Made For Living Well

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#320: 10 Habits of The Healthiest People Jan 04, 2024

Show notes

For decades, health has existed in a black-and-white space. It's been a series of rash and often unrealistic lifestyle changes, leaving one to believe the extreme lifestyle is the only one that will help you reach your goals.

It's also why resolutions have become such a focus of the new year. They bring the hope that you can change. The more extreme those resolutions, the faster things will change. But change rarely comes.

You can blame yourself, or you can blame the resolutions. But I'd argue neither is wrong. The failure happens because of the process or lack thereof.

On the podcast, I teach you how to create a process you'll love based on the habits lived out by the healthiest people on the planet. It begins by learning how to romanticize the process and not the destination, knowing if you stick with the process, the destination will come.

Check out these resources to get you started building better patterns and setting healthier resolutions:

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/320

#319: Five Health Skills You Didn't Know You Needed Dec 18, 2023

Show notes

I spent many years attempting to hack my behavior. Forcing change, trying to make something budge. It's the typical approach to life and health that appears like it should work.

Logically doing something should create something different. And it does, but only if you change the pattern because your pattern produces the outcome you experience. If you have a problem, that problem was birthed out of a pattern.

Change requires shifting the pattern, and that starts by understanding the pattern (learn your pattern here).

When you know the pattern, you can influence it by creating better skills.

Skills reinforce behaviors, even those you want to change.

I am skilled at sleeping past my alarm. I'm skilled at waiting too long to prepare food until I'm ravenous and will eat anything. I'm skilled at overthinking, worrying, and anxiety. I'm skilled at things that reinforce the outcomes, creating the problems I want to change. Changing this requires influencing the pattern with better skills.

Part two of this podcast mini-series teaches you how to transform the goal into skills you need to develop to create a better outcome. Change requires you to focus on developing the skills you need to create change.

Ask yourself what skills you want to develop this year. I'm not talking about your average skill, like getting skilled at weightlifting. But the everyday mundane skills necessary to influence your patterns.

Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/319

Additional Resources to get you started building better patterns and setting healthier resolutions:

#318: Psychology Of Setting Resolutions You'll Keep Dec 06, 2023

Show notes

I'll be the first to admit I've set many resolutions. Yet I've never achieved a single one. At least not that I can recount. Yet, I keep going back to the same approach, hoping one of these years it will work.

I never blamed the act of setting resolutions for why they didn't work, but I always blamed myself.

In the last few years, I re-evaluated the traditional resolution approach. I even begged you not to set resolutions, claiming it's not the answer to what you are seeking.

But then I started to question if that was another extreme approach that neglected the answer. What if resolutions do work, but the problem is how we work or don't work to achieve them. What if the answer was our actions?

The problem is we're attempting resolutions with the wrong approach.

Inside the three-part mini-series, I'm breaking down the three important steps to set the resolutions and actually achieve them. It begins by understanding you don't have a problem. You have a pattern. And that pattern feeds or enables the problem. When you know what pattern you are living in, you can break it to create a new one. That changes everything about your outcome.

Learn more by listening to this episode and be sure to read the blog post to get all of the details: https://thelivingwell.com/318

Additional resources to get you started building better patterns and setting healthier resolutions:

#317: How Your Nervous System Impacts Your Digestion Nov 16, 2023

Show notes

Leaky gut seems to be a national crisis. While diet is certainly a factor, the larger issue is stress or the lack of safety inside your physiology. Maria-Victoria Albina of The Feminist Wellness Podcast came on this podcast to share the response of the nervous system on our GI tract and the fight for safety within our biology. We talk about the polyvagal theory, co-dependence, and how to regulate your nervous system to heal your biology. Healing your gut is more than a food issue. It's a lifestyle response.

OTHER RESOURCES TO CHECK OUT: 7 Signs Your Nervous System is Dystregulated: https://thelivingwell.com/317 5 Ways To Use Your Nervous System To Get Healthy: https://thelivingwell.com/5-ways-to-use-your-nervous-system-to-get-healthy/ How To Feel More Energized And Stop Storing Body Fat: https://thelivingwell.com/how-to-feel-more-energized-and-stop-storing-body-fat/ How You Heal: Regulate Your Nervous System: https://thelivingwell.com/how-you-heal-regulate-your-nervous-system/ Put An End to Schedule Shaming and Create A Life You Love: https://thelivingwell.com/2024-nourished-planner

#314: Three Healthy Things Making You Unhealthy Nov 01, 2023

Show notes

It's easy to get sucked into the black-and-white trap of health. It's either good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. Leaving many people attempting tasks and eating foods that perhaps are healthy for some but not others.

The problem with this picture is it diminishes the secret of health. That secret is what your body is doing with what you provide. And that shifts the focus from perfecting the external ideas to understanding how your body reacts.

Health requires internal awareness.

Of course, health takes work. You're going to have to do things to create it. But don't get so lost in doing that you miss how your body is responding. Pay attention to what your body needs and do more of that. And remember, anything out of balance becomes unhealthy—even healthy things taken to a new level become unhealthy.

In this podcast, I share three healthy things making you unhealthy. It's always about balance.

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/316

#315: Change How You Feel Using A Body Scan Oct 26, 2023

Show notes

My therapy journey began because I wanted to stop feeling. Most therapy begins because you want to change how you feel. At least feeling the things you didn't want to feel. Just like I wanted emotional control in the form of only feeling what I wanted to feel and never feeling what I didn't.

Arguably, we'd all love that superpower. To feel the good without ever experiencing the bad. But it doesn't exist, and for good reason.

All feelings are valid. They have a purpose, even the painful ones. But most people have gotten good at avoiding or numbing feelings as a way to deal with them.

But it never deals with them. It just masks them.

Feelings are part of being human. You were created to feel, which means you should feel. The journey to healing is not by suppressing the feeling but by learning how to feel without being controlled by the feeling.

CHANGE HOW YOU FEEL BY UNDERSTANDING WHAT YOU FEEL.

When I went to therapy, I didn't know how much control I had over how I felt or at least the ability to change it. I spent so much time trying to run from feelings and create a life where I wouldn't have to feel the things I didn't want to that I missed the beauty of healing emotions and using those feelings to create a better life.

I realized the superpower we're looking for is not diminishing our feelings but creating better ones. It's being able to feel everything while using what you feel to shift your actions because you know how to heal them.

Emotional regulation is the superpower. That happens through healing your nervous system.

I brought Mandy L. Harvey on the podcast to talk about emotional regulation, healing from trauma, and how to feel without getting hurt by what you feel but using it to thrive.

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/315

#314: How To Stop Complicating Health Oct 17, 2023

Show notes

Health has been hard. I want to emphasize the has as a past-tense explanation. Because while it might have been difficult, it doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to live complicating health. It's only difficult because we've let it become that.

Perhaps not you personally, but the endless external ideas about what health means are overwhelming, even confusing, but only because we've neglected to understand health for what it is. And in the process, we've over-romanticized the outcome of health that we've neglected the process.

When you romanticize the outcome while hating the process, you create a fantasy of health rather than the reality of it.

I get it. The end goal is enticing. I don't think anyone can argue that we'd love to rock our skinny jeans and never have to worry about getting sick again. We'd love to arrive at that destination of health forever and always.

But health doesn't look or work like that. Honestly, I think that's more of a gift than we let ourselves believe. Health is a flow. It's growth and movement that is changing as we change. Because of that, it requires you to embrace the process.

The process of living health makes it personal and practical.

In this podcast, we talk about romanticizing the process of living healthy and the top five ways to stop complicating health so you can start living it.

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/314

#313: We Tried Continuous Glucose Monitoring (Levels) for 30 Days, This Is What We Learned Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) seems to be trending right now. While traditionally, I shy away from the fads of the moment. I had my eye on this one. Rather than another shot in the dark, continuous glucose monitoring offered tangible results in real-time. Unlike the scale, CGM opened up the internal workings of my biology to understand how it responded to what I did.

In real time, I was able to see how my body was responding. More than what I do, health is truly how my body responds. Understanding this piece of data allowed me to create change, not on ideas, but facts.

It helped me feel better than I have in a long time. I loved it so much that my husband also decided to take it for a test spin. Inside this podcast, we talk about our results (some that were shocking) and the changes we've made to help regulate our blood sugar. And we both share our opinions on whether continuous glucose monitoring is worth the investment.

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/313

#312: Five Reasons You Can't Stop Emotionally Eating Oct 02, 2023

Show notes

Food can be such a fight. In one breath, you genuinely enjoy food and want to enjoy the process of it. But in other, it's terrifying. Your mind races with questions on what to eat, how much, will this make me fat, or what if it's not good for me?

There are so many messages and ideas it's hard to imagine thinking anything but dread when it comes to food and your body. But this is not the intended design of food.

Food isn't to be feared. It's to be enjoyed and used to nourish yourself, just as your body isn't to be hated but loved and cherished for its role in helping you live your life.

It may not be a common thought, but you can experience food freedom. You can have the best of both worlds, enjoying food and loving your body.

In this podcast episode, I interview Jessi Jean, Mind Body Eating Coach, on what it looks like to experience food freedom and how we get there. If you intellectually know how you want to act with and around food but can't seem to get yourself to do it, this podcast is for you. Learn how to change your patterns to stop emotionally eating.

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/312

#311: Lower Blood Glucose Levels With These Doctor-Backed Tips Sep 21, 2023

Show notes

Managing blood sugar is not a new conversation, but it is worth having, especially considering the health benefits you could experience by learning how to lower blood sugar levels. Common thought has been to eliminate sugar and restrict all carbs, but blood sugar management is more than just a food problem. It's a lifestyle.

I interviewed Dr. Casey Means on the podcast to discuss blood sugar regulation and what she has learned since co-founding the company Levels. Levels provide an easy-to-use app connected to a continuous blood glucose monitor to give you results in real time.

I took it for a test run and was shocked by the results. Inside the podcast, I ask Dr. Means about the diet and lifestyle recommendations she has found to be the most successful in regulating blood glucose levels. I was surprised to hear her number one tip had nothing to do with food.

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/311

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