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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This episode is brought to you by LMNT. And you’ve probably heard me talk about my love of getting enough salt before and how this made a drastic difference in my energy levels. And LMNT is the easiest way that I have found to do this as well as the tastiest. We know that proper hydration leads to better sleep, sharper focus, better energy, and so much more. But hydration isn’t just about drinking water. In fact, only drinking water alone all the time can actually be counterproductive. Because being optimally hydrated, which is a state called urohydration, is about optimizing your body’s fluid ratios. And this depends on many factors, including the intake and excretion of things like salt and electrolytes. Now, electrolytes are charged minerals that conduct electricity to power your nervous system. They also regulate hydration status by balancing fluids inside and outside of our cells. LMNT was created with a science-backed electrolyte ratio of 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium with no sugar. So even though these taste incredible, they don’t have added sugar, and I love my kids consuming them as well.
Electrolytes are a key component of healthy hydration. And here’s what happens when your electrolyte levels are dialed in. You find you have steady, maintained energy, better cognitive function. I noticed this really helps me get rid of brain fog. I suffer fewer headaches now, experience fewer muscle cramps, even during severe workouts. I perform better and longer. And for people who follow any kind of fasting or low carb diet protocol, when you stop eating carbs or when you’re fasting, the absence of insulin allows the kidneys to release sodium, sodium, replacing that lost sodium with an electrolyte solution can help you continue to feel good. And since LMNT is zero sugar, it won’t break a fast. You might also find that getting your sodium levels in the right range can help improve or maintain healthy blood pressure, regulate digestion, this is a big one for a lot of people, and keep skin hydrated. We know that hydrated skin is happy skin and these minerals are a big key in that as well. You can check out and try LMNT at drinklmnt.com/wellnessmama. And by using that link, you’ll receive a free LMNT sample pack with any order. So you can try all of their amazing flavors. My favorites right now are watermelon and grapefruit, but I also love their chocolate flavors with hot water as a form of a hot cocoa. So again, drinklmnt.com/wellnessmama to receive a free sample pack.
This episode is brought to you by Mito Red, which is a great option for red light therapy, also known as photobiomodulation, which is something I have been fascinated by for a very long time. If you’re not familiar, red light therapy is a therapeutic technique that uses low wavelength red and infrared light. It’s become really popular in the health and wellness world due to its many potential applications and its incredible safety profile. This form of therapy harnesses the power of specific light wavelengths that are believed to be absorbed by specific chemicals in a cell, which improves their function and energy production. Mito Red light therapy is known for its ability to stimulate collagen production, reduce inflammation, and accelerate the healing process. The effects were first discovered by NASA scientists during research into plant growth using red and infrared light. One accidental finding was that researchers who spent hours exposed to the light sources experienced noticeably faster healing of cuts and abrasions. And since its initial discovery, there’s been extensive research into how red light therapy works and its benefits.
Researchers believe that these specific wavelengths of light influence cellular function by their impact on the mitochondria, which as we know, are the microscopic powerhouses of our cells. Red light therapy is thought to enhance mitochondrial function by stimulating cytochrome C oxidase, which is a key enzyme in mitochondria that is sensitive to these specific wavelengths of light. And this is believed to increase activity, thereby boosting cellular energy production. This enhancement is what research believes may cause many of the effects that people experience from red light therapy, like improved cell vitality, increased healing, and reduced inflammation. It’s also thought to stimulate the release of nitric oxide, which is a critical signaling molecule involved in numerous physiological processes. Nitric oxide plays a role in vasodilation, blood flow regulation, and oxidative stress response.
And I really like Mito Red because it’s such an easy at-home option that makes it available to all of us. You can learn more about all the benefits and get one of your own by going to wellnessmama.com/go/mito, M-I-T-O. And if you use the code wellnessmama, you will get a discount.
Hello and welcome to the 800th episode of the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I cannot believe I actually just got to say those words. It’s been an incredible journey, almost 10 years, which I will celebrate in June, and I hope that you’ll join me for that episode as well. But to commemorate this 800th episode and well over 700 hours of recording with incredible guests, I wanted to do a quick short and sweet recap episode that really goes into eight recurring themes that have become somewhat unconventional habits that have changed my life for the better. I would also love to hear your take on these things, on the habits that you feel have made the biggest difference in your life. But today I’ll be sharing some of mine.
Before I jump into that, I also want to just give immense gratitude to all of you who have listened to the incredible guests who have been on this podcast over the last almost 10 years and for the incredible community that has grown from not just this podcast, but in the health and wellness world, and especially in the mom world. I don’t take it lightly that I get the honor of speaking to such incredible people and with such incredible people. And I am so, so grateful that you are here and for your time and listening. I know I say it at almost every episode, but truly your most valuable resources in this life are your time and your energy and your attention. And I am so grateful that you choose to share some of those with me through listening to this podcast.
I’ve been honored to have so many incredible guests over these last almost decade, this almost decade, and to have been able to learn so much from each of them. I’m deeply grateful for the wisdom that they’ve all shared, for the questions and comments that you have all shared, and for all that we’ve gotten to learn together. And like I said, I wanted to, in this episode, just highlight briefly some of the key takeaways that I have heard over and over on this podcast with some practical tips that you could implement as well. And I do have blog posts on each of these. I’ll put a lot of links in the show notes to everything I mentioned to blog posts with more detail if you want to go deep.
And I would love to hear from you what you would like to hear about in the next 100 episodes of this podcast. If you want to leave a rating or review in any podcast app, I do read all of those and very much value that feedback.
I also wanted to briefly just touch on a trend I’ve noticed is that as I’ve changed and gone on this journey, there has been a lot more talk of mindset and inner work and emotional health, mental health, the inner landscape and the way we speak to ourselves. And I understand that is a deviation from the extremely clinical science-y tone I had when I first started this podcast. And understandably, that might not resonate with everybody who listens. As I read all of the ratings and reviews, I received one recently that I really appreciated where someone said that she didn’t really like the new, what she called Eastern mysticism focus on this podcast. And I completely understand where that comment comes from. And I just wanted to briefly address it because certainly while I realize this won’t be the right fit for everybody, I don’t feel like necessarily speaking of the mind or the inner landscape or our emotions and how that relates to our physical health is necessarily in the realm of mysticism or religion. There’s actually a lot of science that continues to confirm how intricately those things are connected. And we know that mindset plays a huge role. We see this in clinical outcomes, even in recovery from advanced diseases. So I realize I do speak more about that than I used to. It seems like that highly resonates with some listeners and not at all with others. And I, of course, respect those personal opinions. But I think it’s a factor that for me personally, it’s worth speaking to and speaking about and learning about because it has been such a powerful part of my journey. And I think of the quotes, there’s one from Buddha that says, change isn’t painful. Resistance to change is what’s painful. And others along the lines of what we chase resists us and what we resist chases us. And so this kind of follows my personal path of trying to learn to live with less resistance, less attachment, and more grace, ease, and joy, which are my words for the year.
Now, candidly, I have actually struggled quite a bit in the last month or so with living in that state of grace, ease, and joy. And I’ve instead felt a lot of overwhelm and even what feels like sort of latent emotions that might finally be processing for the first time in my life, feelings of even anger and rage, which were completely new sensations to me or that I certainly don’t remember feeling before. And I realized I’ve been resisting those emotions. So I’ve been working to give them space to be felt and also to let them pass when they’re ready. And this hasn’t exhibited in my external interactions with people but has been a big difference in my inner landscape recently.
Also, as a recap, before I jump into the specific habits is just touching on first principles. And I know I use that word a lot on this podcast, but I feel these are helpful for me in navigating health changes and navigating mindset changes and navigating life in general. The first being curiosity. And I think of that Walt Whitman quote that Ted Lasso also quoted in that show, which is perhaps my favorite show about curiosity, not judgment. And to me, this really stems from the idea I’ve said on here as well, that we can learn something from truly every situation we are in, every person that we meet, every experience that we have, every approach that an expert recommends. And that doesn’t mean that the same exact blueprint or steps will create the same results for us, but there is always something to learn.
And I’ve found that I am intensely curious about each person I meet, their story, their life experiences. I had a dear friend one time say this and I took it as one of the biggest compliments I remember in my life. She said that I was as interested in the Uber driver on the way to the airport after an event as I was with the billionaire we had dinner with the night before. And I hadn’t noticed that, but I felt like there was no difference in the value of those two people. And I perhaps even learned more from the Uber driver. And I think that to the degree that we can approach life with childlike curiosity, we just expand our ability to learn. And that in the places where we are not open or feel we already 100% have the correct answers, we limit our ability to add to that knowledge.
I also say on here, you’re probably tired of me saying it by now, but that we are each our own primary healthcare provider. And to me, this is also one of the first principles of health, and it’s worth repeating. I understand entirely the feeling of wanting someone else to be able to give you the answer or tell you what’s wrong or help you fix it. I have felt that and been there too. But at the end of the day, we have more data about our own bodies that anyone else ever could. And our bodies are constantly talking to us in how we feel, in our energy levels, in our things we call symptoms in the medical world. It’s our body giving us direct language and cues about what it needs or what it doesn’t need. And our small daily habits are the variables that create the equation of our long-term health. And those are within our control largely.
And so one of my first principles in this podcast and with Wellness Mama as a whole is helping us all to stay in the driver’s seat of our health. That’s not a position I held in my own health for a very long time, and it was disempowering. And I’m still learning to fully step into the responsibility of being my own healthcare provider. And I think that to the degree that we can do that, we are able to create positive change.
Another guiding principle for me on this podcast that I have felt from the very beginning of this work almost 15 years ago is the fact that moms are an absolute force of nature. And there are jokes about this on social media about if you need to get something done, ask a mom. But those jokes exist because they’re true. And when we talk about all of the problems we see in society, I think moms have a very unique ability to change those statistics and to start to shift those patterns. And so that’s another reason it is such a deep honor to have a community of so many moms, so many incredible moms doing incredible things in our own families. I think that’s where true and lasting change actually happens.
So with those first principles in mind, this brings me to the eight unconventional and unusual habits that have changed my life. And a lot of these are becoming more well-known. And I actually see this as one of the positive aspects of social media is that we are able to share our life experiences. Those things can spread, and we can learn from each other in ways that we might not be able to learn from just a book or from a practitioner. And like I said, some of these are a little unconventional. I’m certainly not giving these as advice or recommending them for everyone by any means. In fact, nothing in this podcast is meant to be medical advice or even general advice. I’m just sharing parts of my journey and what’s worked for me and the things I’ve learned along the way. I would also be honored, like I said, if you would leave an honest review, maybe share some things you’ve learned along the way for you or things that have been big needle movers for you. I read every single one of those and I would love to hear from you.
The first one will not come as a surprise to you, even though it does still go against the conventional prevailing wisdom of the day for now, which is that I chase the sun and I prioritize more sunshine, not less within safe limits, obviously avoiding sunburn. But I personally believe that the data supports this really strongly and that many of us could benefit from the right type of sun exposure, more light exposure and not less because this variable goes so far beyond vitamin D. And I feel like we’ve lost a lot in the conversation when we’ve reduced the benefit of sunshine to simply vitamin D because the benefits cannot be replicated by a supplement. Yes, we can potentially, depending on our genetics, improve our serum vitamin D levels by taking a supplement. But we’re not getting the full spectrum of benefits that we would get from the sunshine. And I think this is a really important distinction.
Dr. Courtney Hunt refers to the sun as a symphony of light. And this whole interaction, I think that’s a beautiful way of saying it. So yes, low vitamin D is correlated with some negative health outcomes. And it is important to make sure we keep our vitamin D levels in a healthy range. But the benefits of the sun go far, far, far beyond that. And the right amount of the right timing and type of light exposure benefits our cells, our hormones, and our brain in a way that cannot be replicated by a supplement. So I think of this as far as like morning sunlight, which I have talked a lot about on here and thankfully is now becoming widespread advice. I love hearing this across the board on social media, but that morning light really sets the clock for our circadian rhythm and actually is very closely tied to how we sleep at night. It’s also free.
Dr. Courtney Hunt also talks about how morning sunlight, like sunrise light and sunset light are actually a natural and free form of red-light therapy. So no very expensive red light panel required, but they can simply get that from interacting with the natural light outside at the right time of day and getting that light exposure in our eyes, not through a window, not through glasses or contacts. It doesn’t mean we will look at the sun but that we are outside with uninterrupted exposure to that sunlight. I’ve noticed that everything, literally everything in nature follows the patterns of the sun, chases the sun, and is very aware and conscious of sun exposure and light exposure in the right times and interactions. And we have the ability to shut that off as humans, but everything else in nature follows the sun. Plants follow the sun. Flowers literally turn toward the sun. Leaves benefit from the sunlight on them and grow toward the sun. Animals get sun exposure to create vitamin D. They do that intuitively. In humans, we slather chemicals on our skin to avoid the benefits of sunlight.
And I think that this one change alone can make a big difference in our health and certainly in our sleep. I certainly noticed that. I’ve talked before, and I’ll include a link to the post I wrote about eating our sunscreen instead of putting sunscreen on our skin. And it’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek. I obviously don’t mean to eat sunscreen, but that there are things we can do from a dietary and lifestyle perspective that improve our skin’s response to the sun. And if we address inflammation at a cellular level and as a body-wide level, we can have a healthier reaction to light exposure and get more benefit from sun exposure.
I’m also not advocating, of course, for overexposure to the sun or sunburns. We do know those can be damaging, of course. But what I found really interesting when I really dug into the data, and other companies are confirming this as well, including a new company I will be really excited to share with you soon, but the data shows it’s not sun exposure that’s correlated with the health risk, it’s sunburn. So if we, of course, want to avoid those, but having healthy vitamin D levels and the right amount of light exposure are actually in the data shown to be protective against a lot of the other things, including potentially reducing risk of things like breast cancer by half.
So again, I’ve said on here many times, science is starting to confirm what nature has always known. And I think that our interaction with nature, with the outdoors and with sunlight is hopefully an area we’ll continue to see this show up in. I think of it as, you perhaps heard the term, building a solar callus. And this is very careful and calibrated sun exposure at the right times and not in too big amounts especially early in the year until my skin built a little bit of what they call a solar callus, a protective internal protective mechanism against the sun. And as a practical tip here, there’s an app called Dminder, like letter D, like vitamin D, Dminder, and it lets you input your skin type and where you live. And it can take from the UV index and your latitude where you live and tell you how much sun you need to create the amount of vitamin D that’s healthy for you and kind of also give you at least a range of what your serum vitamin D levels might be based on your sun exposure.
So my general thought on this is trying to get sunrise and sunset for the full spectrum, the symphony of light, especially that naturally occurring red light that we know is so beneficial. And then getting the right amount of midday bright light sun, that important blue light from the sun with the full spectrum of UV and all of the light within that, that signals to our cells for our circadian rhythm, for our hormone production to help keep cortisol in healthy levels, signaling ATP production and so many other mechanisms within the body.
Second one, hopefully not unconventional, though definitely not commonly practiced, at least statistically in the United States, is going to bed early. And this one is a little boring. There’s no silver bullet here. There’s no supplement you can take to replicate this either. But I recently read a joke that apologized. It said, dear old people, waking up at 6 a.m., tending to a garden, eating dinner at 5 p.m., reading books and going to bed at 9:30 feels amazing. I was wrong. You were right. And I laughed because that lines up so much with my personal experience of when I was younger saying things like, I’ll sleep when I die or I can sleep when I’m dead and spending really relishing those really late night hours, especially when I had toddlers, because that seemed like the only time I could find any quiet at all. But realizing now how drastically different I feel when I prioritize an early bedtime.
And I by no means do this perfectly. But I am finding my bedtime drift earlier and earlier. I notice I feel better and better the more that does. And lately, my best nights of sleep have been on the nights I did go to bed before 10 PM. And I see the best scores on my Oura Ring when I go to bed early and allow myself to sleep as long as possible and wake up naturally. And I find it when I do this consistently, I tend to wake up right around sunrise in time to get that perfect morning light exposure. And I feel so much more rested.
I do think that quality sleep is a process that is an all-day process. It starts in the morning with that morning light exposure, with hydration, with signaling safety to our body in the form of proper nutrition and movement and avoiding those confusing light cues like artificial light that has now been talked about a lot. And I’m so excited that that conversation is happening.
But I also have found that it’s helpful, I would say I ruthlessly optimize my sleep environment because anything I can do that creates an improvement while I’m sleeping that requires no effort after it’s set up has a really big ROI for health. And it’s a compounding benefit without effort. A lot of things in the health world require effort. Exercising and movement takes effort. Preparing nutritious food takes effort. A lot of our habits that we integrate take effort. But when we optimize our sleep environment after that initial setup, no continued effort is required.
So some of the things that I have found helpful in that realm are that I budgeted and prioritized a really high-quality mattress that I find very comfortable. I now have, and I’ll link to this in the show notes, a Jasper air filter, which is the best air filter I have ever found. And also I find if I run it on level three, which is pretty fast and pretty loud, it has night mode, so there’s no light and there’s no EMFs in it. But that it is the most perfect sound machine that I have ever found for sleep and that my air in my room feel so good and stay so clean. And there’s even a monitor on there that tells you the parts per million of particulate in the air, and that stays very low.
I also follow, or before I get to that, I will say I also now have an EMF canopy around my bed, which I don’t feel is necessary. I’m not overly actually concerned with EMFs, and I do try to take our Wi-Fi down at night. But a podcast guest said that an EMF canopy had drastically improved his sleep, and I wanted to test it. I was curious. I find what actually might be the biggest benefit of it for me might not be the EMF side since I’ve already done a lot in my house to reduce our EMF exposure in the home, but that I find I do really good in like closed in, safe environments. And if you’re into human design at all, it says my natural environment is caves. And I realized that putting this canopy around my bed sort of replicated the safety and environment of a cave. And so I wonder if I enjoy it as much for that mental benefit as for the EMF blocking, but I’ve enjoyed that lately.
I also have a Dock Pro from ChiliPad that is on my bed that keeps my bed temperature at a standard temperature. And we know that there’s a lot of data about the optimal sleep temperature and that keeping that in a certain range can improve markers like deep sleep. So this is another one that I was able to set up one time and now it just runs and I noticed an improvement in sleep from that. Same thing with, I have blackout curtains in my room to keep it completely dark at night. And I also still sleep with a sleep mask in case a little bit of light gets in at sunrise. And I noticed that makes a big difference as well.
I follow the three, two, one rule before bed. So that’s, and I say that I do this most of the time, I’m not always great at this either, but I will try to avoid food for three hours before bed, too much liquid starting two hours before bed, and then screens at least an hour before bed. And actually in our home, we’re trying to build a family culture around not looking at screens as much as possible after sunset. Just again, trying to sync up with the natural light exposure and the cues our bodies receive from light.
Another helpful tip is to lay down on the ground with my feet straight up against a wall for just about 10 minutes at some point in that hour before bed. And this is kind of an ancient practice that there’s some current data that supports, but I feel like it’s a free and pretty low effort step that does seem to have an effect on my sleep personally. And some theories of why this might be helpful are things like having a positive effect on cortisol or lymphatic ability to move within the body. I just find I’m able to get tired more easily and that I am able to fall asleep more quickly when I do that consistently.
I also joke that I, you know, there’s a thing on social media, like the uglier you go to bed, the prettier you wake up. And I will say it’s probably good that I am sleeping on my own in my room right now, because I often look ridiculous when I go to sleep with my mouth tape and sleep mask and castor oil slathered all over my face and silk bonnet on my hair. But I have my nighttime routine that has me looking a little ridiculous at night. And I feel great when I wake up when I keep those things consistent.
And then a little bit more obscure, but two things I’ve been experimenting with, and I will also link to these in the show notes, but I’ve been taking two supplements, PectaSol and Masszymes right before I go to bed. And I find, so PectaSol, if you listen to podcast guest, Dr. Isaac Elias, talking about the survival paradox, it helps to address something called galectin-3, which is an inflammatory protein within the body that seems to be present when everything from a common cold to even advanced cancer. But this helps address that sort of inflammatory response at a cellular level. And I noticed for me, taking that seems to correlate to deeper sleep, especially in the like one to three timing of night. And then also a podcast guest from Bioptimizers, Matt and Wade, talked about enzymes and how they can have really specific and targeted effects differently than if we take them when eating, they can help with food digestion and absorption of nutrients. But when we take them on an empty stomach, so right before bed or as soon as we wake up, they can actually help on a cellular level with other things as well. So I’ve been experimenting with those two and feel like they’ll become a consistent part of my routine as well. And I will link to those in the show notes.
The third thing that also goes against conventional advice and dietary recommendations for me is that I have become super salty, not hopefully in personality, though that happens sometimes too, but in my water. I have been consuming a lot of salt and minerals. And I think after a decade of six pregnancies, some pretty extreme stress, and now recovering from Hashimoto’s, I realized I probably was missing some key minerals or at least not getting them in the amounts that were the most beneficial.
So for me now, what that looks like is that I often add a teaspoon of unrefined sea salt to a quart of water, and I’ll drink up to three of those per day. I also have been drinking a lot of the two formulas from Beam Minerals. They have a fulvic and humic mineral blend that they call Micro Boost, and then an electrolyzed one that has other ranges of minerals. The great thing about those is they taste like water, so I can add them to my kids’ water as well. And I feel great on the combination of those two things. And I know there’s kind of specific camps when it comes to salt versus minerals and which one we need. And the salt crew would say we need them from salt. And the other mineral crew would say salt can actually be detrimental. What I, my theory on this, totally just a theory, is that our ancestry likely came from different places. All of us, of course, have unique genetics and ancestry, but if the majority of our ancestry was in an area near the sea or the ocean, there was likely more salt consumed through seafood, through the water supply, through food in general, and salt was a more available resource. Whereas if our ancestors lived more inland, we would have likely gotten the more plant-based minerals like the Beam minerals formula. But in the modern world, since a lot of us have very sort of mixed ancestry, I know at least I do, I found that the combination is actually what feels best for my body. And I do think there’s a lot of personalization and experimentation in this realm. And certainly it could be different for each of us, but that’s what I’ve settled on, what seems to work best for me.
I now feel a difference if I don’t get enough salt in a given day, I’ll start to feel fatigue or brain fog and realize, oh, I think I just need some salt water and I feel a big difference. I know that the dietary wisdom conventionally is to avoid salt. And just like with sunlight, I feel like this has done us a disservice with caveats, but that we’ve sort of blamed salt for what sugar has done. The Panda Man, I believe, calls salt one of the best performance enhancers out there. And I’ve seen this in my experience as well. I did a whole episode with Ian Clark about benefits of salt and recommend listening to that one. I’ll link it in the show notes if you missed it before, but I think these are worth experimenting. Our bodies are electrical organisms, and electrolytes and salt are crucial for the right electrical communication within the body. So even though we’ve perhaps heard for years to minimize or avoid salt entirely, I think this is advice worth questioning, or at least doing personal experimentation and seeing what works.
I will say anecdotally, my blood pressure, if anything, has gone down, not up from adding a pretty intense amount of salt. And my energy levels have certainly gone up in a noticeable way. Again, not medical advice, but I feel like perhaps a lot of people listening might have had similar experiences that I did with stress, with multiple pregnancies, or just with life and overwhelm. And I find that the minerals really help me to feel more energy and more resilience in those areas.
The next one is a little bit more fun and unusual, but if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve perhaps heard this recommendation before. I wanted to go a little deeper on it today. So if you’ve seen the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you might remember the dad uses Windex on everything from mosquito bites to any kind of minor ailment, not just to clean windows. And I certainly don’t recommend using Windex as a remedy, but I joke that castor oil is my Windex because I use it for so many things. And I recently did a whole webinar with Marisol from Queen of Thrones about this, and I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes as well. But I find that this really unique oil has so many uses.
I actually first discovered it when I was trying to rehabilitate my eyebrows after having Hashimoto’s. I healed from that, but I still had some thinning in my eyebrows. And castor oil was helpful for that and for natural lash growth as well. And so once I had this in my house, I started sort of researching it and going down this rabbit hole of realizing it has been used for centuries in ancient practices in various ways. There was the belly button trend recently on social media claiming that if you put castor oil in your belly button, it would be sort of a miracle cure for bloating. I don’t know that I would say that I have seen it as a miracle cure by simply putting it in my belly button, but I do think it has a lot of uses. And I use it sometimes as part of an oil pulling blend with sesame oil to swish in my mouth and support the oral microbiome and the removal of plaque in the mouth. I often put it on my face at night. I find that it’s very nourishing if I leave it on overnight. And sometimes we’ll do that for facial massage, either like a facial yoga or gua sha. I also often massage my abdomen and especially the area under my ribs with castor oil at night. I find after so many pregnancies, I had some, it seemed like fascia that was built up there. And that massage of my upper abdomen and area under my ribs has been helpful in sort of working some of that out.
So I’ll often do abdominal massage and sort of lymphatic massage on my stomach area and then wear a castor oil pack over my liver at night. And I actually noticed a pretty big effect the first few times I did that. I actually kind of felt like I could almost like a stomachache or my abs were sore from wearing the castor oil pack at night. And I had some digestive results from that. And now I find that I’ve adjusted to it, that I actually sleep really well with the castor oil pack. And I’ll link to the one I use because a lot of the traditional recommendations around castor oil packs involve kind of just cotton flannel and heat and it’s time intensive and it’s a little messy. And I now use this one that I can just sleep in. I have a dedicated shirt that I wear that can get oil on it. And that seems like an easy way for me to have integrated to have it.
Castor oil is also having this moment in the sun about its potential for helping hair growth. And I, like I said, I noticed that on my eyelashes and my eyebrows. Seemingly, it does not help hair grow in areas where it’s not meant to but can encourage hair growth in areas where hair is meant to grow. And so I’ll also combine castor oil with jojoba oil and a little bit of rosemary essential oil and use that as scalp oil or hair oil before washing my hair.
And then most recently, I’ve been experimenting with mixing castor oil and a few other natural oils with grass-fed beef tallow and find that this is perhaps the best body lotion I have ever used. So I will try to share that recipe soon. But if you don’t want to make it, you can simply just use grass-fed tallow and castor oil, mix them in your hand, and use them as a deep, ultra-nourishing moisturizer before bed.
Next, so if you have been on social media at all and followed any of the fitness influencers on there, you’ve probably heard that losing weight, which I disagree with that term in general, but losing weight is all about moving more and eating less. And this is overly simplistic, and I feel like it deserves a lot of caveat, especially when it comes to female hormones. I do think, of course, there are some basic principles that do apply there. But like I said, I think there’s a more nuanced conversation than just eat less, move more. And in fact, doing that too much for a very long period of time, I feel, or I found in my own case, to be damaging to the metabolism. And I’ve been actively trying to rehab my metabolism since then.
You can listen to my podcast episode, my recent one with Justin Alt, to explain why, how that metabolic damage can happen and how we can essentially, our bodies are so adaptable that if we constantly give it the cue that we’re getting less food and we’re moving more, it will adapt to preserve resources and actually could make it harder to lose weight. But I will say for me, this is actually my biggest health challenge most of the time is eating enough. Even though I know that I feel better, I get leaner, and I have a lot more energy when I’m able to eat enough, especially of the right things that my body needs, enough protein and micronutrients and healthy fats, especially, from years of chronic dieting and under eating, this still actually requires effort for me. I have to be intentional about consuming enough protein and calories. And I still don’t hit my goals most of the time because I taught my metabolism to function on very minimal calories. And my body is always on my side and adapted to that because that was the cue I gave it for so long. So now I’m learning I have to actually eat more to get leaner because this is signaling safety to my body. It’s signaling that food is available, that we don’t have to preserve body fat because we’re not going through a famine. And I gave my body that backwards cue for so long I’m in the process of rehabbing it.
And this is, I find connected to hormones and fertility and even sleep because if food is scarce, our bodies want us to get up and go find food. I have multiple podcasts with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon that I will link to in the show notes as well, that really delve into this and how to sort of figure out your own optimal range. As a little bit of a side note, this is what makes me actually the most nervous about the current semaglutide and Ozempic trend. Is that we aren’t differentiating between weight, losing weight, and if muscle mass is being lost. And the at least initial data that I’ve seen is that a lot of muscle mass can also be lost with things like GLP-1 agonist. I feel like this is worth having caution about and discussing because we know that loss of muscle mass is not correlated with positive things. And that conversely, maintaining or building lean muscle mass correlates to better outcomes across the board, to longevity, to better recovery from injury or from disease, and so much more. And so taking something that simply causes us to lose weight while not taking into account the muscle side of that, I feel like is a little bit short-sighted. I think it’s an exciting thing for me to realize, even though if it’s a hard practicality, that eating more and nourishing the body correctly can actually lead to getting leaner over the long-term.
I’ve used this analogy before, but think of if you have a fire and you want to make it hotter, how do you do that? You add more fuel to get a hotter fire. If you want a stronger metabolism, you add more of the right kind of fuel over time to teach your body that resources are abundant, that it doesn’t need to store fat, and then it can prioritize things like building muscle. Last year, I did my first DEXA scan, which gives a very detailed breakdown of body composition, especially lean muscle mass, body fat composition, where it is in the body, and visceral fat. And I was excited to see that I had extremely low visceral fat, which is one we do want to avoid because that’s the fat around the organs that can be potentially very dangerous. But my hope is to see those trends in DEXA scans every year as I get older, where I actually am increasing muscle mass and decreasing excess body fat within healthy ranges. And I’m actually even working on bringing a DEXA machine to the area where I live so that this is available for more people because I feel like this is data that we can’t just easily get necessarily from looking at the body. And then it gave me such different insight into my body when I could see in really like black and white format on paper where my muscle and my fat distribution were.
So all that to say, I just talked about eating more. The next one I would say that’s unconventional that is also controversial, especially in women is to not eat sometimes with caveat and carefully. Fasting is controversial for women. I have had people on this podcast talking about the benefits of fasting, others talking about why women are better to never fast. I feel like the answer, like everything in health, is very personalized, likely somewhere in the middle, and dependent on many factors. It is a tool that I’ve used in my toolkit, especially during my healing journey from Hashimoto’s. And I do find it beneficial, but I do also think it can be overdone and that we want to be careful to avoid sending excess stress signals to our body or starvation cues, especially if we, like I did, undereaten for years and have already trained our body in that. So I would say now knowing what I know, I would tell my younger self to address the safety and stress side and signal safety to my body before introducing fasting.
Now, I love how Dr. Courtney Hunt calls the right type of fasting in the right amount, sort of running the dishwasher cycle on your body. This is what I have found as well. And I think when used in the right amounts and with the right timing while signaling safety, it can be extremely beneficial, or at least it was for me.
One listener recently requested a whole episode only on water fasting, and I’m going to work to hopefully release that soon. But I wanted to just kind of recap here my own experience with it and sort of delve into some specifics in case it’s helpful to anyone else. So the first is, when I talk about fasting, I’m often talking about water fasting. There is also dry fasting. I think that deserves also more caution and is definitely not a starting point. It’s something I’ve experimented with but not written about because I don’t necessarily recommend it, especially for people who are just new to fasting. So often when I speak of fasting for myself personally, I’m talking about water fasting where I’m consuming only water, sometimes with added salt or minerals, but no other for calories, not black coffee, not bone broth, not juice, water and minerals only. I’m also during states of fasting, like I said, trying to make sure I’m not stressing the body out or sending stress cues. So during water fasting, I avoid strenuous exercise and I make sure to get lots of sunlight and light exposure as well as lots of rest. It does seem like this is one area where potentially men and women differ.
It seems like guys are able to handle relatively more activity level during fasting than women, but I typically don’t choose to do really intense exercise or sprint, for instance. When I’m fasting, I do prioritize deep sleep, because I feel like I said, if you’re running the dishwasher cycle, you’re doing deep cleaning, give your body time to do that. And we know that the liver is active during certain phases of sleep and that during deep sleep in particular, the brain is able to flush beta amyloid plaques in the brain and it sort of is a whole body reset. So if I’m putting in the effort too fast, I will often make sure I’m getting enough sleep to get the maximum benefit from that fast. And then, like I said, doing gentle movement only.
And those are actually things I did during my healing journey, especially when I was in the intense phase of that. Even when I wasn’t fasting, I did only gentle movement for a span of about a year. And I made sleep a huge priority. There were times in the intensive healing part for me that I slept 12 hours a day or more. And I felt like my nervous system sort of needed that to recalibrate.
So all of these first six unconventional habits I’ve talked about have an element of consistency. So I feel like number seven is unconventional habit is that I will be inconsistent on purpose. We hear a lot on the internet about consistency being key. And I agree. And I think that inconsistency with a purpose can be very beneficial as well. So you perhaps have heard me say I don’t do anything every single day except hopefully sleep. Because I want to preserve adaptability. And so while I think that there’s a benefit to having, like I do time blocking, I do meal planning, I do bulk cooking, I schedule a lot of aspects of my life, but I also make space for adaptability, especially when it comes to food, supplements, and some lifestyle habits. So I don’t take supplements, for instance, every single day, or certainly not the same supplements. I don’t eat, in general, every single day, I fast sometimes. I don’t eat the same types of foods every single day. There are days where I don’t eat carbs or I don’t eat fats or I don’t eat at all. And other days where I intentionally am making sure I’m really fueling myself and eating plenty of protein or plenty of healthy fats.
I also don’t exercise the same way every single day. And I just think the conversation about consistency has become quite loud. And I do agree that consistency can be a struggle and that there are many benefits to it. But from a metabolic perspective, I think there’s also tremendous benefit in keeping adaptability as a focus and a priority and making sure that we aren’t giving our body cues to, for instance, down-regulate something it naturally produces by supplementing that thing every single day.
So the only consistent lifestyle habits that I try to get most days, of course, sleep and that morning sunlight, which I actually consider part of my sleep routine. But as far as things that I consume and that go in my body, I try to vary those quite a lot.
And then lastly, I feel like this is its own whole category and will vary vastly from person to person, but it is to do extreme things sometimes, to do the hard things. We have a family saying that you were made to do hard things. And we’ve also added the modifier that not everything needs to be hard. But I think for me personally, I’ve seen tremendous value in getting out of my comfort zone and whether it’s trying new things, even simple things. And my children have been some of my best teachers in that realm, but also just things that are hard. If our nervous systems, for instance, are in a good state, and if we’re rested, even doing physically hard things can have tremendous benefits to the body.
I read the statistic recently that most people over the age of 30 have already sprinted for the last time in their life, that they will not ever sprint again. And this actually led to quite a lot of debate on that, where I read that, in the comment section, people were saying, that’s not true. I sprint all the time. I sprint to the stove to keep my kid from touching the stove, or I sprint to the bathroom when I have to pee. And I think this is a cool area to delve into a little bit because for the most part, short of extreme athletes, it is not actually possible to sprint. The technical definition of sprint within our homes, they’re simply not big enough unless you are an outlier who has a massive house with a hundred-meter hallway somewhere. Truly sprinting is being able to reach very close to maximal effort. And there’s just not enough room in a normal home to do that. So I think there’s a lot of nuance to the definition of sprinting when it comes to that.
But I have become a huge advocate for sprinting, even though it’s something that I still find quite difficult and I wouldn’t say I enjoy. But I would say I prioritize it. Basically, I have teachers in this and my children who are in track and field, but there are really well-documented benefits to true sprinting, even just once or twice a week, and what that can do for hormone production in the body, for muscle creation. There are some data that point to it being far better than doing extended cardio. I think it’s always a both and equation that in general, across the board, most of us can benefit from more movement. But from an ROI perspective, I think that sprinting is one of the most powerful signaling things we can do in the body.
And it’s sad to me that that statistic seems accurate, that many of us stop doing that over the age of 30. And so I want to not be part of that group. And I would love to invite you and encourage you to not be part of that group as well. It doesn’t mean you have to go put on spikes and sprint on a track. You can actually do this on an exercise bike. I know that the Carol bike is designed somewhat for this and for the VO2 benefits that can come as well. You can do this in various ways that are not hard on your joints. If that’s something you’re concerned about, I personally love barefoot sprinting and grass at a soccer field, but whatever it is, that sort of exertion of maximal effort, I find we know that it has physical benefits. I find that sort of pushing our edges like that also has a lot of mindset benefits. And I would encourage you, if you’re willing, to find that edge and to experiment with it yourself.
I would say some of my personal goals on this in the physical realm are to continue to get faster at sprinting as I get older. But also, I saw a statistic that if you can bench press your body weight, back squat 1.5 times your body weight, and deadlift two times your body weight, and run a mile in under seven minutes, then that sort of puts you in the physically elite category of humans. And so those are sort of numbers I’m just loosely keeping in mind as I train and as I get older, but I do think that these things are a long game. It’s very difficult to massively increase our strength or our speed in a span of, for instance, three weeks, but incredibly possible if we do it over a span of months and years. And I just think this is a very high ROI thing that it can be entirely free. You don’t need a gym necessarily to do those things, certainly not to sprint. And I think we can see tremendous benefit from it.
So I would be curious what your experimentation has been like in that realm or in any of these points that I’ve talked about. If there are parts of these that you want to hear more about, if there are entirely new topics you want to hear more about, I would love for you to weigh in and let me know.
And then I will also in the show notes, if you are interested, link to a few things I have been experimenting with and I’m curious to continue experimenting with, as well as I mentioned Masszymes becoming a big part of my routine. I’ll link to those, the salt in my water, the minerals.
I’ve also been, as I get older, trying to just keep a good baseline of data going on within my body. So two new ones that I love, The Functional Health Panel, which is a yearly plan. I love this new company. They let you get two rounds of labs for much less than I have ever found anywhere else. This is drastically less expensive than most lab companies. And they’re testing a lot more markers than I’ve ever seen. They even give you a pretty accurate indication of your biological age, which was helpful for me to see. And I’m very curious to watch as I get older.
And then also a company called TruDiagnostic, which looks at epigenetics and cellular age and methylation and ways that you can improve that. Because we now know, of course, it isn’t just our genetics, but which genes are expressing and what they’re doing that can really come into play with long-term health outcomes. So I will link to both of those as well.
And like I said, I would love to hear from you in the comments or in rating and reviews of what your unconventional habits are or the things that you feel have made the biggest difference in your life. And I would also really love to know what you want to hear about in these next hundred episodes and beyond. If you want to hear more of the sciencey, deep health, and very specific type of episodes, if you’d prefer more of the mindset and inner work type episodes, perhaps parenting, I really would love to know what you would love to hear.
So if you would be willing to take a moment and leave a rating or review that delves into that, I will absolutely read them and try to respond. And you can also always reach out to me on places like Instagram and direct messages. And I try to get to as many of those as possible. And we hope to hear from you in one of those places.
But for today, thank you again for your time, for listening, for being here and being part of this community. I am so deeply honored that you share your time and your energy and your attention with me. I hope that you will continue to do so. I hope to get to know you better. I hope that you’ll reach out and say hi. But for today, thank you for your time and thank you for listening.
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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