How do you get healthy? The typical approach is certainly not working. In fact, it seems to be doing the opposite. It's not making you healthy, but there is something that is. Learn the key to living healthy so you can stop asking the same questions. The first episode of the new podcast series, Health School, starts with quite a bang. I share what I consider the most critical element of health, yet the most overlooked. That is energy. Discover the profound impact of energy on our biology, mind, and soul. This understanding will revolutionize your perception of health, empowering you to take control of your well-being and make it simple.

Learn More: https://thelivingwell.com/322 Don't forget to track where your energy level using: This FREE energy quiz to determine your metabolic output. This FREE download to track your body temperature and pulse rate. Take things to the next level: Get health advice that works delivered straight to your inbox. The only place guaranteed to make you healthier and happier. Join The Weekly Fill here. Ready to go deeper and take back your health? Learn how to nourish yourself in a way that is personal to you while also helping you to fully embrace all of you. Take back your hormones, get more energy, and learn how to thrive inside Health Made Simple. Follow my day-to-day life plus mini tidbits of health encouragement on Instagram.

Your body's not that sensitive. It can be, but only because it's been pushed into forms of dysregulation so long it's turned to survival. Survival means your body will do anything to keep you alive, even if that means it works against what is healthy.

It's not the intended design. The intended design is to thrive. But when forced, it will revert to survival.

I had to learn this the hard way.

For years, I believed my body was just overly sensitive. It tended to react to everything, from foods to different beauty products and even occasionally the sun. My body felt overwhelmed in all areas. I could find nothing that would settle.

While I knew how sensitive a body could become, it wasn't my own health that made me confront the question as to why our bodies seemed to become so weak. It was one of my clients.

He was only a child but had taken a few tests out of desperation to realize his body was reacting to everything. Not just environmentally, but nearly every food was causing a chain reaction inside his body. What was supposed to nourish him was slowly killing him.

At a loss for how to feed him, his parents came to me for help.

When I laid eyes on him, I could tell his body was overwhelmed, but I also saw something beneath the rash on his skin and the dark circles under his eyes. He had life in him. He was just so undernourished it couldn't surface. It left me questioning how to nourish him when he couldn't consume anything that would sustain him.

Here, I began in-depth research into food sensitivities. I wanted to know why we are experiencing them more frequently than ever before. What I found was alarming and provides a solution to health the health space has repeatedly overlooked.

In this podcast, I highlight why we are becoming more sensitive but also remind you this was not the design. You were not designed in weakness but strength. Your body can heal and thrive amongst several healthy and even unhealthy things. But it can only do that when it has the nourishment and support.

You must change the paradigm and see your body as good to get healthy.

Learn more: https://thelivingwell.com/321

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:

• Upgrade Your Wellness Routine With This Tip
• 5 Ways To Guarantee Health Success
• 15 Healthy Habits To Take Into The New Year
• Why I Gave Up Finding Myself (Real Story)
• The Power of A Habit

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

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:

• Upgrade Your Wellness Routine With This Tip
• 5 Ways To Guarantee Health Success
• 15 Healthy Habits To Take Into The New Year
• Why I Gave Up Finding Myself (Real Story)
• The Power of A Habit

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:

• Upgrade Your Wellness Routine With This Tip
• 5 Ways To Guarantee Health Success
• 15 Healthy Habits To Take Into The New Year
• Why I Gave Up Finding Myself (Real Story)
• The Power of A Habit

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

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

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

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

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