Made For Living Well

I know a thing or two about stress. No matter how much I hate it, or at least hate to admit it, I find a lot of comfort in being stressed. Somewhere along the path, I attached the idea that stress is a measurement of productivity keeping me stuck in the stress response. If I wasn't stressed, was I being lazy? Learn more about this and how to get out of this response in today's podcast.   Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/328 Listen To The Rest Of The Health School Episodes: https://thelivingwell.com/health-school   Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

There's a lot of chatter in the health space about seed oils, which has opened up all kinds of room for confusion. But today, I want to clarify the answer to the question: Are seed oils bad for you? Not to throw shade at another food. We all know we can't possibly risk losing one more staple in our diet and feel okay about it. We've shamed sugar, potatoes, carbs, and even fats. Fats were the first food on the chopping block as the health industry began exploding in the early 80s. It was the same then and the same now. Researchers were trying to identify the cause of our rising health problems, which seem to grow exponentially every year. The study responsible for the correlation made between fat consumption and rising disease has since been debunked. But that study opened the door to a fear of food we've repeated over the following decades. The food industry willingly and quickly picked up on this fear, leaving you turning to their "healthier" options like factory-made butter known as margarine. Ironically, the same fats we once thought were the vain of our existence we now understand as critical to survival. But the part that leaves me most upset and you most confused is that we've misunderstood how our body responds to fats. We've neglected to understand the role of certain fats inside the body, which is the only way to identify what is good or bad for you. While this is a personal question, like all concepts in the health space, in this podcast, I provide an overarching framework on if and how to consume seed oils. Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/327 Listen To The Rest Of The Health School Episodes: https://thelivingwell.com/health-school   Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

The rain was pounding on my window to the same degree that tears were streaming down my face. I had just left a counseling session talking through my sense of self-identity. I was desperate to uncover who God made me. The problem was I had spent most of my life trying to be something others would respect. I wanted to be something that others would need. You could say it's part of being an , but more likely, it's birthed out of the broken places in me. I had picked up the desire to be needed. The issue was that I had spent most of my life striving to earn others' respect. I aimed to become someone others would rely on. You could attribute it to being an enneagram two, but it's more likely rooted in my own brokenness. I adopted the longing to be needed. Out of this, my identity became a conglomeration of many different things that masked who I was more than it helped me live true to who God made me. From there, I created my own form of identity crisis. I struggled to understand myself and my purpose, creating this gaping wound that seemed to fester in all areas of my life. In many cases, leaving me feeling worthless while also falling victim to anything promising to help me 'become.' There is a lot of chatter in the world about self-identity. It's the theme of the self-help industry that has taken over bookshelves worldwide. I don't disagree; we need to understand ourselves (to have a solid self-identity) to live our best selves. But it's not so much about understanding who you are but whose you are. It could be the word 'self' in self-identity that throws us for a loop, leaving us chasing what it was never intended to be. But your self-identity is less about amplifying yourself and more about your connection to something greater. It's recognizing your place not as an independent being but interconnected with God. Your self-identity is your sense of self, not your created self but your God-created being. Understanding this changes things because when you change your self-identity, you change how your body responds to all of your life. That includes the food that you eat. Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/326 Listen To The Rest Of The Health School Episodes: https://thelivingwell.com/health-school   Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

Health is difficult, and not in the way you think. It's difficult not because you don't know what to eat but because it's emotional, making healing less about food detox and more about emotional detox. It might feel like food complicates things. But it's not food but the reason you eat what you do. If you remove the emotional aspect, eating healthy food would be easy. But it's not or hasn't been, like exercise and every other health tip on the planet, because there is an emotional attachment. All of life is emotional or at least stirs an emotion inside you. That's because humans are emotional beings. Emotions are part of the human experience. Even when you don't think you're feeling anything, you are. You've likely become great at suppressing, numbing, shoving, or distracting yourself from what you say you're not feeling, making it appear like you feel nothing. I say this because I, too, lived this. But you can't escape emotions. They are part of you, as are your fingers and toes. However, you can learn how to use them to improve your life and health. This is where health and happiness coexist. On the podcast, we explore emotions and prove why they are responsible for biological functions. Inside, you'll learn the connection between cellular health and emotional health and how to boost both. Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/325   Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

Calories tend to be another controversial and somewhat confusing subject. But I'd argue that is only because we don't understand how they interact with our bodies. If you've ever wondered if calories matter, the answer is yes and no. Let me explain. Calories are a metric of energy often used to describe the nutritional value of food. Technically, a calorie is a unit of energy equivalent to the heat energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by one degree Celsius. Our simplistic view of calories does not determine nutritional value. It's the nutrients within those calories that truly matter. Calories are only significant to the degree they influence energy levels. Understanding this is much easier when you break through the misunderstanding of energy and thus understand the role of food. In this podcast, we dive deep into the misinterpretation of caloric energy while diving into the only thing that matters: your internal energy. Calories cannot change you, but they can influence your internal energy, which matters more than how many calories you consume. Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/324   Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

Metabolism is a sexy word in the health space. Everyone wants that flourishing metabolism. The same one we assume is why some people can eat anything and never gain an ounce. It's easy to envy those people while hating our bodies for not functioning in the same way. But truth be told, this understanding is a bad perception of your metabolism. Yes, it does change the structure of your body, which is why a higher metabolism is associated with a lower waistline. But you can't misrepresent metabolism by thinking it will help you eat anything you want and never gain a pound. Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/323 Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

How do you get healthy? The typical approach is certainly not working. In fact, it seems to be doing the opposite. It's not making you healthy, but there is something that is. Learn the key to living healthy so you can stop asking the same questions. The first episode of the new podcast series, Health School, starts with quite a bang. I share what I consider the most critical element of health, yet the most overlooked. That is energy. Discover the profound impact of energy on our biology, mind, and soul. This understanding will revolutionize your perception of health, empowering you to take control of your well-being and make it simple. Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/322 Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

Your body’s not that sensitive. It can be, but only because it’s been pushed into forms of dysregulation so long it’s turned to survival. Survival means your body will do anything to keep you alive, even if that means it works against what is healthy. It’s not the intended design. The intended design is to thrive. But when forced, it will revert to survival. I had to learn this the hard way. For years, I believed my body was just overly sensitive. It tended to react to everything, from foods to different beauty products and even occasionally the sun. My body felt overwhelmed in all areas. I could find nothing that would settle. While I knew how sensitive a body could become, it wasn’t my own health that made me confront the question as to why our bodies seemed to become so weak. It was one of my clients. He was only a child but had taken a few tests out of desperation to realize his body was reacting to everything. Not just environmentally, but nearly every food was causing a chain reaction inside his body. What was supposed to nourish him was slowly killing him. At a loss for how to feed him, his parents came to me for help. When I laid eyes on him, I could tell his body was overwhelmed, but I also saw something beneath the rash on his skin and the dark circles under his eyes. He had life in him. He was just so undernourished it couldn’t surface. It left me questioning how to nourish him when he couldn’t consume anything that would sustain him. Here, I began in-depth research into food sensitivities. I wanted to know why we are experiencing them more frequently than ever before. What I found was alarming and provides a solution to health the health space has repeatedly overlooked. In this podcast, I highlight why we are becoming more sensitive but also remind you this was not the design. You were not designed in weakness but strength. Your body can heal and thrive amongst several healthy and even unhealthy things. But it can only do that when it has the nourishment and support. You must change the paradigm and see your body as good to get healthy.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/321

For decades, health has existed in a black-and-white space. It’s been a series of rash and often unrealistic lifestyle changes, leaving one to believe the extreme lifestyle is the only one that will help you reach your goals. It’s also why resolutions have become such a focus of the new year. They bring the hope that you can change. The more extreme those resolutions, the faster things will change. But change rarely comes. You can blame yourself, or you can blame the resolutions. But I’d argue neither is wrong. The failure happens because of the process or lack thereof. On the podcast, I teach you how to create a process you’ll love based on the habits lived out by the healthiest people on the planet. It begins by learning how to romanticize the process and not the destination, knowing if you stick with the process, the destination will come. Check out these resources to get you started building better patterns and setting healthier resolutions: Upgrade Your Wellness Routine With This Tip 5 Ways To Guarantee Health Success 15 Healthy Habits To Take Into The New Year Why I Gave Up Finding Myself (Real Story) The Power of A Habit   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/320

  I spent many years attempting to hack my behavior. Forcing change, trying to make something budge. It’s the typical approach to life and health that appears like it should work. Logically doing something should create something different. And it does, but only if you change the pattern because your pattern produces the outcome you experience. If you have a problem, that problem was birthed out of a pattern. Change requires shifting the pattern, and that starts by understanding the pattern (learn your pattern here). When you know the pattern, you can influence it by creating better skills. Skills reinforce behaviors, even those you want to change. I am skilled at sleeping past my alarm. I’m skilled at waiting too long to prepare food until I’m ravenous and will eat anything. I’m skilled at overthinking, worrying, and anxiety. I’m skilled at things that reinforce the outcomes, creating the problems I want to change. Changing this requires influencing the pattern with better skills. Part two of this podcast mini-series teaches you how to transform the goal into skills you need to develop to create a better outcome. Change requires you to focus on developing the skills you need to create change. Ask yourself what skills you want to develop this year. I’m not talking about your average skill, like getting skilled at weightlifting. But the everyday mundane skills necessary to influence your patterns.   Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/319   Additional Resources to get you started building better patterns and setting healthier resolutions: Upgrade Your Wellness Routine With This Tip 5 Ways To Guarantee Health Success 15 Healthy Habits To Take Into The New Year Why I Gave Up Finding Myself (Real Story) The Power of A Habit

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve set many resolutions. Yet I’ve never achieved a single one. At least not that I can recount. Yet, I keep going back to the same approach, hoping one of these years it will work. I never blamed the act of setting resolutions for why they didn’t work, but I always blamed myself. In the last few years, I re-evaluated the traditional resolution approach. I even begged you not to set resolutions, claiming it’s not the answer to what you are seeking. But then I started to question if that was another extreme approach that neglected the answer. What if resolutions do work, but the problem is how we work or don’t work to achieve them. What if the answer was our actions? The problem is we’re attempting resolutions with the wrong approach. Inside the three-part mini-series, I’m breaking down the three important steps to set the resolutions and actually achieve them. It begins by understanding you don’t have a problem. You have a pattern. And that pattern feeds or enables the problem. When you know what pattern you are living in, you can break it to create a new one. That changes everything about your outcome. Learn more by listening to this episode and be sure to read the blog post to get all of the details: https://thelivingwell.com/318   Additional resources to get you started building better patterns and setting healthier resolutions: Upgrade Your Wellness Routine With This Tip 5 Ways To Guarantee Health Success 15 Healthy Habits To Take Into The New Year Why I Gave Up Finding Myself (Real Story) The Power of A Habit

Leaky gut seems to be a national crisis. While diet is certainly a factor, the larger issue is stress or the lack of safety inside your physiology. Maria-Victoria Albina of The Feminist Wellness Podcast came on this podcast to share the response of the nervous system on our GI tract and the fight for safety within our biology. We talk about the polyvagal theory, co-dependence, and how to regulate your nervous system to heal your biology. Healing your gut is more than a food issue. It's a lifestyle response.    OTHER RESOURCES TO CHECK OUT:    7 Signs Your Nervous System is Dystregulated:  https://thelivingwell.com/317   5 Ways To Use Your Nervous System To Get Healthy: https://thelivingwell.com/5-ways-to-use-your-nervous-system-to-get-healthy/   How To Feel More Energized And Stop Storing Body Fat: https://thelivingwell.com/how-to-feel-more-energized-and-stop-storing-body-fat/   How You Heal: Regulate Your Nervous System: https://thelivingwell.com/how-you-heal-regulate-your-nervous-system/   Put An End to Schedule Shaming and Create A Life You Love: https://thelivingwell.com/2024-nourished-planner

It’s easy to get sucked into the black-and-white trap of health. It’s either good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. Leaving many people attempting tasks and eating foods that perhaps are healthy for some but not others. The problem with this picture is it diminishes the secret of health. That secret is what your body is doing with what you provide. And that shifts the focus from perfecting the external ideas to understanding how your body reacts. Health requires internal awareness. Of course, health takes work. You’re going to have to do things to create it. But don’t get so lost in doing that you miss how your body is responding. Pay attention to what your body needs and do more of that. And remember, anything out of balance becomes unhealthy—even healthy things taken to a new level become unhealthy. In this podcast, I share three healthy things making you unhealthy. It’s always about balance.     Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/316

My therapy journey began because I wanted to stop feeling. Most therapy begins because you want to change how you feel. At least feeling the things you didn’t want to feel. Just like I wanted emotional control in the form of only feeling what I wanted to feel and never feeling what I didn’t. Arguably, we’d all love that superpower. To feel the good without ever experiencing the bad. But it doesn’t exist, and for good reason. All feelings are valid. They have a purpose, even the painful ones. But most people have gotten good at avoiding or numbing feelings as a way to deal with them. But it never deals with them. It just masks them. Feelings are part of being human. You were created to feel, which means you should feel. The journey to healing is not by suppressing the feeling but by learning how to feel without being controlled by the feeling. CHANGE HOW YOU FEEL BY UNDERSTANDING WHAT YOU FEEL. When I went to therapy, I didn’t know how much control I had over how I felt or at least the ability to change it. I spent so much time trying to run from feelings and create a life where I wouldn’t have to feel the things I didn’t want to that I missed the beauty of healing emotions and using those feelings to create a better life. I realized the superpower we’re looking for is not diminishing our feelings but creating better ones. It’s being able to feel everything while using what you feel to shift your actions because you know how to heal them. Emotional regulation is the superpower. That happens through healing your nervous system. I brought Mandy L. Harvey on the podcast to talk about emotional regulation, healing from trauma, and how to feel without getting hurt by what you feel but using it to thrive.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/315

Health has been hard. I want to emphasize the has as a past-tense explanation. Because while it might have been difficult, it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to live complicating health. It’s only difficult because we’ve let it become that. Perhaps not you personally, but the endless external ideas about what health means are overwhelming, even confusing, but only because we’ve neglected to understand health for what it is. And in the process, we’ve over-romanticized the outcome of health that we’ve neglected the process. When you romanticize the outcome while hating the process, you create a fantasy of health rather than the reality of it. I get it. The end goal is enticing. I don’t think anyone can argue that we’d love to rock our skinny jeans and never have to worry about getting sick again. We’d love to arrive at that destination of health forever and always. But health doesn’t look or work like that. Honestly, I think that’s more of a gift than we let ourselves believe. Health is a flow. It’s growth and movement that is changing as we change. Because of that, it requires you to embrace the process. The process of living health makes it personal and practical. In this podcast, we talk about romanticizing the process of living healthy and the top five ways to stop complicating health so you can start living it.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/314

Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) seems to be trending right now. While traditionally, I shy away from the fads of the moment. I had my eye on this one. Rather than another shot in the dark, continuous glucose monitoring offered tangible results in real-time. Unlike the scale, CGM opened up the internal workings of my biology to understand how it responded to what I did. In real time, I was able to see how my body was responding. More than what I do, health is truly how my body responds. Understanding this piece of data allowed me to create change, not on ideas, but facts. It helped me feel better than I have in a long time. I loved it so much that my husband also decided to take it for a test spin. Inside this podcast, we talk about our results (some that were shocking) and the changes we’ve made to help regulate our blood sugar. And we both share our opinions on whether continuous glucose monitoring is worth the investment.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/313

Food can be such a fight. In one breath, you genuinely enjoy food and want to enjoy the process of it. But in other, it’s terrifying. Your mind races with questions on what to eat, how much, will this make me fat, or what if it’s not good for me? There are so many messages and ideas it’s hard to imagine thinking anything but dread when it comes to food and your body. But this is not the intended design of food. Food isn’t to be feared. It’s to be enjoyed and used to nourish yourself, just as your body isn’t to be hated but loved and cherished for its role in helping you live your life. It may not be a common thought, but you can experience food freedom. You can have the best of both worlds, enjoying food and loving your body. In this podcast episode, I interview Jessi Jean, Mind Body Eating Coach, on what it looks like to experience food freedom and how we get there. If you intellectually know how you want to act with and around food but can’t seem to get yourself to do it, this podcast is for you. Learn how to change your patterns to stop emotionally eating.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/312

Managing blood sugar is not a new conversation, but it is worth having, especially considering the health benefits you could experience by learning how to lower blood sugar levels. Common thought has been to eliminate sugar and restrict all carbs, but blood sugar management is more than just a food problem. It’s a lifestyle. I interviewed Dr. Casey Means on the podcast to discuss blood sugar regulation and what she has learned since co-founding the company Levels. Levels provide an easy-to-use app connected to a continuous blood glucose monitor to give you results in real time. I took it for a test run and was shocked by the results. Inside the podcast, I ask Dr. Means about the diet and lifestyle recommendations she has found to be the most successful in regulating blood glucose levels. I was surprised to hear her number one tip had nothing to do with food.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/311

Getting healthy requires hasn’t been easy. But are you overcomplicating what should be simple? Here are five truths to change your health. I’ve spent some time pondering how many things in life I overcomplicate. The conclusion came to nearly everything. In the past, I have complexified my health routine, how it should look to spend time with God, and overthought nearly every hard conversation I’ve ever had. I spend so much time in confusion that I suffocated any new idea or thought that might pull me out. It wasn’t until I realized confusion was the fuel keeping me stuck that I stopped letting confusion be an answer. I stopped letting it be the final say. Health happens to be considered one of the most confusing topics of today. But I’m arguing it shouldn’t be. Confusion is only holding you back from living out health. But doing that means breaking down what you thought about health, redefining it, and choosing to live it even when you don’t fully understand it. Health is an action. Inside this podcast, I break down the five critical tools of healing and how to use them to change your health.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/310

Forgiveness is hard. It’s messy, overwhelming, and scary. And it often feels better left alone. Yet, it is one of the most powerful healing modalities we have. Forgiveness is considered one of our most significant forms of freedom. Learning to embrace forgiveness as a way of life changes the entire outcome of your story. I know firsthand the power of forgiveness. I also know how difficult it is to forgive. At least until you learn what true forgiveness is, outside of what you’ve been told. There’s more to the story of forgiveness. I don’t want the overwhelming artificial beliefs to prevent it from being the powerful tool of healing that it is. Inside the podcast, I dive into the biological response to a lack of forgiveness and what forgiveness can do for your health. I also break down what forgiveness is, what it is not, and how to make forgiveness a way of life to experience more life.   Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/309