Hello, we are now halfway through the podcast series, which is exciting! If you’ve just joined us, then welcome – if you’ve been listening from the start then hopefully you’re getting a sense of how this is all building together. This episode is Chapter 10: Specific adrenal support, and it’s all about how you can use food to help calm down your stress hormones and prevent your adrenals from wearing you out.

So who needs this? Well, I certainly do, and I’m willing to bet that you do too. Our days are filled with stresses of various sizes, and sometimes larger threats and traumas too - alongside all the happier, rosier stuff. We can’t escape it, so we need to learn how to deal with it.

A major theme running through this podcast, the book it’s based on and my work in general is stress. Stress has such a profound impact on every aspect of your body and how it functions, as well as your mental and emotional health. So I spend a great deal of time helping people to become more stress resilient, i.e. better able to recover and bounce back. I’m not a psychotherapist, I do this with my own set of tools, which revolve around nutrition. 

More info: kirstenchick.com

Hi everyone, Kirsten Chick here, I’m back with another instalment of the podcast accompaniment to my book, Nutrition Brought to Life. Namely Chapter 9: The gut-brain-adrenal triangle.

We’ve been talking a fair bit about mindfulness and digestion, and the connection between stress and digestion. Chapter 9 extends this concept to look at some more of the links the make your gut, your brain and your adrenals influence each other so much. 

More info: kirstenchick.com

Hello and welcome back – or welcome if you’ve just joined us. This episode relates to Chapter 8 of my book, Nutrition Brought to Life.

I’ve already introduced you to my Three Mindful Mouthfuls practice – if you missed that, it’s in Chapter 6. And I’ve mentioned mindfulness a few times in previous chapters. Chapter 8 is called Mindful eating and your health – so we’re sticking with the theme for a while.

I start Chapter 8 with a quote from Rick Hanson’s book Buddha’s Brain: “Suffering is not abstract or conceptual. It’s embodied: you feel it in your body, and it proceeds through bodily mechanisms.” Buddha’s Brain is a fantastic book about the neuroscience of mindfulness – in fact its subtitle is “the practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom”, it’s a great one for the geeks out there. The point of this quote is that suffering, i.e. stress and trauma, has a very direct impact on how your body behaves, the state of its various tissues and all the biochemistry that happens there. And therefore your health. 

kirstenchick.com

Hello, me again. I hope you’re enjoying this podcast series so far. We’re about a third of the way through now, and we’ve looked at self-nourishment, digestion, energy production, insulin resistance and blood sugar balance, comfort eating and snacking, and my Three Mindful Mouthfuls practice. This week’s chapter introduces the fight/flight/freeze concept, some of the ways the freeze response can impact you, and how to start melting that and letting go. 

I’ve found this concept to be fundamental to my work because, like inflammation, getting stuck in this freeze response seems to be a key feature of how illness develops.

Chapter 7: Melting the freeze response and letting go is based on the chapter of the same name in my book Nutrition Brought to Life. Find out more about me and the book at kirstenchick.com

Hi, thanks for joining me again – and if you’re new here, today’s episode is on one of my favourite topics. It ties in with Chapter 6 of my book, which is all about Digestion, absorption and mindful mouthfuls. We’ve already had a Brief Look Inside the digestive system, and this chapter goes into a little more detail about how this system actually breaks down and absorbs the food you eat. I also introduce my Three Mindful Mouthfuls practice, which helps you do this more efficiently.

For more on me, Kirsten Chick, and my book, Nutrition Brought to Life, visit kirstenchick.com

This episode relates to Chapter 5 of my book, Nutrition Brought to Life.

There are lots of tips and ideas you can try out - and if you have any of your own you'd like to share, please do so at the Nutrition Brought to Life Podcast Community group on Facebook.

More info on me at kirstenchick.com

In the last episode – or chapter, as I’m calling them, as each episode focuses on a chapter of my book – we talked about harnessing sunshine and creating energy batteries called ATP in your cells’ mitochondria. This chapter, chapter 4, is called Sugar – the highs and the lowdown, and we’re going to look a little more closely at the sugar that holds that sunshine energy to begin with.

Now, sugar isn’t the bad guy – it’s actually a magical little sunshine carrier. It’s how we eat it that’s important. So I also give you a few tips around that, and there's more on this in the next chapter.

Hello again, Kirsten Chick here, this time talking about chapter 3 of my book, Nutrition Brought to Life. Chapter 3 is about Vitality – harnessing nature’s energy, i.e. how we get energy from our food.

We can get energy from the proteins, the carbohydrates (which break down to sugars) and also the fats in our diet. These are called your macronutrients, and they have many functions in the body, including building blocks for making structures such as cells, hormones, antibodies, enzymes and a whole lot more. The focus in this chapter is on energy, but it’s important to remember food is not just fuel. 

This also means that food is not just calories – the measurement for fuel you see on most food labels. We’re encouraged to count calories to measure our food, but this can be so misleading. You can, for example, eat your recommended daily calories in nutrient-poor, ultra-processed products and experience poor physical and mental health and also poor weight control as a result.  You are so much more than a slot machine for calories, and a nourishing approach to diet needs to recognise this.

Hi again, Kirsten Chick here. This episode is based on Chapter 2 of my book, Nutrition Brought to Life. Chapter 2 is called “Digestion – a brief look inside” and it’s just that. I talk much more about digestion and how to support it later on, so this chapter is really about familiarising yourself with the nuts and bolts of how it works. 

Most of us aren’t very good at nourishing ourselves. We may be good at looking after everyone else, but it takes a special kind of effort to nourish ourselves. Deep down, a lot of us feel like we just don’t deserve it. These patterns of low self-esteem can derive from specific situations, such as being bullied or abused in some way, but are also reinforced by social structures, conventions and expectations. So we end up feeling guilty when we do something just for ourselves, just for the pleasure of it, or for how much we benefit from it. Or perhaps not even knowing how to do that. 

But once we figure out how to really nourish ourselves, guilt-free, then we are in a much better place to serve and support our families and communities. So actually, taking time out to focus on ourselves, to recharge, recentre and rebalance, can be a selfless act rather than a selfish one. 

This chapter suggest some ways you can start to practise doing just that.

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