how they eat, the answer is always, “I eat pretty well, I just need an exercise plan.” OK sure. But you can’t exercise your way out of poor nutrition. And if you want to try, be my guest but it’s a waste of time. Yours and mine.
What you put on your plate matters. It’s responsible for 85% of your health. And you’re being misled - fooled at the grocery store to believe if the package says Diet, low fat, 0 calories, organic or fortified that means it’s healthy.
Inside the happy belly kitchen episodes here and on the Youtube channel we’re going to untangle some of that twisted common knowledge with some not so common truth about food politics and hopefully arm you with some information that will make it easier to make better choices when it comes to nutrition. Choices that can have big impacts on your overall health beyond what your eyes can see like weight and size and even those pesky numbers.
Today I want to give you the WHY behind the Happy Belly Kitchen. Up to this point on this podcast we’ve done a lot of talking about the nervous system and stress response and it might not be all that obvious how what you eat connects to chronic stress and stress injury and tension, etc.
But part of our work in is making connections, so let me explain.
We have talked in the past about the Vagus nerve as a major player in your autonomic nervous system. That's the 10th cranial nerve, the wandering nerve, that runs from the brainstem all the way to and through your gut. It’s the information super highway from your intestines and basically everything related to your digestive system back up to your brain. It is responsible for the parasympathetic nervous system's state of calm, rest and repair. This relationship & communication is sometimes called the gut brain axis.
Now stay with me. Everything you do, eat,drink, come into contact with, or are exposed to requires some kind of response from your body in some way. For example when you eat a meal your digestive system comes on line to break down and absorb the nutrients you can use and filter out anything you can’t use. When you drink alcohol the liver has to work a little harder to filter out the toxins. Now maybe after dinner you turn your ankle and fall down. You’ve injured yourself, causing inflammation and pain. You’re prescribed pain killers that not only affect your liver but also the lining of your stomach. The pain prevents you from sleeping and starts to affect your appetite. You drink a couple extra cups of coffee to make it through your day which then makes it hard to get more sleep so you have an extra glass of wine to help you relax which adds a little more burden to the liver and kidneys.
What I’m describing here is called allostatic load. Basically that is just a fancy word for all the hard work the body does in the background to keep you alive to the best of it’s ability. Every choice you make either adds to the work load or lightens the workload for your body and that includes what you put on your plate.
That gut brain axis connection through the vagus nerve is responsible for telling your primitive brain whether everything is ok in your body. What and how you eat communicates with your nervous system through the neurons in the gut lining. But that conversation may not be what you think it is.
Anything that disrupts your gut can disrupt your mind by creating a sense of dis-ease or unease within the body. Which in turn can trigger an anxiety loop that feeds on itself and where much of our GAD comes from. Even without gut pain per se. So you may not be aware that certain foods and food additives are damaging the gut because the response is so delayed and it happens slowly over time and the body is constantly trying to repair itself. Plus because it’s such a slow change the adaptation feels like this is your normal until that allostatic load becomes overwhelming and then you start to see real dysfunction beyond just how your stomach feels.
What might that look like? Lethargy, depression, anxiety, gut pain, cravings, insomnia, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, hypertension, obesity, High cholesterol, weight gain, IBS, IBD constipation, diarrhea, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, hypoglycemia, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, dementia & alzheimer’s. You know stuff like that.
All of these non communicable chronic diseases we’re now learning more and more have ties to nutritional imbalances, liver and gut dysfunction and are directly related to the how and what we eat.
The kicker is that the way we process and consume food today is so twisted that expecting to find the “perfect diet” is practically impossible without a PhD. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do better in order to be better. It just takes a little bit of effort, that's all.
Nutrition facts labels and the so called health recommendations from the alphabet soup agencies are confusing and misleading and it’s annoying. I’ve had about enough. SO as a part of the Work IN I’m opening up the Happy Belly Kitchen with joy! This will be an episode we’ll do probably once a month or so and this will be a way to share some simple changes that you can implement immediately for big changes in metabolism. If you adopt and embrace those changes, of course. Keep in mind any changes to your diet or eating pattern will take at least a month or so before you really see results.
We’re going to focus on 3 areas of change. 1 sugar exposure 2 gut health and 3 is mindset around food 4 making it work for you.
We’re going to look at healthy, healthier and healthiest options. How to work with your body for optimal nutrition. How to cook, prep and purge your pantry to make healthy eating easy and fast. Slowly change how you think about food to cut off cravings and find an eating pattern that fits your lifestyle. And of course the best part...the recipes.
What you won’t find in the Happy Belly Kitchen is any Cold Turkey. I’m not saying you can’t make some of these changes that way but it’s not necessary nobody likes feeling deprived. We’re going to be replacing old habits with new healthier ones. And this is important because in order for any change to work long term you have to be willing to do it forever. And If I told you that you’ll never be able to eat a piece of birthday cake again no way would you stick around. I wouldn’t blame you.
I eat cake, I love dark chocolate, I love to make candy and I’m on a mission to find the world's best creme brulee… but all of that is for special occasions. It’s not the norm so I give myself permission to enjoy those things with joy because by correcting my gut balance and resetting my palat I can have those treats without overdoing them. Which never used to be the case.
You also won’t find any food shaming or fat shaming. This is about going beyond what the eyes can see both in your person and on labels. We’re not counting calories. Weight and size is not as important as your internal metabolic and nervous system health and we can affect that without ever cutting a calorie at all as Dr. Robert Lustig shares in his book Metabolical.
Everything that we talk about in the Happy Belly Kitchen we’ll support with video demonstrations over on my Youtube Channel Kinetic Grace Resilience so be sure to check that out and subscribe so you can get notified when new videos come out.
And to kick off that playlist in honor of Memorial day weekend and to thank all those who served in our armed forces past and present and especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice you’ll find a video demo of my favorite breakfast salads the Red White & Blue. I eat this for breakfast on hot days but it’s great anytime. I’ll link to the video in the show notes and be sure to subscribe and share. I hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for joining me today. Now let’s go work in!
I’m Ericka,
I'm a certified trauma release exercise provider, RYT, health coach and nutrition specialist and host of the podcast The Work IN.
I coach warriors. Guiding outstanding individuals off the battlefield of trauma For lasting resilience to all sources of stress, tension and anxiety. Join me as we explore natural balanced ways to work through the body to re-establish safety in the body and find recovery - for the body, mind & spirit.
I teach a powerfully effective modality called trauma release exercise that works through the body without the need to relive the story.
I offer online, on demand private sessions, courses & memberships for individuals, small groups and corporate clients looking to build resilience and recover from stress injury.