[00:00:00] Kelsey: Hey everyone, I am excited to be back here with you for our second episode. Today we're going to talk all about nutrition, what holistic, traditional, and intuitive nutrition means, and how you can begin incorporating it into your life today. So without further ado, let's dig in. If you're anything like me, you are probably wondering, how in the heck do you sift through all the nutrition advice out there?
[00:00:34] There are so many opinions in the world of nutrition. I am not sure there is any subject in the healthcare and wellness world. Or really any world that is more controversial and heated than this, everyone has an opinion and everyone has something to say on this. If you were around for last episode, you know that I will say this right off the bat.
[00:01:00] There is no one, absolutely no one, not me, not any healthcare practitioner, not anyone with any degree, any podcast, any social media following, any certification, background training book that they've published, whatever that knows more about what's right for your body than you do. You are the ultimate authority on what works for you.
[00:01:27] So how do you sift through all of the nutrition advice out there? How do you decide which type of diet is right for you? It's pretty simple. You learn to practice embodied, intuitive eating. Now, I'll tell you straight up, complete honesty here. I have tried all the diets and all the things since I first began diving into nutrition, reading all about it 12 years ago.
[00:01:57] I. I have really taken in like every angle and every perception, I've done that very intentionally. I want to hear what the people who believe in vegan and vegetarianism have to say. What people who believe in like animal-based diets have to say. All, all of those are like two of the most extreme right.
[00:02:17] But there's, you know, there's also different traditional diets and lineages coming from different traditions, like eating a macrobiotic diet, eating An Ayurvedic diet according to your dosha. There are so many different ways of eating and they all can be helpful to an extent, right? I tend to really appreciate the traditional ways of eating.
[00:02:47] More than any other because they're thousands of years old and they were created with particular constitutions in mind. So they can be applied, you know, pretty personally according to your situation, and they can be customized and shifted and adjusted. However, that does not mean that they're right for everyone or that they're right for you.
[00:03:13] And I guess I should probably start by saying, How I define the word diet. So I am defining the word diet here as simply the way you eat. I do not believe in dieting, period. I don't believe in punishing yourself with food. I don't believe in trying to eat perfectly. I certainly don't believe or condone or advertise trying to eat a certain way to like lose weight or change your body or.
[00:03:42] You know, anything, if that's your goal, if that's important to you that's beautiful for you. But I am never going to push that or, or condo that because I think all bodies are beautiful. And we're all made differently. And someone being bigger bodied does not mean that they don't eat clean. Someone having acne or cellulite or whatever, you know, physical thing that mass media and our culture tries to say is like a bad thing.
[00:04:15] It it's, it's bss. It's bss. We're all made differently. We all look differently no matter how you eat. That's just the truth. I have, you know, we all know folks who eat whatever they want and they're never not gonna have a six pack. And we all know folks who eat salads three times a day and they're always gonna have a bigger body and more soft, luscious curves.
[00:04:40] That's great. That's beautiful and wonderful, and I love that. We're all unique and the way we eat really shouldn't, and I do not use the word should lightly. I really have tried to eliminate should from my vocabulary a long time ago. We should not be eating to achieve some kind of like external goal to please other people eating.
[00:05:06] Needs eating should be coming from a place of self love and self nourishment. And that is my goal here, to teach you how to eat from a place of love and nourishment, to follow your gut instincts, and to learn how to eat intuitively in a way that feels good in your body. And once we do that, we know how to sift through all the nutrition advice out there because, Ultimately, there's no higher authority, no wider, deeper, more wise authority in the world than your body.
[00:05:41] Your body is unbelievably intelligent. It took vast, vast incomprehensible amounts of time for our bodies to evolve from stardust to living cells, to the multicellular complex animals that we are today. Our bodies know what's right and when we can begin to feel into our senses. When we can begin to cook and choose foods based off of smell and taste and color, it completely transforms our relationship to food.
[00:06:22] When we begin to choose foods because we want to love ourselves, which means some days it might be chocolate. Some days it might be salad. Some days it might be chocolate and salad, right? One. Food is not bad, one food is not good. When we are coming from this place of self-love and self nourishment, when we can follow our gut, What is going to feel good, good in our body in any given moment, and we're honest with ourselves about that.
[00:06:51] We'll never fall into the trap of doing diets again. Right. I've done them and while I insisted to myself, I would never do them for the intention of like weight. I tried all kinds of different therapeutic diets in my journey to try and relieve some of the symptoms I was having due to chronic ly and co-infections.
[00:07:14] So I tried like every therapeutic diet out there, right? There are so many. There's paleo, autoimmune, paleo, keto, vegetarian, vegan gaps, wolf protocol, fodmap. Oh my gosh, oh my goodness. There are so, so many more beyond those. But ultimately none of those diets are what like healed me or made my gut healthy or whatever.
[00:07:38] What helped me get to the place that I'm at now, which is not perfectly healthy and healed from chronic Lyme, but in the process of treating it, feeling the best I've felt in more years than I could count. Is incorporating these basic principles incorporating the three pillars we talked about in the last episode of holistic nutrition, herbalism and nature, connection and holistic, traditional and intuitive nutrition is something that belongs to all of us, right?
[00:08:10] Holistic nutrition means that we're looking at. Whole Foods, right? We're sourcing as locally as possible. We're getting to know our farmers, our fishers and, and who we're getting our food from. We're acknowledging how hardworking these people are. We're acknowledging. How many farm workers in this country are immigrants who are not even granted citizenship or legal status, who have no rights and protections, yet work in fields all day long in unbearable conditions so that we can eat that yummy kale salad or that juicy watermelon.
[00:08:48] We need to acknowledge that this is part of eating holistically. This is part of acknowledging the wholeness of, of our diets and the way that we're eating. I. Holistic nutrition means, you know, eating, aiming to eat all the colors in the rainbow. It might mean that you eat some animal foods. No animal foods, all the animal foods.
[00:09:13] It's different for everyone. It means sourcing them ethically. It means, like I said, trying to source them locally, but also, you know, acknowledging if these are animal foods, what conditions. Like I said, what conditions are the farmers experiencing? What conditions are these animals being raised in? Are they pasture raised or did they grow up in a warehouse and never see the sunlight in the course of their life?
[00:09:40] Are they being caught with huge nets in an unsustainable fashion, dumped onto a shipping deck, and then the net discarded back into the ocean? Or are they being caught on lines? Are they being farmed? Are they wild caught? Are, are foods grown in healthy soil? Are they sprayed with toxic herbicides and pesticides?
[00:10:06] Are honeybees carted in from the thousands of miles away to pollinate these foods only to be carted again? Carted away again afterwards. There is a lot that goes into the ethics behind where our food is coming from. And this might sound really overwhelming, but don't worry. You don't need to know it all right now.
[00:10:28] You just need to do your best, and that doesn't mean giving it 110%. That just means doing your best. It can still feel easy, it might feel a little bit difficult. But you're doing enough I, that is the one thing I wish every single one of you knew. It is the one thing that I feel like I reiterate to my clients the most is that you are already doing enough.
[00:10:54] You are doing a wonderful job. You are doing amazing. Just listening to this podcast, listening to this episode tells me how much you care. This is the first step or one of the many steps you've taken in the right direction. So pie yourself on the back for that. You're doing a good job. And we're gonna talk a lot more about the ethics and the moral considerations about what goes into our food, how we can navigate food labels in a way that feels safe and good for us.
[00:11:26] How we can contribute to better quality of life for our farm workers. Better quality of life for. The animals and the plants and the environments from which we're getting our food. So that's a little bit of holistic nutrition. Traditional nutrition is what it sounds like. Traditional, it, it's nutrition that is rooted in tradition.
[00:11:54] It is rooted in cultural heritage, so it's gonna look different depending on where you live or what culture you're from. There are, there are myriad different cultures and different ways of eating across the globe. And there are beautiful, right. There are so beautiful and it is just absolutely brilliant to learn about the wisdom behind why our ancestors prepared foods.
[00:12:22] In a certain way because they did so for a specific reason. And I think it's really easy for us to dismiss this, to dismiss the wisdom of our ancestors. And it's not to say like, oh, because they're ancestors, they're ultimately wise, we need to do exactly what they did, blah, blah, blah. No, that's, I, there's like such a deeper topic to go into, but Our ancestors were wise.
[00:12:49] They did know what they were doing, and we don't need scientific studies to back up that wisdom. They can be really helpful. They're definitely interesting and I love that people continue conducting them because we need people to do that, but we can also just trust. That they knew what they were doing, that the way in which indigenous Americans valued and prized and treated every part of the bison as secret.
[00:13:21] We can just lean into that. We can trust that we can trust the types of, of fat preservation, fermentation and cooking that. You know, our ancestors and the Mediterranean Incorporated, or in Northern Europe or wherever our ancestors are from, people have devised brilliant and beautiful ways to work with food, to preserve food, to grow food over thousands of years, over countless generations.
[00:13:57] That's what traditional nutrition is all about. It's about honoring and exploring culinary dietary traditions, practice by our ancestors. And while some of these may seem a bit disconcerting, right, like I did not grow up fermenting grains, that was a weird thing to me when I first heard about it. I did not grow up eating organ meats.
[00:14:26] Again, not super appealing when I first heard about it, juicing vegetables. Ugh, you're kidding me. I was so grossed out. It was like an effort of will to drink vegetable juices for, I don't know, the first couple of years that I drank them there was this awesome juice bar where I used to live in Humboldt at Wild Berries Marketplace.
[00:14:48] Shout out to Wild Berries and to Ian, if you're ever listening to this. And I, I mean, their juices were amazing. Looking back, like it completely is a huge part of what's developed my flavor and like palate for making my own juices today. But I was so grossed out back then. I could not handle the bitterness and the different flavors of veggies.
[00:15:09] I was all about sweet back then, but now I love it. Right? I love all these things and. There's definitely a level of retraining that has to happen, but it's not about forcing yourself. Right. And that's what leads me into the next category, which is intuitive nutrition. I. Intuition is so important.
[00:15:30] Unfortunately, a lot of us have lost our sense of intuition around food because, well, let's face it, the processed food industry is an huge multi-billion dollar industry. Companies invest so much money and so much research into creating foods that are as palatable and addictive as possible to get you to eat as much as possible.
[00:15:57] I will never forget the quote from, oh my gosh, I am blanking now, but it was back when, oh my gosh, this is gonna drive me crazy. Before craft split from. Whatever this tobacco company was that made cigarettes, I apologize for forgetting, but it, you know, Kraft Nabisco, it was this huge conglomerate, right?
[00:16:19] And they ended up splitting because when all the lawsuits were happening over cigarettes, they didn't want the food companies to be tied up with that. So they ended up splitting the companies. But, so back when they were all one, I, I wanna say it was the C F O, but one of the executive branch officers.
[00:16:37] Was quoted in an article saying that he was totally comfortable every day smoking a cigarette around lunch, but he would not touch Oreos and he would not allow his family to touch Oreos because they were a different level of addictive, and he knew how dangerously addictive they were. So this guy was cool, smoking a cigarette at lunch every day, but he wouldn't touch an Oreo.
[00:17:01] That says a lot, right? This food is so addictive. It is so unhealthy, and this, I will say it is straight up unhealthy. That's not to say I'm gonna judge you. If you truly feel in a moment like you need some soul nourishment via Oreo, that's a valid thing. I'm here for it, right? I'm here for it. Do not think I ever fit some standard of like eating completely, perfectly.
[00:17:24] I constantly try to remember to post stuff on Instagram stories, like if I order chocolate chip pancakes at, at breakfast with a friend. But the truth is I eat it faster than I could remember to take a picture to post. So trust me when I say I don't eat perfectly, but this problem of these processed foods completely being addictive and rewiring our brain, rewiring our sense perception is a huge thing.
[00:17:53] It is a huge roadblock to tapping into our intuitive knowing of what foods work best for us. So intuitive nutrition is all about stepping back into that. For me, that looks like loss of willingness to experiment, to be curious, and to be playful. If you get strict with it, if you ever get caught up in the shoulds or feeling like you need to like, like the should, we just gotta let go of the shoulds, right?
[00:18:21] There are no shoulds when it comes to your diet, except for eating from a place of love and nourishment. If we get caught up in the shoulds, right, of like eating right, eating clean, eating healthy, eating to lose weight, eating to heal our gut, eating to whatever, I just don't think it's gonna work. It certainly doesn't work for me.
[00:18:41] I know for me, if I try to do like some super strict elimination diet or whatever, it's, it always backfires, right? So I don't do that, and I don't really encourage anyone else to do that unless they truly, truly, truly need to, or it feels absolutely right for you. Then go for it. For me, it's not right. For me it just leads to really disembodied eating.
[00:19:02] 'cause I'm coming from a place of external logic, right? Of like, this is what I should be doing because of this research or this person, or this book or whatever. I. I instead am coming from a place of intuition of like, I want to eat this way because this is what my body's asking for. That comes with almost ease, that comes with clarity and alignment and a dedication to loving yourself, to nourishing yourself.
[00:19:30] And that's what it all comes back to. That's how we cut through all the BSS out there. That's how we cut through all. The wellness influencers, all of the practitioners, all of the people out there saying that this is the way to eat. You need to have fermented foods at every meal. You need to take probiotics every day.
[00:19:48] You need to do X, Y, or Z. Excuse me. You don't really need to do anything except learn how to eat intuitively from a place of self love. And eating intuitively looks different for everyone. It's something that happens slowly and it's something that, like I said, happens with a level of curiosity and playfulness and willing to willingness to experiment.
[00:20:12] When we come from this place, I. It actually becomes pretty easy, right? Because over time we let it happen slowly. I mean, it, it's taken me probably like 10 ish years to be in a place now where I absolutely love juicing and I like, love my veggie juices and I don't need there to be a bunch of fruit in there to make it sweet.
[00:20:36] 10 ish years. That's okay. Like there's nothing wrong with my journey taking that long. It might take you that long. 10 years is gonna pass by either way. So instead of trying to be perfect, just let it, let it be loving. Let it be nourishing. Let it be playful and curious. That's what intuitive eating is about.
[00:20:56] It's about dropping the shoulds. It's about acknowledging that processed foods are super duper addictive. That's okay, they're there. Let's slowly let some of those go. But instead of focusing on eliminating them, we wanna crowd them out. This is something I learned very early on in one of the first nutrition trainings I did is the idea of instead of focusing on what you wanna cut out, think about the nourishing things you can add in.
[00:21:22] This is a huge health hack, if you ever feel like that, like how can I cut out drinking a bottle of soda every day? Well, instead of thinking about cutting out a bottle of soda every day at the same time that you'd normally have your soda, think about how can I add in? That same amount of herbal tea or a kombucha or like something else, some other alternative that feels good, that sounds yummy to you.
[00:21:48] And add that in. And then maybe you'll find you want a little bit less soda because. You're, you've already had so much to drink, you like aren't craving that or don't need that. Or maybe you just start having it on only a few days a week instead of every day or whatever, right. We don't really want to focus on cutting things out 'cause that's not all.
[00:22:08] Sometimes it can come from a place of self-love. And like I said, if that's what you need, go for it. I think if we can, instead of focus on incorporating more of what makes us feel good, incorporating of more of what makes us feel loved, which could look like chocolate, it could look like literally anything.
[00:22:28] Only you know what's right for you. That's how we come to this place of eating in a way that feels good and quote unquote clean. That feels loving and nourishing and just wholesome. To us, to our bodies when we come from this place. And it's really important because the more we can come from that place of self-love and self nourishment, the more we're also gonna start caring and loving the places we get our food from, right?
[00:22:59] The more we're going to fall in love with, with our farmers and fisher people. And You know all of the people that collaborate to bring these foods together, and that's so important. There's really nothing more important than that, and that is why I went through the experience of wanting to know what it's like to do this for myself.
[00:23:25] Know what it's like to butcher an animal myself because I was choosing to eat meat. Know what it's like to grow vegetables from seed. Know what it's like to grow fruit. Know what it's like to grow medicinal herbs. Not everyone can do that, but for me, it completely transformed my love and appreciation, not just for the food I.
[00:23:48] But also for the soil, for the pollinators, and for the people that come together to make it a reality, to bring it into fruition. And the generations of people that have gone into developing these different breeds of of produce, right? That's why apples are bigger, tomatoes are bigger. All of our produce is bigger, more disease resistant, and there are pros and cons to this which we'll talk more about.
[00:24:16] But ultimately, when we can come from this place of love and nourishment and gratitude of deep tending and deep care for ourselves, for our communities, and for our planet. It just completely transforms everything. And no longer do we feel overwhelmed by all of the people posting about how to eat because we know in our gut what's right for us, and that is my goal.
[00:24:43] My goal is for you to walk away from this feeling completely empowered about how to choose the right foods for you so that you never question it again, so that as you grow and your life changes and the seasons change. You'll feel good. You'll know intuitively what to eat, what will feel good in your body, and you can always come to me or look to others for a little help and support for fine tuning.
[00:25:11] But ultimately, my goal is for you to walk away knowing how to choose what's right for you at any given moment all of the time.