26: 4 Ways Gut Health Changed My Grief Journey

Hello, friends, and welcome to Grief Guts and Green Smoothies. I am your host, Melissa Dugalecki, and I am so excited to be here with you all to chat about ways in which we can all get through different adversities, challenges and loss and how getting outside of our comfort zone and maybe having a green smoothie or two can help us do so. We will cover different topics ranging from interviews to recipes to sharing my own stories of my grief journey and the loss of my daughter, Layden. Honored to be able to share her light in hopes of helping you spread yours. Now let's dive in. Hey, friends, and welcome back Grief Guts and Green Smoothies. I'm Melissa. I'm your host. Super excited to be here with all of you, just having a ball, chatting about all things grief, guts and green smoothies and loving your feedback, your questions, your messages. So please don't hesitate to let me know what you're thinking and what resonates with you and maybe what doesn't resonate with you. Right? That's feedback too. Super important. I am not a butterflies and rainbows person. I like to know all of the things that make some type of impact or imprint. So thanks for sharing. And today going to be breaking down a little bit more about the connection between guts and grief, particularly my gut health journey and my grief journey. And I am going to be really specific and share four different ways that improving my gut health impacted and changed, in my opinion, the entire trajectory of my grief journey. Truly, I do not think I would be where I am coaching, supporting, podcasting, running, move with Mooch if it hadn't been for changing and taking control of my own gut health. I believe that strongly in it that I want to share it with you all today. So let's just start by breaking down what is gut health Now. Our guts run from our mouths all the way to when we go to the bathroom. We can get super sciency and dive into it. That's not my zone of genius, right? Mine is more in the holistic health area and just understanding and honoring the body and how energy works. You guys know, energy is my zone of genius. So the way that our body works is think of energy. It's like a bank, right? We have like our own energy bank inside of us. And when we eat, the purpose, right, the way we are designed, the purpose is to be to convert that food to energy and then to eliminate anything else that we don't need. Now, the way that we eat foods has changed and of course, like, it's important to incorporate social and Pleasure and whatever it may be. But many times, in fact, in my opinion, most times what people are doing is they're eating in a way that instead of making a deposit. Deposit in their energy bank, they're making a withdrawal in their energy bank, and then they're feeling tired. And what do we do when we're tired? We reach for more food. So this cycle repeats itself over and over and over, and we don't understand, rather, why we're bloated and tired and not getting results and foggy and all of these different symptoms that show from an unhealthy gut. Now, for those of you maybe new to the show, just tuning in. Hi, welcome. But I only began studying gut health after I lost my daughter laden in 2014 to a sick gut. Her case was termed a catastrophe. Her heart, which had been the initial concern, was fully functioning, and it was her gut that led to her losing her battle. Right? And ultimately shattered my world and she lost her life, understandably. At first, I hated gut health. I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn't want to talk about it. I began reading Laden's medical records. My daughter's name is Laden, and I would read her medical records on Friday nights. It was kind of this thing that I did after she died. It was like I created and held space for my grief. And I also needed to kind of have a container for it because otherwise I would have read those medical records 24 7. Right. So I gave myself this designated space, and it was like 18,000 pages of medical records. And so I really began kind of looking at more what happened to her body and studying that. And then I began doing my own studying now, background information. Prior to Laden, I had been diagnosed with mono multiple times. I've been diagnosed with celiac. I was on acne medication. I was on anxiety medication. I had the most irregular digestion. I carried around the digestive aisle from CVS in my bag at all times, not even exaggerating. And it almost was something I just accepted. It was my normal. I ran on Starbucks. I drank Starbucks coffee, venti, bold red eyes, just obsessively. I began studying gut health and noticed a lot of these things that I was experiencing were symptoms of. Of an unhealthy gut. So I thought, well, you know, Layden lost her life to a sick gut. What are my choices? My choices are I can learn and maybe that honors her life, or I can keep saying, f you, gut health and feeling like crapola. So I decided honoring Layden is always my first choice. So that's what I decided to do. And it started as you heard recently from Susan Cabana, owner of Nourish youh Soul. I went to her juice and smoothie bar and began kind of questioning and trying to figure out juices from that very first time there. About four years ago now. Yeah, about four years ago now. Holy cow. Not a day has passed where I have not had a green juice. So it's taken a lot of creativity. It hasn't always been the highest quality green juices when I'm on the road, but I have still. I've made that commitment to myself and it has truly changed my life. And what's funny is when it first started shifting, I had a lot of people asking me, like, what changed? Like, are you in love? You have a glow. Because truly, when you are feeding your energy bank so you have energy, you're gonna have a different kind of vibe around you. You're gonna have a glow. And on top of that, for talking specifically with skin, our skin is our largest organ. So if our body's over toxicated, we're not even aware of it, but it's trying to detoxify, it's trying to clean out, and it's backlogged. You better believe that's coming out through our skin, right? Different. Different manifestations of it. So my skin was a major thing that cleared, but a lot of other things cleared. It has now been. I said it's been about four years since I haven't had a green juice. Point of reference. It's been in June. It will be three years since I've had a single medication. I'm talking Tums, Tylenol, anything for three years now. And I feel really good about that. And I also am really grateful to Layden that she opened my eyes. I wish they were never open to it again. I would trade this podcast and everything to have her back, but I don't have that choice. And so I am really grateful that her light led me to studying it so that I can feel and live my best. Because I am telling you, my life has changed. I was in a dark, dark place, understandably, but I could have stayed there, right? And I fear that I might have stayed there had it not been for Laden's light guiding me to gut health and gut health giving me the tools, the vehicle of feeling my best to make progress. And I think this is important for everybody to understand whether you're grieving or not. What gut health did for me was it gave me the energy and the physical ability to feel my best. Because I was emotionally so broken. And not even just physically in terms of fitness, just functionally. Right. It allowed me to feel functionally my best when emotionally I was so broken. And I would just argue that there's nobody in this world who wouldn't benefit from feeling functionally their best. So whether it's stress or overwhelm or transition or kids or job training for a race, there's nobody who wouldn't benefit from feeling functionally this best. So I hope these help you. Hearing this helps you. And the four ways that it specifically impacted me was first and foremost, probably no surprise was in my energy. Because when I stopped eating foods, either combinations or actual foods or timing of them in a way that didn't work for my body. I wasn't constantly making withdrawals. Like, think about it. If we're constantly eating in a way that's a withdrawal, we're bouncing checks. We're constantly bouncing checks. Our body's going to become super depleted. So one of the very, very first, most noticeable things was that it increased my energy. And one of the very first changes I made was I no longer drink coffee. I haven't had a coffee. I think Mooch and I maybe had one last summer and we didn't even like it. We just. It was the only option. I think we both threw it out. I think it was like an almond milk latte much. When you listen, you can remind me if that's true. So I stopped running on coffee. So energy was a huge thing. The second was my mood and my anxiety. Huge, huge difference. There's a lot of research around the toxins in our body and how they impact our brain functioning, our mood, depression, anxiety, these different things. I think everyone can agree when you're anxious or worried, you feel it in your gut, right? Our appetite's impacted. Maybe we go and anxiously eat, or maybe we can't eat, or maybe we can't go to the bathroom. Or maybe we can't stop going to the bathroom. Yep, we're going there. Here. What are we going to do? It's gut health. We got to talk about poop. All of these things. Mood and anxiety. There's this huge connection between our guts and our brains. And so I noticed that my mood was way better and that my anxiety was way less. So much so that I was able to. And now, please, I'm not encouraging anybody to go drink a green juice and stop taking medication. I was able to safely, with support, stop taking any anxiety medications. And as I've shared, I've been three years now medication free and my body feels really good that way. I work really hard to keep it that way because that's what aligns with me. So mood and anxiety was the second thing that I noticed. So being able to stop, you know, to not drink coffee so much actually at all and to come off of anxiety medication. And then the third one was performance. So I noticed. I had promised that I was going to run the Boston Marathon for Layden when we were in the hospital. And so after she died, I wanted to maintain that promise. And so I ran it that first year. And at this point, I hadn't gotten into my gut health journey yet. I did fine, I did really well, but I was achy, I was sore, I did a lot of my training on an elliptical. I was battling injury. And that next year, after being really focused on my gut health, I didn't change much in my training program. If anything, I actually reduced my amount of training. I took 11 minutes off of my time and again I had so much more energy and my performance was way better. Now, if we want to get technical, the inflammation in my body was down. And so inflammation is going to impede our performance. Anyone knows? Tom Brady knows. He's all about keeping inflammation down. Shout out TB12. Big shout out TB12 and BB too, of course. But keeping inflammation down is huge, right? Allowing our body to recover again. Think of that energy bank. If we are putting so much energy to digesting our food, we don't have as much energy. Think of it again like money, right? If we're putting that much money, dollars. Think of all of your energy as dollars. Your digestive energy. Putting all my dollars to digesting my food. I don't have a whole lot of dollars to put on recovering from a workout, right? Or fueling for a workout on top of that. Knowing what things to eat right after a workout was huge for me. Huge. Like life changing, performance changing. So I also felt like I was getting so much more ROI return on investment from my workouts, from improving my gut health. And my body shifted a lot, which is good. And I think it just found alignment right with where my body's fitness was supposed to be at certain times. And it continues to do so. And then the last thing that was a huge change for me was that I found a lot of clarity. The best way I can explain it is I feel like I got out of this fog, like above the clouds. And again, gut health gives you more energy, it reduces anxiety. And also if we have toxins and heavy metals and food that's not digesting kind of sitting in us. We're going to feel heavy when we start moving stuff and eliminating stuff. We find this weightlessness, this lightness. And so when you have this lightness and this weightlessness, you're so much more open and so much more clear. And for me, I really attribute that. Like, I began, you know, I laugh. I used to do juicing workshops in my church in, like, the church basement, right? And I didn't even want to charge. My reverend made me charge just to cover my own costs, but I didn't want to charge. But I just. I won. I wanted to spread the power of gut health. I also want to be clear. Gut health does not mean that you just walk around drinking juices. It's what we eat, how we eat, the timing of what we eat, the combinations of what we eat, all of that. You know where to find me on move if you want to dive into that. But I found so much more clarity. So, one, I was doing these workshops because I wanted to spread the power of gut health, right? That's spreading Laden's light. And two, I was so clear that this was something that I was, like, meant to do, that there was something bigger. I laughed. Like, I got a website, you know, I started blogging. I was doing these workshops. This was all while I was working my former job full time. I just knew there was something more. And it was a year later that we started moov and doing the work I do now. So I believe, for me, it came from clarity of not just going through the grind. I mean, how many people listening feel like you're just going through the grind every day, going through the motions? I know, I was there. I get it. But when we feel our best, when we're functioning our best, we have this greater sense of clarity where we step back and we say, why am I doing this? How does it serve me? What is my higher purpose? And that may seem like a lot from a couple of green smoothies, but I am telling you it is true. And like I said, gut health is much more than that. Gut health is the way we eat our food. Chewing our food, hydrating our food, the combinations of our food. And it's going to look different for every single person because our guts are impacted by our makeup, our experiences, our past, what we've consumed so far. And so when you are healing your gut, the path you take is going to be really different than the path I take and than other people take. So I highly encourage you not only to start looking at your gut Health, but to have guidance and coaching in doing so. And if it's something that you're looking to learn more about, of course, you know, I'm happy to support you. We have move where we dive into. That's one of our three pillars. Gut health. Right? Gut health and nutrition is the belly pillar. We believe it's all three. Right. I do the life coaching, the mindset, which does the fitness. Watch out, she's coming for you. And then we do the gut health and nutrition in the center. So gut health has really changed my life for me. It was in my grief journey that I discovered it, and it took me out of a really, really dark place. And I do not believe I would be on the path I am now had I not chosen to improve my gut health. And it was a choice, and it was a hard choice for me to make because I kind of resented gut health because it had taken my daughter Laden from me. And why would I want to quote, unquote, support or quote, unquote, buy into something that had taken Layden? And then I realized that was pride and pain speaking and that Laden deserved to have her life to be honored and that I could learn from it, then help other people learn too. So you don't have to be grieving to benefit from functioning your best. If you feel sluggish or tired or foggy or anxious or unclear or have acne, any of these things, please do yourself a favor. Start noting your symptoms. Stop treating your symptoms. Let your symptoms be things that give you feedback, not that you just mask and shut down. Let them be feedback. Your body is telling you something. Listen, slow down, listen. And maybe begin to dive in a little bit on your own. Gut health, as I shared it, changed my life, and I really do believe it has the power to change yours, too. So thank you for tuning in. I hope this was helpful and gave you a little bit more of an understanding as to why this podcast is called Grief Guts and Green Smoothies. Now, when I talk about guts, it's actually a little play on words. It's not just about gut health. It's also about having the courage to get out of our comfort zones, to face failure. All of these things. And of course, the green smoothies plays into that gut health component. But for me, these are three things in my life. They change my world. And whether it's one of them, all of them, or maybe just little bits of them, I hope that they can support you in your own journey. Friends, thank you so much for tuning in. If you have a second if it resonates with you, don't force it. We don't ever want to force energy. But if you happen to be on itunes and you subscribe, leave a review. I would so appreciate it because it's going to help me spread these messages. These messages and stories I have learned from Layden, which is going to allow my daughter Layden to shine on. Thank you so much.