5 Reasons You Still Feel Bad Even When You Eat "Pretty Healthy"

Welcome back. We're going to address today why you still feel pretty bad even if you're eating, quote, unquote, pretty healthy. So this is something that tons of clients of mine and our functional medicine dietitians in my nutrition business see on a daily basis, people who think that they're eating pretty healthy, but they're like, why am I not seeing the results? Why do I still have the symptoms that I do? Why am I not seeing the improvements in my labs? Why, why am I still having these pains or these menstrual irregularities or issues with my period? So much of it comes down to sometimes people think that they're eating healthy when they actually aren't. The issue with the word healthy is that it's a very subjective term. So the meaning varies a lot from person to person. What you might think is healthy, I might look at and say, wow, that's really not an optimal choice. So if you're eating, let's say like granola with a banana for breakfast, that's likely spiking your blood sugar, it's likely not giving you enough protein, it's potentially causing issues with your gut depending on what the ingredients in the granola even are. So there's a lot of layers to this. Now I want to get into why you would still be feeling pretty bad even if you eat, quote, unquote, healthy. Okay, so the first one is that you have a rigid, all or nothing mindset with food. So when it comes to the way that you're eating, if it's so unsustainable that it leads to these weekend binges or an evening binge where you're completely falling off the wagon and you're incorporating a lot of less optimal choices because you're trying to micromanage your diet so much on a day to day basis, then it's time to reassess your approach. When it comes to achieving long term health outcomes, you have to do it in a way that actually supports a healthy relationship with food. I have worked with more than 7,000 clients in the last 10 years and I have never seen a person achieve true long term health outcomes when they have a negative or restrictive relationship with food or too rigid of an approach that it becomes unsustainable to follow on a day to day to day to day basis. Reason number two is ignoring the fact that your body is one connected organism. This is really important and something that we often lose sight of. Your blood sugar levels impact your inflammation levels, your gut health impacts your blood sugar, your blood sugar impacts your hormones, everything in your body is interconnected. Every system of your body, your endocrine system, your cardiovascular system, your neurological system, everything impacts other areas of your body. The issue is that in conventional medicine, we're taught to think about the body in isolated parts. You go to the endocrinologist for one issue, then you go to the cardiologist for another issue, and then you go to the gastroenterologist for the other issue. No one's really thinking about how are all these things interconnected? That's something that requires a mindset shift where you're thinking about how everything is interconnected versus just something in isolation. So if you're struggling with fatigue, with waking, with insulin resistance, with painful periods, with joint pain, you need a comprehensive food approach. Everything in your body is connected, and that is so key in order to better understand what your body actually needs. Now, that leads me to the third reason that you might be eating pretty healthy, but you're not feeling the results that you think that you should. And it might be because you're following extremely generic nutrition advice. Nutrition is not one size fits all. The nutrition plan that works best for you is not gonna be the nutrition plan that works best for me. Something that your neighbor had success with doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna have success with it. Something that you've read about from your favorite influencer who' this probiotic. And having the greatest results isn't necessarily going to translate to the greatest gut health results for you because you have your own unique microbiome that has a very different composition of microbes than your influencer that you're following. So following generic advice can be difficult and challenging in terms of creating those optimal results that you feel like maybe you, quote, unquote, deserve. You want to dive deeper into what you personally need instead of following these generic nutrition plans, reading a book, and then following the book protocol exactly the way that it should, because the author doesn't know exactly what's right for you. So figuring out what is right for you when it comes to your gut health needs, your blood sugar levels, because we know that every single person has a different blood sugar response to the exact same food. When it comes to things that are creating inflammation, whether that's food allergies, food sensitivities, or ultra processed foods, those sorts of things. When it comes to thinking about your protein consumption and how much protein you actually need, when it comes to thinking about genetic predispositions that may impact whether you do really well with a higher fat diet that's higher in Saturated fats, those types of things are all important to consider and account for and a reason that it can be really beneficial to work with a dietitian. This is what my team of dietitians does, is we help people personalize their nutrition needs. When you're working with us one on one, or when you're working with us in our My Food Is Health program where we're running testing on you to better understand what you uniquely need instead of just adhering to the generalized approach. The next reason is that you're focusing on the branches and you're not looking at the roots. You think of a tree and those branches are what we're taught in conventional medicine to think about when we're not feeling well. So one branch is, you know, your gastroenterology track, your next branch is your endocrine system, your next branch is your gastrointestinal symptom. And we think of it as like, this is my dying off branch, like my GI system is my dying off branch. It's not in the greatest health and I need to like focus on improving that branch. Because you're so focused on the branch and the symptoms that you're experiencing, most people will lose sight of what's happening at the roots. What is happening at the root of the tree that is leading to that branch dying off in the gastrointestinal area? Chronic stress, poor nutrition, nutrient deficiencies, sleep deprivation, sitting too much, lack of quality, sleep inflammation, blood sugar imbalances, those are the root system of your tree. So you want to focus less on the branches and more on the systems, the roots, what's actually happening underneath the surface. In order for you to figure out how you can optimize the way that you're feeling on a day to day basis. The last reason that you may be feeling not as well as you would like to, even though you are really trying to eat, quote, unquote pretty healthy, is because you're focusing on quick fixes and lacking a long term plan. So focusing on quick fixes, jumping from plan to plan, or trying everything all at once, trying to put a ton of different recommendations together, or following one thing one week and then jumping to the next thing the next week, all of these make it pretty much impossible for you to see results. The key to success is developing a rock solid nutrition strategy that feels like a personalized roadmap that is just for you, that has an ongoing compounding effect that you're sticking with over time. And that comes down to one, figuring out what works best for you. Two, not being too aggressive in the changes that you're making so that you're making small compounding changes rather than completely overhauling everything at once where it's only sustainable for that to last for a week and then you're back to your old habits the next week or a month later, or two months later. You need something that is sustainable and that is personalized to you so that you're able to have this long term roadmap to success that is so, so key and often really under recognized and overlooked when it comes to the significance of helping you really create health long term. You can't expect to change your diet one day and then have amazing results two weeks later. It typically takes a little bit of time for the body to heal. And while you might be seeing signs that you're on the right track, where you're experiencing symptom improvements or lab improvements just gradually happening over time, you need months and months and months of that compounding effort in order for you to really see the rock starting to shift down that mountain. So thinking about the steps that you can take to create that compounding effect by having that long term strategy and plan is so key. If this is something that you're struggling with putting together all on your own, then we would love to work with you and to help you create a strategic roadmap that works well for you and has those compounding results. If you're interested in learning more about my nutrition programs in my nutrition business, you can click the link in the notes below where it will link to all of our programs. And we would just love to support you because I know that it can feel sometimes overwhelming when you're trying to do it on your own. Okay, that's all for today. I will see you soon.