Opening on body awareness and curiosity

Your body is such an expert and it's on your team. It is incredible and its trying to protect you. So please don't ever feel like stalled progress, plateaus and symptoms are your body failing.

I hate that. Your Body is always working in your favor to Protect you So, kind of like how we started, your body is not failing you. We have to speak life over our body.

It was given to us to take care of. And to know that if there's something that is off, instead of feeling frustrated, start to just ask different questions.

Take a different perspective on it because that can be the difference between feeling stuck and stagnant and feeling empowered, like, oh my gosh, my body's doing so great.

Here's how I'm going to help it more intentionally. I love that. Ask those questions. I have a whole show on curiosity. It's one of the most powerful tools in wellness.

Get curious about why your body is telling you what it's telling. That in and of itself can be absolutely powerful. Welcome to Vitality Radio, the podcast that helps you make sense of natural supplements and thrive without pharma drugs.

I'm Jared St. Clair. I grew up in a health food store and spent over 40 years now figuring out what works and what doesn't, so that you can make confident, informed decisions about nutrition, supplements and your health.

Hello and welcome to Vitality Radio. I'm your host each and every week, twice a week. My name is Jared St. Clair and I get this amazing opportunity once a year to go to a conference in Boise, Idaho called the Cellcore Eco Conference.

three or four years. I think this is our fourth year this year. And we always just absolutely love it because we get to reconnect with some friends that we've made over the years, but mostly because get educated by some of the best functional medicine practitioners in this country, really in the world.

Every time when we're sitting in these events, we are carefully taking notes of not just what's said, Oh, I wonder if this is someone who our audience here on Vitality Radio needs to hear from.

And that is the case with my next guest. We're going to talk about metabolic health, which depending on how you slice it, sounds like all kinds of things, but specifically metabolism, Which I'll say before we get started, Ellie, and then I will introduce you properly.

I always remember my mother talking about her sluggish metabolism. And I think that was like the, that, was the eighties, right? The, the seventies the 80s women that struggled with her weight, they had a sluggish metabolism or a slow metabolism.

And so I, think most of us think about metabolism and we think. Weight loss specifically, but there's a lot more to metabolic health. Then I want to dive into all of that stuff, including the weight loss angle with you here in a minute, let me introduce you proper.

Introducing metabolic health and the guest

Ellie Anderson is the founder of Elevated Integrative Wellness, where she combines evidence-based nutrition, functional medicine, lifestyle medicine and advanced therapeutics to help individuals uncover the root causes of metabolic dysfunction.

Her passion is helping people move beyond symptom management and understand how the body is designed to heal when given the right environment. Ellie believes that medications, hormones and peptides can be valuable tools, but they should never replace the foundations of health.

Her approach focuses on restoring metabolic resilience through muscle health, nutrition, gut function, sleep, stress physiology, hormone communication and lifestyle before relying on quick fixes.

And in all of that, she and I are very much on the same page. Ellie, welcome to Vitality Radio. Oh, it is so good to be here. I completely agree with you on all things Eco.

What an exceptional and gifted to us practitioner weekend. It has been one of my favorites for as long as I've carried Cellcore products. And so being able to speak there has just been such a joy for me because it's such passionate weekend of connection and creativity and cultivating ways to further help people.

And I think that when you're in alignment with so many people, mission driven, there's just such as spark that's ignited in everyone who attends, whether they are practitioners or patients, because they open it up to patients as well.

So I love that you guys have been going and It's my team's favorite weekend for sure. They look forward to EECO every year. So it's just an incredible way to continue to learn, which I'm obsessed with learning.

Yeah. And you can tell by your various, I skipped over the degrees just because. Go ahead. That's fine. Now you tell me you're going for your doctorate and you only have six children at home.

I guess you have a longer day than the rest of us. Oh, I have more than 24 hours. That's my secret. that is an awesome secret if you could teach that to my listeners, i would be the most popular podcaster in the world.

Oh so true. All right. Well, let's get down to it here. I invited you on I told you before we started recording that we just love your energy, but we also loved your message.

One of the messages that you shared was about the body being on guard for us, not malfunctioning or being dysfunctional in a way. And I shared, I'll share this with my listeners, my knee was bugging me the other day.

I'd kind of stepped wrong and put a little twist into it. It was just a tender and I was, as you do, you kind forget about it, it's feeling fine. Then I went to go up the stairs and hit the stair and it was like, ow, got a twinge there.

Immediately said, oh my dang knee. And I thought, wait a minute, what do you mean my dang knee? My knee is literally telling me right now, Hey buddy, you've hurt me.

Take it easy. Give me a little bit of a rest. Everything will be fine. But there's a reason why I'm telling you that I don't want to be stepped on like that.

And yet my own words were kind of accusing my body of fighting against reality. It was actually being my friend. Tell us your take on that? Yeah, I just love that example because it's such a clear physical indication, like I moved, tweaked, hurt my body in this way, and it is trying to tell me like, hey, this motion created an effect on me.

And so then when you go to step again, you can't do that without modification because there is an injury there. I'm going to use this and build on it for this conversation because I've been in clinical practice now, starting as just not just, but as a dietitian and then building my background from there.

And I lived in fear of people coming in for their metabolism. If it was a weight loss thing, I can't do it. It's not what I was taught, which is calories in, calories out.

I think that basic foundational nutrition piece of what was I taught about metabolism and weight It's a lie.

The body as protector, not failure

It honestly doesn't even work for men anymore. I used to be able to do that for man and it was fine, but now there's so much more complexity to it. So when we look at when get an acute injury like hurting our knee, we have inflammation to that area.

That's why it swells and we have the reality of seeing our body when it's inflamed, when we're under chronic stress, we hate that, okay? But when have inflammation around a cut, an injury, a trauma to an area, it is protective.

So at what point does that change for us? At what do we start to recognize, oh, our generalized inflammation is actually trying to protect me. What is it protecting me from?

So as I was operating, doing more traditional dietetics, then getting into gut work and lab work, and then eventually hormones, I recognized and realized that there's different pillars of health.

And it was funny as you were listing them off, those foundations of help, it seems like a lot. Like, when I'm talking to a client and they're first coming in and, they are like, wait, it's a miracle I am here.

What do you mean I have to do other things? It's like no, yeah, you have do do things. Otherwise, I don't want to waste your time and I do not want waste money.

I can't care about your health more than you care. We have this unfortunate reality of a pill to problem mentality and a systems-based mentality where, like, if it's a hormone problem, I'm going to see an endocrinologist.

If it is a gut problem I am going see a GI specialist. And I will not sit here and knock the Western model too much, although I probably could do a whole podcast just on that and health insurance and how frustrating all of that is.

But I think we have lost some of the beauty in the reality that our body was designed as a hole. So as I was in clinical practice and realizing I need to zoom out less on organs and systems and more on the body as a whole.

That's what led me to really have profound breakthroughs for people's health by looking at their nervous system and seeing how their system can override even the best, the strongest, most pharmaceutically based metabolic goals for the people.

I had clients coming in on multiple, and I'm sure if there are clinicians listening, multiple diabetes medications and their blood sugars were still high.

So the solution was we're either going to continue to increase the medication or we are going have to add another. And so that's where it was just like continued rampant high blood sugar.

Okay, so then when we start to learn about the impacts of high-blood sugar, we realize how damaging that is for so much of our body. But why is that happening?

We have ask another question because the focus is always that bad for you, that for your metabolism. Your body, you know, it's not responding. Is the tip, your body's now responding to these pharmaceuticals.

I like to go one question deeper, maybe two, but like, why is it not corresponding? What is protecting us so aggressively from that it feels it needs to mobilize those sugars all the time at baseline?

So I think when we start to look at the body like that, we can see higher sugar, higher inflammation, chronic inflammation. The body will keep going down that path because it was designed to protect you.

Not because it's broken, not because its not responding, but because is continuing to protect you from whatever the stress is in your life that's not letting go of its vice grip on your nervous system.

I love that. No, that was a great explanation. But you mentioned a couple of things that I think are really important in there that i want to elaborate on a little bit.

First off, you talked about the nervous system and, when we think about blood sugar, metabolism, weight loss, fat gain, however you're looking at it, We don't usually, I think, put a lot of emphasis on the nervous system.

We are talking about the metabolic system, we're talking the endocrine system and you're talk nervous. System. And it's interesting. I was on, uh, the just ingredients podcast a few months ago with Carla and call, and we got into this a little bit.

Well, it's critical, really, if people understand this. And as I look back on it, because I was a kid when my mom was saying that stuff way back when, there's a lot of things I can look on and say, okay, I actually understand it now, but I didn't understand then.

So I just took it at face value, a sluggish metabolism, whatever the heck that means, right? So tell us about the nervous system and metabolic and how that all works.

Yeah, my nervous system passion is like the driving factor of the way we approach, especially me, but the ways we approached client care within our practice because our nervous is that has two parts to it.

The autonomic nervous has a gas pedal, it has the brake pedal. And most of these activities of our system, if not all, I won't say all are done without us having any brain direction, not telling us monitor your respiratory rate, monitor, your heart rate monitor.

Your blood sugar rates, the body is constantly trying to protect you. And so the nervous system and the health of your nervous. I believe profoundly impacts every single health outcome you could have mind, body, soul, I mean all of it, because when your system senses a threat, you go into what's called the general adaptation response.

And so there's three phases to this general adaptation syndrome. And what happens in the first phase is alarm. You notice, and a lot of people will sense this if they are startled by something.

Your heart is racing, your legs might get a little bit tingly. So what's happening physiologically in that moment is a cascade of things. This cascade starts to increase your heart rate, increase you respiratory rate.

Nervous system stress and metabolic dysfunction

Repattern your circulatory pattern to go more towards your extremity and less towards you core because you are getting ready to run from a bear or fight a bare.

And you're not thinking about it, your body saying, oh shit, we're running. Like we are going to do it. We are gonna survive. we don't care about thriving.

This is what's happening. And so during that time as well, your blood sugar immediately will spike based on this stress because you need quick energy to run from the bear.

So smart. Good job, body. You're so smart, it's saying, I need fuel and I needed immediate fuel because I don't know how long I'm going to have to fight.

I dunno how I am going have run, but I know I have do it. And just from a physiologic pattern, those changes immediately set in the minute we have a startle or an alarm.

If that alarm lasts longer and we can't come down from it, we cannot decompress, recognize, okay, there's not a threat here, I was just startled by my dad coming around the corner or something like that, then the body goes into a more chronic alarm state of that phase two general adaptation syndrome.

And this is where our blood sugar remains elevated, so we start dealing with metabolic dis-ease. Our blood pressure starts to increase because our circulatory patterns have changed.

We don't want to procreate or reproduce, we're running from a bear. We do not need progesterone, We can minimize estrogen and minimize testosterone so that we can conserve energy because we are running a from bear, and we aren't focused on making a baby right now.

And then our gut pattern, because of our circulatory changes, as well as just our brain signaling, is saying, ''We're runing from the bear! We dont need to stop to poop, were running form a bare.'' And so all of these things, when you have clients coming in with fertility issues, chronic constipation, and chronic bloat, over time, if we're stuck in that phase two, we end up going to phase three, which is adaptation failure.

And I mentioned this before, I hate the term failure when it comes to our body. Our body is protecting us from the threat. so much to the point where it will protect, reserve, conserve, shut down what it views as non-essential to keep us alive, to our brain getting the fuel that it needs, um, keep firing.

But there are more in-depth physiologic changes that also happen as we progress from stage two to stage three and we get caught in that limbo of being in a more chronic adaptation state.

And a couple of things that align with that are increased cortisol output because the body is thinking I'm running from a bear. So with that cortisol out put, we see natural declines even more so in our sex hormones, especially progesterone because of that inverse relationship.

Then we're dealing with mental health stress for women, luteal phase crash outs for woman. Again, fertility issues for a women. Short windows of the lutial phase, spotting before their cycles, things like that.

High blood sugars, so constant chronic inflammation. more blood sugar and blood pressure stress, so then cardiac, unnecessary cardiac stress on our body.

And it just creates this cascade again, still physiologically. But then mentally, what happens when we're in that adaptation failure is two really important things that I like to touch on for people because a lot of times when someone's going through an incredibly stressful season in their life, they will look back and be like, I don't remember all of it.

or I don't know why I made that decision during that time. And so there's two really critical things that happen within the brain during these intensely stressful seasons.

The hippocampus, which is memory storage, core memories, kind of a calm, cool, collected outlook on things, starts to shrink. It becomes hypoactive. So it first starts slow down, and then over time, if you're stuck in chronic stress, it starts And then our amygdala becomes more hyperactive.

Amygdale is making decisions that will allow you to survive, not thrive, survival. And so the amygdale starts to become more hiperactive, amigdale hyperactivity leads to some irrational, erratic, decisions because your, again, your body is thinking primitively.

So it's like, how do I survive this? So when I look back at like some of my earlier business years when we were going fast and like I don't know why I made that decision, it worked, but I dunno why.

It's just so interesting. And so the, this is why during other traumas, traumatic events, a good example for me, cause I've had six of them, childbirth, It like oh, you'll forget all about it.

and you literally do because primitive Lee, especially if you're doing an unmedicated birth, it is a very primal design. So the amygdala becomes hyperactive to get your body into positions and poseologies to help you get that baby out as efficiently and safely as possible.

It helps you better tap into the things going on in your that you don't necessarily know or have a conscious awareness of, but your bodies saying, I need to move or pivot or get in a different position.

Meanwhile, the hippocampus is shrinking because it's like, this sucks and I don t want to remember it. We are going to just shrink that up so we do it again so our lineage is solidified.

And I always like to try to pull in why these designs were given to us because when you hear fight or flight, when your stuck in chronic stress, it's easy to think this is I'm failing or cortisol is bad or this bad.

It's like look how intentionally these design were created in our body to save us, to protect us to, protect our children. It's all such a gift. It is learning how are these things impacting you in your daily life and how can you begin to down-regulate to optimize your healing.

Because you can take all the blood sugar medications. You can all take the GLPs in the world. But if you're trying to out supplement or out medicate a body that thinks it's running from a bear, you are probably not going to win or it is not gonna be efficient.

And it will end up being harder on your different drainage funnel organs like your kidneys or even your heart. because your body is saying, no, I'm ramped up.

I have all these physiologic changes happening in order to protect me. You're trying to suppress them. i'm just going to work that much harder because we're running from a bear.

Good job, body. So smart. Yeah, i love that. I'm glad that you finished it that way because that is exactly right, right? The body does indeed know what it's doing and even without our direction, as you said, almost all of the time when it comes to the nervous system.

There are some interesting things here though because That explanation I think lays out a really, really clear understanding of what's happening. But then I also think it has the potential to maybe have some people throwing their hands up and saying, well, I'm just under stress and there's nothing I can do about that.

What's your answer there? Bullshit. Oh, no, just kidding. Now they just turned it off. Nice job, Ellie. No, okay, you're gonna get brutal honesty from me with so much love.

Because I think that we… wear stress. And I am a high performing individual. Most of us listening are, we thrive on it most of the time before we realize it.

It's because it's a trauma feedback loop from our childhood. Like, okay, I'm going to just keep building and keep growing and keeps scaling and keeping striving and wear stresses as a badge of honor.

I think that we don't realize how poorly we handle or that's probably not the kindest way to put it, how much We don't value rest the way we were designed to rest, and we don t honor rest to the wa that we are designed t rest because if we could just fit in one more thing and let us check one mor box, that's what's going to help us feel accomplished.

And so a lot of times it's reprogramming and repatterning what we find to be our priority. Because if your health is a priority to you, which most people listening are, you have to find ways to intentionally downregulate.

And what's really difficult is teaching people that down regulation is productive. But rest does not make you lazy and rest is not devalue you and it does take away your worth.

And on the flip side, your accomplishments don't actually add to your work either. You're, I'm a Christian, so you're worthy and you are valuable just as how you were because God made you that way and designed that you way innately.

And so like a restoration full circle of like, yes, you can have accomplished amazing, amazing things and stress could be a part of your life because you're a high performing mom or you are a CEO or own a business or an entrepreneur and that's all well and good and great.

What is it worth building all these incredible things, and feeling terrible, feeling, terrible and also pushing your body past the point of anything healthy or good so that it's constantly protecting you.

You're going to do all these amazing things and then not have the health to enjoy it in the long run or be preoccupied with bigger health issues down the road.

Why chronic stress drives symptoms and weight gain

So I think that when it comes to that, like, I have a stressful life mentality, It's like, okay, pick your poison then because if you're not going to stop and do something to down-regulate your nervous system now, it will inevitably catch up to you because that's how we were designed.

And it's not the body failing. It is trying to protect you. Most people, once they start to unpack that, they realize, I don't love living a stressful life, it just sort of chose me with my passions, with what I've done.

And so figuring out ways to continue to allow them to thrive, like I love going to work, I work that doesn't mean it's not stressful. How can I make my lifestyle more conducive to the work I'm doing so that I can maintain my health and so my kids get the best of me and not my clients because I just toughen out another day and then I go home and I am exhausted for my family.

That's Yeah, 100% agree. And you could definitely be talking to me, especially at a younger age right now, because yeah, that's the personality I have.

I want to build and create and grow and move forward and all of those things are incredibly rewarding when they happen. But balance, find myself using that word a lot lately because We talk about hormones and what do we talk balance?

We talked about blood sugar and we talked balance. We're talking about work-life balance and all of these other things that are kind of thrown around.

But it really is the truth that we have to find balance in that. So an example of this, just really briefly, my wife and I went to a conference in Denver last week.

And we intentionally chose two days. I would say one of the highest stress business times of my career, which is what's going on right now. Not bad, just intense, lots going.

So we go to this trade show and rather than making it a work trip, we spent two and a half days just in nature in the mountains of Colorado, hiking. We saw a red-tailed hawk swoop over our head and land on a branch right above us and we saw these stellar blue jays dancing around and playing and saw so many beautiful things and were able to connect with nature.

We put our feet in the dirt and just sat on the bench and talked and prayed and did those things prior to the event. And then we had this amazing great business event that we loved also.

And, then, we come back recharged and ready to really hit the ground running. Whereas, when we left, were pretty depleted. So, I could not possibly agree with you more.

We do a series on this podcast called Emotional Vitality. I always tell people, you know I'm a supplement guy and I want to talk about this with for a minute because I know you believe in supplements as well.

He's a supplement guy to my core, right? I grew up in a health store selling these things. I was the child of a father who worked for supplement companies for 50 years.

Um, I've now been doing it most of my entire life. But when we do these emotional vitality episodes, I always preface it with, look, this is an episode where I'm not going to sell you on anything that I could possibly make a dollar on.

Instead, try to tell you something that has made my life better because of what it's helped with for my emotional balance, my wife's emotional balancing, what we've been able to do with our family through this stuff.

I want to hit this because it's an interesting point. My show is primarily a show where I educate on supplementation. How to do it correctly, how to tell if you've got a good brand, and how make sure that the brand you're using is this or that and all these other things.

And people tune in for that show. That's what this is about most of the time, which is why when I do these emotional vitality shows, I sometimes wonder if people even want hear that.

They're like, no, just talk about vitamins again, Jared. Because it takes a long time. I don't know if that's true, but sometimes that is the perception I have.

Give us all the tea. Yeah. But I want to talk to you about this because, again, it's a balancing act. And when you say you can't out supplement or you out prescribe or can out peptide or out exercise, how do you help people actually find that balance with those things?

Because it is not one of any of those thing. It is a nice combination of the right things. Right, right. It is. That's such a beautiful way to put into words.

I typically tell my clients, the sooner you realize just one thing is not going to change your life, that will change you life. Because a lot of times when we're stuck in that cycle of chronic stress, we are kind of just looking for one things to get us through, one more thing, I do think it's important to realize while you can't necessarily out supplement it, the higher your stress load, the more supplements you're going to need.

Because when you are in that general adaptation syndrome, when your in the state of up-regulated physiology, your eating through minerals so much faster.

When your blood sugar is unregulate, you need more vitamins, especially B vitamins. More minerals, specially magnesium to offset the inflammatory load of having high blood sugars.

So, to make that clear, You do need, more supplement during that time. I also am a person who loves biohacks. I love the sauna, I loved red light, the Flo Presso fascia work, but for every bio hack there's usually a free natural alternative.

And so I try to preface this to my clients, like usually when you're stuck in a state of high stress, usually, and it's not from a bear, it is because you are spending too much time inside or in an alternative reality and less time unplugged, uncentered and out in nature.

or away from the people that you love that, you really feel connected with your spouse, your children, or your parents. So I think that there's something to be said about finding the right dance to do both.

To do the intentional supplementation. One thing I really love especially when people are high-driven, high stress individuals, Vibrant America's micronutrient panel, so that you can see when your stress load is high, what is it depleting specifically for you?

And how do those micronutsrients correlate to the symptoms that your experiencing because of your That can be a huge game changer for people's metabolism because if we can start to fill up where the body's depleted, it gives the the enzymes, the coenzymes, and the factors it needs for metabolism to function properly.

So I think that there's so much to be said about proper intentional supplementation, especially in a stressful body because, if you want to continue to go at a high level, again, I'm a higher level person, this is not saying in order to restore your health, you have to stop doing everything that you're doing, It's in order to restore your health, you need to be intentional about your supplementation.

Find out what your body needs. find the good brands that you can stand behind that help do that in a way that's not going to cause more stress in the long run.

And then get back to reality. Set aside time in your day to down regulate, to do nothing. Have working hours for what's stressful in life. A lot of times, especially entrepreneurs or the high drive people, they're like, I can't do.

That and my answer is no, do you want to? And if you don't, then we need to find a way to make it more routine and regimented. Because if can start to reset your Sarcadian clock and have working hours for the Sarcanian rhythm, that plays into metabolism.

That plays in to rest and digest, parasympathetic activation. One really quick thing too, The biggest driver of getting the nervous system out of a sympathetic or fight or flight mode is having a brake pedal or a parasympathetic part of your nervous that can work the way that it is supposed to.

That can down regulate the The nervous system will not down regulate if it feels like, one, it's not safe enough to down-regulate to fall asleep. We're still running from a bear because we're doom-scrolling or inoculating ourselves with blue light.

And those fibers are only 20% of the autonomic nervous-system fibers. I think they're the most important. If you like learning, you know, anatomy and physiology in school, like parasympathetic nervous, rest and digest.

Okay, but do we realize that's like the pillar of health? Rest and digest. It's so important. And so I just tell people you have to really nurture and coddle and make it your job to let that brake pedal work the way that it is supposed to.

For some people, it's just like actually getting the brake paddle reattached to the car because it has been ripped right off. So that needs to be a focus and more often than not, its done by just shutting things off and going outside.

Its amazing what that can do for regulation.

Balancing supplements, biohacks, and lifestyle

Yeah, and it's overwhelming the amount of overwhelm that we've built into society, right? Yes. It's just massive. And you talked about the doom scrolling thing.

All of it, again, still comes back to balance, too, because with technology, with AI, With podcasts and YouTube and everything else, you can choose to learn from a podcast like this.

Hopefully, we don't consider this counterproductive. Uh, or you can just fill your head with all kinds of things in many cases that are incredibly stressful, right?

If we're focused heavily on, you know, politics or news or these kinds things. And then one of the things that I see a lot, and I really think my wife and had this conversation the other day too.

I think it's something that we. I hope it's something that people recognize, but I see it a lot, and I say it especially in younger people than myself.

And that is that we tend to spend a lots of our quote unquote downtime being entertained, not necessarily being fed. And there's a really big difference between those two things.

And I think entertainment can feed you, but it depends on what that entertainment is. Are we watching something that's creating additional stress in our lives or that is just simply mundane and not moving us forward in life and just an off switch?

Because that off-switch doesn't work because your brain is still firing. The offswich of literally hugging a tree like we did in the mountains of Colorado and burying your feet in the sand or the dirt and looking at nature and doing those types of things.

That is a different level of off switch than just checking out from your normal cares to check in on whatever's on your Instagram feed. 100% and to your point too like I'm not saying quit Instagram cold turkey maybe that's what you need to do but I think there's beauty in moderation and so many people have that all or nothing mentality of if I doing X, Y, or Z and failing.

No, that's not what we're saying. We're that it is that all or nothing mentality that can make you feel like you're failing and create additional stress.

Start to find the beauty and the balance in feeling like I can step away, I can put my phone down, check into my family and check out of my work. I have permission to do that and that is okay.

And then I check back in and feel more restored and invigorated. We have made amazing movements in technology and at the same time I'm like I still wish everything had to be sent via snail mail.

You know, there's just some things where it's like, if this was back then, I would have had two days to respond and it would've been fine. So it just this re-centering of not everything needs to be done with extreme urgency.

Some things do, but not everything does. And that does so much to down regulate the nervous system. That is the biggest shift that I've been able to make for people's metabolic health because the other primary thing that happens when you're going through these stages of general adaptation syndrome is, the body has no idea when and where your next meal is coming from.

It just knows it's running from a bear. Now, unfortunately, usually when it is running a from bear, we still have a full fridge. We still eat six meals a day.

You know, we have resources at our fingertips to still nourish us, but the body and the metabolism are saying, We're just going to store that. We are just gonna store it.

And fat is smart storage. So there's excess hormones, excess sugar, and excess toxins stored in fat cells. And when we are looking at a body that is stressed, it's saving those.

It's savings the excess sugar because your blood sugars have been consistently high. So when people get upset, upset that they're not losing weight, and upset they have cortisol belly or whatever you want to call it, I'm like, fat is so protective.

Its taking those toxins, those excess sugars, excess estrogens, tucking them in there because that's a better place for them than in your gut. You don't want those toxins built up in you gut lining, you don' want them in the liver, and you certainly don''t want it in heart.

Start giving your body more grace. It's exceptional, it's doing such a good job. And if we can start to allow the sugars, allow inflammation, the stress to come down, then metabolism will follow suit.

That's where we see the needle really starting to move, is when we start more of the controllable, set healthier boundaries, to protect the nervous system, to the brake pedal, and then the metabolism can shift from thriving back to surviving.

I love that. One of the things I always tell people is, you know, the rest and digest thing is the under-appreciated side of nervous system, right? We talk about fight or flight all the time.

We experience fight-or-flight far too often in our society today. But when we think about rest-and-digest, there are two things. You mentioned it really early on when you talked about the different parts of the ability for rational thought is part of it as well.

So when we're resting and we are digesting, it's not just that now our stomach and our digestive system is turned back on because we aren't running from the bear, but our brain is turn on in such a way that we can actually have more rational thoughts and think through more challenging things which in turn can also reduce our stress because were making probably better decisions as we do that.

So I tell people, protect your meal time. When it's time to eat, whether that's breakfast, lunch, or dinner, if it is a rush job, it a stressed dinner or a stress meal and a stressful meal is not in rest and digest and therefore we're not digesting the food effectively.

We're able to process whatever information we are trying to processes before we run to that next meeting or picking up the kids from school or whatever it is that we've got going on.

Take three or four minutes, five minutes at the beginning of a meal time and spend some time with some breath work. If you can, go out and just see the sun.

if you're in an office complex or something like that, Go out there for a few minutes. Do those things, get yourself down so that you can then do what needs to be done during the meal, which is nourish your body in an effective way.

And in so doing, I think you have this amazing mental break too, because you just relax and enjoy the goodness that is that meal. Hoping that your made excellent choices there as well.

I think the rest of the digest thing is so underappreciated. A little bit of breath work before a meal, a little but of grounding, some prayer, meditation, something to get you in that mindset of relaxation while we do that.

And then that means not eating with one hand and scrolling with the other. You know, turn that off and just focus on the task at hand. Have a nice conversation with a person you're eating, not a conversation the phone and the person that you are eating.

Those types of things. Absolutely. I think that's one of the most important things is like, put the tech away while you're at the dinner table. It shouldn't be hard and yet somehow it always is.

Yeah. And it's almost universal. Very few people, I don't think, at least struggle with that a little bit. One of things I try really hard to do with Vitality Radio is give people for lack of a better term, some marching orders.

You know, what do we do this information as opposed to just, well, that all sounds great, but now I'm just going to go back to my stressful life. So when you have one of these people who you look at their situation, they're doing many of the things right.

Sleep, pooping, and daily downregulation

Because I know so many my listeners have already made huge changes to their diets. So many listeners made big changes how they are cleaning their clothes.

cleaning their home and what they're storing their food in and so many of these other things. And most of the people listening to this podcast are already supplementing with good quality supplements at some level.

So they are doing a lot of those things, but maybe they feel like they re banging their head against the wall a little bit because the needle is not moving with whatever they were trying to do with their health, whether it's weight loss or it s better energy or pick the thing, blood sugar like you mentioned.

When you see that person and you the stress, how do you advise that in a like, this is what you can do right now kind of way? Yeah, my top goal with all of my clients is to try to get them sleepy more than seven and a half hours every night.

It's an absolute must. You can shortcut anything, but please do not shortcut your sleep. And this just goes back to brain cognition, clarity, general brain inflammation, the glymphatic system within your brain drains at that seven and a half hour mark.

The way I describe the Glymp system to my clients is it's sort of like how our trash systems work, at least here in Minnesota. We've got our big trash can in the garage, we've our little trash cans in house.

So every, you know, multiple times a day maybe, I mean I have six kids so we're emptying the trash a lot. We're constantly putting trash into the outdoor trash can and then once a week we take it to the end of the driveway and the trash man comes and takes it away.

So through the earlier phases of sleep, we're starting to dump toxins from our brain cells into The Glymph, but it's right around that seven and a half hour mark where it can actually drain out into lymphatic circulation.

flush through the lymphatic system the way that it's supposed to. You can't take a supplement for that. you need seven and a half hours of sleep and you can have a little bit of brokenness in your sleep but if you're getting consistently less than seven-and-a-half hours if hours, five hours.

It doesn't just start where it leaves off the next night. And that's where we can see brain fog compounded, brain distress compound, mental health issues compound.

Psychosis from not sleeping compound like there's just so many things that studies have shown happen when we're not sleep well. So if you're sleeping less five or less hours I tell my clients like you are just taking a glorified nap.

That's not good enough. We have to get to that state of getting to seven and a half or more hours of sleep. So that's always my top priority. I love that one.

However, that can be a challenge for people too. So, you said you can't out supplement it, but you use supplements to help enhance sleep in many cases.

A hundred percent. And I will say to everybody listening, this is really, really critical. There is not a sleep supplement that works anywhere close to universally.

That product doesn't exist based on my experience. I have my own sleep supplement called Vital Sleep that it works really well for a lot of people. It does not work for everybody.

And so you owe it to yourself. If you do struggle with getting to sleep, you struggle staying asleep, finding something supplementally, because one thing that I also have found, and I don't know if you've seen this in your practice, Ellie, is that a lotta people need that kinda assistance initially until they get back into the zone of sleep on a consistent basis.

And they may not need a sleep aid three months in, but oftentimes to get there, they do. But experiment, try three or four different things. Don't give up because you tried melatonin once.

I hear that so many times, I'm like, okay, well, you probably weren't even deficient in melotonin and you didn't try the right thing. Now you've given up cause you thought that was the sleep-aid, right?

Yeah, you're 100% right. And I completely agree. A couple of things that most people don't need supplements for ever, but at least while we're starting to regulate the nervous system is something to help down regulate and fall asleep.

Something to maybe help their bowel movements start to regularly because typically if you are chronically in fight or flight, your not pooping every day.

So that's a huge goal for my clients too, sleeping and pooping. And it's so boring, but it is so important because that alone starts to signal to the nervous system, we have time to down regulate and sleep, We have to time poop every day.

We're not running from the bear. It's the body created for routine. So like you said, you usually won't need it forever. and it will help you to get back on a different brain loop versus the negative feedback pattern your body has created being stuck in fight or flight mode for so long.

You just have to start to pave the new normal and the routine for your new body. So sleeping, pooping, watching the sunrise, that's always homework for my clients.

And then the last thing I typically have them do, depending on the level of busy, is one of two things. First, setting margins in their day. Sometimes people have to start at five because it feels too overwhelming.

Five minutes to do nothing. During their day, I'm like, you have a scheduled in like a meeting with yourself. And eventually over time, You can turn this into prayer or meditation, but right away it is literally time to let your brain shut off and do Nothing.

Here's what happens. For the first two weeks, it Feels painful. You're going to want to skip it. It feels unproductive. But as you start to shut the brain, let the Brain kind of come down a little bit.

You'll have very intrusive, like, oh, I have to do this, and I tell them, write those things down, go back to doing nothing. You probably only have two more minutes of doing, nothing go, back, to, doing.

And then the first thing you're going to once you are out of your margin time is do those three things on the list, because those are typically the things that get lost in the shuffle as we're doing tons of stuff.

Those are the ones that are going make you think, ah, got to cut my time short with my family because I had to get these done. I forgot to them earlier.

So write them down check them off the list and then when you clock out for the night you can clock in to time with your family time With the people that help you down regulate and that makes such a huge difference or the other option especially for like high-performing Individuals CEOs people running companies.

I tell them every 30 minutes. You're gonna write down what you did you're going to set a timer on your phone and you are going write what You did for 30 those 30 Minutes during the day, and then you're going to figure out who to delegate the things that you don't need to be doing to.

What are the thing you can offload? Because typically you are wearing too many hats and it can be for a number of reasons, right? But if you want to start to change your health, you could start off load with the people you've hired usually.

Or it could give you a good place to serve if haven't hired anybody yet. Yeah. I love all that. And Ellie, one of the things I'll have about this show is that I learned something every time.

The other thing I loved is I relearned something. This conversation has been really good for me.

Final takeaways on curiosity and body trust

My wife in her wisdom has been kind of gently nudging me to slow it down a little bit and take a break. She's recently just started a new thing that she's doing where she is out in the morning sun with herself and with her thoughts.

I came out on our deck the other day and said, hun, I got a question. And she said 10 more minutes. Queen! She is protecting her peace. Ten more minutes with myself.

And I was like, okay. But it's been cool. I've sat and watched her just kind of decompress. It's too long of a conversation, but I'm seeing some real wisdom in that.

So I appreciate you reminding me also of that and my listeners. You've given some great ideas and I would say critical practices that people can institute.

Is there anything else that you want to leave with my listener's before I let you go today? Yeah, just always reminding people your body is such an expert.

Your body and it's on your team. It is incredible and its trying to protect you. So please don't ever feel like stalled progress, plateaus and symptoms are your bodies failing.

I hate that. You're body always working in your favor to So, kind of like how we started, your body is not failing you. We have to speak life over our body.

It was given to us to take care of. And to know that if there's something that is off, instead of feeling frustrated, start to just ask different questions.

Take a different perspective on it because that can be the difference between feeling stuck and stagnant and feeling empowered like, oh my gosh, my body's doing so great.

Here's how I'm going to help it more intentionally. I love that. Ask those questions. I have a whole show on curiosity. It's one of the most powerful tools in wellness.

Get curious about why your body is telling you what it's telling. That in and of itself can be absolutely powerful. For people that want to learn more from you, Allie, what are their best avenues?

I know a lot of people will be moved by what you've had to say today. Yes. Oh, that's so sweet. ElevatedAllie on Instagram. My business is called Elevated Integrative Wellness.

If you search us up, we're in Minnesota, central Minnesota. And yeah, I have a podcast, EleVated, conversations about health and healing. We're on our season two break, and season three will be starting up next week already with my Cellcore talk.

I'm going to publish that one for the first episode. Oh, nice. It was a great talk! Yeah, I don't ever re-listen to myself, but it moved a lot of people, which is very, it's everything.

I'm so thankful. So thank you so much for having me on. This was incredible. Such a fun conversation. Well, thank-you. And I will say already from the time that I didn't meet Ellie at the Cell Core Conference, that you get a chance to actually say hi, But I was introduced to her and listen to our talk. I've been following her, and her Instagram content is fantastic.

Highly, highly recommend it. Definitely worth your time. Ellie, thank you so much for what you're doing in the world. I look at it this way. Each one of us has our little corner and some corners, I guess, could be a little bigger than others in terms of that influence.

But if we're putting the proper energy into it and really trying to help our fellow man, that's what we can do in a world that oftentimes looks pretty dark and pretty dreary and stressful.

There is some incredible energy and love that can be found in people that are trying to spread this type of message. So I appreciate your time. I Appreciate your energy. I appreciate you doing it with your six children in tow and everything else that you've got going on and sharing your Time and energy with us on Vitality Radio.

What a huge blessing it was. Thank you so much for having me on, Jared. It was so fun to get to know you and your story too. I look forward to connecting again in the future.

So thank you so much for listening. If you have questions, call us 801-292-6662. Jump on our website, vitalitynutrition.com, or find us on Instagram, YouTube, and all those other places, Vitality Nutrition, thank-you so-much.

I'm Jared St. Clair and this has been Vitaly. Thanks for listening to the Vitality Radio Podcast. If this episode helped you, follow the show, share it with someone, and explore trusted education and resources at vitalitynutrition.com.

See you next time. Hello, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Vitality Radio. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only.

This podcast has not been evaluated by the FDA. Thank you.

Ellie Anderson

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