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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This episode is sponsored by BiOptimizers. I love all of their products and I have been mega-dosing their masszymes for a variety of reasons. But today I want to talk specifically about Magnesium Breakthrough because you might’ve heard me talk about or write about magnesium before. And once I started taking Magnesium Breakthrough, my sleep completely changed and I wake up feeling so energized. It also helps me wind down at night, although I am one of the weird ones that I prefer to take magnesium in the morning and find it really supports my sleep when I do. And here’s why this one’s different. Other forms of magnesium might only be giving you one or two types of magnesium. But Magnesium Breakthrough contains all seven forms designed to calm your mind and help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. And over 75% of the population is magnesium deficient. And this is important because magnesium is vital for hundreds of enzymatic reactions in the body. And what most people don’t know is that even if we’re taking a magnesium supplement, we can still be deficient because we’re not getting all of the forms. And Magnesium Breakthrough is the easiest way I found to get all seven forms in one supplement. So not only does it help me sleep better and calm my mind and body and stay relaxed during the day, it also helps me to have better digestion to recover quicker from exercise. And magnesium is well studied to also support bone density. Most magnesium supplements are ineffective because they only contain a couple forms. And Magnesium Breakthrough is unique in that it contains all seven forms. And I noticed a big difference from this one. For an exclusive offer just for Wellness Mama listeners, go to bioptimizers.com/wellnessmama. Your brain and body will thank you. And if you use the code wellnessmama during checkout, you will save 10%.
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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and I absolutely love this episode about the real reason for obesity and self-love as a path to better health. I think this topic is so important, and we get into some really important nuance on some things that you might have tried but not implemented all the way. I’m here with my friend, Justin Nault, who is a nutritional therapist who specializes in helping people heal their metabolisms after years of damage from diet culture. And if you’ve listened before, you know this was a large part of my story and that I now eat much more than I used to while being much leaner than I used to be. But it was a process to heal my metabolism. Justin teaches people how to take back their health from a place of self-love, joy, and nourishment rather than the outdated model of sacrifice and pain. So if you want to lose weight and heal your metabolism, make peace and love with your body, and finally feel confident in your own skin, Justin is the guy to help you. He’s helped thousands of people do this with his 20 years of experience. And I love his unique approach to choosing self-love over restrictive dieting. He gives his five core principles in this episode, and I highly encourage you to give them a try if you haven’t already. Let’s join Justin. Justin, welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Justin: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m crazy excited to chat with you again. I always love our conversation.
Katie: Me too. And especially the topics we’re going to get to go into today, I think are so relevant for everyone, but especially for women and moms. And there’s probably a thousand directions we could go that we could talk on for an hour each, but I’d love to really jump in and get to the meat of this right away and sort of tackle because you, I follow you on Instagram. You’re, I feel like such an amazing voice for this, but sort of debunking a lot of the really pervasive myths around diet culture and the true root causes of obesity. And it seems like a lot of us have just been given misinformation for a long time that’s leading to a lot of frustration. So I know that’s a broad question, but let’s jump in there and kind of walk us through what is the actual, what’s actually going on with obesity and why is it not what we’ve been told?
Justin: Yeah, I mean, the term frustration, it’s the perfect word for it. Basically, everyone that comes to me now is what I call recovering dieters, right? They’re recovering from something, whether these days, it’s usually like intermittent fasting, keto is hugely popular, any kind of low carb is still hugely popular, carnivore has taken off in recent years. And people are really recovering from some sort of diet, where maybe they like to think it worked for them in the beginning, but then their health started to get worse and worse and worse. And they end up moving on to a new method. It’s like from method one to method two to method three.
There’s a study at one point that said the average woman tries something like 126 diets in their lifetime, which of course is just going to lead to endless frustration and the false narrative of like, well, I tried keto and it worked really well for me, but now here I am three years later and I’ve gained all the weight back. And I always just look at them in the kindest way possible, like, yeah, the diet worked so well for you that you had to stop following it, you know, which is a strange question to get hit with.
So what I’m trying to help people see is that what we believe to be the underlying root cause of obesity is not actually the root cause of obesity. The obsession with diet culture and jumping from method to method to method is actually an avoidance pattern for the real cause of obesity, which is emotional and psychological. In my opinion, and this is the way that I teach things with clients, is obesity is usually stemming from unmet emotional and psychological needs. So all humans have needs for things like human connection and love and freedom and self-expression and even adventure to some degree. But most people have created lives for themselves in which those needs are not being met. So either food like, junk food, or an obsession or over obsession with diet culture and healthy food becomes a sort of way to gain control in a life that you don’t really feel like you have control or a life that you feel disconnected from. So the obsession with health and wellness becomes a substitute for unmet needs and the biggest need of all being self-love. So I truly believe that one of the biggest puzzle pieces for obesity is a lack of self-love and it’s an epidemic that we have.
Katie: And I’ll make sure to link in the show notes to the other episode we did because we got to go really deep on the undereating, undernourishing side and everything that happens metabolically there. And I think that is really important foundational information for this conversation as well. And perhaps longtime listeners have heard me speak about this before, but what you’re talking about directly lines up with my experience in really struggling with weight loss for over a decade. And then once I started addressing the emotional and inner side of it, the physical stuff caught up. And I was actually, the fun part was, I was actually eating a lot more, and I took a year off of any high intensity exercise at all and just walked and did gentle restorative stuff. And it was like, my body was like, finally, you’re listening, you’re nourishing me, and you’re not stressing me out with super intense workouts. And it took that time of sort of recovery, like you used recovering dieter for my body to like really be able to heal and my nervous system to calm down. And I love that you connect this to the emotional and psychological roots of it, because I feel like this part is not talked about enough, but I know you see this all the time. I saw it in my own life. Seems like not just a piece, but a really pivotal piece of understanding this whole equation.
Justin: Yeah, for sure. And it’s understanding that our programming, we’re kind of like little computers, right? We can metaprogram our brains. And that’s really what parenting and caretaking is when we’re children, right? So a lot of these patterns are actually handed down to us. So when private clients come to me one-on-one, the first thing I have them do, and even in my online courses exists, an exercise called the Food and You Journal Prompt, which is helping us tease apart our actual beliefs around food, health, wellness. And for women in particular, they may have, and it’s not to blame our parents, right? Our parents loved us to the best of their ability, but they had their own struggles as well. So oftentimes I’ll see women that are like, my mom’s great. She’s still my best friend. And she’s been super nice to me my whole life and super positive and always told me that I’m beautiful. Those were the words that were being spoken. But then we go into this exercise and they remember, yeah, when I was eight years old, I realized my mom was weighing herself every day and was trying to fit into her skinny jeans and was not eating food at the family cookout and all these things, right?
So it’s kind of like the monkey see monkey do situation where we end up with these thoughts really programmed into us that that food is bad. And when your body’s not doing what you want it to do, which is like what you’re discussing here, the things that you’ve been through, until you dig into the emotional psychological piece and realize that the path forward to real optimal health and wellness is a self-love journey, prior to that, your body is actually the enemy. You know, this is what I’ve seen more than anything, women come to me and they’re so frustrated and on our first calls, they end up crying and they have these big emotional releases and stuff because they’re in a situation where they really like they think that they hate their body, that it’s their body’s fault. Like if my body would just do what I wanted, why does my body keep storing fat? What is wrong with this stupid body? I’m going to bring it to the gym and I’m going to punish it and I’m going to starve it and I’m going to try intermittent fasting and keto and I’m going to put it in cold plunges and freeze it and put it in the sauna. And I’m like, it’s just like this constant attack on our own bodies without understanding that like body fat storage is not a bad thing, right? Humans are adaptation machines. It’s our body’s job to survive in whatever environment we put it in.
So if I can help people see through the lens that body fat is simply an adaptation to the body trying to survive in an unnatural environment. And that’s really all there is to it. If we create and cultivate an environment that is loaded with artificial blue lights, and we’re on screens all day, and we never go outside, and we never see the sunshine, and we never go for walks, and all the food we’re taking in is toxic, ultra-processed junk that doesn’t work properly in our cells, that disrupts our mitochondrial function. If the environment is just nothing but toxic and then our body tries to adjust and survive in that environment by going into crisis mode and storing some body fat, or our hair is falling out, or we’re tired, whatever, the body is desperately trying to survive. And then we’re like, how dare you, body? You’re not doing what I want you to do, and I will punish you into submission.
And this is why any and all restrictive dieting, long-term, is doomed to fail, because it is an insistence on ignoring our body’s survival mechanisms, right? It’s like hunger. People go keto and they try intermittent fasting and fasting in hopes of not feeling hungry. Oh, it’s great. I’m on keto now and I’m never hungry. You’re like, hunger is your most basic survival instinct. It is your body saying, excuse me, brain, we have needs and I would like you to meet those needs. And then we basically just tell it to shut up, which is like it’s the equivalent of like abusive parenting. It doesn’t meet emotional needs, you know. So we end up in this kind of vicious cycle of like restriction and punishment and the body becomes the enemy. But the flip side of that is what you experience, like truly saying, hey, listen, I hear you. I know that you need me. I know that you need to be protected. I know that you need to feel safe. I know that you need to be nourished with foods that are nutrient-dense and full of vitamins and minerals. You need sleep. You need sunshine and all those things. It’s really like tending to your own human garden, really like doing that from a place of love.
Katie: Yeah, you said so many important things. And I think of a quote I came across in the middle of that journey that said, I said to my body, I want to be your friend. And it took a deep breath and said, I’ve been waiting our whole life for this. And just to unpack some of those things you said, it was like a slow process for me to learn. I can’t punish myself healthy. I cannot shame myself thin. I had to really actually be willing to look at the reasons why those things felt so difficult in the moment and understand my body. And I love this because it’s also seemingly very individual. And so it’s not a prescriptive one size fits all, eat exactly this, take exactly these supplements. And so that’s why I don’t often share at all what I’m taking, exactly what I’m eating, because I realize it’s going to be different for everybody. And I don’t want anyone to just see what I’m doing and try to use it as an exact blueprint for what’s going to work for them.
But I think that you are great at building some foundational principles that people can work from to start to understand their body, to start to nourish their body. And I think even that mindset shift from the deprivation mindset of dieting into a how can I most nourish my body? How can I most send safety signals to my body? How can I most love my body and my lifestyle choices is just such a profound mindset shift to begin with. And if you’re willing, can you just kind of walk us through some of the framework principles that people can start to understand and build from in learning how to actually know what their bodies need?
Justin: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that’s the thing is like, if we look at it like a pyramid, the nutrition and fitness piece and even fitness, I don’t mean high-intensity exercise, I mean, like going for walks and stuff, right? I have these, you know, full online courses and people can come work with me and we do personal development exercises and all the things. But like, foundationally, I have a video called the Quick Start Guide, which is just basically five daily habits that I give people for like really getting 80% of health and wellness, right, which is the things that I give to everyone are basically number one, removing seed oils. Number two, getting 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, which yes, this goes against intermittent fasting. And the next is the daily protein rule, which is basically one gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. Number four is daily sunshine. If you can watch the sunrise and the sunset every day, this will have a profound impact on your health and wellness. And then if you can add in some midday sun, that would be great too. And then number five is daily walks. So I tell people after each full meal, just set a timer on your phone, go outside and walk for five minutes. And when the timer goes off, turn around and come back. That’s it.
These five daily things, and notice, like, I’m not saying you need to get your protein from X food or blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, if you can just follow these core principles, which are, get protein because protein is usually quite nutrient-dense, depending on where you’re getting it from. Kick-starting the metabolism first thing in the morning, resetting your circadian clock with the sunrise and sunset, not putting poison in your body. The most prominent poison in modern grocery stores is seed oils. That’s really it. Like those are the principles, right?
So if we can get those principles down, then we have time to actually focus on all of the other things that are at play here. The things that you’ve learned, like becoming friends with your body, creating a place of safety in your own body. If it’s a constant game of punishment, then the body never feels safe. Like you said, like you’re always in sympathetic nervous system. You’re in fight or flight. Your nervous system is like waking up to another day of punishment. Sounds like a lot of fun, you know, and it’s this kind of vicious cycle. So the word you use is perfect, principles, like principles versus methods. If we can adopt some basic principles, understanding that modern society is really not designed for optimal human health and wellness, get those principles down, and then from there, we can dig into the deep stuff, which is going to make the lifelong transformations, the things that really last.
And we can talk about any, any and all the exercises that I have, but like we talked about the Food and You journal prompt, which is going back in time to understand where your beliefs around food and calories and weight loss and getting on the scale, where that all comes from, kind of untangling that. And the very next thing that I have clients do, which seems very strange to them at first, they’re like, I thought I hired you for nutrition advice is every morning, it’s called daily mirror work. You stand in the mirror, preferably in as little amount of clothing that you’re comfortable with and you can start fully clothed if you want, it’s totally up to you. And you’re just looking yourself in the eyes and saying, I love you 10 times and really trying to mean it and like doing it slowly and seeing what comes up for you when you speak those words out loud. And for a lot of people, their face gets red, they feel a little embarrassed. And you’re like, well, think about this for a second. You’re in a room, you’re alone by yourself. There’s nobody else here to be embarrassed in front of, right? So something is happening in that connection with self just saying I love you 10 times. And then I have them move into saying I’m proud of you for and coming up with five different things. I forgive you for, five different things, and I commit to you that, five different things.
So this is one example of actually flexing the muscle of self-love. It’s like anything else. If I want big biceps, I have to go to the gym or at home get dumbbells, and I have to flex that muscle because if I don’t have biceps currently, if I don’t have the big biceps that I want, it’s a muscle that just hasn’t been worked. So believe it or not, like self-love comes with practice. So it seems I always use this term that like Clovis is a Trojan horse, my programs are a Trojan horse because it’s really personal development disguised as a nutrition plan. Because that’s what we have to get into. The principles are pretty basic. And then we got to do the deep work to make sure that you are choosing yourself in every moment, prioritizing self and self-love.
Katie: And I will put a lot of links for follow-ups to all these things in the show notes, because I know you have a tremendous amount available that people can really dive deep on. But I love how that mirror work makes this so tangible because I found out myself, it’s not as easy as just deciding that you want to have self-love to actually just make that switch. It’s a little bit of a journey. And I did something similar in my process where I had a therapist have me do a form of tapping and say, even though I, whatever the thing I was struggling with, I love and accept myself. And I love and accept myself when I now choose and then whatever I was working on. And the first time she had me do it, I literally could not even say the words, I love and accept myself. They got stuck in my throat. And I would guess people have maybe similar experiences with the emotion of looking in the mirror and saying those words. And perhaps some of us, even as adults have never heard those words out loud to ourselves. And so I think it’s so profound that you have people do that. And I can only imagine the stories that you hear from the shifts people have just from that one piece alone.
But I would love to go a little deeper on the topic of sunshine. Cause anytime I get a chance to get on the soapbox of the importance of sunshine, I love to take that chance. And I feel like this is another thing that’s been unfairly demonized in modern society. And just for context, if anybody hasn’t tried your five foundational steps, and especially if like me had been restrictive dieting for years, it is incredible the shift that happens relatively quickly in energy levels, I noticed in sleep. And even for me, learning to feel hunger for the first time in a really long time was so profound. It actually like the first few times I was like, why does my stomach hurt? And then I was like, oh, I’m hungry. I’m actually feeling hungry. But I know light is a big key to this. And this one, I feel like doesn’t get enough talk. So can you walk us through a little bit of why sunshine is so profoundly helpful?
Justin: Yeah, yeah. So a basic way to think about it, one, this gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there is really a new and emerging field called quantum biology. There’s actually a company called the Quantum Biology Collective that is doing this. The most famous and prominent expert, I would say doctor, actually, well, I guess neurosurgeon, talking about this is Dr. Jack Kruse. And really all the cells in your body work like a clock. Your body is one big clock. And all of life on planet Earth is completely dependent on the sun. Human beings are no different. Literally everything in your body reacts to light of different wavelengths, which is also the reason why I’m sure your listeners at this point, because you’ve had so many amazing experts on your show, like blue blockers are real. They are helpful. Putting blue blockers on at night is a big deal for melatonin releasing in your body. Sunshine in the eyeballs is actually what drives something called the leptin-melanocortin pathway. And this impacts every single aspect of your health and wellness to unbelievable degrees. I mean, it really is like resetting your circadian clock every day. So seeing the sunrise every morning with no sunglasses, no sunscreen is a pretty profound thing. And then seeing sunset at night is a pretty profound thing.
And a great example of this is like, that’s the fastest way to beat jet lag. Like I actually just got back from two months in Asia. So the time shift was like 13-hour difference or something coming home. The first thing that I do in those several days being home is try to make sure that I’m getting my naked eyes on the sunrise and the sunset every single day to reset my clock in the area that I’m currently living in, right? And you can do this all around the world, no matter how many time zones you’re traveling, the sun is that impactful.
But if you think about where we’re really at in modern society, people like to talk about seed oils. They like to talk about, you know, more calories in food, the rise of fast food, whatever. There’s all these charts online that are these kind of hockey stick growth of all the things that coincide with obesity, right? Look, more seed oils in the diet goes perfectly with the curve of obesity. What also goes with the curve of obesity that most people don’t consider is lack of sunlight, one, and two, blue light exposure from screens. And it’s not that blue light is bad. Blue light exists in the sun. The problem is getting specific spectrums of blue light in your eyeballs without all of the other spectrum of light that is in sunshine.
And on top of that, all of your screens, if you’ve ever taken your camera and taken a video of like your laptop screen, it becomes all distorted and flashing and it looks very strange. That’s because these are what’s called flickering lights. The backlights on all of your devices are flickering like thousands of times a second. It’s like every millisecond there’s a flash happening. And this is sending a constant signal to your nervous system. So to give people a good example of this, if you were to eat the same meal, same exact meal, same calories, same makeup, identical, let’s say you eat it once on Monday and you eat it once on Tuesday, and we hooked you up to a continuous glucose monitor, if you ate that meal indoors while staring at your TV watching a TV show, you would get one blood glucose reading. The next day, if you ate that same meal outside in your backyard with your bare feet in the grass and the sunshine on your skin and no devices around you, you’d have a completely different blood glucose response.
We actually know for a fact from clinical studies that you can spike your own glucose and stress hormones just by looking at blue light coming from devices. It’s that powerful. So it’s not just that the sun is important. It’s that we’re eating some very strange artificial version of the sun for countless hours a day. I can’t remember, the average person checks their phone 300 times a day or something like that. Most, even us right now, like we’re on screens, there’s a ring light in front of me, but it’s not all doom and gloom, once the sun goes down, put blue blockers on. I use Raw Optics. I just love that brand. They’re great. Put those blue blockers on. Try to get to the sunrise every morning. And even if you can’t get sunrise, just try to get sun before 9 a.m. your local time, and that will be really powerful. Go outside again midday when the UV is pretty high. And if you can only stay out for 10 minutes without getting burned, only stay out for 10 minutes. And then see the sunset.
What you’re doing is getting that natural sunlight is combating some of the constant assault that we’re getting from these blue lights. I own four different companies. There is no chance I can live a life without blue lights. But I have to do the other things to mitigate that damage, which is like, you know, every day I try to take try to walk outdoors in my neighborhood for 45 minutes to an hour. And maybe I break that up into a couple of different walks if I’m having a particularly busy day. But I want to get outside and get that sunshine.
One last thing I’ll touch on. This is so important and this is becoming, it’s not mainstream yet for sure, a lot of people are still kind of dismissive of the idea, but I actually just went to a launch party here in Austin, Texas, for a company called Daylight that has made a tablet with zero blue light. It looks a lot like a Kindle Paperwhite. If you’ve ever used those, we’re like, you can be outside in the sun. It looks like normal paper. There’s no flicker on the backlight and there is no blue light whatsoever on the device. You can stare at this thing for 10 hours and you won’t have any eye strain. You won’t get headaches. It’s really crazy. So I mean, there’s entire tech companies that are like really catching on to this. It’s gonna be a very big wave that we see happening in the coming years of people waking up to the artificial light problem.
Katie: That’s awesome to hear, especially as a parent, that there are going to be options like this available. And just to reiterate what you just said, too, about food is you could be eating the most perfect diet, quote-unquote, perfect diet in the world. And if you’re eating it in a state of stress, even if it’s cellular stress that your body’s feeling and you don’t mentally feel stressed, it can still be having a negative impact on your body. And I think, thankfully, the reverse is true, is like if we can mitigate those factors, we actually get a little bit more leeway and our body’s absorbing food better. We’re able to uptake nutrients more effectively when we’re in a more parasympathetic state.
Also, I love the highlighting the sunshine part, especially sunrise and sunset, because I feel like people don’t often realize that we pay for these expensive red lights. Those exact same wavelengths are available for free when the sun rises and when the sun sets before the full other spectrum of light comes on board. And people like Dr. Courtney Hunt really go deep on that light piece. And I love that this is being talked about more.
I also find it interesting that a recent analysis of all the studies related to skin cancer, I feel like this is an important follow-up to the sunshine piece, found that it’s not sun exposure that actually correlates to skin cancer risk. It’s the number of severe sunburns. So obviously, we want to avoid sunburn, but sunshine is actually extremely helpful and they find can reduce the risk of a lot of problems when it’s done in the right amounts. So I just wanted to give that as a piece for the fear side.
Another thing I would love to talk a little bit more in depth about is seed oils, because this is another soapbox for me. And I would love for people to have a little bit deeper understanding of why these are so worth avoiding and maybe alternatives they can choose instead. I know these are pervasive in processed foods, restaurant foods. They’re everywhere. But why are they so harmful?
Justin: Yeah, this is a tricky one, right? Because you have really big influencers with millions of followers who are really hammering that they’re safe. And they’re talking about people that say no to seed oils. This is where you hear terms like quack and misinformation and all this stuff. What’s happening there is we’re not able to point to randomized controlled trials showing harm for seed oils in humans, which makes things really confusing. And not only that, but we have some trials where they’ll take humans, let’s say, and put them in a metabolic ward, and they will feed them lots of seed oils, whether it’s soybean oil, sunflower oil, canola oil, whatever. And they’ll measure one marker, like let’s say inflammation levels. So they’ll say day one, subjects had X amount of inflammation. Maybe they’re doing homocysteine or C-reactive protein or something like that. Day three, that same measure of inflammation went down after three days of seed oils. Amazing, seed oils are good for humans, right?
Also, it’s worth noting that the primary problem in seed oils is not there’s chemicals and hexane and all these things that go into processing them. I highly suggest everybody get on YouTube and search for canola oil, how it’s made, and watch a video of how canola oil is made. It will make you want to vomit and never eat canola oil again. The visual of it may be enough to get that done. But anyway, so, seed oils are very high in a type of fat called polyunsaturated fats. I always refer to them as PUFAs. You may hear this online. It’ll be capital P-U-F-A. PUFA stands for polyunsaturated fats. There’s polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats, saturated fats. What that means is just the types of chemical bonds that exist within the fat, which gets a little bit nerdy and into the chemistry. But the easiest way to picture it is coconut oil and butter are nearly 100% saturated fat. They are solid at room temperature. Olive oil, liquid at room temperature. It’s mostly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Canola oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, it’s basically always going to be liquid. It’s a very unstable fat, right?
So these polyunsaturated fats are actually what’s causing the issues. Inside your digestive system, when we take in food, there are steps to metabolism, right? There’s lipolysis, there’s glycolysis that goes into the citric acid cycle and then onto the electron transport chain. The electron transport chain is where all the magic happens. This is where your body creates ATP, which is like the cellular energy currency of your entire body. Nothing you ever do in your body gets done without ATP. You need ATP to function. Like for example, if you take cyanide, the poison, it prevents your body from creating ATP and within seconds you are dead and it’s a very painful death, right?
So what’s happening there is in the level of the electron transport chain, there are these hydrogen atoms that are pushing across what’s called a phospholipid membrane. That phospholipid membrane is made out of fatty acids. When we’re taking in polyunsaturated fats instead of saturated fats, saturated fats are animal fats. Well, we’re animals. Makes sense. Saturated fats should be the primary fat in our bodies, what our cells are made of. So these polyunsaturated fats are disrupting the body’s ability. It’s making a leaky phospholipid membrane, which prevents those hydrogen atoms from being pushed through something called ATP synthase. And I know this is very nerdy, but it’s basically, that’s the last step in taking food and turning it into energy.
So seed oils, polyunsaturated fats, and it’s not just seed oils mind you, like if your diet consists of mostly almonds, you’re going to have a ton of polyunsaturated fats without consuming any seed oils. This is problematic at the level of the electron transport chain. So if we go back to that study, they’re giving someone seed oils and just measuring inflammation levels, let’s say. They’re not measuring the output of ATP from food, which is very difficult to measure anyway, right? They’re not measuring something like that. They’re just saying, look, inflammation went down. Therefore, this is good, which is reductionist science. They’re not paying attention because metabolic ward studies where we take humans and put them in a controlled environment and we control absolutely everything they’re eating is unbelievably difficult to do. It costs tens of millions of dollars. These seed oils, polyunsaturated fats, stay in your cells for years. There’s no way for us to actually measure this. You can’t put humans in a metabolic ward for years to measure what’s happening with them.
Now, what is happening at the level of the immune system, it’s like all of a sudden inflammation is lower. That must be good. Polyunsaturated fats are also used in hospitals to prevent human bodies from rejecting organ transplants. So we have to pause and say, okay, inflammation levels went down. Is that a good thing? Or are we simply suppressing the immune system? What we know is that polyunsaturated fats and seed oils are immunosuppressive, which is the reason why we use them to prevent organ rejection and transplants when someone’s literally going to die if their immune system acts up too much, right? But in a three-day study, it’s very easy to say, look, inflammation levels went down. These are good for humans, which is what ends up happening. This is where we get into the game of science, right?
And this is a really tricky one for me because I have to dig into topics like learned helplessness and helping people see that they’re outsourcing their authority. Like the way that I live my life, nobody has authority over my life. Nobody, right? So if somebody has a PhD or something and they come to me and they say, I disagree with what you’re saying, you’re spreading misinformation, you’re a quack, whatever, I can point to my Facebook group of 12,000 members and the thousands of people who have transformed their lives and the people who have transformed their lives so significantly through my programs that they tattoo my brand on their skin, right? These are, these are kind of my credentials as I say them. But what ends up happening is people get nervous because in the science world, they’re getting hit with all these people that have these credentials that were programmed and taught by a system that carefully put information in their mind to help them talk the way that they want them to talk, to spread the information they want them to spread, to give a big thumbs up to mainstream medicine, which is the third leading cause of death in America, by the way, right? So it’s very hard for people to accept it.
My stance on this is I’ll look at these people and say, listen, I actually, I don’t believe in the perceived authority that handed you those credentials. So I’m really not interested in what you have to say. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that I think they’re bad people. It means that I just disagree with them, but this is really where the madness of seed oils comes into play because we have countless studies in virtually every animal that is not humans. If we go to the reason why we do animal studies is because we can actually control them. They have shorter life expectancies. Rodents have like something like 99.7% of the same DNA we do. We can actually carefully control their environments and really see what happens in a way that we can’t ethically do with humans. And all of that data points to seed oils being toxic.
But the mainstream will say, well, we don’t see the data in humans. What do you want to do? So like, I’m not willing to wait for mainstream science to do the science that needs to be done in seed oils. I can just make that decision, know that I feel better and know that in 100% of the people I work with who remove seed oils, they see health improvement across the board.
Katie: I completely agree. And I say often, at the end of the day, we are each our own primary healthcare provider. And I talk a lot about not outsourcing our health decisions to any professional. I think amazing things happen when we partner with medical professionals who are willing to work with us. But at the end of the day, the responsibility is still ours. And it’s worth remembering too, these things did not exist in the human diet for most of human history. These are a new addition to the diet. We didn’t have the ability to extract them for a really long time. And like you said, those hockey stick curves match up really, really closely. So I think it’s at least worth the experimentation for people who have not tried it to try it and see how much better you feel without it.
I’d also love to talk about the kid piece a little bit, because you mentioned earlier how many of us have internalized patterns from our parents that they probably didn’t mean to pass on to us that have led to patterns in our own relationship with food and our lifestyle. And a lot of the people listening are moms, which I think it’s important for us to address these things because what we model is so important to our kids. But I think often about any way that I can help my kids avoid some of these things that I was a slow learner on or that I had to figure out in my 30s and have a stronger foundation earlier in life. And I know for me, that’s a lot about the conversations we have around food and the words that I use and the education around it while also respecting their autonomy around their food choices. But I would love any advice you have for the parents listening in the best ways to help our kids build both an understanding and a solid foundation for these principles you’ve talked about much earlier in life than we have.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. This is maybe the topic that I am the most passionate about, genuinely. It’s a bit of a challenge for me because I don’t have children, right? I’m 37 years old now and I don’t have kids. I have four nieces and nephews. And actually I know that you know this, but the story of Clovis comes from my niece being born terminally disabled. So I’m very familiar with childhood nutrition. I’ve done serious deep dives into it, but I want to actually stick to, again, it feels like information, like I need information. What do I feed my kids? What are their macros? What foods do I give them? It can really feel like that’s the thing, but it is always emotional and psychological. Because again, you can tell your kids what to eat all day and then they’re going to watch what you eat. You can tell them that they don’t need to punish themselves with fitness. And then they’re going to watch you punish yourself with fitness. You can tell them that they need to get sunshine. And then they’re going to see you watching Netflix at 11 PM, right? It’s like, it’s monkey see monkey do. So that’s the most important piece. And I don’t know the stress of having kids. I certainly don’t know the stress of like, having a 40-hour-a-week job and then taking care of kids or having partners or divorces or all those things. I haven’t experienced those aspects of life yet. So I want to be like very empathetic to the situations that people have.
But the way that I try to teach this is I believe your entire reality is a mirror of your internal state. So this will happen a lot when people try to make changes in their household where they’re like, well, Justin, you don’t understand, my five-year-old, all that he will eat is Doritos and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and pizza bagels. He won’t eat anything else. Well, then we have to peel back the layer of extreme ownership there, which can be hard to do. And realize children actually do not have any say in the foods that they grow to like. That child didn’t go to the grocery store and buy pizza bagels and take them home. They didn’t go get the Doritos. They don’t have a job. They don’t have a paycheck. They didn’t go do this thing. So what can be really hard for parents is when they try to change their child’s eating habits that are already well cemented, there’s tantrums. There’s conflict. There’s emotional explosions and fights. And then you’re like, okay, well, do I really just let my kid be hungry until they decide that they’re going to eat the grass-fed steak that I bought them, right? And it can be this really like it’s emotional turmoil going through this. I totally understand that.
And on top of that, like you said, and we’ll just kind of, so their nervous system is already jacked, right? They’re like, they’ve been watching YouTube for five hours and then you tell them, hey, you can’t have Doritos today and they have a full-blown meltdown, right? But we have to see this for what it is. It’s kind of that mirror reflection of our internal state. If you can learn to get comfortable with the emotions of your children, so you can get to a place where you’re having conversations with them if they’re old enough to have these conversations. Now, if they’re young, they’re probably just going to throw tantrums when you change their food and understanding that over time, things are going to get better. And on top of that, the more vitamins and minerals these children are taking in, the more they will be regulated, the better their mental health will be. Because they’re creating more ATP, they have more energy, which is all that we talked about on our previous episode, right? The same is true for children. If we can increase their metabolic rate and increase the amount of energy that they have available to them through getting them appropriate vitamins and minerals, they’re going to have a better emotional experience.
But in terms of like the basic things you can do, the top five daily habits that I discussed earlier, the number one thing that I have parents do is try to take their children with them on that journey, right? So it doesn’t automatically have to be day one. We’re cleaning out the house and none of your favorite foods exist here anymore, Junior, and you need to get over it, right? It doesn’t have to be that. It’s just bringing them along on your journey of health and wellness. It’s like, hey, we’re up in the morning. We’re going to walk down the street and we’re going to watch the sun come up and we’re going to go home and we’re going to eat a little bit of protein. And if that means they’re going to eat some protein alongside whatever food they’re currently willing to eat and you get them to just eat a few bites of protein, that’s a win, right? And now we’ve had a meal. We’re going to go for a little walk. Great.
You know, all these different things you can, and if you, if you’re comfortable doing this, it may be difficult if it’s a challenging exercise in the beginning, but let your children see you do daily mirror work. Wow, Mommy stands in the mirror every day and says she loves herself. What is that about? You know, I guarantee you, I’ve never had a client come to me who’s suffering, struggling with health and wellness, who watched their parents say, I love you to themselves in the mirror when they were kids, right? So this really is your child is to some degree going to be a mirror reflection of what you’re doing. And it actually gives you real-time feedback, right? You get to see, okay, listen, I bought blue blockers for my kid. And at night when they’re watching screens, we have them put their blue blockers on. But then the next day it’s 11 PM and I’m watching TV with no blue blockers and the kid’s like, well, I’m not wearing my blue blockers. You know, like you’re, you’re getting immediate feedback from that child of where you need to improve.
And like you talked about these five daily habits, this is always gonna be a matter of consistency, right? Like you said, if you implement these things, Justin’s talking about, you’re going to, you’ll be surprised how quickly you see improvements. And that’s true. But what a lot of people do, if they’re honest about it, is they hear something like this and then they say, okay, over the last month, I did those five daily habits four times total. And my life didn’t transform. I’m not going to do this thing anymore, and it’s like, well, consistency is king. It’s consistency over the long-term, which is the same with parenting, just like flexing the self-love muscle. You have to flex this muscle of allowing your children to see you live a healthy lifestyle day in and day out. As you’re building the habits, they’re seeing that habit building the entire way and they want to mimic you. It’s what children do. They want to do what you’re doing, right? So take them with you, take them with you on the journey.
Katie: Yeah, I love that. That’s such a great explanation. And for parents listening, I would also just encourage you, even if like me, you didn’t always have the best relationship with food and you over-dieted and your kids saw that when they were young, that was actually a big part of my story was looking in the mirror one day and feeling disgust for myself. And then my daughter was in the bathroom and realizing it registered in her eyes how I was looking at myself in the mirror and realizing that is not what I want to pass on to her. And that was actually the impetus for really finally being able to make changes and do the emotional work was feeling that pain of seeing her see that.
But the beautiful part is kids are even more adaptable, I feel like, than adults are. And when we make these changes and just give them access to these foundational habits and model them, they will often, I feel like, adapt more quickly than we do. And so even though this has been only the past three or four years of my journey, I’m seeing it play out in my kids as their daily habits and them listening to their bodies. And even when they’re not at my house, they typically make really good nutrition choices because I’ll hear them say things like, yeah, I realize I feel terrible if I eat processed meats or if I eat a donut. So I just don’t eat that. And they’ll come home and eat tons of like eggs and avocados and meat.
And the one warning I will give to parents is when you make the switch, your food bill might go up temporarily or permanently because especially now with four teenagers, there’s a lot of protein consumed in our house. So I’m often bulk cooking all the proteins and just keeping constant access. But those little moments of, like glimmers of hope and seeing them understand their bodies on a deeper level at age 14 or 15 than I did until I was in my 30s is so incredible. And seeing and being able to speak to them about they wake up and they’re hungry, which is a great sign. I’m like, that means your metabolism is healthy. You wake up and you immediately want protein. That’s a great sign for your body.
And just having those conversations, not in a fear-based way, not in the deprivation-based way, not in the food is bad way, but in that, like you talked about, maximally nourishing your body, giving it what it needs, being its friend, sending it safety signals, and then even seeing that play out in their athletics and how well they’re able to perform on the field and their events. And so I just really give that encouragement to parents. I know that was part of my story is all the things that were so hard to change. Finally, I became willing to change that inner experience when I saw how it was going to affect my kids. And so I think this is a profound thing to do, not just for ourselves, but really for our whole families. And that when the parents make the shifts, the kids often will adapt faster. So I love your messaging around that. And I know you have so many resources for people to actually implement these, to continue learning. Can you explain where to find some of those? And I’ll, of course, put links in the show notes also.
Justin: Yeah, for sure. One little bookmark. I want to share this with you because I think you’ll love it. And you’re probably familiar with him just because I know you know all the people. You have one of the coolest networks I’ve ever seen. But there’s a coach named Peter Krohn. He’s amazing. And Peter has this statement that he said that was like, he tells parents, he’s like, listen, your kids probably aren’t going to do a great job of listening to you, but they are going to do a great job of becoming you. And that is such a profound difference. When you really sit with that, it’s like, oh, wow, I am setting an example in every single moment. Like you said, little kids are brilliant. They have like a spidey sense that we just don’t have that’s been kind of programmed out of us. So yeah, it’s like you could sit there, be looking at yourself in the mirror with your daughter in the bathroom, and you’re kind of despising yourself at the time. And she could say, hey, Mommy, how are you feeling? And you’re like, oh, I’m doing great. Everything’s fine. She knows. She knows the emotional experience you’re having. So yeah, that’s just one piece of advice that I want parents to have is like, even if they don’t listen to you, they will become you. So you have to be the change you want to see in them.
But yeah, for anyone who wants to connect to me, you can find me on all the social media platforms. It’s @theclovisculture, C-L-O-V-I-S-C-U-L-U-T-U-R-E, The Clovis Culture. And then for your listeners here, I’ve just created a website. It’s just my first and last name, justinault.com/wellnessmama. And I’ll put a free training video there so you guys can learn a little bit more about what I do and about what you and I discussed on our earlier podcast way back when.
Katie: I love it. I’ll make sure those are all linked in the show notes so people can find you. I really enjoy following you because you always do these great practical takeaways, like short videos that explain so much. And I feel like the beautiful hope in the way you teach this and the way you talk about this is, especially for people like I was coming from years of overly restricting, undereating, overdieting, and not seeing results, is that there actually truly is a way that you are eating more, you’re not having to do as extreme of workouts, especially in the beginning, you’re making peace with your body and you’ll get better results. That was so much of a profound shift for me to realize I’m eating literally double what I used to eat and I’m getting leaner. And so I feel like there’s just so much freedom in that message and that it can really help so many women, especially. So I’m extremely grateful for the work that you do in the world. I’m so glad we got to reconnect. Highly encourage you guys to go follow Justin and keep learning. Justin, thank you so much for your time. It’s always a pleasure.
Justin: Yeah, right back at you. I respect what you do so much. And I’ve watched you do this for years now and put amazing information out into the world for people. And I’m deeply appreciative for you. And thank you for having me here. I appreciate it.
Katie: Thank you. And thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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