Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 458 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! Thanks for hanging with me. It’s good to be with you..We are alike you and me..we want to be the best we can be and we know that means consuming content that’s good for our minds like my podcast and so many others out there. I thank you for listening. But being the best we can be also means consuming food that is good for our body. When we’re younger our bodies are resilient so some abuse is tolerated but as we get older it gets harder because our cells aren’t regenerating as fast, so we just end up lethargic and tired and in pain. And yet we fail to see the elephant in the room…what we are eating and not eating is a majority of the problem.
Part of the problem is we don’t know our food is the problem and part of the problem, a bigger part I think is that we don’t want to know that food is the problem because we’re addicted to our chips and cookies and wine and bread. I’m with you…In the not so distant past I would say things like “I’ll never be someone who eats totally healthy” or “I’m not one to give up sugar totally” You may have heard someone say “you’re gonna die from something why deprive yourself”….As long as our mindset is in that state of lack we will never make a change because instead of rewarding ourselves by GETTING to “eat healthy” we view it as punishing ourselves by HAVING to “eat healthy”. This is a losing mindset. And I’ve been guilty of it but drastic times call for drastic measures.
I mentioned in a previous episode that Eric my husband found out from a routine checkup that he in in AFIB. Which is irregular heartbeat…Since he found that out we have made a bunch of changes around here. Honestly we already ate pretty healthy but we had let things slip a lot. Now, I have a lot of problems with different foods so I don’t eat dairy, gluten, or grains so my meals usually revolve around proteins and veggies. But almond flour has made it where there’s a lot more you can eat if you don’t eat grains and gluten.
But a scary health report will wake you up quickly! We have become what I call Functional Nutritionist junkies. We’ve been watching videos, reading all kinds of articles about the role that nutrition plays in AFIB, but along the way, we were reminded of what we already knew but had pushed it away in our mind and that is that nutrition is the key to life.
But we definitely underestimated how often we were eating things and drinking things that simply were aging our bodies, making us feel like crap, keeping us hungry, basically doing nothing for our health but a lot towards putting us on the road to disease. There’s the 80/20 rule that if you eat healthy nutritious food 80% of the time, the other 20% could be what you want. But that 80% really needs to be food that serves you, that gives your body the nutrients it needs to function optimally. When I really sat down and looked at it, we were generally eating at least one big salad every day but did you guys know for our body to be optimal we need at least 6-8 cups of fruits and vegetables a day? I was probably limping in at about 2 cups. And we were eating the same greens day in and day out so organic spinach and green and red lettuce. No real variety. And we were eating out 6 or 7 times a week maybe more which isn’t good because restaurants don’t stay in business if their food doesn’t taste exciting and for most people exciting means sweet or savory or gooey. And now we have the added problem of seed oils and hidden ingredients, now not all restaurants but most. What finally did me in on restaurants was a little hidden secret about salads. Have you ever seen those reels about salads always tasting better when you eat them out? Yeah, well some restaurants will dip or soak their lettuce in sugar water before preparing it…..You can’t even confidently eat a Salad out! That broke my brain. This is an American thing at the moment, but don’t worry we are quickly sharing our food problem with our European friends. Now, I think they so far are being a little smarter about it. But studies show that 73% of Americans are overweight and more than half of those overweight are obese. Where do you fall on that scale? Are you average or above average when it comes to these statistics? I know that if you’re in the average you are doing something about it because you’re listening to the wildly successful lifestyle podcast! It’s all about nutrition, exercise is for our mindset, nutrition is for our physical health. We have to get our nutrition under control.
If you look at nutrition like a movie….Refined Sugar would be the super villain disguised as a handsome, charming prince. You’re blown away by how good it is but it’s definitely gonna kill you in the end. Alcohol would be the bad boy that we love to love. We know he’s not good for us but we do it anyway. You can switch the gender if you’re a guy listening.
I’m not a big alcohol drinker whereas my husband loves his wine, but I do have a sweet tooth and he doesn’t really but I thought my vice of a little too much sugar was better than his vice of too much alcohol. We always like to make our stuff not as bad, Turns out their equally bad. Turns out both are making us grumpy, old, and puffy and that’s just the outer signs…inside our bodies they’re killing us.
So Eric and I decided the day after we got home from our trip to Europe that we had to do something drastic. Tony Robbins always says take massive action and that’s what we did. We decided on a 21 day reset to see how we would feel. No sugar, no alcohol, no restaurants. I told him at least we were both gonna be miserable together. But honestly because we’ve been planning our meals and we have been eating more fruits and nuts, probably a little too much of that but right now we are ok with that while we get accustomed to our new lifestyle. Eric also found some wonderful alcohol free wine called Fre and he has a couple glasses of that, now it does have some sugar but not that much and it’s giving him something to replace that habit with, it really is important when you’re trying to change a habit, to replace it with something. Molly my little sister actually told him about that wine because a friend of hers that had a problem with alcohol switched to it and she’s doing better than ever. I love that he found that and actually likes it.
In just the 9 days we have been doing it my back pain has all but disappeared, my joints don’t feel like I’m 80 and my head is clearer than it’s been in a while. The other weird thing that I’ve noticed and I’m not sure if it’s because of cutting out sugar but I was starting to have hot flashes a lot and all of a sudden those stopped. I was talking to Kevin my trainer about that and he said “you mean to tell me that sugar was making you age faster?” Hmmmm. Such a Kevin response. So yeah, I think my body has kind of put a halt on aging quickly. Not aging altogether obviously but slowing it down bit, which did I just discover the anti-aging pill? Eric is a lot more private about all of his revelations since we’ve been doing it but for me I’ve noticed he seems much happier, I haven’t seen mood swings and his energy seems to be really good.. all of that in spite of the fact that he has AFIB.
As a side note…..we could have taken that diagnosis and made it awful and stressful and put our health into the hands of whatever medication the drs ordered but that’s not who we are and that’s not what we did. The best dr you have in your life is YOU and the best medication you have in your life is the food you eat. We both have known this and we got slack on it, but we are looking at this as a wake up call. As an opportunity to reset back to a path of health and wellness instead of the path we were on, which we like to tell ourselves wasn’t bad but hindsight is 20/20 and our path was going in the opposite direction of Wellness. Hard pill to swallow but one that we needed.
I talk so much about the worst things you go through end up leading to some of the best things happening. Eric and I are feeling blessed that we had this wakeup call.
This is our new lifestyle, we were telling ourselves we were on the 80/20 plan when in reality we were probably on the 50/50 plan and our bodies were letting us know. That’s mediocrity at it’s finest and I think you guys know how I feel about mediocrity, so to admit that is hard, but catching yourself and pivoting is part of a wildly successful life, no-ones perfect, you don’t even want to be, but you do not want to be average, especially not average in America. We have a problem here, and I don’t want to be a part of it and I know you don’t either.
My challenge to you this week is to be honest about where you are. Don’t wait until something drastic happens with your health. Let this be YOUR wakeup call. I know I’m not doing these episodes for nothing and I know this episode was meant for one of you listening, maybe a bunch of you listening. This is your wake up call that no one cares more about your health than you do and no one can make the changes to your nutrition but you. And just because the average American is overweight it doesn’t make it right or normal, we have to wake up that it just makes us sicker, and sometimes it takes massive action to change it and it starts with you and me. Share this with 3 people who inspire you to be better. I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days!
