Engineering Your Life for Optimal Health and Better Habits: 24

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Angie Cat, and she's had a very interesting health and wellness background and journey of her own. So she's going to share some of that with us today. Welcome, Angie. And can you just tell everybody a little bit in your own words how your background with health and wellness and your own personal kind of journey that you've been on in improving your health?

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited. I love your podcast. And yeah, my, my journey has been a long one. I have— I got into health and wellness a long time ago. I was looking for my career path and I loved to be an educator. And so I actually was doing a lot of human resources training, but the girl in the cubicle next to me, she was the wellness coordinator. I thought, that's the coolest job ever. So I went back for my master's degree and got a master's degree in wellness Management and have been working in corporate wellness for over 25 years. So my background is really from that traditional wellness standpoint. I got certified through WellCoaches and I was living and breathing the trifecta of eat right, exercise right, and manage your stress, right? And what was interesting is once I started coaching people, I recognized that so many people were coming to coaching and they needed something more than just a diet plan. Like most of the time, they were not, they don't need that kind of assistance. They know what to eat and they know how to exercise. They needed deeper kinds of interventions. And so I really kind of expanded my awareness from that. In addition, I had, as you mentioned, I had a very interesting personal health journey. I was doing all the right things. I was teaching high-intensity fitness classes, teaching yoga. I was doing my own running and strength training workout. I was a vegan. I was eating all the right things. I was doing all the right things. And all of a sudden, it slowly started to creep up where I was exhausted after my workouts. I had all over aches and pains, and I couldn't figure out what it was. I was just fatigued all the time. And then Normally a very sound sleeper, no problem, I can hit the pillow and I'm out. For a solid year, I had the worst insomnia I've ever experienced. I would be up all night long. And so, clearly there was something going on. But when I went to my physician's office, we tested, all of my lipid panels were excellent, except my triglycerides were flagged as low. So I asked my doctor about it and he said, "Oh, it's just 'cause you're really, really healthy." And I said, "Mm, something doesn't sound right there. If the lab is flagging it, there must be something." And after doing my own research, I came to find out that low triglycerides means that I was malnourished. So I was doing too much, not getting enough of the right nutrition, and guess what? We need triglycerides because triglycerides make hormones. So all of a sudden it was too late for me. I had really damaged my endocrine system because if you, if you impact one hormone, you impact them all. And so that really started my journey on looking at what is wellness and what is it that really optimizes our health and well-being? Because I thought I was doing all the right things. And that actually made me sicker. So that's really what started me on this path and looking at how I approach wellness. It's more tailored and it's more spiritual. And so that's what I really am passionate about right now is really helping people to decipher what wellness is for them.

Yeah, and that's such a great— I knew that we had so much in common before the call, but now hearing your story, I think we have even more. But I guess— There's so much there that I have follow-up questions on, and I'll try to keep it in the order if I can.

Yeah, no problem.

The first—

I know it's a lot.

It is, but it's all really interesting and cool, and I think that people might benefit from just hearing, um, your first thing talking about your wanting to be like the wellness coordinator at a job or something, for example. Can you just tell people a little bit more about what that entails in the traditional setting and kind of your training obviously is in a traditional setting. So what were the sorts of things they were telling you that you were to do as a wellness coordinator for a company? And then after we address that, we can say something about maybe, I'm guessing, how your perspectives shift after, um, being in that traditional paradigm for a while and then learning more through your own health journey? So if you can give a little background.

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, as part of my training, wellness coordination really is about how do we design and develop and deliver employer wellness programs. So the idea is that you're managing an entire population of a corporation. And I've done that for, you know, organizations, profit organizations, nonprofits, universities, healthcare systems, the gamut. And really, it's about looking at— we start with looking at the health risks. What are the highest health risks within that population? And then from that aggregate data, we design different wellness programs that help to target that so that in it, we, we try to get the population moving towards a healthier baseline, which is generally measured by lipids, glucose, you know, your standard blood panel. And so a lot of the types of programming that we would do would be around chronic disease, as well as standard nutrition and exercise. And a lot of it, you know, it's still very relevant, except that it tends to be a one-size-fits-all, right? Here's the way you're supposed to eat. Everybody's supposed to eat this way. Well, we all know that there's a million and one different types of nutritional plans out there, and everybody can point to, "Well, I've had success with this one, but not with this one," right? And then as far as exercise is concerned, it's the same thing. We do it with the end goal in mind. We are trying to lose weight or whatever it is, instead of looking at it from, how do we make these healthy behaviors sustainable? So it's been really wonderful. My job as a wellness coordinator is not only to design those programs, deliver them, and then I pull down the data to report back to those stakeholders and say, here's, here's how we're doing. But traditional wellness isn't working as well anymore because of the fact that we're really focusing on those chronic diseases and we're focusing on a one-size-fits-all type of program. Coaching has helped me to see from my one-on-one interactions that it absolutely has to be tailored to every person, and quite frankly, I think all wellness programs should have a coaching component, and it should be incentivized for people to take part in that because you just, you get to your end result quicker with a coach who can work with you one-on-one and help you to determine what is the best path for you, and interestingly enough, There's plenty of clients that I've had where we don't even talk about diet and exercise in the first several sessions. We don't. We talk about managing stress, managing time, you know, taking care of relationships, the stress management, life management. How do I set up my environment so that I can be successful in eating healthy and exercising, right? So, so that's kind of in a nutshell what we do as a wellness coordinator, how it's shifted for me. Since I've started coaching.

Yeah. And something you said there I think is so important for people to remember. And I try to mention this every opportunity I get because after so many years of being in this and I think that stress and sleep are such underrated parts of overall health, number one, but also weight loss. I work with a lot of people that are focused on they want to lose weight and, you know, sometimes they'll say, I'm eating all the right things, I'm exercising every day, but I'm still having trouble. And I've experienced this myself..

And so, I know that it's true.

Absolutely. If your stress is out of control and you're not sleeping well, it just leads to a whole cascade of health issues.

Yeah.

And, I think that leads pretty well into— I don't know if this was the exact next thing that you mentioned in your original intro, but I know that you've become extremely focused on hormones. And, that is probably the third thing I should add in there, stress, sleep, and hormones because I'm almost going to be 50 here. I've certainly started experiencing the perimenopausal stuff and a lot of changes in my hormones, some changes in my thyroid lately. So it is— if you're a person that's very focused on all that, you might be aware of it. We still don't necessarily know what do we need to do, right? So what have you been discovering as you've been working on learning more about hormones and their role in So many processes.

Yeah, it's a really great question. And the first thing I would say is that it can be complex, you know, and there's, you know, so the idea of getting a quick fix is, there's a little bit of investigative work that has to happen, you know, because we can all say, oh, I've got a thyroid issue, but unless, you know, a trained and qualified physician can get in there and tell you which one of those thyroid hormones is out of whack, you don't really know what to do other than, well, let's just try medication, which I'm not knocking, it has its place, but I'll give you an example, a personal example. I was experiencing some fatigue. I turned 52 this year, so I'm right there with you, and I just was not, I was trying to do all the right things, but I was tired all the time. And fortunately, I have a great functional medicine doctor who took my panel and she said, "Well, all of your thyroid hormones are fine except for reverse T3." Reverse T3 is like your brake. It presses on the brake when you are sick or stressed. And the idea behind that is that in a homeostasis, when you're sick, it wants to slow down your metabolism because it wants you to rest and heal from your illness. That's the purpose of it. So when your reverse T3 is high, it's indicating that either you're fighting an illness and you need to slow down and rest and heal from that, or you have excess stress. My situation was excess stress, and so she wanted to put me on a thyroid medication, and she said— I said, "How long should I expect to be on this? 'Cause I don't wanna be on it forever." She said, "Until you get rid of your stress." So, So, you know, you brought up a great point. You know, I mean, stress and sleep are huge. They are absolutely huge in terms of managing all those hormones. And interestingly enough, once I started intermittent fasting and I had reduced my stress at work and, you know, all the things that I reimagined my life and I removed some of those stresses. And interestingly enough, between those two things, I was able to come off that thyroid medication. I have more energy now than I've had in years. So it's, it's absolutely possible to heal from healthy lifestyle behaviors, but you absolutely have to target sleep and stress. That has to be in there.

And when you are reimagining your life and identifying kind of these stressors, to the extent that you're comfortable, can you just share, um, some of the things that you did to really not only identify them, but kind of come to terms with that, and then how you made that shift to improve the situation?

Yeah, it's a good question. So I employ a lot of different things. One is I just wanted to make sure that I was taking care of myself with more of the spiritual side of things. I really upped my game with regards to my meditation. And I'm very, very adamant about my sleep. I don't want noise, I will not allow a TV in my room, I go to bed at a specific time every night. You know, I have a routine. There is a thing called sleep hygiene, and you may have heard of it, but it's really about how do we set up our routine. And I'm religious about it. And that has been really helpful. In addition to really diving into the fasting, I will say that has been a big piece of, of my healing as well, is we don't need to eat as much as we think we do. And allowing our digestive system to rest has so many hormonal benefits in terms of increasing growth hormone, which helps build muscle, and it helps all the other hormones fall into place. So those two key things, my spiritual practice, sleep, and then of course the fasting, were the big pieces that I just said, I'm, I'm not going to sacrifice this. This is a non-negotiable. With regards to work, it was really about reevaluating my role and what are the things that I want to be doing versus the things that I don't want to be doing. And then, you know, working with my team to, to make sure that those things come into place. And also, I'm one of those people that I need to work from home. I need to have less distraction. So if you're in an office situation and you can't do that, what are some ways that you can carve out time for yourself so that you can create space? It's all about space. So that, those are a couple of things in a nutshell. That really helped.

Yeah, that's an interesting thing because I've, I've worked from home now for probably 15 years, which is a very unusual thing. And, um, I work for myself now, but at various points it was with different companies that I had found. And I was like, um, I did tech events all over the world, so it was kind of like you weren't always in the office anyway because you were traveling, traveling a lot. Um, but what I did notice was when we had an office and we weren't required to come in. We'd come in like 1 or 2 days a week to have meetings and, you know, just have face time. But those were by far my most stressful and least productive days when I was in the office.

Absolutely.

I also write a lot, and then the way that offices are designed these days, they're kind of designed for distraction. Like, there's not even an— we had a— we called them the hole or the closet. Like, if I needed to go write or something, I could just go.

Yeah.

Um, but it's not— it's, it's like a, a constant barrage to your senses when you're in a very open space and there's a lot of noise. And I can totally see, especially for introverts— and I don't know which side you fall on, you don't have to share that if you don't want to— but, um, for me, I'm an introvert, and so for— I draw my energy from rest time, you know. And right, that would just drain me being there. Um, so it's an interesting point that you bring up, and it's not always easy to change, but I think at least now employers because of the pandemic are realizing the benefits of having people, if not in the office all the time, at least some space for your wellbeing.

Absolutely. I mean, I'm an extrovert and so I do draw some of my energy. I love doing teaching and presentations and all of that, but an extrovert has a max. And when I've hit that max, it looks like I become an introvert and I need to recharge. And I think it's important to note that whether you're at work or you're at home, the world is distracting, right? And I'm a firm believer that having space in your day, whatever that looks like, carving out space in your day can be a game changer. And here's why. Because if you think about when you're at your healthiest and your best, when you're making healthy choices, you are usually feeling centered and at peace, right? We don't make unhealthy choices when we're in that space. So when we are giving ourselves the time and the space to get there, then that really helps us to make choices from that place, you know? And I actually had a point where I had a closet in my teeny tiny apartment that I shared with my ex-husband, and When I wanted to meditate, I went into the closet. And it was great because nobody knew where I was. I just shut the door and that was my time. And so it sounds radical, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do in order to get even 5 minutes of that time to breathe and to get centered and to get focused again. So you could do that at work. I tell people, go into the bathroom stall. No one's gonna follow you there. You know, use that time, you know, use that time to your advantage.

I just had— you made such a great point with when you're in a space of, you know, being grounded and taking care of yourself that you don't tend to make unhealthy decisions as much. But I did want to just have you expand on that a little bit because what I find is I work with people a lot on habits too.

I've—

my background's in psychology, so I'm very focused on habits.

Perfect.

And, you know, sort of the mindset that you need to get new ones, the tricks that you can use, which people have already heard me talk about this before, but replacement behavior sort of things. But what I find is when people are in that healthier space and they're starting to, you know, get the space to make these healthier choices, what they still struggle with is they still have these bad habits. And so they're not— it's, I think the difference, and you can tell me if you agree with this or not,— is a conscious versus an unconscious thing. Because when you're trying to get healthier, you're being very conscious, you're being intentional, but then you still have these habits that are ingrained and are, that are not very thoughtful or intentional. So I think you're exactly right that when you're in that different kind of mindset, that you're more likely to make healthier choices. But I still think the bad habits can still creep in and hold you back. Would you agree with that? And do you have any advice on dealing with that?

Absolutely, yeah, I think part of it is, it is a combination of things. I don't mean to make it sound so simple that, oh, just sit for 5 minutes of meditation and you're gonna make all these healthy choices. There is mindfulness, which is all about the consciousness, right? It's when we're mindful, we can make conscious, intentional choices. And yet, if our environment is set up in such a way that it's engineered to make us, you know, choose the unhealthy choice because it's the easiest one, then there's other things that have to happen, right? I'll give you an example. I have a client that I'm currently working with, and we didn't even start on diet and exercise right away. What we started on was decluttering, because what we found was that she was choosing bad habits because She was constantly distracted by the stuff in her environment, by all the things that she was trying to manage, even the overflowing closet. And so again, that's just another manifestation of not having enough space. Once she starts clearing out email inboxes and her closets and what's on her calendar, she now sees, "Oh, I've got time that now I can think about what I want to do with that time. I want to exercise, or I'm going to use this time to meal plan, you know. So it's, it is really about engineering your life so that you're set up for success. And there's so many different ways to attack that. But yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I love that. And that for me, the, the clutter thing is huge. I just find that it's like a psychic weight whenever there's a space or something where it's out of order. And this could also be like a little OCD-ish if you take it too far, right? But there is something to that.

Yes, I agree, I agree. And I've seen it, I've seen it play out in so many different ways. The amount of change that she's experienced, all my clients have experienced when they start decluttering some area of their life, it's profound. Because that's really what the issue is. We're stressed because there is just too much to manage in our lives. And so we have to sit down and we have to figure out what is it that's screaming for our attention. And that's what I give my clients permission to do is, if that's not what's screaming for your attention right this second, then we're not going to talk about it right away. Let's, let's take whatever is really holding you back and figure out how that's impeding your ability to have these healthy habits, and then we'll move on from there, you know. And it is, I mean, I can say that I'm going to go exercise and 3, 4 times a day for a week, and, and I can have that intention, but I have to engineer my life for that, right? And here's the other thing I'll say about habits that's worked really well. This is a key tip that I use. I call it the alphabet plan, and the alphabet plan is: Plan A is your ideal state, right? Plan A is, I'm gonna go and exercise at the gym 5 days a week for an hour. That's the ideal, and I'm going to do it in the morning. What happens if your morning is derailed by your kids, by a work meeting, what have you? Most of the time what ends up happening is we say, "Ugh, I didn't get to exercise today." I encourage my clients to come up with Plan B. What's Plan B? Oh, I could walk at my lunch hour. What if that doesn't happen? What's Plan C? I'm going to do some calisthenics and weight training in my room. You know, so the more that you have all these different nudges in your environment, in your life, you can never— then you're less likely to say, "I had this one opportunity and I missed it." You'll always have an opportunity, right? Same thing with eating. If I didn't get my healthy breakfast, what's the next best thing, right? What's Plan B, Plan C? And that has worked really well for people because it gives them more choices. The more choices we have with our habits, then the more likely we're going to choose a healthy habit.

Yeah, I love that. I love the backup plan idea because so often life does intervene. Something comes up, something derails us, but it doesn't mean it's over for the whole day just because it didn't fit your plan. That's, that's an amazing tip. I love that. So people take that away from here.

Yeah, absolutely.

What about Angie? What about So going back to your exploration into hormones, and I also did want to mention just for people that might not have heard this before, over on my website, there is a big article about sleep. This is one of my passions as well. I had— I struggled with insomnia for a little bit myself. I was actually interviewed by a national magazine about all these things that I did to improve my sleep. So all that information is in that article. And two new things, which if you're still working on this, or for anybody out there who's still working on this, you haven't tried this yet, I got the most amazing sleep mask. I swear I get at least an hour more really good sleep with it because I don't have the excess light coming in the room. I don't have the little, you know, the blinker on the alarm and the thing on the air cleaner. There's all these little sources of light. So they're really amazing sleep mask. It's one that totally blacks out. I have a link and a discount for it because I just love it so much. And then Same thing with this other tool that I got last year called an Ooler. It goes on the top of your bed and it can heat or cool underneath the sheet. And so for those of us experiencing hot flashes or night sweats occasionally, it also works in the other direction. So to wake you up in the morning, you can set it so that it warms gently so that it's just a very natural way to wake up, which I kind of need now that I have the sleep mask because I don't have the light doing that. But they're both two really excellent tools that have taken my sleep even to the next level from where it was. So there's, there's always something new to try or something that you can do, but making the room as black as possible and having it the proper temperature are two, like, well-known sleep things. So those tools just help a little bit more. But anyway, I just— that was an aside, but I would love for you to go into your information about hormones, what you've discovered, anything that you've changed or that you find that really can help support optimal hormone health.

You know, I will be the first to admit I'm not an expert on hormones other than what I've experienced personally and what I've done research-wise with my own clients. But I will say that what has helped me the most is a few things. One is, and I'll touch on the sleep in a minute because I do think that that's super important. I do, I'm a big advocate of a plant-based diet. And when I say plant-based, this is what's interesting to me. I think it's really funny how we've kind of made nutrition the new religion, right? Everybody's gotta argue for their, you know, it's keto, no, it's paleo, no, it's vegan. If you look at all of them, the common denominator's plants. So just eat more plants. I think, and if you can do organic, do that, because that's going to really help to impact your hormones as well. You're not unloading all of those pesticides, et cetera. There's lots of ways, lots of tips that you can, you know, ease yourself into organic plants, but the more plant food, the better. So that's one of them. You know, I do think that it's important to choose, if you are going to have animal products, Choose the highest quality that you can, you know, those that are not pumped full of hormones, that are not overly processed. That is also a big piece. So the diet can really be helpful with that, and ensuring that you get enough fat. This is one of the biggest challenges that we've had coming out of the '80s when all of a sudden that was that low-fat craze, right? If you look at the research graphs When we started that low-fat craze, the incidence of type 2 diabetes skyrocketed because we were no longer getting healthy fat in our diet. Healthy fats help with hormones. That's what hormones need to function. To build more quality hormones, you need healthy fats. Not processed fats, healthy fats. So it's important that you have that as a part of your diet. People will actually lose weight if you have healthy fats in your diet. So that's another key piece with regards to the nutrition side of it. You know, so those are some of the things that I've really experienced. And then of course the fasting, because of insulin. Insulin is another hormone that we have got to start up, we've got to start talking about. Particularly if you are on the verge of being type 2 diabetic or you have family members, it's really important because insulin is released every time you eat, every time you eat. So if your insulin is shunting all of that food energy, it's converting it into energy and getting it into the cells. If we're eating too much, then what happens is the cells go, "Look, I'm full, I can't take on anymore," and it sits in your system and is converted to fat, okay? So, the issue is not to eat less fat. We do need to eat perhaps less, but we also need to look at how often we're eating. You know, I was on the bandwagon for a while there where, "Oh yeah, 6 meals a day, every 3 hours," and I thought that was the healthy way to do it. And really, it just keeps that insulin pumping. Just keeps it pumping. And so, what I've discovered on my own health journey is that By fasting, I will have 1 to 2 meals a day and I have a long period of time in between those 2 meals if I'm choosing that. And that has healed my digestion, it has healed my blood sugar. I used to have problems with hypoglycemia. My blood sugar is stable, I have better energy, and I actually, the weight, being premenopausal, the weight came off like that. And all I do for exercise, people, is I walk every day and I do yoga. That's my exercise. I'm not doing CrossFit or anything, not that there's anything bad with that. I'm saying you don't need to kill yourself to get healthy. Very simple changes can, can really make an impact. And then let's talk about that sleep piece. One of the things that is shocking for a lot of people to know about me is that whenever I was with my husband or with my boyfriend, we had separate bedrooms. And I'm a big advocate of that because my previous husband was a snorer. He had sleep apnea really bad. And you know what? It impacted my sleep, which then impacted my health. I was chronically tired. It impacted my hormones, all of that. So when I finally buckled down and said, I can no longer do this, I'm going to have my own room where it's black, there's no TV, it's quiet, I reduce all the little lights, you know, all of that stuff. And that was a game changer. So, you know, it's interesting, I think, you know, in relationships we think, oh, well, we're gonna have to sleep in the same bed. There are no rules about that. If you're struggling to sleep with someone else in your bed or your sleep environment, take control of that. I cannot advocate for that enough.

Yeah, that's a huge tip and something that probably a lot of people wouldn't even consider until you know, hey, there isn't a rule there. And if it's really going to impact your health, there's a great reason to do that. And just to echo, most people that listen to this podcast or that follow my work already know that I'm a huge proponent of fasting. It— no matter what your diet is, if you just implement that one simple tool, it is literally one of the most powerful health tools that we have. So, and that's the one reason too that I did not want to— when I started this podcast, like, I am very focused on low-carb nutrition personally, but I did not want to put that in the title of the show because everybody's a little different. There's a lot of different ways to do it, but there are some consistent things, and that is 88% of Americans are not metabolically healthy. That's research at a University of North Carolina. It is linked everywhere in my stomach. Right. So, getting your insulin under control and getting your blood sugar under control, fasting is one really excellent way to do that. It doesn't have to be strictly low carb or keto to do that. Now, of course, everybody knows that I have a bias for that, but there are other ways to do it and fasting is a great way.

Right.

Right. The only other thing I would love to share this with you because I don't know if you've run across this yet. I'm focused on this also because of my age. But as we get older, you might want to not do one meal a day. You might always want to do at least two because you want to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And so you want to get at least 3 grams of leucine in every time you eat. So that's a high-quality protein. Generally, if you get 30 grams of any kind of protein, you'll probably hit that leucine threshold. But the older we get, the more we need to eat. Like, the older we get, we need to eat maybe 4 40 grams every single meal to get that muscle protein synthesis. So I think it's important for people— like, there's a lot of people on the OMAD, one meal a day, train. And yeah, I think it's okay occasionally, like, even no matter what age you are. But I would say every opportunity we get as we get older to stimulate muscle growth, we need to take it, because that's also a very big predictor of health outcomes. As you probably know, the older people get, they lose muscle mass and they break hips, they break bones, they can't get out of chair. It's really important. So just for people out there hearing that, like, you know, the older you get, you might not want to do OMAD.

Right. Well, yeah. And when I say, you know, when I, when I say that I'm doing fasting one meal a day, here's the other thing, you know, I'm not religious about following these types of diets to the T. I'm just not because I, you know, somebody has a birthday, I have a birthday, I'm going to have a birthday cake, you know. So I think we get so rigid in it and think this is the only way we have to do it. And so I listen to my body. That's the biggest thing that I've gotten out of this whole journey is listening to my body. Because when you do that, then you start to realize it will talk to you and tell you when something is off and you can research that. If I'm really that hungry, I'm gonna have 2 meals a day. And let me tell ya, they're sizable. I'm not eating little tiny plates, you know, I get my fill 'cause I like food and I like to cook. So I agree with you, I don't think it's, you know, we don't wanna paint it that one meal a day is, fasting that way is the only way to go. I think it's a cycle. You find what works for you and then you do that 80% of the time. Sometimes you'll have 3 meals a day, sometimes you'll, go to the buffet dinner or whatever at the party, and then you'll go back to one meal a day 'cause you're feeling really full. So you're absolutely right. And look, I was paleo for a while, I did keto for a while, and what I think is interesting, and this is coming from a lot of the coaching clients that I work with, is that, and correct me if you think this is wrong, but I have found that most people think of paleo and keto as, I can eat all the red meat and bacon I want. And then they'll eat bacon and cheese and they'll, you know, as long as I'm not doing carbs, then I'm fine. And I'm like, ugh, you really, really need to have vegetables. You know, you have to have vegetables in your diet. You know, like the meat is more like a condiment. It's, you know, so that's my understanding of keto and paleo is that it's really meant to be You know, yes, meat is a complement, but lots of plants.

Yeah, I think— I mean, I think there's obviously so many different approaches. And— but I do think that that is what people often think when they think of keto. They think we're just over here eating bacon and butter every day or whatever it is.

Right.

But I will share with you, as in a side note— and I think there's all different kinds of ways to think of it. But I did change my thinking a little bit. I've been a vegetable person all my life. I was a vegetarian for 7 years. I've always been a whole foods-based person, grew up on a farm. But if you ever get a chance, read The Carnivore Code by Paul Saladino. Oh, because it will change the way you think about plants. And I'm not gonna say you'll never eat plants again after it, but I, I certainly think of it much differently now.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And the, the basis of this, for those of you that wouldn't read the book or you just wanna know what's the synopsis, it's that, you know, plants don't wanna be eaten. They don't have any defense mechanisms. They can't run away. So a lot of them have anti-nutrients. Nutrients in them, like oxalates, or there's a million of them, and you may or may not be sensitive to some of those things. But particularly people with skin issues seem to have some problems with those kind of plants. And for a lot of people, as crazy as it sounds, eliminating plant matter and eating just meat has healed a lot of things. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence. A research study just came out on it. But it isn't— I mean, I personally, I just like them. I like them.

Yeah.

Yeah. But it doesn't make me feel guilty me anymore. If I'm not that hungry that night, I just put my piece of protein on a plate and I call it a day, and I'm fine with that.

Yeah, absolutely.

A little differently. And I think just being how into nutrition you are, you might enjoy that book because it's, it's definitely interesting.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I think that just again points to the fact that I think this is another piece, is empowering people to do your own research a little bit, you know, that certainly a coach can help you to navigate the plethora of information out there and help guide you towards what's right for you, because it is gonna vary for each person and it's gonna vary across your lifestyle or your lifespan. And so, you know, but to take one person's word over everything and, well, this is the diet they're doing, and so that must be the only one, and why isn't this working? You know, we really, I really wanna give people their power back and say, what feels right to you? How do you feel after you're eating that particular nutritional plan? How do you feel when you're eating 3 meals a day, 6 meals a day versus 2 meals a day? You know, because I think that that in itself will help to identify the best option for people. So absolutely, absolutely. And again, I think also it goes, you know, and this is a whole nother podcast, is looking at the source of your food. Looking at the source of your food because our agricultural system is not necessarily healthy either and it's pumping out unhealthy foods whether that is animal protein or not. And so knowing your farmer and what kind of agricultural practices are they using can make a huge difference as well in the quality of your food.

Yeah, that's an another awesome point and I think people are becoming, at least people in our sphere that are interested in this sort of stuff, becoming a lot more interested in that. Well, Angie, I just want to thank you so much. Can you, can you tell people before we go here, because I just want to be respectful of your time, but where, where you are on the web, are you active on any social media channels? How can people get in touch with you if they want to work with you? Do you do any group work? All those kinds of things about Angie.

Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, I, I have a website and I am on Facebook. That's my only social media because that is a stressor for me. I'm not interested in doing all the social media platforms. So you can find me as Angie Cat on Facebook, but my business is called Soulful Living with Angie, and it's www.soulfullivingwithangie.com. You can search for me on the web and you'll find out all about my coaching programs and additional, you know, programs and events that I'm running throughout the year. So you can contact me through there, DM me on Facebook. I'd love to work with you. So yeah, and I do happen to have some coaching slots open, so if you'd like to learn more, we'll do a free consult call and we'll talk about how my approach of coaching is a little bit different and what will and see if it's the right fit for you.

Awesome. And of course, all those links will be in the show notes for everyone, or if you're watching this on YouTube, just look below. So, um, again, Angie, thank you so much. I loved our talk today and getting to know you a little bit better. And I think highlighting the fact that there are many different approaches that can work. And I think part of the, um, beauty of the internet and some of these kind of interviews is, you know, also getting people's philosophy and figuring out, you know, one of the most important things working with a coach is, is it a good match for both sides?

Right.

So hopefully people got a good sense of you today and they'll reach out and get in touch.

Yes, I would love that. And thank you so much. I, I just love the work that you're doing in the world and, um, that you're preaching the gospel, so to speak, and, and helping people get healthy and well. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, thank you. And I know that's what we both want for everyone. So anyway, go have a wonderful wellness day after listening to this and, and, uh, pick up some new habits, right?

Yes, absolutely.

All right, take care, Angie. Thank you.

Thank you.