Eye on Nutrition: Healing Through Food—Missy Lapine’s Strategies for Energy & Gut Health

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

everything you eat, even cottage cheese, even chicken breast, whatever, is going to raise your blood glucose level. But you have to think when you go in for like that glucose tolerance test, they don't give you a milkshake. Why? They give you what's the equivalent of like a flat soda, a flat orange soda. Doctor, you know this. Why? Don't want you to have any fat, any protein, anything that will blunt the blood sugar effect. So if you think about it, that's the difference between sorbet and ice cream.

Welcome to the IQ Podcast. I'm Dr. Rani Banik, here to help you boost your IQ with powerful insights that connect your eyes, your brain, and your whole body wellness. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the IQ Podcast. In this podcast, you can gain insights into your brain health, your vision health, and your overall wellness to help you raise your IQ. I'm your host, Dr. Rani Banik, and I'm an integrative neuro-ophthalmologist. And today, I am so excited to bring on my special guest, Missy Chase Lapine.

Thank you so much, Missy, for joining us today on the IQ Podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Rani. It's a pleasure to be here. And you got my last name right, so we're starting out on a good note. Yes, that's always kind of one of my pet peeves. So thank you, thank you, thank you for letting me know how to pronounce your name properly. So for those of you in the audience who are listening, I actually met Missy through a mutual colleague. Dr. Gary Goldman, she works very closely with him.

He's a functional medicine expert and OB-GYN here in New York and he loves her so much that he did not want to share her with anyone else. He wanted to keep her all to himself for his patients, but I was able to kind of you know, sneak my way in, and we're going to be talking about that, and get access to Missy and some of her services. So I'm really fortunate to meet you. And let me also just share a little bit about your background, Missy, with the audience. So Missy is a functional health coach.

She's the bestselling author of The Sneaky Chef, amongst many other books. And she's the creator of a high-energy, low-sugar strategy or strategy program. that's been able to transform the way thousands of families eat. And today, we're going to be diving into a lot about nutrition, about sugar balance, gut health, stress resilience, and we're going to be picking your brain, Missy, about what your thoughts are on all of those things. So again, thank you for joining us. With my pleasure, thank you.

So Missy, I always love to begin by asking my guests, how did you get to doing what you're doing today? So can you share a little bit about your journey into first diet and nutrition, and then about how you got into functional health coaching? Well, to make a long story short and not to, you know, I love my dad to pieces. He's still with us and we're extremely close and he was my bachelor father. I was raised with no mom at home and my dad raised four of us and he did the very best he could. He taught me so many things in life, but nutrition and food were definitely not one of them.

He did his best, but most of our meals were really usually out of a cereal box. And to this day, my dad doesn't even know how to toast bread. Luckily, he has a young wife and younger, I should say. But he did do one thing very effectively, which was to put a little girl who had no mom at home, feeling a little bit probably vulnerable, just a little kid, and he put us into intensive tennis. And that gave me confidence. I could walk down the halls of middle school feeling just like, I have a secret weapon.

I can play tennis pretty well. And the problem was, I made it all the way to college tennis, division one, and I would get on the court and I would be into a match and I would make it through the first set. Why? Because what I had been taught back in the day was carb loading was the way to go. as much as he could, you know, bagels, pasta, even candy. And that gives you a quick burst of energy.

Missyu2019s Journey Into Nutrition 4:06

But by the second set, it wore out. And quite frankly, I had many times I just felt that shaky, low blood sugar feeling. Didn't know the name for it at the time. I just knew that I was feeling pretty tight, pretty low, and it was really a sugar crash. And I even had some fainting episodes. And then carried that on through grad school and felt very anxious. It was a high stress grad school, let's just say it's not what I'm doing today, but it was pretty high stress and I was living on caffeine and carbs and stress.

And that left me foggy and drained and constantly fighting my energy and I had no idea any of this really was related to food. But somehow weaved my way through a career and ended up as the publisher of Eating Well magazine. Suffice it to say, I started to see food very differently. And I print there that food is absolutely pleasure. and beautiful, and I became a real foodie. But you know what else? Food isn't medicine. And that can sound pretty not delicious. Food is medicine. Who wants to take their medicine?

Medicine doesn't taste good. But in this case, I learned that food could be both. Food could be pleasure and medicine. And that insight planted the seed for a very different path in my career. Got pregnant, had my first baby. Emily came out, a wonderful eater. I thought, what are all these moms talking about? It's the problem here, people. This picky eating, that's for you. I'm publisher of Eating Well. Ina had to feed a kid kale with chopsticks. You know, she was eating like this thing called hijiki seaweed.

Not something I'd recommend for an 18-month-old, but she was. It was in a Japanese restaurant. It's one of her first foods. Anyway, do we feed our kids kale if they'll eat it? Sure. Emily was a good eater. The second kid comes along, and boy, did he humble me. very quickly became the super picky eater of the family, also had some food allergies. There went the missy theory that I had it all nailed. So I started getting very clever with Sam. How could I get Sam to eat the foods he loved with the foods I wanted them to eat?

So I started, let's call it, slipping the veggies into kids' favorite meals. And having come from the world of magazine publishing, I knew I had to market this something different from the Chakra Mom's Guide to Healthy Eating for Children. That wouldn't even have gotten me an agent. But here I was, nobody in the world of publishing, nobody in the world of food necessarily, but I got published because we named the book Sneaky Chef. I say we, my husband and I. And Sneaky Chef to this day will raise a lot of eyebrows and get people talking.

If you don't mind, can I just tell a little story about- Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. On the Today Show. Today's show, six million people, I had never been on national television ever, or any television for that matter. And here I was going on national television and I thought, well, if I faint, it will make headline, so that's okay, I guess. And if I make it through, great, maybe the book will sell. We get this book published, Sneaky Chef, and they tell me to come on with my absolute most innovative favorite recipe, and that was going to be my brainy brownies.

And they were rich, delicious, chocolatey, fudgy brownies with, in the batter was a puree of baby spinach and blueberry. The sugar and all. It's one of my favorite foods, by the way, especially for eyes. Absolutely, but not so much for a five-year-old. Okay. If you've ever, you know, you want to meet your match, face off against a five-year-old at the dinner table with a bowl of spinach. That aside, I go on the Today Show and they, unbeknownst to me, do this thing called B-roll. And the B-roll was having a family in New York make my brainy brownies and try to serve them to this five-year-old, speaking of five-year-olds.

And he had to take a bite, not knowing what was in, what was in them. And he took a bite of this seemingly normal looking brownie. Thank goodness it was covered in powdered sugar. That's sort of the loss leader on that. He takes the bite and I stood there and I was panicked. Panicked. This little adorable little boy was going to make or break that book right then and there. So I held my breath, it didn't faint, and the little boy had a big smile. He took a bite and a big smile. Beautiful little face.

Thank you. Thank you, little boy. Don't your name. We'll call you Daniel, for lack of a better name. And thank you, Chef, for the best seller list. And he made your career, right? He made my career. Yeah, that is such an amazing story. I love that. And the whole journey of how, you know, you maybe not, did not, you weren't taught how to eat healthy when you were younger, but then you realized it through your own journey being an athlete and then built on that. And it's just amazing how you've shared your journey and impacted thousands, if not millions of people along the way.

I've tried. I'm not somebody who keeps a good idea to myself. If I have something, I want to share it. I'm in the middle of reading a great book. I want to call every friend I know and have her read it with me. This was where I shifted my whole career into healthy eating for families. My kids got bigger and now they're in their 20s. They outage my own demographic and the moms who I have been working with through the books, They grew up, too, and their kids grew up, and we all shifted into looking at ourselves as adults and saying, hey, can I put myself on the priority list now?

Not that I'm done taking care of kids. We're never finished taking care of kids. We're in the sandwich generation. We take care of our parents. We take care of our children. We take care of our careers. Who's last on the list? Us. Yeah. Yeah. I can definitely relate. Absolutely. As can many of my friends and colleagues. We're in the same boat. So let me ask you something about Sneaky Chef before we move on to some other topics. Yeah. I don't go by Sneaky Chef anymore. I just wanted to say that. Okay.

Well, it's such a catchy name. I love it. It's that intrigue and curiosity. But the way that you incorporated some of these quote-unquote healthier foods into other recipes, do you still do that? You know, I do, but not in, and sneaky, by the way, I'll just say, but my own defense was never meant, it was always through love and always never through anything malicious. It's just all in good fun and most kids are in on it and they want, and they just want to have fun. And it's basically giving people their cake and eat it too.

It's. If you can make a kid's favorite brownie with loaded up with veggies, not that you always have to do brownies. Well, anyway, it's invisibly or magically or putting things on a level where it still looks like a meatball, tastes wonderful. But guess what? maybe it's made with eight, not hidden, it's made with eight different veggies in anybody's ground meat or even ground tofu, for example, like umami mushrooms diced up. Even hemp seeds go in there beautifully. Chia seeds go in there if you hydrate them a little bit.

All of these wonderful superfoods that you talk so eloquently and brilliantly about in your books and your practice that we want to get people eating,

Blood Sugar Spikes and Energy Crashes 11:24

Even if you have time and you like them, who's making the time? So why not make all of our favorite foods amped up? Yes. Supercharged. Supercharged. That's really where I shifted my whole practice into what's called functional health coaching and now this community called Heal Through Food. where I kind of saw a pattern, which is private coaching is powerful, but like it's one person at a time. And if you really want to make progress and transform the way you live, join some people, you know, support you, do it together.

You learn from each other. And it's more fun and we can all support each other along the way. I think, you know, human beings are social, we're social creatures. We function better when we're doing it together. especially with some of these life changes that may come along, where you feel like things are changing, you feel like you may be losing control, you know, certain times of life, especially for women during perimenopause, menopause, it is so important to have that community that you can fall back on, that can support you, and then you can contribute as well.

I think people feel even better about contributing their ideas. It's so much fun, you know, just to share. And there's so much confusion out there now. Headlines sell, so you get a different headline every day and you just think, hmm, you know, is it okay to eat a card? Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I want to get back to something you mentioned at the very beginning, Missy, when you were sharing your story about when you would, playing tennis, you would do carb loading before matches and then you would have this crash.

So I know many of us have experienced the same thing I definitely have where just like my energy level suddenly plummets and I have this kind of like overwhelming difficulty focusing, concentrating, you could call it brain fog. What do you think is really going on there and how can people try to avoid that from happening? What are some suggestions you have? This is really what's a quick spike and crash from glucose. Look, our brain runs on glucose or we need it. It's not to say that's bad. But when you eat something high glycemic, with a high glycemic index, which means- Could you just backtrack a little bit and explain for some of our listeners what they may have heard of the term glycemic index, but what does it mean?

Right. So it's kind of just how fast your blood sugar rises and what goes up must come down. So think of it like the Alps. You ever go to Europe or you see mountains that are really peaky, you know, real peak, and then they fall off pretty radically instead of like beautiful rolling hills, North Carolina or something. We're aiming for a more gentle, gradual rise in blood sugar so that our blood sugar, our insulin, doesn't react to an onslaught of glucose and sugar grams. Let's say you eat something crazy like jelly beans on an empty stomach, or even something like fruit on an empty stomach can do this.

So you wake up in the morning and you think, I'm going to have a wonderful bowl of mango. Now, you're coming off of a fast, and it's not to say mango is not healthy or once in a while you can't have candy, but you know what? For example, if you're on an empty stomach, it's sort of like a glucose tolerance test. It's like you have it, you're coming off of a fast, I'm sleeping, let's say, your blood sugar rises up really quick, you have a burst of energy, it is not sustainable, it spikes and then you crash and you feel brain foggy, irritable, you get hungry all day long.

And the repeated swings of this kind of rise and fall, rise and fall, the quick high glycemic, quick rise, quick fall of glucose really is what leads to a lot of oxidative stress, low grade or chronic inflammation. These are all the things that you talk about, which can really impact our overall health and also in you know in our mood and our and how we feel and nervousness like I was very careful when I ate today coming into this podcast a little bit nervous being interviewed by you. I was chatting like over a cup of matcha green tea.

And yet I want to be, you know, firing on all cylinders and not be foggy and lose my train of thought in the middle of, you know, or you go to a 10 o'clock meeting. My clients are pretty high achievers. I deal with very accomplished people, you know, who want to be sharp. Depending on what they eat for breakfast, the normal American breakfast is not going to make you feel sharp at 10 a.m. You're going to be crashing by 10 a.m. if you had cold cereal or a bagel. Unfortunately, white flour sort of acts like that high glycemic sugar.

Now, white flour is sort of similar to white sugar. Body and how your body deals with it. Yeah. I want to share something with you. You know, you were talking about eating things that you would normally think are super healthy, but, you know, they can contribute to this sudden rise and sharp decrease in blood sugar. So I grew up eating bananas for breakfast. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, we're rushing out of the house in the morning, getting to my office, and I'll just grab a banana. and eat that, you know, as my mid-morning kind of meal slash snack.

And I never realized how much that banana was impacting my energy level and my mood until I got a continuous glucose monitor. Okay, okay. And I was always thinking, like, why do I feel this way? You know, like, you know, just around 11 a.m., I just feel like, like, I don't think I can make it to lunch, right? And then I got the glucose monitor and I saw what was happening. And I saw that sharp rise, because again, I was, I had been fasting, I went certain days, I don't have time for breakfast, right?

So I had my banana, great source of potassium and magnesium, et cetera, fiber, or probiotic, I guess you could say like prebiotics, right? So I saw what happened based on the on the CGM. I had this sharp increase and sudden fall. And it was just quote unquote, I mean, pun intended, eye opening to me to see that pattern. And I saw it happen with so many other foods too that I loved. You know, like you were talking about some of the white foods, right? You're so right. I mean, this is where confusion comes in.

People just don't know how to make up that. Like a banana is meant to be healthy. It's a fresh fruit. It's not processed. In fact, bananas are so healthy, you know, my editor in one of my books had to stop me from writing three pages on the health effects, you know, how nutrient dense bananas are. And yet, First of all, here's a quick takeaway. Did you know that green tipped bananas are a lot less sugar spiky or glycemic fancy word than a very ripe banana, a very yellow ripe banana? So I take my green tipped bananas and throw them in the fridge.

or at times put them in the freezer for smoothies. And another simple tip, so we're all coming off a fast and we're more susceptible to a quick rise and fall of, but you know we want to eat bananas would be a wonderful dessert, not a snack. See the difference between a dessert and a snack is one is kind of paired with the meal and the other was by itself maybe three hours later. I, too, have worn a glucose monitor on my arm because I generally try everything I recommend to my own health coaching clients.

I once almost caused myself, I mean, it was so low, I was very worried. You can usually get yourself out of a real low by a little bit of carb. But one thing I realized, once I realized, okay, these bananas are causing my sugar spike in the morning, I said, hmm. Let me see what I can do to kind of make that effect plateau a little bit. So I started adding protein. And I'd have first a yogurt, like a Greek yogurt, high protein yogurt, or cottage cheese, and then have the banana a little bit later, and the spike wouldn't happen.

So I think just for people who are listening, if you're used to eating something and you don't maybe feel so well afterwards, sometimes it's useful to get some data. And even if you don't wear a CGM or continuous glucose monitor, you can experiment and see. If you include some protein, have some nuts with it, have some peanut butter with it, or just play around with it and see if your response is better. I mean, when it comes to sugar, you know, we do want those rolling hills. Everything you eat, even cottage cheese, even chicken breast, whatever, is going to raise your blood glucose level.

But you have to think when you go in for like that glucose tolerance test, they don't give you a milkshake. Why? They give you what's the equivalent of like a flat soda, a flat orange soda. Doctor, you know this. Why? Don't want you to have any fat, any protein, anything that will blunt the blood sugar effect. So if you think about it, that's the difference between sorbet and ice cream. Now, again, I'm not espousing eating ice cream, although I do eat it because I believe in strategic imperfection.

I just want to put it out there right now. I do too. I love my ice cream. Absolutely. One time I wore that continuous glucose monitor and it was a hot summer day and I had had lunch at 12 and at 3 o'clock I said, I want to see what happens if I eat sorbet right now. Sorbet, not rocky road ice cream, which probably with the nuts and the fat wouldn't have done what sorbet did to me on an empty stomach. I mean, it plummeted so bad and I took a walk, I think it was walking on the beach. Oh my goodness.

I thought I was going to have to call 911. Luckily, you get a quick hit of glucose, a little sugar. I think the rule is like 15 grams, you wait 15 minutes and your blood sugar rises. You're okay. But you're right about starting the day. If you just pair that fruit or delay the fruit, or lay the white flour or preferably no white flour, but we take people where they're at. So you're having the banana, great. Have it with almond butter or with your Greek yogurt, Greek yogurt and almond butter, a hint of almonds.

I'd rather someone run out the door. You know, we need grab and go. I'm a realist. Run out the door with a handful of walnuts. that of the grab and go that normally we, you know, we. Yeah, no, I love that. And yeah, such great tips. So Missy, this has been so much fun and I've learned already so much from you. We're going to take a very short break here from one of our sponsors and then we'll be right back with more on the IQ podcast. Stay tuned. Discover Nourish, The Core of Ageless by Dr. Rani.

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Gut Health and the Microbiome 23:00

Nourish. Elevate your life with eyes that see the world anew. Welcome back everyone to the IQ podcast. Today we're chatting with Missy Chase Lapine, who is a functional health coach and bestselling author. We've been talking about food a lot. I wanted to slightly shift a little bit from dietary strategies to something very much so related, which is our gut health. and how our gut health can impact so many other things. Brain health, immune system, and even our eye health. So can you just give us some pointers, like what can people do from a dietary perspective and lifestyle perspective to support their gut health and see the impact?

Just maybe like a couple of quick tips. Right. I mean, as you said, the gut is our second brain. There's a direct connection to your brain and that bi-directional highway between the brain and the gut. So maybe you feel like butterflies when you get to go to do something that makes you a little bit nervous or vice versa. You're going to really feel the impact of what you eat on both your mood and your hormones and Your happiness factor, 90% of our serotonin is made in the gut or 70% of our immune system sits in the gut.

It's unbelievable. It's where we absorb nutrients. It's where maybe we're eating a good diet, but we still feel low and not energetic. And that may be because we're not absorbing what we eat because maybe our gut isn't as healthy as it could be. Anyway, what do we do about that? We're made more of bacteria than we are of cells. Something like, what is it, 30 trillion? I mean, just an unbelievable amount of bacteria and they're all different. So they all thrive on different nutrients. They thrive, our little bacteria, our microbiome, which is that word we keep hearing about with gut health, it's all the rage now.

And we hear microbiome and what it thrives on is a wide variety of plants. which means a diverse variety of plants, which can sound like, oh my goodness, I can't even get in one vegetable a day. And there's a thing, the 30 plant food challenge. I didn't make it up. It's out there in the gut health world. It's wonderful. I keep a bingo card and you can print out my bingo card. I'll send it to anyone who wants it. And you check off. By the way, if you eat spinach every day, that's wonderful, but it only counts for one.

It's the diversity, absolutely. It's the diversity. It matters more than any single superfood. So, you know, spinach, collard greens, arugula, now you're racking up three. You can go get a salad and you'll probably rack up seven plants right there. And if you add sunflower seeds on top and maybe a little fruit, I mean, it all counts, some beans. So one of the takeaway tips I love is this 30 or that's an overwhelming number. Let's just say a wide variety of plant foods. You know what I sometimes share with my patients similar to the 30 day plant challenge is the 21 day color challenge.

21 colors a week. I don't have an official name for it, but basically I tell my patients that most of us eat three meals a day, so breakfast, lunch, dinner, with each meal strive to include a different color from a plant. So not processed, but from a plant. And so if you have those 21 colors in the week, most likely you're getting a lot of what your body needs. Your eyes, your brain, your gut. You don't have to think about like, did I eat this? Did I eat that? Just have the colors. Right, now that's brilliant.

You know, that really protects the gut lining, those colorful foods that are rich in the polyphenols and even omega-3s. I mean, you know, berries and those are the obvious ones that you think of berries, right? You think of green leafy things. There are some white, let's say white can be one of those colors. I mean, cauliflower and- Yeah, jicama. Oh, jicama is about my favorite. It's a vegetable. Yes, it's a vegetable. Yeah, I think it's a root vegetable. Yeah. Oh, wonderful. It makes for a good cracker.

Did you know? You just peel it and slice it into planks. And then, you know, I spread out a little guacamole. It makes for a wonderful gluten-free cracker. And it's just so refreshing and wonderful. It's great and crunchy. I've had it with guacamole. I've never had it like as the base like a cracker. I'm going to try that. That's a great tip. Yeah, no, and in fact you can also use other things as a base that are unusual like sweet potato toast. Have you ever heard of sweet potato toast? No. So if you keep in your fridge, and this is kind of a great takeaway, which is keep things in the fridge that might take a little while to make.

So let's just say a sweet potato that's not very mushy, an organic yam, a sweet potato, love those. Maybe you make it a little underdone. And you take a slice, even in the morning, and you might warm it up. If you have a toaster oven, it works better. You could warm it in the pan, maybe throw it in the toaster, and use it as bread. And I used it as a crouton on soup the other day. I had onion soup. I'm gluten-free because I just didn't feel good from gluten. That's me or whatever. So I try to go gluten-free, but not always use the gluten-free substitutes that I think are ultra-processed and not so great.

So I try to find more plant-based or different types of gluten substitutes. And Sweet Potato Toast was one of them. And I put that little round of sweet potato on my onion soup, which I made at home simply. and topped it off with a little bit of cheese and threw it under the broiler for a minute and it was sounds amazing onion soup wow yeah i'm gonna try that you have such unique innovative recipes missy phenomenal i'm gonna i mean food is for us and look we're not looking to make healthy garbage cans you know if you don't eat it you take all that time to make it it costs it's expensive It's time consuming.

It's very frustrating when food either goes bad in the fridge or you serve it to the family and everyone pushes it around or says, yuck. So how do we make food absolutely crave worthy? I love that. I love that message. Crave worthy. Healthy food should never feel like punishment. So true. Should never be deprivation. Yeah, no, I love that. Okay, so you mentioned like the diversity for your gut. What about like probiotics? Like what types of natural probiotic foods are your favorites? Well, the ones that are probably best are not my favorite because I'm one of those people who can't eat garlic.

But I would say kimchi is right up there if you can eat garlic or maybe there's garlic for your kimchi. I don't know, but you know, the fermented cabbage, I love sauerkraut and you want to get... So properly fermented, not just in vinegar or something like that, right? Right, right. You know, not canned. You get the one like in the refrigerator aisle. Of course, there's wonderful yogurts of all kinds, non-dairy and dairy. Misha would be my favorite of their fermented foods, but you can't boil it.

So the real tricks and nuances. People don't always know. I make my whole soup, right, miso soup at home. It's the easiest soup. And I'm all about easy, simple, like we're busy, like tell me how to do this in five minutes. Here's a shortcut miso soup. Should I share it? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Now let's do it. All right, so you just take water, you know, filter water, throw in some, let's say some chopped up mushrooms. Today I used like a shiitake, but they were already chopped from the grocery store.

Nice little shortcut. And then I took cabbage, which was already chopped up as well. I was in a rush. So I did the coleslaw mix, but without the dressing, of course, it was just shredded organic cabbage. It had shredded organic carrots in it as well. So here I'm dumping in to water my chopped up shiitake mushrooms, chopped up cabbage, and a little bit of tofu. I'm a big fan of organic tofu, non-GMO. So I chopped up old tofu, and it took about four minutes until this all softened beautifully. Not a little longer if you want.

Now, why didn't I put the miso in yet? First of all, this soup has zero flavor. People are like, what are you doing? You haven't put salt, you haven't put pepper. This is water and veggies. Like, who would eat that? Well, the magic happens when you take the miso. You take that paste, which you bought. Luckily, you have it in your fridge, and that's key. Keep the good stuff in your fridge, and I'll give you the whole list, like, what to keep in the fridge. keep that miso paste in your fridge. And you take it, like you don't put it into the soup and boil it because then you kill the good bacteria, the good cultures in there.

So you take some of the soup water out into a little bowl and you just mix it up with the miso outside of the boiling soup. And then you just put it back in and you don't bring it to a boil. Miso is warm. The miso warms up, but it's not boiling. It's pretty hot, but not 212. Right. Okay. Wow, that's so simple. I'm going to have to try that. It's delicious. Again, I did not chop anything. I didn't, you know, I didn't chop wash. I didn't slave over my stove. And it was a five minute wonderful soup.

And you could even add some seaweed to that. Shout out to seaweed, right? Yeah, it's actually one of the therapeutic foods in my book for eye health. Yeah. So many amazing nutrients, minerals, trace minerals. It's really phenomenal. Iodine. How many of my clients, you know, we're all like deficient in iodine because we're all eating really good salt now. We're not eating table salt anymore because obvious reasons. Well, we're missing a little, you know, a little bit. One good thing about table salt was You know, the good with the not so good was enriched with iodine fortified.

So, you know, in a week, if you have seaweed once, I think you're covered on iodine.

Heal Through Food Community and Closing Advice 33:00

I think so. Yeah. It is. It is. It's one of my daughter's favorite snacks. Really? Oh, the Norway flight. Yeah. So, Missy, tell us a little bit about the community you've created online because you're supporting people. You're doing it in a setting where they can support each other. What is it? What's the mission? And how can people find out more about it? So I started Heal Through Food, and it's an online community. Heal is a funny word. I named it Heal Through Food, and yet it's not about having something wrong necessarily.

It's about optimizing how you feel, your energy levels, You know, just really using food to work with us and work with our bodies and make us feel great as opposed to the opposite working against us. And in this community, we celebrate the small wins. It's not just expert advice. I feel like I'm the person who helps people go from knowing to doing. And I think all of us, I would say, if I were to say, raise your hand if you know what you should be doing for good health. Every hand would go up. And then I say, raise your hand if you're actually doing what you want to be doing every day.

It actually changed your habits. If you've actually taken that advice, if you've actually listened to this podcast and went off and said, I got that. Let me incorporate that into my life in this way. No, it doesn't happen. So how do we make transformation stick? How do we make progress really not hit the wall? Those habits are very fragile. They're very fragile. Maybe you leave the doctor's office and your blood test results weren't so great. Like, oh, wow, wake up call. And he says, or she says, well, they just go off sugar, gluten, dairy, lose 30 pounds and sleep eight hours.

Oh, by the way, no stress either. Right. Easy to do, right? And they end up in my community, they go, what now? Right, exactly. Yeah. And I remember, I think I read somewhere where it takes like over 60 days to create a habit and have a new habit stick at least 60 days. It takes some time. Well, Heal Through Food, we meet as a group online. It's all online. We meet as a group. It can be Ask Me Anything. It's a way of just scaling myself and what I do. I mean, normally I would work one-on-one with people and that's not always practical, either monetarily or just people want, you know, they don't want to go through this process necessarily in isolation.

Also, the transformation does not happen only through information. It really happens when people come together around this shared purpose and they start practicing new habits together. Context of connection, which is what we're all missing. We do guideline cooking together. We might even go through the pantry. I open up my pantry and say, hey. Let's get rid of some stuff in here. I got way too many processed foods that my husband has somehow slipped into the pantry, emptying me every day. Let's kind of hide some of those or put them aside and get the good stuff in there.

What should we fill our pantry with? What should we keep? I love that. It just seems like what you're doing is you're teaching people actionable, practical strategies, right? Not something like super theoretical. Oh, let's do this. And it's something you can do every day. And small steps can make a big difference. Well, you know, I'm all about small high impact shifts because they do add up. And suddenly these people have the greatest year of their life. They're feeling the connection between these new habits and their energy level or just the joint pain or the brain fog or so many things that perhaps we didn't know we were walking around with.

Mm-hmm. Well, thank you. Thank you for doing that and providing that support network. How can people, if people were interested in joining your community, how can they find out more about you, your work, and the community? Well, so it's spelled kind of funny, so get out of pen. Heal through food. Heal, H-E-A-L, through T-H-R-U, food.com. All right, you might even start low barrier to entry is just get my newsletter. I also have a co-founder I should mention. She's wonderful, Trinity Pate. She's young and she's a neuroscientist with an expertise in the gut-brain connection.

She's kind of, I say knowing to doing. She's more the knowing and I'm the doing part. Not that I don't know as much as Trinity, but she really goes into the science. And then I'm like, okay, let's take that and put it into action. Anyway, back to how to find out. Get our newsletter, healthroughfood.com. It's free and it's chock full. And if you stop there, wonderful. Your life will be changed. You want to go one step further, you're welcome to join the community. We have an offer for your listeners okay well we will share that we'll share the website your link to the newsletter and the generous offer so thank you and you can get i think it's a percentage off if you join the community 20% off it's not an expensive venture but it's it's really life-changing and like you can change your gut in 72 hours it's that simple Community makes that kind of change last.

And I feel a transformation really happens when they kind of go from just knowing information to putting it into action. Absolutely. Well, I love everything you've shared, Missy. You've had some amazing insights and some of those recipes you shared are fantastic. I can't wait to try them. Thank you so much for spending this time with us today on the IQ Podcast. If there is any one last message you'd like to leave our listeners with, what would that be? Well, I'm going to kind of write up what you said about the color.

I would say if you do one thing this week, just add one extra color from nature to every meal. It's simple, it's doable, it's powerful for your gut, your brain, your eyes. You're exactly right on that. So let's just add a color to our meals or even a snack. Perhaps people can take, you know, let's not have those naked carbs, right? We talked about having even healthy foods that might be too high in sugar for us to pair them with, say, protein, a fat, some fiber. It's a package deal. Yeah, I love that.

It really is so impactful and so simple. That's the beauty of it. It's simple. We're all dealing with a lot of overwhelm. Yes, yeah. And we need to support ourselves from within. Well, again, Missy, thank you so much for spending this time with us and thank you all for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe and share it with your friends and family so they can learn as well. And I look forward to seeing the rest of you on the next episode of the IQ Podcast. Please stay tuned.

Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the IQ Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and learned something new to help you boost your IQ. Leave us a review and share the podcast with your family and friends. Stay connected with me for more eye-opening insights on eye health, nutrition and lifestyle. Until next time, keep your vision clear and your IQ sharp.