The Emotional Gut Nutrition and Lifestyle Solutions: Deanna Minich, PhD

So welcome to the first day of our 10th annual conference. And you know, last night we had this amazing banquet and then we had this wonderful time to celebrate and dance together and have fun. How many of you guys shook your little adrenals last night?

Yeah, I know.

I think I took a little extra adrenal support this morning and I saw that some of you shut it down last night. Some of you are pretty late. You know, many of us only come together and get to see each other once a year. And, you know, maybe we can connect on social media. But being here and be able to connect face to face is really special. And it's really special for me to be able to connect with all of you. And so it was just such a fun time to be able to let her hair down and to celebrate together for the last two banquets. And part of what made that possible was Caroline Barringer with her amazing voice and the band that she selected and those really fun parody songs. I think I still have that gluten song stuck in my head. So let's give a warm, warm round of applause to Caroline Baringer. Thank you so much for making that possible. Okay, so today is Sunday and sometimes don't you guys feel like you're at NTA camp? I totally feel like I'm at NTA camp. So Sunday. I know sometimes we start thinking about traveling home and what we have to do on Monday, but we have an action packed day ahead of us and so you're not going to want to miss any part of this. I'm confident that today will be just as exciting as the last couple days. And we're going to start off the day with a great talk from Deanna Minick.

Yeah.

And then you will have a chance to attend your choice of of different breakout sessions. We'll end the day with a speech from Rob Wolf. And then our very final speaker of the day, our keynote will be NTA founder and board president Grey Graham. So you won't want to miss hearing him speak. So make sure you stick around and get every bit of information today that you can because it's really special that we get to be here and do this. The next thing that you're going to want to we'll get wait for the slide. But the auction for Jennifer Pico that closes at 10:30. So if you need to run out there and make sure see if you can one up someone and get the item that you really want to a wonderful cause. So that closes at 10:30 and then the winners will be announced at 11:30 and you can go, I believe the winners. Are they announced or they're going to be at the NTA booth. Okay, so the winners will be at the NTA booth and you can go pick up your prizes there and find.

Out if you won.

So there's some really good stuff out there. I got to bid on a few things. And as we jump into the day, I want to make sure for one last time that we thank our sponsors. You know, I don't know. Yeah, thank you, sponsors. I don't know how many NCAA conferences all of you have been to, but I've been to a few. And I have to say, by far this has been the best conference. And a lot of that is because of our wonderful sponsors. And I love walking around out there. Actually killed three hours yesterday. I looked at my watch and like, oh, it's been three hours going around to every booth and getting lost in conversations and looking at all the different products. I know many of you have been getting a little infrared sauna treatment. So make sure we have more vendors. There's more programs out there, so make sure that you get a chance to go around and see all of them. Let's just go ahead and mention our platinum sponsors. Biotics Research Northwest, Enviromedica, Heart to Heart Farms, Vital Choice, Vital Proteins. Our gold sponsors, Knotout Organic 3, Rosita, Real Foods USA. And then our silver sponsors, Alaska Broth Company, Balanced Bites, Bio Individual Nutrition Institute, Chelsea Green Publishing, Dry Farms, Wines foundation for Functional Fermented Food, Holistic Mineral Balancing, Biocult Protocol for Life Balance, Sauna Space, the Flavor Chef, and Megasporbiotics. Thank you, sponsors. All right, and then just a couple announcements before we get started and reminders. Once again, I think you all know the drill. But by day three, I think we start kind of getting a little lax that your conference ticket is your badge. So make sure that you have your badge on. We do have people checking the doors, and so just make sure you have your badge with you and on. And it's also nice, I think a lot of us have gotten a chance to connect, but, you know, still see some people. And it's nice to be able to see your names on your badges and then a few just administrative announcements. Thank you. We want to try to keep the time going. So we do have a tight schedule today. So we're going to try to stay on track, keep that going. And if you can't attend a session, like you've already heard, there are going to be conference DVDs, so you can go to the NTA booth and pre purchase those. That way you'll get them as soon as those are available. I know that there was a couple of the breakout sessions where I wanted to see all three because they're so good. So make sure that if there was a couple that you didn't get to see, don't worry, we have you covered for that. And then with travel today, for those of you staying at the hotel, if you need to check out on time, the hotel bell stand will be able to assist you with your luggage. So if you want to hold your luggage, be able to see the rest of the conference, just go talk to them and they'll be able to help you with that. Another reminder, we have over 70 exhibitors, so today is your last opportunity to go say hi to them and check out what they have to offer. And if you have any questions at all, there's the NTA booth right outside the door. They'll be happy to help you and assist you with any questions that you have. So strap on for another great ride today. And let's kick off the day right with welcoming our first keynote speaker. Speaker. Our first keynote speaker, Deanna Minick, is speaking about the emotional gut, nutrition and lifestyle solutions. And she's really inspiring. I had a chance to talk with her yesterday. She is a PhD and master's in nutrition and has five books, including Chakra Foods for Optimal Health and her new book, Whole Detox. I actually picked up a copy of that yesterday, and I think I might have even picked up the last copy. It seems like it's been very popular this weekend, so I know we're all really excited for that book. And Deanna offers a personalized path to healing, weaving together science, nutrition, psychology, philosophy, yoga and chakras. And she's really developed a system putting this all together called Food and Spirit. Today she's going to dive into the deeper terrain of the gut through nutrition and lifestyle. And I'm really excited to hear about this. So please give a warm NTA welcome to Deanna Minick.

Thank you so much, deann.

All right.

Get our technical gear in place here. It looks like I have a few extra minutes even. Yes. How's everybody doing this morning? Yeah, I'm feeling the energy here. I feel it every time I come to meet with all of you and be part of this conference. And I'm so grateful to be part of the board now. So, you know, I've been touching base with many of you that have been coming by the food and spirit booth and Chatting a bit. And what I'm sensing is that some of you, I don't know, you tell me. But is anybody on information overload just a little bit? Yeah, I'm kind of feeling it. You know, I was sitting in many of the talks yesterday as well, and I'm just thinking, my goodness, this is such great information. But one of the things that you all need is some time to digest, don't you think, and really assist all this great intellectual wisdom that all of these speakers have and that you have, too. You know, it's not just us on stage, it's what you bring to the table and having that discussion with you. So I really do want you to reflect, rejuvenate yourself when you leave this conference. And I want us to have a little bit of a different experience in this talk this morning with me. So I'm going to take you down a little bit of a journey. It'll be peppered with science. It's going to have some maybe interactive things. Now that I see I've got maybe a couple extra minutes so we can do some fun stuff. And what I'm going to do is bring in some work on emotional things that you can do from a food perspective that will help your clients. Because one of the things that I've noticed as a nutritionist for these past 20 years, I can't believe that, is that when I was working with food, that was one thing, right? Food can really help people along significantly. But I also found that not everybody got well with food and eating. And then that caused me to look at the deeper levels of disease, the root cause, like what's going on in that mental emotional space. And I myself had a lot of emotional eating issues. I. I grew up with very strict parents. I had my own emotional things to deal with. And so a lot of that manifested in the world of eating. So this will be a journey, and I want you to interact with this as much as possible. So really take this in at not just the level of the brain, but really take it into your viscera. You know, just like much of the conference, I really want you to take that in. So let me ask you this. This is just a quick stream of consciousness question. What do you think of when you think of the gut? You know, shout out some words. Digestion, instinct. Oh, I love that. What else? Immunity. Wow. Very strong scientific audience here. You know, I did this exercise with a group of people in the health field not too long ago, and I had a little laddering activity where I said the word gut. Ten times. And then they wrote down the first thing that came to them. And for many people, it wasn't a pleasant thing. You know, we think of poop and gases and bugs and it's kind of this squishy terrain, right? I mean, for many years, we didn't want to even talk about the gut, and now it's like the biggest thing, which is why we have this conference. It's all about the gut. So it's interesting to me because if we think of the bigger body systems, the brain, the heart, the gut, you know, the brain, we have this reverence for the brain, the respect for the brain. It's our seed of wisdom. And then we have the heart, which everybody loves the heart. How can you not? The gut is kind of like this uncomfortable place for some people. And so I want to take us down kind of that emotional space, because this tends to be where people stuff a lot of those emotions, right? You probably know that for yourself. So we're definitely going to get into that space. And I would say that when you're working with clients, working with the gut is like working with the dark night of the soul. You know, it's really a person's inside interfacing with the outside. So it's a very intriguing place to come from. And it requires a lot of deep work, too. In fact, we were talking yesterday about the different types of massage and how, for the most part, massage therapists cannot touch the gut area. And this is where we have so much locked in. And there are certain types of massage and visceral treatment and manipulation that allow us to really get into that space. And when you actually do that, I've done it myself, it releases so much emotionally. It really and truly does. So when I think of the gut, I think of all the different systems coming together and playing. So I think of this whole term psychoneuroimmunology. It's the brain, the nervous system, the immune system. You know, it's truly the place where all the systems come into being. So one of the things I'd like you to think about is looking at disease in a really symbolic way, almost a metaphor or a storytelling way with clients. So if we just step back for a second and look at the gut in a symbolic way. We've been hearing a lot of this this past weekend, right? It's our terrain, it's our soil, it's what we grow things in. And if you're familiar with a lot of the ancient traditions, which many of you are, it's also where a lot of the different elements come in. Fire, air, earth, water. We bring a lot of those elements into that gut interface. And if we're balanced, those elements are playing well together. I also see it as the web of how we connect outside to inside. Because if you think about it, the gut really starts in the mouth, goes to the anus, and it's a tube. It's a tube that brings in things from the outside, and then we decide whether or not to process them on the inside. And so really and truly, it is that inside, outside interface. It's very unique because no other part of the body is doing that. So it is what connects us to the outside, which is why it's so connected to our immune system. And it's also where we feel it really and truly is. I mean, how many of you have had butterflies in your stomach or an uneasy stomach after an event? You know, and not many of us talk about that with clients, because it opens up a whole other trajectory. But if you do a timeline with people and see where they're at, you can start to see how emotional things that happen in people's lives have birthed a lot of their different pathological complaints. You can really bring it back to these different stressful events. So that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about how the gut is truly the peacemaker. And when our gut's not right, our whole being's not right. Have you ever thought about this for yourself? I kind of feel like if I have a headache, I can kind of make do. But if there's anything going on down here, it could be debilitating. You know, we double over. Our posture changes, and when our posture changes, our being changes. The hormones that we make change. How many of you just notice your posture right now? How many of you are in the power pose? Shoulders back, both feet on the floor, right legs not crossed. So when we have good posture, we open up our gut, and that helps us to feel even more so. I love Grey's vision for this conference about it always starts in the gut. And it doesn't matter if you're an NTP or if you're into nutritional medicine, functional medicine, integrative medicine, naturopathic medicine. We're all speaking this language that it is all about the gut. This is 101. And it's almost like I love what whoever said instinct when I said gut, because this is really kind of our primal, our most bodily, connected, visceral force. You know, we bring things up as we go into the heart. And we care or we think. But really and truly, here is where we're getting those gut feelings and really raw. So there's this great book that just came out in 2016 called, if you're interested in. Definitely applies to NTPS and what you all learn. It's called Functional Strategies for the Management of Gastrointestinal Disorders. How do you like that for a title? Tells you exactly what you're getting. And what Dr. Gilliam said is that gastrointestinal symptoms are some of the most frequently experienced by all subjects and one of the most common reasons individuals seek medical care. You've been hearing that a lot this weekend. If you look at the number one prescribed pharmaceutical. What is it? It's PPIs, proton pump inhibitors. And when I think about the stomach that we have misalignment with our stomach. This is our cauldron of rotting and ripening, our seed of transformation. I kind of think of it as an altar. It's like, what do we bring into the altar of our being? And if that's not right, then how can anything else be right within our bodies? Right. So I like to think of the body as a continuum rather than all or nothing, black or white. There is a lot in between. And so the gut has a spectrum of different functions. And that's what you've been learning this past weekend, all these different functions that the gut is really responsible for. Right. And I like how somebody shouted out digestion, because really and truly, yeah, that's a big one. And so digestion and think about these metaphorically. What are you digesting and absorbing? I hear from so many of you who are so busy doing so many different things. You're so passionate about this. But what we're missing is that ability to assimilate, to be restful, to reflect, to just be in the shower and take some time and just let these ideas come through us or sleep a little bit longer, you know? But we're always so much on the run and we're not really processing in ways that might be good for us and good for our guts. The gut microbiome you've been hearing a lot about, lots of good talks about the gut microbiome. The fact that these bugs are kind of running the show. And so how do we make that community within us happy? Right. And we can do that with food and different lifestyle strategies. Elimination and detoxification. So I grew up in a household. My dad was a police officer and a funeral director. My grandfather owned a funeral home. So we were always talking about Death at the dinner table or we were talking about poop and it was not a big deal. It was like, you know, my dad loved anatomy and biology. I loved anatomy and biology. We were always talking about elimination, but I noticed that this wasn't common in many families. They weren't talking about their pooping habits and how many bowel movements they had per day. But fortunately, you are forging ground into people's lives and really impacting them. Just asking them a very basic question about their poop. You know, we don't need to be embarrassed about that kind of stuff. I mean, it says so much about somebody's nutrition and their health by what they're eliminating. And then if we look at that symbolically, what are people eliminating? What do we need to let go of? What are we keeping within our bodies locked that's causing stagnation and disease? And I want you to think emotional on that one. So ask your clients. Ask them, you know, what do you need to let go of? I've had people cry before when I ask them that question and they tell me all about their physical complaints and that's all really relevant to know about. But then at the end, once they're done telling me all of that, I'll ask them the question, so what do you really need to let go of? What needs to be out of your life because it's so toxic, right? And this brings into the whole realm of detoxification. And I see a metaphorical meaning of that as well. It's not just the hepatic phase one, phase two, and even phase three pathways, which you better all know about anyway, right? And you all do. But what else is toxic in people's lives? What are the toxic emotions and the baggage that we're carrying? What are the toxic thoughts that we continue to ruminate? You know, it's been estimated that we have something on the order of 60 to 80,000 different thoughts in a day. Wow. I bet you even have many more than that because this is a very intellectual, high thinking crowd, right? Many of these thoughts that we think are recycled. We have the same thoughts over and over again. They repeat, and they're not necessarily positive. So think of how that feeds all of our gut functions, right? This is so much of our seed of thinking, protective barrier, leaky gut. Leaky gut, to me symbolically means leaky life. It means poor boundaries. It means that we said yes when we really meant to say no. And so when I have a patient that has high intestinal permeability, one of the discussions I'LL have with them is, okay, so how are your boundaries? What are you up to in your life? Are you saying yes to everything? Are you doing everything under the sun and not feeling adequate because you can't do it all well? And then you start feeling lots of guilt. The last one is the neuroendocrine. And I'm going to take you through that path of stress. Because, you know, I was just at a conference last weekend and we were talking in a small group about how. And I bet you agree with this. If I were to ask and just do a poll, how many of you think stress is the culprit and the root of so many different diseases? Just show of hands. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, we're right in the same tribe, in the same way of thinking with that philosophy. So if we can handle the stress, and stress is never going to go away anyway. So we have to figure out ways to deal with that stress and to make it digestible. Digestible stress. Maybe we have to call it something else. So we're going to get into that. So I love nutrition. This is what I do. And I've married nutrition with lifestyle because I feel like that is a complete picture for the whole self. So first I'm going to tour you through food, and then we're going to get into some of these lifestyle things that I have found to be really worthwhile and do help people. So think of your gut as the seed of power. And this is how I talk with clients about it. I even have them do a very short visualization to get into their gut. And I ask them, what do you see in there? Do you see colors? Do you see people? Do you see sounds? Do you not see anything at all what's going on in the gut? And normally I'll just have them put their hand on their gut and just really get into that space of. Get into your seat of power. What's there? Do you feel powerful? Right. Because so many things are here. The immune system, the nervous system, our emotions, our boundaries. My goodness, this is a person in their entirety. This is really the identity of somebody sitting right there in the gut. So I work a lot with the 5R protocol. You also have very similar digestive type of protocols where you look at what do you have to remove from the body. We learned about that yesterday with sibo, all the herbal antimicrobials that we can introduce to take bugs out. Right. And then how do we replace. With enzymes and acid. I wish that we had a whole talk that I could give just on the stomach. Because I feel like in addition to stress, one of the things that really impacts us is low stomach acid. You all know that, right? Achlorhydria, hypochlorhydria. And if we don't have good stomach acid production, you know, that throws everything off. Reinoculating with probiotics, which you all know very well. Repairing the gut. Did you all know that the gut turns over its cells every three to five days? So that means that every week you've got a new gut lining to work with that tells you of the importance and how the body really registers having a good gut. It wouldn't be turning over that rapidly if we didn't need it and it wasn't necessary. And finally, rebalance, that's the point of stress, really looking at rebalancing our lives. So indeed, the gut is an emotional system. And what is happening here is that we produce more serotonin in the gut than we do in the brain. Only there's a little bit of a difference here. I want you to know this distinction that the serotonin that we produce in the gut is not necessarily a good thing because that serotonin travels systemically to different parts of the body. And we're going to talk about that. Like the bone and causes some chaos. So our gut feels through these neurotransmitters. There are all these different neuropeptides that are produced. If you're not familiar with Dr. Candice Pert's work, she did a beautiful. Her book is Molecules of Emotion, where she really gets into these neuropeptides. And you might argue that the gut might be the first brain. It might really and truly be our first brain and our first signal, which then brings us up into kind of the processor of our body. Right. Our physical gray matter. So did you know? You probably did, because you're all really smart and you're really up on literature that SSRIs, serotonin, reuptake inhibitors work in the brain and in the gut. We usually think that these things just work in the brain, but there's science to suggest that they also work in the gut, which makes the longevity of serotonin that much greater in the gut, which is not necessarily a good thing. Right. Because what can happen is that they can work at the level of the bone. So the serotonin produced in the gut can travel systemically in the blood and go and impact bone tissue and lead to changes that are not so good in the bone. So what we're starting to see is that people that are on SSRIs tend to have a greater risk of things like fractures, a greater risk of osteoporosis, because we're changing up the serotonin mechanics and dynamics at the level of the gut. All right, so inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome. You know, isn't it interesting how the lexicon of our medical terms involve emotions in some way? You can almost figure out what's going on for somebody emotionally just by looking at the name of whatever diagnosis they have. So for your IBS clients, what are you irritable about? Or inflammation as the bedrock of so many different chronic diseases? What are you inflamed about? You know, that's a really interesting question to ask your clients because oftentimes they don't need further prompting. They already know what they're really angry about. You know, and they get kind of red with that anger, and then they just let it out. And some of them just really need to let it out. You know, we've kept it stuck for so long, and it's just burning us up on the inside, and it leads to that sense of burnout. So what I would encourage you to do is wherever you are in your practice, have a bit of fun with it too, because disease and pathology and symptoms have a very literal meaning. You know, we have ICD 10 codes, we have diagnoses and symptoms, and, yeah, we get all of that. But then we also have the right brain, which is calling us the creative side of us, which realizes that every patient has a story. Every person in this room has their story, and connected into that story is the underlying root of how they got to be where they are. So explore that. Explore that with your clients, with yourself, and really mapping out and telling your story. Because therein lies lies the root. So that's the system I work within. For those of you who were here last year, I talked about the color coded system that I use to integrate psychology and physiology. And really looking at all these different colors within us that we know from ancient medicine. Well, you know, I don't think we need to talk chakras because, you know, not everybody knows what that is. You know, it's not even that relevant. But what's important is all these different body systems and how they all work together and. And how they all integrate with physiology and psychology and foods and lifestyle as the modalities. All right, so where do we start? Let's get into the practical, therapeutic side. I, like you, was trained to go with food first, and it makes sense it's almost like the other mantra too. It all starts in the gut is food first, food is medicine, food is information, food is connection. And so really working largely with what's going in and what's coming out. Now, there was a nice talk here yesterday looking at mental health as it relates to the gut. So what I'm going to do is go through some science that will show you some of the really great evidence. And what I want you to do is take that scientific evidence and turn it into clinical pearls and I'll mention some things so that you can make this real and you can start to bring this into your practice with your clients. So when we change our food, we change our mood, don't we, when we're eating, Right. I feel like there's no way that anybody can lure me into fast food anymore because I know how bad I feel after eating food that has no good energy to it. And so for me, it's more about my energy state, my vitality and how I feel, because how I feel will drive what I do. You all know that we're driven by our emotions, right? That's the biggest leader for anybody. You make something emotionally connected for a client, they're going to do it. If you find an activity that they love, they're going to stay with it, or a recipe or a food. If you connect into somebody's really, truly and deeply their gut through their feelings, it will have that sticky quality. So think about that first and foremost. You know, the average person is taking in something on the order of £2,000 per year and over £5.5 million in a lifetime. So we're taking in a lot of stuff. And why is it that so many people are on SSRIs that are depressed, that are anxious? Well, they're not cleaning up their diet. And that's your role, is really to bring that to the forefront. So look at this. March 2015, Lancet Psychiatry. This is one of the top tier journals in the medical field, showing that there are robust associations between nutritional quality and mental health, indicating a protective effect of healthy diets on depressed mood. And I mean, this is a duh for all of us. But for the Lancet to be talking about this, that detrimental impacts are seen with unhealthy diets. I mean, this is a first to be seeing this in the medical community. One of my mentors, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, had mentioned several years ago, he said, Deanna, the 21st century is the age of mental health. We're going to be so into everything about the Brain, which means that we're going to have to do everything about the gut because they're so interconnected and we are seeing so many different offshoots of mood disorders, attentional disorders. And to think that we can be changing things with food is for us, we know, but for the medical profession, quite revolutionary. So here's another article looking at how people with mental disorders have a number of things going on. Chronic low grade inflammation, oxidative stress, impaired metabolism, alterations to microbiota and numerous other pathways, all of which can be mediated through food, through nutrition. And so much to Dr. Bland's comment about really looking at mental illness at a deep level in this century, what we're seeing is that there are so many different medical groups that are now making that a focus. So looking at how to promote recovery after mental illness has taken hold and how to prevent that because the cost is exorbitant. And I don't think we have really good solutions in various circles of medicine. And, and that's where all of you as ntps are here to play a role. Seriously, if any of you, and what I would give to you as guidance now being in the nutrition field for over 20 years is find something you really like and anchor into it. You know, maybe for some of you it's mental health, mental illness, and really make that the thing that you go deep into so that you can really offer people a special, a very deep well of experience and knowledge within that. Well, there are lots of different things nutritionally and I'm not going to go through them all because you learn about this already. But having nutritional insufficiencies and deficiencies can impact the brain and our mood, whether it's depression or dementia. As you know, the brain is very metabolically active, as is the gut. They both are. So, so we need amino acids for neurotransmitter synthesis. One of the bigger things that's really being talked about in nutritional medicine now is methylation and figuring out people's genetic propensity towards under or over methylating. And that can change mood as well. It can definitely change whether or not somebody is depressed. So looking at somebody's eating, you know, I have a tax accountant who I try not to visit very often, but I had to go in and he's like, hey Deanna, by the way, you know, my son has just been really off and just really cranky. And I said, well David, you know, what is he eating? I mean, he should know that I would ask that question. And he kind of put his head down, sheepishly he's like, yeah, he's like, he's only eight. He just kind of eats what he wants. And I'm like, you've got to start there. And it was almost like I gave him the information on the slide in a very layperson way, because most people don't realize that what you're eating is feeding your mood right there. Like, even within hours after eating, you are a different person and you're thinking different and you're emoting differently. So I'm very passionate about phytonutrients and fruits and vegetables. I don't subscribe to any dietary dogma because I do believe in personalized eating, that it's all based on epigenetics and, and your genetics. And so one thing that I think we can all agree on is that we can all eat more fruits and vegetables. The science on fruits and veggies, hands down, is, I mean, it's hard to argue with it, right? Maybe we eat different fruits and vegetables, but we're all in some way eating something from the plant kingdom. And what I find really intriguing, you may want to mention this to your clients, that people that eat fruits and vegetables tend to be more creative, they tend to be more curious, they have a greater sense of well being. And there was even a study that showed that they're more attractive because their skin changes, the skin quality changes, the skin becomes more hydrated. It takes on kind of a nice hue from all those carotenoids. So you have to find, you know, what is motivating somebody emotionally in order to give them that information so that they keep doing it. Here's another study showing the same thing, showing that young adults, now this is in younger people too, and these aren't too small of studies. You know, these are pretty robust and there are many more other than the ones that I'm showing you. On the days when young adults experienced greater positive affect, when they were in a better mood, they reported eating more servings of fruits and vegetables. The minimum threshold of what they found was at least 6, 7 to 8. You had to have at least 7 to 8 to kind of make it to that level. But still, somebody having zero versus three servings is going to be different. But if we can get beyond that threshold, and it's so easy to get those servings, if we just, you know, a serving is not very much. There is some good data too on the Mediterranean diet, which is filled with plant foods and spices. And I often think, you know, in the Mediterranean, it's not just what they're eating. It's how they eat. You know, they kind of take their time, they're laughing. It's kind of like we were last night at dinner, you know, that truly was kind of Mediterranean. It's almost like we were transporting into another sphere of just enjoying ourselves with that really amazing meal. Fast food, as you see here, if you need data, it's there. But fast food is associated with depression. And this is one of the biggest things that I see these days is mood states. You know, just people being depressed for no apparent reason. So starting with food and getting into that space is important. Now I want to get a little bit into emotional eating. How many of you deal with lots of different clients that, you know, have emotional eating issues, and you really want to get in there and tackle that a bit? Yeah, over 75% of overeating is due to emotional reasons. So if you've got somebody who's overeating or a lifelong dieter, they're in and out of dieting. You really want to in some way connect that emotional work to their eating. So what this study showed was, and this was a meta analysis, it took in lots of different studies and then looked at all the participants and found that when people were in a bad mood or a negative mood, they had greater food intake, especially the people who were on diets or just had a history of binging. So this means that when you're working with people who have a history of binging and overeating and emotional eating, whenever they have a negative emotion, it's going to come up even more. They're going to be more susceptible. It's kind of like an epigenetic programming. They just kind of go there. And what's interesting is that positive mood is also associated with more intake of food. But here's the difference. Here's the difference. And this is also shown in studies that when people are in a positive mood, they can think kind of out of that situation and kind of look and know that they're just kind of in that moment eating. But somebody in a negative mood who can't remove themselves from that space just kind of continues on, right? They don't really see an out, and so they continue to. To overeat, whereas the people with positive mood don't do that necessarily. Does that make sense? So our mood can kind of clip us from that eating event, especially with binging. Because with binging, typically there's guilt, right? You have a binge, you get guilty, and then you feel so miserable that you just kind of go and do it again. So with positive mood, it's a little bit different. You might go to a party like you were last night, you might eat a little bit more than you might normally, but it's just kind of a one off event and it's not something that's prone to continue. This was a really interesting study showing the short term effects of eating certain things. So 100 students, most of them women, and they had a questionnaire and they had people on either kind of this chocolate crisp snack or fruit, and they had them consume the snack once a day for 10 days straight. And then they did the questionnaire again and, and what they found. And you know, I'm bringing up this study because so many people tell me, oh, chocolate's good for me, I should be eating more chocolate, right? Well, we'll talk about that in a sec. But essentially what they found in this study was having the chocolate every day for 10 days led to greater emotional eating and depression. Now these are people that were not depressed from the get go. These are just college students who were eating the chocolate for 10 days. Now you can say, well, Deanna, what was the quality of the chocolate? Was it organic? What was the percentage? Cocoa, did it have sugar? Did it have dairy? All these things. It was kind of a snack. And then the fruit had. The people that consumed the fruit had lower anxiety, lower depression. So it's just really intriguing to me because I think, and you know about this, I know you do through your curriculum about histamines in chocolate and in cocoa. I wrote this whole blog on why chocolate may not be the healthy food we think it is. Even if it is organic, even if it is 70 plus cocoa, there may be other things we have to think about there. All right, so emotional eating, tender topic, but really relevant. And not many of us really want to go there. But the way that I define it is emotional eating is when we eat instead of feel. I'll give you an example. I know many people who have done this and I've worked with lots of clients who have many different stories about this. I have one. I'll give you an example of a friend, this is not a client, but a friend who every time she would argue with her husband, he would just become very quiet. He would go over to the freezer, take out the ice cream, and not talk to her, but just start eating the ice cream. And I said to her, I said, jill, that's so interesting. It's like he's becoming very cold towards you. You know, here he is eating this cold ice Cream, you know, just kind of freezing the situation. And I asked her, I said, what is his relationship with his mother like? And that just, like, was an outpouring for her because, you know, usually with a lot of these foods that we're drawn to when we're emotionally eating, they have symbolic meanings and messages. So whenever I think something sugary and something dairy, I think mother nurturing. And it's not for everybody in the same way, but we all have these connections into food that have these memories attached. So it could also mean having some feelings about eating. I can't tell you how many people I have seen who have a fear around eating or about eating certain foods. They almost feel like, deanna, just tell me what to eat, because I can't make sense of it all. And I'm just so fearful of the reactions I'm going to have. Some people don't ever want to go off the elimination diet because they have so much fear around kind of their emotions with that food. They don't realize, but they've got much more encrusted into that relationship with food than they've realized. And if I can unearth that and kind of just dig it up and show them that they have that relationship, it's almost like the fear just kind of disintegrates. So when we look fear in the eye in that way, it's almost like what we thought was the big monster is really just this little pebble that just kind of rippled through our waters. So we have to get into that space in some way. How do we become emotional eaters? Lots of different reasons for that. Most of us, we are so busy. And again, talking with many of you, I sense some of you are on that same track. So, again, take that time to digest, rest, and restore being parasympathetic. Because when we don't have time to feel, we don't have time to cry. Did you know that you release 25 different inflammatory cytokines in your tears? Who talks about tears and detoxing? Who talks about tears and the ability to really move those emotions through. There was a study in people with rheumatoid arthritis, and. And they had them watch a sad movie, and then they looked at the people who cried versus those who didn't, and they found that the people that cried during the movie had better control of their rheumatoid arthritis symptoms than the people who didn't cry. So we need to feel. This is who we are as beings. We often think that feeling is a sign of weakness. But I actually think it's a sign of strength because it brings us right into our seat of power, our gut. Right. It unlocks rather than blocking us. So, yeah, there are many different reasons why people are not choosing to express those emotions. So what I would say here is looking into that story. I call this epigenetic emotional eating. Because we weren't all born with these patterns with this relationship with food and eating. It was almost like it developed the story of our lives, which is really what epigenetics is. Kind of created this relationship with food and eating. And so oftentimes, we have to go into that story to figure out what's really going on. Now, emotional eating wouldn't be bad if we would always go for spinach or carrots or fruits and vegetables, but those are not the foods that people are going for. When they're emotionally eating, what do they tend to go for? Sugar. Yeah, sugar. Although this is one of the questions I ask people typically, and I usually get the sugar people, and then I get the salty people, like the crunchy. The snack goods that are crunchy and salty and give you that sense of satisfaction. I remember one client I had who was emotionally eating. She would carry potato chips with her wherever she was. She was an executive, 47 years old, very successful. Everywhere she went, she would bring this bag of potato chips. So I thought, you know, do you want to explore that a little bit? And she said, yeah, we can. But, you know, she kind of had her. You know, she just wanted to figure it out. Kind of like, just tell me what to do nutritionally. And I said, well, we can do that. And that's really easy to do because I can give you a whole protocol. But I kind of. I'm curious about this potato chip thing you have. So as we did this exercise, what I found out by going through her story, and there's a way to do this, and I'll tell you how to do it, is as we went into her potato chips, she broke down crying midway through, because she realized that the potato chips were connected to. When she was 12 years old, she was the only child. Her parents would go out in the evenings, like Saturday night. They'd leave her home alone with a bag of chips and dip, and they'd sit her in front of the television. She started crying because she had no recollection, no apparent. It wasn't in her conscious mind. It was in the subconscious. So we had to get into that space to figure out the fact that she had this connection with potato chips. Almost like they were her friend, which is why she was bringing them everywhere. She wanted that comfort. So for her, that was really energizing because obviously we didn't want her consuming potato chips. Right? Okay. So the different emotions that we have are going to propel certain foods that we're eating, as you can see, and there's even good literature on it. So when people are emotional eaters from the get go, and I'm going to show you how you can tell if somebody's an emotional eater, they eat significantly more after being sad than after joy. Sweet foods are especially culprits in all of this. They're kind of the moderator of that whole emotional eating experience. Here's another one looking at women. This was just a smaller study, 23 women looking at their emotional state and their motivation to eat throughout the day and then the different emotions that they felt. And of course, having certain types of foods during these negative emotion times. A lot of these studies talk about negative emotions, but I don't believe that any emotion is negative. The only emotion that is negative is the one that is not expressed. So I think anger is a really good thing because if you didn't have anger, you wouldn't have boundaries, you wouldn't have action, you wouldn't feel fired up to do something. If you didn't have sadness, you wouldn't take the time to sit and grieve and to cry and let go of any kind of inflammation or processing these memories or events. We need all of these things and we need fear too. Fear is the one that most people are afraid of, right? Being afraid of fear. But goodness, we need fear. We need that kick in the butt. It helps us to survive. So even though the studies are showing these as negative emotions, that's not something that I agree with. I don't think it might be negative on the part of the person. Like they don't want to feel those. But really and truly, all of these emotions are messengers. They're just getting us to wake up. They're signs. So this one was looking at how, and this is what I was alluding to before, when we have a binge, typically the mood is even more down after the binge than before the binge. So if we can work with clients to help them be aware of their emotional state after a binge. I remember working with somebody like this who the very thing that helped her was after she would binge, not being in that nest of guilt and really feeling stuck by that, she was almost liberated. It's kind of like, okay, I had a bunch of chocolate. Let's move on. Let's go do something now. Let's not belabor. Let's not ruminate. Let's not stagnate in that whole swamp of stickiness, right? Because we just kind of create our own emotions that take on a life of their own if we do that. This was a very interesting study. So I don't think I would have been in this one, but they had a tube that would feed into the stomach, certain substances, and then they would look at certain emotions. And what they found was that the sad emotion was attenuated or lessened by having fat infused in the stomach. So this might tell us something about kind of the physiological basis of how these nutrients get in and perhaps change our neurotransmitters or neuropeptides that are connected into the stomach. So why did she reach for potato chips? Was it just the crunchiness and just the saltiness, or was it something with the fat kind of calming any kind of grief or sadness? I think it's really more complex than we realize. So this is really an interesting study. Our emotions in the moment will determine the taste of food. So this was a study with 550 people at a hockey game. And they rigged these games so that there would be certain wins and certain losses and then even a tie. And they found that when there were the wins, that the sweet things that they were eating tasted sweeter, and that when there were losses in the game, that the sour things tasted more sour. So isn't that interesting how who we are in a moment and what we're feeling determines how much we're tasting something. So you can imagine that if we're depressing our sense of sweet, when we're feeling really down, we're probably going to eat more. We're going to eat more things that are sweet, we're going to eat more intensely sweet things because our brain is not registering them in the same way. I think that that is such a key study. There are more studies like that, by the way. So I'm really also big into personality types and characteristics of people. And I watched the literature on this come through, and I'm going to share with you some things about people with gut disorders and their personalities. This was looking at personality and eating style. So what they found here is they looked at a number of different things, everything from neuroticism to perfectionism to conscientiousness. And they found that there were different eating patterns that emerged with different personalities. So if somebody was more open to experience, they had higher Fruit and vegetable consumption, high agreeableness, low meat consumption, conscientiousness. You can kind of see the flow here, how personality just drives food choices. Now it doesn't mean that people that eat meat are not conscientious or something, right? They were just looking at general patterns here. And I think that there's something to this idea of conscientiousness. I think sometimes I became, I was a perfectionist when it came to food. I almost became too conscientious. So there is kind of a double edged sword to each of these things. Being agreeable or being a people pleaser. Right. Being conscientious or being kind of neurotic because you're focused on everything that you're eating. And it almost becomes its own pathology where the food becomes the driver rather than you being in the driver's seat and feeling emotionally connected to being present in your surroundings. So conscientiousness, the sense of consciousness and centering is, is so key. But there is that balance, right? There's the yin and the yang of how far we go with a lot of these characteristics. So I'm going to share with you the three steps that I use for helping with emotional eating issues. Here are the steps in general. So first we have to know if somebody is actually emotionally eating and what that looks like. The second part of it is developing alternatives. And then the third one is getting deep into the root. I love getting deep into that space, into the land of the symbolic, the terrain of the story. So how do you determine if somebody is an emotional eater? There is a list of different characteristics. So emotional hunger, you know, it because it's something sudden, it's something that comes on usually after an emotional event. And you typically want a specific food. Like it's gotta be mms, pull off to the side of the road. I've gotta get M&Ms, right? You just had something happen to you or you know, there's some kind of where it just doesn't stop. Usually when I think of emotional eating, it's hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth. So in this case of this client with the potato chips, hand to mouth, typically it's something that, you know, it's not like it's just an apple, you know, I wish it was, but we tend to be just feeding incessantly without being connected to our sense of power. We're just giving over our power to the food in that moment. So physical hunger is different, as you know, it's gradual, it's a little bit more patient. So if you're not able to eat in that particular moment, it's kind of okay. And you might be more forgiving about the different types of foods that you can choose and that are available to you. And I would say the biggest thing here is that with physical hunger, we tend to stop when we're satisfied. How many of you have walked away from a meal where you feel like you are just so extended, with just too much, you know, too much taken in. And it's almost like you did automatic eating. You weren't even present. You were just eating, eating, eating, because that was the size of the plate, and the plate becomes the target, right? There are so many studies now looking at colors of plates that, you know, I grew up in the Midwest and I was told, eat everything on your plate. So that's kind of imprinted in me. I had to undo that one. And it's still something that if I'm not conscientious, I can override and, you know, I can kind of get into that place again. The second part of this, once you know whether or not somebody's an emotional eater, is now you have to figure out what are the alternatives. So in the case of this woman with the potato chips, what I said is, okay, you're looking for a friend, you're looking for comfort, because that's what the potato chip symbolize to you. So what I want you to do is let's make a list of all the things that are really comforting to you. What are all the things that feel like a friend? So we made a list, and what I asked her to do is every time she felt the urge to go to the potato chips to pick something off the list, that gave her comfort instead. So this is just a simple substitution, and this is sometimes where we have to get to before we get into the deeper root of it. So there can be lots of different things. It might be for her, it was calling a friend and actually talking with a friend. And. And in the world of addictions, there is this whole idea of the 15 minute wait out. 1, 5, 15 minute wait out. So if we can move away from a situation for 15 minutes, we have changed our neurotransmitters, and then we don't feel that same addictive emotional hook to something. So maybe for somebody, it's walking outside their door in the morning for seven and a half minutes and walking back another seven and a half minutes. There's your 15 minutes, and you've already re patterned your neurons for some other type of emotional activity and hopefully we would make different choices at that point. So we have to find alternatives, right? That's so important. And I also think it's important to know what we're feeling as we're developing alternatives and trying to figure out what to do. Many of us gloss over the idea of even expressing what our emotional state is. The science shows that when people can identify what they feel, they're more apt to find solutions. Most people don't know what they feel. You know what's really interesting? I was doing a workshop once, and it was all on emotional eating. And I asked everybody to just kind of go around and just say what they were feeling in that moment. And the first woman says, I'm concentrating. The other woman says, next to her is, I'm focused. I'm like, wait a minute, we have to stop. These are not emotional words. We are in our brains. So I think what we have lost is emotional wording and the lexicon, the rich emotional lexicon that's available to us, you know? And do we just say, you know, I'm happy or I'm sad. I'm glad. There are so many layers to that. Are we really upset or are we depressed? Are we angry? Are we frustrated? What is really the emotion at play? And our society is so primed, where we have these fleeting moments of saying, how are you? And we don't really even wait for a response. We're expecting a fine or an okay, but we're not expecting an authentic answer. And this is part of the issue, is that when society primes us in that way, then we don't expect an authentic answer, even to ourselves. Because this is how we've been programmed to think and to feel or to not feel. So within the programs I do, I have people track emotions. You can make something like this as well, something really easy, where you just have people. At the end of the day, there's a checklist. What did you feel? And this puts people in touch with a couple of things. First of all, whether or not they had an emotion, how they define that emotion, what's the word for it? And really getting deep into that, because they can go through this whole list. And then number three, what I like to connect them to is the bodily sense of those emotions. Where do they feel those emotions in the body? Is it up in the chest? Is it in the throat? Is there something stuck in the throat? I see a lot of women that have a lot of emotion here. Or is it stuck low in the belly? Or is it in your left toe? You know, where Is that emotion playing out in the body and making that bodily connection? So it's really important to be looking at all those emotions, doing an emotional inventory. And if we have a busy day, many times we don't have time to be emotional and be thinking and feeling. So at the end of the day is when I like clients to do this. Just a quick inventory of what they're feeling. They can journal on it if they want, but the first step is just becoming aware and just really getting into that and feeling it too. Right. So one of the things that I'll do in a workshop is I will. In fact, let's do it here. Let's do it here. So let's see the words that are in red, that column. What I want you to do is I want you to pick one of those emotions. Just pick any one. The first one. Don't think about it too much. And the next thing that I want you to do is just kind of close your eyes, and I want you to have that emotion, because all of us have experienced those emotions, so we all know them really well. I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to conjure up that emotion in you, and I want you to see where in your body it maps to. Open your eyes. It shouldn't take long to feel an emotion. The Average emotion lasts 20 to 30 seconds, but we can get a lot of information from it. Did you feel anything in your body when you went to that word? You did. Okay, good. Yeah, most people do. And most people are not aware of where they're feeling these things in their body. So if you ever work with a client on emotional eating, one of the things that you can do is just have a whole session focused with them on where do they feel emotions in their body? Because what you're going to find is many of them are going to feel it in their gut, and they're going to read that as a I want to eat signal. They won't see it as, oh, that was an emotion. That wasn't hunger. So we mix our cues with food and eating and emotions very often. So see if you can play with that. And being that you're connecting it to food, you know, it falls right under being a nutritionist. Right. You're connecting food into the emotional experience and seeing how that registers in the body. All right, so let's not leave you with the red emotion. Let's go to the green, and let's see if you can feel that one in your body. So just a couple seconds. I like to Close the eyes, because you can actually. Okay. You can just kind of go within a little bit more easier. So that one came up quickly for me. Did you all feel that in your bodies? How many of you felt this one in your heart area, had a feeling in your chest? Yeah, that's really common. I've noticed that in people. How many of you felt this above the neck? Interesting. How many of you felt it in the gut and below? Yeah, some of you. Okay, interesting. So keep in touch with that. Because everybody has their emotional sensor in their body. For some people, it might be their low back. Every time their low back goes out, it's kind of like there's something emotional going on. Or for me, it's my fingers. I just get stuff through my fingers and my hands all the time. And I know what I'm feeling emotionally through my fingers and my sense of touch. So this is really. This is a good clinical pearl for you. Just in terms of working with somebody on emotions and eating is just getting them to feel in their bodies. Because when we feel something and we don't feel safe, we tend to dissociate. We tend to remove ourselves from our bodies, which leads to less good decision making, especially when it comes to food. So one of my favorite things to do is what I call an eating timeline. If I'm sitting with somebody and I really want to get into their eating epigenetics, I'll look for the 10 top events in their lives as it relates to their eating. This is something that you can do. You can workshop this. So you just have them write out 10 things that happen in their life and the ages. And you know what? Everybody really knows what's pivotal for them. You don't have to coach or guide them on this. You just have to listen and you let them plot their story. This will take a bit more time. So think about this. If you have a longer visit or you do a workshop, it's so fun also to share people's stories. So to have a group of people doing this is really interesting. And you get a lot of different insights. There's even science on this, showing that when you do life story interviewing and narrative analysis, which is essentially what I just spoke about, it's just giving a fancy name to it that distinct food and mood pathways will emerge. And typically, what you will see is that many of the things that connect to emotions in food go back to childhood. We know that. But sometimes it's nice to bring it out and have the client uncover that for themselves. So here's the technique that I'm going to impart to you, I already have some practitioners in the audience who know this really well because they've studied, studied with me. But this is a technique called laddering, where if you want to uncover the root of somebody's food craving, you take the name of that craving, which maybe, let's just say it's. And I've done this in many different audiences. For some people, it's peanut butter. Other people it's coffee. Ice cream is a big one. Pasta is a big one. Bread's a big one. So what you do is you say this word. First of all, you get comfortable. So. So you would have the client across from you. Or if you're doing a workshop, you have the person up on stage or up in the front of the room so everybody can hear. And what you do is you say that word over and over again. You have the person close their eyes and then they say the first thing that comes to their mind. So let's just say it's ice cream. Maybe they say it's smooth ice cream, creamy ice cream, vanilla ice cream, chocolate. They do this really fast. And you're writing it down. You're the scribe. What you're going to find is that after they go through kind of the hedonic properties of the food, which will come out initially, usually they're going to get into more of the emotional things. This is where people usually their bodies start to change, their posture starts to change, they might start crying, and then you've cracked them open into this whole space of their emotional eating epigenetics. So it's really fun to do. And again, 20 times, and you make a story from those 20 words to see what has come. So maybe even try this. Since you're all here with your tribe, do this with somebody that you trust and just kind of have fun. Take a piece of paper and label it from 1 to 20. And then you ask the other person, you say, okay, what is the one thing that you're so intrigued by in your relationship with food? You know, which food is it? Is there something. And you don't even have to do it with a food. It can be with a word. For example, I had a client who had a lot of fear, so I used fear as his laddering. I was trying to figure out what is he so fearful? And he didn't even know. He just said that he had all this fear. So I did the laddering on fear and oh, my goodness, he had a lot of stuff come up. And again, it's not in the conscious mind when you do this quick stream of consciousness work. It just flows. It's coming more intuitively. It's coming from the body versus the mind. So it's very useful and very fun. All right. Stress in the gut. This is huge. And I know that we can't avoid stress, but stress is affecting motility, it's affecting metabolism, it's affecting how we feel in this space. Secretions in the gut. My goodness. You know, if you look at just even people that have chronic stress burden, what you tend to find is a lot of chronic GI diseases and disorders. And so in this study, they were looking at irritable bowel syndrome specifically, and showing that these folks tend to have more in the way of inflammatory cytokine production. So quelling inflammation, which means trying to really eliminate or reduce a lot of that stress. So stress can translate into a lot of different things. I think that we're different people when we're stressed. You know, if you have somebody when they're in their relaxed state, you know, they're on vacation, they're completely different than when they've got to go in and take a test or prepare for something or be on the spot. You know, this is really, you know, changing our physiology. When we change our physiology, we become different psychologically. You all know this. But when we do have chronic gastrointestinal inflammation, this sets us up for anxiety and depression both. And there are studies on this. This is pretty well founded in the literature. So if you have a person with anxiety, rather than thinking about all the different things that we can give for neurotransmitters and support, maybe it's just working on the gut. It's. And once we get the gut healed, we don't have that same level of anxiety, because now they're sitting in their power. Right. You brought them back to their sense of power. When we're stressed, things do not taste the same. Sweet doesn't taste as sweet. Sour doesn't taste as sour. So this was a study in which they had people do a mental task and then they monitored their perception of tasting certain foods. So what that means is here's the clinical takeaway for you. When somebody's stressed, what are they going to choose? They're going to choose lots of sugar and things that are intensely sweet, intensely flavored. Why? Because their bodies are actually not physiologically primed in that stressful moment to take on the spectrum of the palate. They're very limited. Our sense of taste diminishes during stress. What about personality types? So this was again, something I find very intriguing. You all know that there are four personality types in the literature now, right? Type A is kind of like the hotly wired type, prime for cardiovascular disease. Type B is kind of the steady eddy, kind of the calm, parasympathetic person. There aren't many of those. Type C, this is the type that doesn't like conflict. And so what these people do is they tend to stuff a lot of the conflict within. And what you see in these studies is a greater association with autoimmune disease and cancer. Now, that does not mean that everybody with autoimmune disease and cancer have issues with conflict. This is an association, not causal. So good to be aware of that. And then there's type D. Type D is the depressed type, more the. You know, usually when I think of a type D, I think of a body type where there's, you know, really caved in, more introverted, more apathetic, listless. They just don't have the energy. So they're not very well connected in. So speaking of personality, I wanted to show you some of the literature on different gastrointestinal conditions and the personality types. So in ibd, the commonest personality trait reported was neuroticism, kind of being like, again, overly wired, overly stimulated, overly stressed about things. And in ibd, they also found perfectionism. I am so keen on really getting to the root and helping people with perfectionism because I feel like that was part of my journey. Sometimes it still rears its head and it comes back and it's like, oh, my gosh, I've got to be perfect. I've got to do the right thing. I've got to be the right person in that moment. But these personality traits are just chiseling away at our gastrointestinal power, right? It's not everybody else's story. It's who we are in our story. And really helping people to come into their authentic selves sometimes is one of the hardest journeys that people are taking. So the type D personality that I mentioned, the depressed type, is associated with lower quality of life, of course, in ibs, right? So IBS has many presentations. Constipated, diarrhea or also alternating. And there's a lot of mood disorder that goes into this as well, a lot of stress. So you can decide, you know, there are many portals that go into working with clients. You can take it if you have a client who's very open to this and working with the more personality, psychological aspects of eating. One of the ways that I've chosen to do that is to use a questionnaire. Because oftentimes people are not going to disclose a lot of things to you outright. They don't even know what to disclose. But when they do a questionnaire, it will guide them into psychology and physiology. You can actually get a lot of information from the questions and how they're woven together. And then you can say, aha, I have to figure out how to help this person with perfectionism. So would you put that person on a very strict diet where they have to take all these things every day? No, I'd be wanting to move them away from that. It's like, play with your food, have colorful food. Let's create food and art. Because that person has too much in the way of the p. The perfectionism. So knowing their personality is going to drive your clinical strategy. I think it's really useful information. So in our closing here, we've got just a couple minutes. I felt like my practice was incomplete until I had mind body medicine techniques. This is really and truly they work for me. I meditate, I focus on deep breathing. You know, deep breathing is something that we all have to do, kind of like eating, only we have got to do it every minute, every moment. And when we have a deep breath, if you think of our diaphragm coming across that transverse colon, pushing it down, gently, creating this nice flux and flow in the gut again, it's kind of rippling through our seat of power. Just even having that sense of a breath is anchoring. It's supportive. So I've written a book about this, actually doing visualizations and meditations for all the different conditions. Because back in graduate school, I was working with an oncologist and he did all the right things with patients. You know, he had them on food and movement, and he also had them do guided imagery. Guided imagery was powerful for them. It really put them back into the driver's seat of their health. So what we find with a lot of these mind body medicine techniques is that they improve our immune system function. And I think that they do it by way of our gastrointestinal health as well. Mindfulness training reduces the severity of IBS symptomatology in women. So what they did in this study is they looked at mindfulness training versus just a support group. They actually put it against, not just placebo, but a support group where you think that you'd have a lot of effect. They found mindfulness outperformed having a support group. Now, do I think that you can combine Them and have synergistic effects. Yes, I definitely see great work in groups. The relaxation response. Dr. Herbert Benson cardiologist Lots of great information here. It's so basic. I think many of us know this. We just don't get into that space. Relaxation changes gene response and gene expression. And if we do it on a consistent basis, we start creating epigenetic imprints from that relaxation practice. So that's something to bring into your GI protocols is just a basic relaxation practice. Because when people are, I've noticed, even if they're not eating 100%, but if they're, they're just right on with their meditating or they're more mindful, typically they're going to be eating better anyway because they're just more aware of choices. I feel like they get into the zone. And the zone has been classified scientifically as syncing up brain, heart and gut. And we all know when we're in the zone, right? We feel differently, we feel empowered. And I think that many of us feel that lack of confidence and lack of self esteem. So many different ways to tap into the zone and to help your clients do that. And what I would say is you do it first. Not that you have to be perfect, but you got to go and try out a lot of these things. You got to find what works for you so that you can speak authentically with your client about, okay, you know, deep breathing works for me. But let's try a number of these things with you and let's see what you like and where your body goes, what your mind likes. So I've actually reported on a lot of the scientific studies for those of you who like to bring it up to the head and like to know a lot of the science. I did that in my book the Complete Handbook of Quantum Healing. No, I'm sorry, I don't have any of those for sale here. It's an older book and so I didn't bring any of those. But I do report on the science of what this does in the body with all of the imagery. And I have 100 different visualizations in that book. So this will also give you the relaxation response. If you're wanting to do this with folks again, do this with yourself first and then try it with clients. And you know, by the way, you're going to have all these slides. I see many of you taking pictures. I'm giving you my exact deck. I haven't made any changes. So you have the exact thing. I've already turned it into nta, so just Being parasympathetic with me. So mind and body are one, definitely within our gut. And that's where we've got to bring the. The soul back into eating. It's not just about nutrients. It's about nutrients on one side, but we need to get into our right brain. This is why I put together the nourish your whole self card deck. I was tired of books. Sometimes I'll tell patients, I'll say, stop reading, you're taking in too much. Stop digesting all that stuff. Listen on your own time within. Listen to your own inner voice. What does your gut want to say? What does your heart want to say? Because you know you have all the answers within. You don't have to go on the outside. So I wanted something different. I wanted people to interact and to have more of a dynamic interplay with food and eating. So I created these cards because there's no other card deck that really connected into food the way that I wanted to. So, no, I don't have any more card decks here today, but they're on Amazon. So eating mindlessly puts us out of touch. Right. We're usually doing something else when we're eating. So I usually like to have people chew their smoothies if they have a smoothie in the morning. This helps with digestion as well. Simple exercise of gratitude. So taking a bite of food. Thank you, thank you, you know, with every bite, bringing in that sense of gratitude and really anchoring ourselves into that moment. So there is some good research showing that how fast somebody eats is correlated with body weight. The more chews we have per minute, Believe it or not, this has actually been studied, and it's been studied in children showing that more bites per minute lead to, or at least are correlated with increased body weight. And then when they looked at the parents of those children, they also had the same bites per minute. So children are learning from us. So if we have this environment at the dinner table where it's like, hurry up, hurry up and finish, We've got to run, we've got to get to soccer practice, Then we're again priming. And what we heard yesterday about sibo even and meal spacing, chewing the food, there's more to it symbolically than just the digestion. There's a lot. So when we're eating, let's eat, let's be attentive. This is going to change our mood state and our digestion. Mindfulness meditation, bringing that into the meal, I think is so key. Any way that you can inject some ritual, some Sense of soul. Even if other people don't do it. Set an intention for yourself and work with that. Most people can do that. All right. I said a lot of things. Hopefully you had some tools and you have some of the science, too. What I'd like you to jot down now, if you do have a piece of paper and pencil or pen, or maybe you've got your phone, I just want you to be in parasympathetic right now and just kind of digest and figure out your own three takeaways, because they're going to be different than my takeaways for you. So just kind of sit with this just for a couple seconds. All right. Since we'll move forward kind of in stream of consciousness, anything that anybody wants to shout out, we'll do like the rooms. I'm going to go over here, over here, and over there. Just one thing that you're going to take away into maybe your practice or into your personal life. So anybody from this area, just raise your hand quickly. Yes. Mindful eating. Mindful eating. Great. Thank you. How about from the middle of the room? What was one thing that you took away? Yes. Helping clients to identify their own emotional issues. Helping clients to identify their own emotional issues. And you can do that, by the way, Google the feeling wheel. The feeling wheel. It's a circle with all the different words for all the different emotions. And that might be a nice tool that you can work with them and you can say, okay, just point. What are you feeling? You know, rather than have them figure it out. Okay, from this side. Yes. Oh. Oh, I can't hear. Ah, perfect. Emotional health equals physical health. Wonderful. Thank you all so much. I hope that you'll meet me at the booth. Would love to see you, talk with you, stay in touch. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks so much.