by Amanda Malachesky | May 16, 2019 | Chronic Illness, Diet, Food Intolerance, Food Sensitivities, Functional Medicine and Coaching, Functional Nutrition, Nutrition, Uncategorized
It seems like everyone today is aware of food intolerances. It’s likely that you have tried at least one elimination diet in an attempt to improve your digestive or other symptoms. And with good reason: our daily food intake has a lot of effect on how we feel. Food is the main foundation of our health and how we feel—along with our habits around self-care, exercise, stress reduction, and sleep.
But along with the widespread use of special diets and restrictions I see being used by those with food intolerances, I also see a lot of very confused people. The Facebook Groups I frequent, related to autoimmune disease, digestive disorders like SIBO or IBS, and chronic fatigue, are full of people asking questions like:
“I have been eating a Paleo diet for a while, but I recently read about the low histamine diet, and I think histamine might be part of my problem. But half of what I eat on the paleo diet is high histamine, I’m so confused. What should I do?”
“I have been told to go AIP, Keto, low histamine, no dairy, no Eggs by my Functional Medicine Practitioner following the results of my elimination diet. I know I can do it, but I’m getting cold feet. Any tips and tricks to make this a little easier?”
“I’ve read about several diets that are “good” for SIBO—low FODMAP, SCD, GAPS, Cedars Sinai diet. But there are foods that some diets restrict that other diets say you can eat. Does anyone have an explanation for these discrepancies?
Or: “Diet. Do I need a dietician? I’ll stick to one diet, then hear of another and veer that way. Then I find myself cheating, feeling guilty, and picking another diet. My Naturopathic Doctor just said to do the SIBO-specific [diet] 80% of the time. It’s hard when you are surrounded by family who can eat whatever, whenever.”
Sound familiar?
As a bonafide do-it-yourself-er, if I want to do something like a specialized diet, I spend time online, or buy a book or two about it, and dive in. But even with a very detailed book as a guide, many of our health situations are very nuanced and complex, and need a more nuanced approach.
Though a handout or a book is a great starting place, successfully applying a specialized, therapeutic diet requires a methodical approach. To use this approach makes sure that you are appropriately using the diet as a tool to learn more about your unique body, so you can continue to make better and better choices.
The alternative is blindly grabbing for the next right thing, anxiety about whether you’re doing it right, and hopping from one diet to the next , without really understanding what you’re seeing and what’s best. For example, how do you know if the diet is really working for you? Should you be concerned about deficiencies? How restrictive is too much?
So I’m going to spell out the method and approach I use to help my clients with digestive symptoms and food intolerances adapt the principles of using therapeutic diets so they can be successful with their food-as-medicine approach. You can use these tips to improve your success, too.
Food Intolerances Key #1: A Basic Elimination Diet, to Remove the Most Common Inflammatory Foods, Should Be Completed First.
The thing most therapeutic diets have in common is that they typically eliminate the top 3 most common inflammatory foods and focus on whole, real food. In my practice, I consider this to be gluten, dairy, sugar, and alcohol at a basic level, followed by the next top three, corn, soy, and eggs. A significant number of symptoms improve with this approach alone.
So, if you haven’t already gone down the elimination-diet rabbit hole, I recommend starting with a basic elimination diet that removes these top 3‑6 foods, and focuses on removing anything processed and eating nothing but real food for 30 days.
Many people find that this basic level of clean up provides a lot of relief from food-sensitivity symptoms. Most of us can benefit from this template at least once or twice a year.
A friend and colleague of mine, who doesn’t have any significant health issues, has recently decided to do this cleanse, using the Whole 30 template, twice a year for a month at a time, and always notices that his sleep and stress management improves, digestion improves, and he generally feels great.
When my clients use this approach, they usually find they sleep better, have less digestive upset, better skin, more balanced mood, and they often lose unwanted weight as a side benefit.
A significant number of problems clear up when you eliminate gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, and focus on eating whole, unprocessed food. This is the food our bodies were designed to eat, and is a valuable investment in our health, no matter your health issues.
Food Intolerances Key #2: Choose the Right Template and Customize
OK, so you did the 30-day elimination diet, but you are still seeing food intolerances and symptoms, and are confused about what foods are contributing to the problem. Now what?
The next step is to choose another elimination-diet template to work with, to see if you can isolate the food-related causes of your symptoms.
Diet templates like the Autoimmune Paleo, Keto-Adapted diet, or Low FODMAP diet are examples of templates that might help you figure out what is causing trouble. They are important and essential tools, and should absolutely be used. But as tools, they are really just the place for you to start.
The most important step here is to choose the right template for your situation. Imagine that your best, personalized diet is a small apartment in the middle of a huge city—you want to begin your search by looking in the right neighborhood to start.
So for example, if you have been diagnosed with IBS, or have symptoms that suggest IBS, you probably shouldn’t give the keto-adapted diet a try. (See my video Is Keto Good or Bad? Keto for IBS). It’s generally acknowledged that the Low FODMAP or Specific Carbohydrate Diet is a useful place to start thinking about which foods might be triggering your IBS symptoms.
In contrast, if you are have Type II Diabetes and Metabolic syndrome, the Low FODMAP diet probably isn’t a useful template, whereas the Keto diet might be right for you. For more about how to choose the right diet template, check out my earlier blog post Choose the Right Elimination Diet for your Persistent Symptoms.
Next, to get the best mileage out of diet template, you must take it and make it truly your own. The way to do this is to:
- Work with the suggested elimination lists to choose small groups of foods to eliminate for a few weeks. The most likely culprits are the ones you eat frequently, especially daily.
- After your elimination period, test them one at a time to see if they really do cause symptoms. You can use a Food-Symptom Diary (like this one) to track your results.
- Remove the foods that truly cause a change in your symptoms or mental state while you work on healing the underlying causes of food intolerances (usually things like gut dysbiosis or leaky gut).
Food Intolerances Key #3: Only Test Specialty Elimination Diets for a Set Amount of Time, and Customize, Customize, Customize:
Specialty elimination diets, like Autoimmune Paleo, Low FODMAP, low histamine, low oxalate, low salicylate diets, should be a) trialed for about a month, and re-evaluated at the end of the period; and b) should be customized.
One thing I’ve found personally, with my food intolerances, and more widely with clients is that they are rarely sensitive to everything on that list. Our bodies are complex systems, with many overlapping influences, and our food tolerances are as unique as our fingerprints.
The key here is that the template tells you where to look. You have to look at that list and identify the likely culprits, but the wider goal that we shouldn’t lose sight of is that we want to have the widest-variety diet we can have.
We don’t want to eliminate foods that are actually working for us, and we don’t want to inadvertently create nutrient deficiencies by quitting foods that are actually OK for us. Eliminating foods that we DO tolerate for long enough can lead to reduced oral tolerance and actually increase food intolerances!
Specialty eliminations, with lengthy lists of things to exclude, should be taken on for a trial period, about a month, and then evaluated.
If you haven’t seen any improvement in that time, then that diet is likely not the right template for you, or there are bigger issues that need addressing. A supportive diet is always an important piece of the healing puzzle, but it sometimes isn’t enough.
Food Intolerances Key #4: If Symptoms Persist Beyond an Elimination Diet, You Need to Start Thinking About WHY Those Symptoms are Persisting.
The problem is likely bigger than just food. And regardless, I always want you to be thinking about why the sensitivities are there in the first place.
Some top possibilities include:
- Gut dysbiosis or SIBO
- Leaky gut
- Adrenal or thyroid problems
- Gut adhesions/scars
- Environmental illness from mold, pollen, dust, household toxins, workplace toxins, etc.
At this stage in your game, it’s important to find a qualified Functional Medicine or Functional Nutrition Practitioner, or Naturopathic Doctor, or similar holistic health care provider to help you investigate your root causes.
Each of these providers has a methodical way of figuring out where to support your body in your quest to regain function and quality of life.
Food Intolerances Key #5: It’s Vitally Important to Work Methodically.
It’s easy to skip around, get confused, and just get no clarity while diet hopping. But the true value of the elimination diet work is to test a series of theories about what is causing your problem, and to slowly cross off the ones that have nothing to do it.
In this way, you build on your experience and create a highly personalized diet template. And not only this, but this work empowers YOU to intimately understand what your body is doing why.
If we return to a question from the top of this article, I can now answer it:
“I’ve read about several diets that are “good” for SIBO—low FODMAP, SCD, GAPS, Cedars Sinai diet. But there are foods that some diets restrict that other diets say you can eat. Does anyone have an explanation for these discrepancies?”
The reason for these discrepancies is because there is no one, right diet for everyone. Food intolerances are caused by many different possible causes, and without doing some methodical investigation, it will be difficult to tell why this template helps and this other one hurts.
There is a right template to begin with, and this will depend on the specific symptoms or problems you are trying to address. Once you’ve chosen that diet template, it must be customized specifically for YOU! You may not need to remove everything or even a lot of the foods on the list.
This person asked specifically about SIBO, and why all these diets are supposed to work for SIBO. The answer is because each person’s SIBO is unique, and has unique causes. For many SIBO patients, the low FODMAP diet is very helpful. But “FODMAPs” are five different types of fermentable starches. The particular bacteria causing your SIBO bloating, diarrhea, or constipation may only be interested in one or two of them. But to figure this out, you must do the methodical work of getting clear about which specific foods are triggering your symptoms.
Doing this work is definitely a little bit time consuming, compared to popping a pill, or using a “stock” diet template, but it provides drastically better results in the end.
Conclusion:
Cutting through the confusion of which diet to eat for your health can be easy: simply choose the right place to start, and do your homework about which foods are specifically a problem for you. Working through this method will provide you with the most useful food information you could imagine: a perfect, tailor-made diet, uniquely suited to your personality and circumstances.
If after reading through all this, you’re still confused, or not sure how to move your situation forward, please reach out to me to get some support. This is the exact method I use to help my clients, who struggle with everything from anxiety to SIBO, figure out what to eat to thrive, while minimizing symptoms.
When you’re ready for that kind of support, you can start the process of becoming my client by scheduling a Free, 30-minute Assessement Session here.
by Amanda Malachesky | Apr 15, 2019 | Digestion, Functional Medicine and Coaching, Functional Nutrition, IBS, Stress, Uncategorized
Today’s blog post is a guest post by Ben and Rupali Brown, owners of Pali Yoga in Eureka, CA. I reached out to them to help you learn about the most useful and valuable yoga poses to support your digestive health, particularly symptoms of bloating and IBS. Ben and Rupali are a husband and wife yoga team, and offer a wide range of Vinyasa flow classes, restorative classes, barre yoga, and more. If you happen to live on the NorthCoast, check out their studio.
Whatever the cause of belly bloating, simple yoga poses can go along way towards helping to relieve the symptoms of belly bloating.
By practicing a range of asanas, we get our bodies moving, which increases blood flow and aids in the expulsion of gas and excessive fluid retention.
There are both physical and mental results of these poses that will positively effect belly bloating. Simple inversions calm the nervous system and give gas an easy pathway out of the body. Twisting stimulates your internal organs and helps you move internal stagnation, while forward folds can also put direct pressure on the abdomen to squeeze gas out.
Additionally, breathing in a way that encourages abdominal contraction on the exhales and dilation on the inhales will increase peristaltic (digestive) motion.
Lastly the benefits of calming the nervous system and reducing anxiety will have perhaps the greatest impact on the healthy functioning of our digestive system, discouraging the over-production of gases in the first place.
While practicing these poses for bloating, focus on contracting the abdominal muscles during exhales, and relaxing and dilating the belly during inhales. We recommend a range of asanas, or poses, from twists to inversions, that will help increase blood flow and stimulate the digestive tract to remove gases and fluids that have become trapped.
We recommend a sequence that begins reclining on the back, to allow the nervous system time to relax, which will create the correct conditions for the physical poses to help. Here are the poses we feel are most likely to reduce bloating and improve digestion.
Apanasana (knees to chest pose)
Draw knees tightly into chest, without creating tension in the shoulders and neck. If range of motion allows, interlace hands to elbows around the shins and hold for approximately thirty seconds. A simple modification is to practice holding only one knee at a time.
Supta Matsyendrasana (reclined twist)
Twisting sometimes offers nearly immediate relief for significant bouts of abdominal distress, and also offers the benefits of stretching tight spinal muscles and stimulating the internal organs.
Lying on your back, bend both knees and place your feet firmly on the ground. Move your hips a few inches to one side and drop your knees towards the other. Make micro-adjustments to your upper body so that both shoulders can rest easily and evenly on the ground.
If needed place a blanket under the raised shoulder to allow it to rest. Make sure to switch sides, and hold for 30 seconds at least.
Setubandhasna (Bridge Pose)
Inversions like Bridge Pose help calm the nervous system, stimulate the circulatory system, and encourage the expulsion of gas from the abdomen. Of course this can reduce bloating!
Lying on your back, bring your feet to the floor and knees to the sky, taking a moment to bring your heels in fairly close to your pelvis. Engage your thighs towards each other, press evenly through the feet and lift your hips off the floor.
Pause for a moment and bring your hands, elbows and shoulder blades closer towards each other, and then press your hips and abdomen up as high as you can while maintaining even, easy breathing.
Marjariasana Pose (Cat Pose)
Toning the front compartment of your abdomen will stimulate peristaltic motion, allowing your body to bring itself back to equilibrium, and relieve bloating.
Coming to your hands and knees, with your hands under your shoulders and your knees under your hips, press the ground away actively with your hands, broaden your shoulder blades, “tuck your tailbone”, and arch your back strongly to the sky. Focus on contracting our abdominal muscles especially with exhales and softly releasing them on the inhales.
This pose can be held, or it can be practiced in conjunction with “Cow” pose. Alternatively you can come back to neutral spine with the inhales and repeated 10-15 times with each exhale.
Malasana: (Yogic Squat)
This asana simulates the correct body position for elimination, and massages the end of the digestive tract including the colon. This can help eliminate gas and move the bowels, relieving bloating.
In a standing position, turn your toes out slightly, with heels approximately the width of your hips. Squat down between your heels. Lift the crown of your head upwards as you drop your pelvis downwards, using these two opposite forces to lengthen your spine. Use your elbows to press the thighs apart and make Anjali Mudra (prayer hands). Squeeze the thighs in against the elbows.
If it is uncomfortable or impossible to keep the heels down, prop them up. If there is too much strain in the knees place a block or a bolster under the sit bones.
Uttanasana (standing forward fold) with a pillow
Uttanasana offers the benefits of inversion, and is also a great tonic for an over-stressed nervous system. If your bloating is made worse by stress, this may help. The pressure from the pillow may also help expel gas.
Standing with your feet hip-width apart, place a firm pillow at the top of your thighs. Hinge forward from the hips and let your hands fall towards the ground. Bend your knees slightly especially if you tend towards discomfort in your lower back.
Find the ground, or yoga blocks, or your ankles, with your hands, and fold deeply, relaxing your head to gravity. Allow the pillow to exert light extra pressure to your abdomen.
Balasana (Childs Pose)
Begin on your hands and knees with toes stretched out. Shift your hips back to sit on the heels and rest your abdomen onto your thighs and your forehead onto the floor. Either extend your arms out ahead or behind you. If there is discomfort in knees place a folded blanket in between the feet and hips and/or place a bolster under the forehead. Hold for a minunte or longer.
We encourage practicing these poses and holding each for approximately thirty seconds, and repeating as needed.
Need help integrating relaxation practices AND nutrition and digestive support? Please grab your Free copy of Roadmap to Gut Recovery to learn more. You can also schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me. Together, we’ll identify where your best, most efficient action towards healing can be directed. I look forward to meeting you!
by Amanda Malachesky | Aug 31, 2018 | Functional Medicine and Coaching, Functional Nutrition, Uncategorized
As a Functional Medicine Nutrition Practitioner, I am drawn to work with people who have confusing, complicated cases. I LOVE sitting down with a stack of labs, an interview, and a case history, and working to help a client connect the dots, so they can create a path out of their health-challenge-wilderness. They want a root-level solution.
Many people who are experiencing a complex health challenge WISH someone would do this for them.
This is where Functional Medicine and Functional Nutrition providers fill the gap left open by the insurance-model of health care, because not every health problem fits into the diagnose-prescribe-treat model. A 7-12 minute office visit simply isn’t sufficient to gather the information needed to create a root-cause resolution solution for complex illnesses.
While Functional providers are trained to make sense of complexity, there is no reason why YOU, as a client or patient, can’t play this game as well. You can uncover important details about your own health challenge, and be an integral player on your health team.
But how do Functional Medicine and Functional Nutrition providers do this work? What can you, a patient or client learn about your own case by doing some of your own legwork?
The Functional Nutrition Timeline and Functional Nutrition Matrix are two tools you can use to do this.
I’d like to share more about these two simple but radical health care tools, so you can play with them yourself and work to unlock your case mysteries and clarify your healing path.
The Right Functional Medicine Tools are Key for Success
Before I was introduced to these two tools by my mentor and teacher Andrea Nakayama of the Functional Nutrition Alliance, I was using a complicated spreadsheet that tallied a client’s self-reported symptoms with points.
Not only was it hard for both me and my clients to use, but the clinical value of the information was hard to glean.
The Functional Nutrition Timeline and Matrix are two user-friendly and intuitive tools that help clinicians think into a case systematically. Nakayama adapted the Functional Medicine Timeline and Matrix that The Institute for Functional Medicine teaches in its clinical training coursework for use in her Functional Nutrition clinic and training programs.
One of the most important things she noticed was needed when you are struggling with a complex health challenge is a framework to help clarify what is happening in your body and why. You need to discover where to look upstream for source problems. The Timeline and Matrix are the tools that help us do this.
The Functional Nutrition Timeline
The Functional Nutrition Timeline is essentially what it sounds like: it’s a chronological map of your health issues throughout your life, including detailed information all the way back to your parents’ and grandparents’ health.
This is often intuitive for people looking for answers about their difficult health problem. Those of us with puzzling symptoms have been known to pore over all the details, hoping to reveal a new clue to reveal answers. We think if we can note enough details, the picture will become clear.
I once interviewed a woman with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a connective tissue disorder. When she presented a timeline she created of her illness to her doctor, he looked at her a little funny and said, “I had another patient do the same thing, and they were my only other EDS patient.”
In most cases, the emergence of a more chronic health problem is not something that just happens out of the blue. There is often a confluence of many events that collectively created it.
Correctly identifying these triggers can help you to understand where you need to work to resolve your issue at its most upstream location. The Functional Nutrition Timeline helps you do this.
To create a Functional Nutrition Timeline I use an extensive health history and interview with my clients. In the health history, I ask them about their background: their birth, childhood, teen years, significant life events, injuries, illnesses, travel, stresses, potential environmental threats, like indoor air quality in their place of work or in their home, and so on.
But as you live inside your own body, you can review your own situation and your own history. You know it better than anyone.
You want to note not only the health events you have experienced, but you also want to make note of what may have triggered those events. Anything that you feel is important should be noted.
You must also explore the particularities of your situation. How did your condition evolve and change over time? When did it begin? When did it get better or worse? What other conditions are contributing?
This information may be useful in and of itself, but provides a whole new perspective when collated onto the Functional Nutrition Timeline.
I am regularly surprised by the power of making connections on the timeline. For example, a client shared that they began having seizures at one point in their history. I suspected environmental toxins as a cause, and asked about them. But later, I asked whether there had been any history of car accidents.
The client had been in a significant car accident 3 months previous to the onset of seizures. The client had never made this connection, nor had the various doctors to whom they had gone trying to figure out the issue.
Understanding the specific demons we are confronting helps us craft effective solutions! In this client case, the missing connection between the seizures and a likely traumatic brain injury kept them from the most appropriate care. To best help yourself heal, you must understand the breadth and depth of what you are facing, and how it came to be.
TIMELINE ACTION STEP:
You can create your own Functional Nutrition Timeline by mapping out significant health events in your own life. Map them out in any way that makes sense to you.
Once you have things mapped out chronologically, consider what you know to be true about what might have triggered those events: Were you recently sick? Was there a recent stress event, like a change of job, sick child, divorce, money stress, or whatever else you can think of? Did the onset of symptoms correlate with another health event, like a pregnancy or surgery? Note the potential triggers on the timeline.
What can you learn about the evolution of your health challenge throughout your life? Make some notes, and consider asking your trusted health provider about this at a future visit.
The Functional Nutrition Matrix
Functional Medicine practitioners keep a holistic view, and no detail is too small to take note of. While creating the Functional Timeline helps you understand the big picture of what we’re dealing with and why it’s happening, creating the Functional Matrix helps you understand which body systems need attention, and helps you craft the skills to address them.
I like to refer to the Functional Matrix as your case map. First, it summarizes the top highlights of the Timeline on the left-hand side by noting the Antecedents (family history), Triggers, and Mediators.
In the center area, we make note of your current symptoms and relevant lab results, and mark them in the body area that is affected: Gut, Immune, Mind-Spirit-Emotions, Oxidative Stress and Fatigue, Hormones and Neurotransmitters, Structural Integrity, Environmental Inputs, and Detoxification.
Looking at your case details in this way helps you organize the complex, overlapping symptoms, and helps you prioritize your approach.
On the right hand side, we add in the all-important realm of skills, which represent the actual on-the-ground actions we will take to work on shifting the terrain of illness. This includes Sleep & Relaxation, Exercise & Movement, Nutrition & Hydration, Stress & Resilience, and Relationships & Networks.
This one sheet of paper can summarize your case history, your current situation, and what you’re already doing to help yourself, and where you want to go. It can help you see clusters of symptoms, and help them feel less random.
Having a completed Matrix can also help make the most of that short office visit with your other providers by giving them the most important context of your illness. It can save them the time of needing to work hard to discover all of this via interviewing, so they can focus on crafting care solutions.
Not only that, but I find that it helps educate clients about the physiology of what is happening inside their own body. For example, many clients don’t understand that food cravings can indicate a hormonal or neurotransmitter problem, or that fatigue can be an indicator of liver health. Understanding these connections can open the doorway to solutions that you hadn’t previously imagined.
But even more important than the Timeline and Matrix themselves are the conversations that open up between you and your providers to help connect the dots. Ultimately, the best Functional Medicine tools position you in a new relationship with your body, highlighting self-knowledge, personal empowerment, and connection to the intricate inner workings of your body and psyche.
MATRIX ACTION STEP:
Draw an 8-arm star in the center of a piece of paper (see the picture above for an example). Label them with Gut, Immune and Inflammatory, Environmental Conditions, Oxidative Stress and Energy Levels, Detoxification, Hormone and Neurotransmitters, Mind/Spirit/Emotions, and Structural Integrity.
Note your varied symptoms in each area of the Matrix. Is there a particular area (or areas) where your symptoms cluster? See if you can take an action to lessen the burden of the symptoms in that area.
To learn more about how I can help you use Functional Medicine tools like the Timeline and Matrix to help you walk your own personal Road to Recovery, grab your copy of Roadmap to Recovery here
When you’re ready to learn more about creating your own Functional Nutrition Timeline and Matrix with my support, schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me. We’ll discuss how I can help you make sense of the complex details of your case, and create a plan for moving forward.
by Jen Briar-Bonpane | Jan 23, 2018 | Digestion, Inflammation, Recipes, Uncategorized
A winter cold swept through my family over the weekend. The old me would have pushed through it, ignoring my body’s call for rest and restoration… and the old me would have ended up much sicker for much longer. It pains me to cancel things that are important like social events, client sessions, and meetings. But I have learned to do it. Some things can’t be cancelled …like parenting or caregiving for elders. Allowing myself to pull back from as much as possible when my body is working through an illness has been life changing. The result is that I get sick less often and I get well faster.
Soup is another go-to when someone in my family is sick. During these cold winter months, a hearty homemade soup is a great way to nourish, warm, and feed your body. By starting with whole foods like organic veggies and clean protein, adding in some healing herbs, and healthy fats you are flooding your system with nutrient rich goodness that is easy to digest and soothing to sore throats.
Soup certainly doesn’t sound like any special life changing superfood. Yet soup has massive potential that often gets hidden behind the preservatives and artificial flavoring agents that are added to many store-bought varieties.
Making weekly (or even daily) soup with local, seasonal ingredients and high-quality broth is as potent as any superfood or supplement out there. It’s a wholesome way to nourish your skin, immune system, joints, digestion, mental health, and gut.
Starting with a base of chopped onion and garlic sautéed in coconut oil is a healthy foundation. Onions have antimicrobial properties and are a great support for a burdened immune system. In the Fall and Winter, soups made with root vegetables and hearty, healing herbs like sage, oregano, and rosemary are ideal.
Bone broth is another key ingredient in any soup. Homemade bone broth is rich in natural gelatin which is anti-aging and great for rebuilding damaged intestinal lining. Making a weekly bone broth at home to have on hand for soup bases, sauces, and cooking liquid (use with water to cook whole grains or add to your crock pot when cooking a batch of beans). Bone broth from scratch is as easy as throwing your leftover chicken carcass in a large pot of water and letting it simmer for 24 hours.
If you’re interested in getting healthy, restoring your digestion and boosting your energy, check out my comprehensive program, Gut Restore. The program is full of tips, strategies, tools, and recipes to help rebuild your digestive health and intestinal flora.
Enjoy this soup recipe in good health!
Curried Butternut Squash and Apple Soup
This is one of my favorite soups. I could eat it every day, it’s so tasty and nutritious. A good soup does wonders for the body and soul. Soups offer a certain comfort that other foods lack. They’re also a vehicle for nutrient dense ingredients.
Butternut squash is an excellent source of vitamin A and one of the healthiest starches you can get. It’s got a gentle sweetness to it which pairs well with a bold curry flavors and embraces the sweetness of apple. Apple and butternut squash naturally compliment each other. They’re harvested at the same time of year, they’re both high in fiber. When Fall comes around this is one of the first soups I whip up. It’s become a staple in my house and I hope you’ll enjoy it just as much.
Ingredients
1 Tablespoon coconut oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 Tablespoon curry powder
1 lb butternut squash, cut into cubes
3 granny smith apples, cut into cubes
4 cups homemade chicken stock or bone broth
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp thyme
Directions
Heat oil in a large pot, add onions and garlic and simmer until golden. Add curry powder, salt, butternut squash and apple chunks and cover with chicken stock. Allow to simmer for about 30 minutes until butternut squash is soft. Use an immersion blender or add to your blender in batches to create a smooth creamy consistency, enjoy!
- Another alternative to cutting the squash is to split it in half, remove the seeds and roast in the oven with skin on oiled baking sheet at 400 degrees for one hour (or until fork can easily pass thru). You can then cool it a bit and scoop the flesh directly into the blender with the broth and other ingredients.
by Jen Briar-Bonpane | Jun 12, 2017 | Uncategorized
Changing your own diet can feel like a monumental task. When your child has health issues that warrant big changes in what they eat, it can be downright overwhelming. Working around children’s food sensitivities and guiding them to give up foods they love can be tough but there are some strategies we can use to ease the journey and get them on board with eating the foods that can nourish and heal their unique systems.
Support, Support, Support
Whether you are changing your child’s diet to eliminate food allergies, address auto immune conditions, boost immune response, heal gut issues, decrease ADHD or autism symptoms, support thyroid function, manage Lyme disease or PANDAS, or balance blood sugar, it will be more manageable if you have support. Parenting a child with health challenges can be excruciating. Taking on food changes against that backdrop might feel impossible. Getting support as you move through this is essential.
Who supports you as you tackle food changes with your child? Who supports you as you make dietary changes for your own health?
Take some time to reflect on these questions and enlist the folks that come to mind to be your cheerleaders as you move forward. You may want to include providers like a therapist or health coach who can give you their undivided attention, encouragement, and problem-solving.
Kitchen Collaboration (aka “buy in”)
Depending on your child’s age, they can work with you in a variety of ways to have some ownership over their food choices. My 3 year-old has always been gluten and dairy free so avoiding these foods is fairly easy for him. Getting him to eat more vegetables, however, is a bit challenging. He is most open to eating food he has helped to prepare. So, when I get him planting, weeding, and harvesting in the garden, he eats more greens. When I let him cut up mushrooms with a little butter knife, he will eat some of them. Older kids can help by picking out recipes that appeal to them and making a meal schedule. My 10-year-old jumped on this opportunity when I let her do it on the iPad. I opened a vegan website and let her peruse the recipes and save the ones she liked into our online meal planner. You can also have kids pin appealing recipes to a Pinterest page.
What are some age-appropriate ways your child can be involved in food preparation and planning?
Give the Why
We all tend do better at making behavior changes when we understand why we are doing it. This is true for our kids as well. If your child is eliminating gluten to address thyroid issues, help them to understand why that is helpful. Visuals can help make sense of the why. I recently drew a cartoony version of gut villi to illustrate to my 10-year-old how permeable gut works and why her multiple food sensitivities are happening. This leads logically to why avoiding specific foods for a while will help her gut heal and reduce her symptoms and feel better. She was much more positive about the changes after we looked at these ideas together.
What kind of explanation will resonate with your child… verbal, visual, physical, written, etc.? Do you feel like you understand the why? If not, who/what can help you with this?
Make it Yummy
Feeling deprived can undermine healthy eating. This is true for grown-ups as well as kids. With food sensitivities, we often need to fully eliminate offending foods. Whenever possible, it feels better to approach dietary changes with the idea of crowding out the less healthy foods by increasing the healthier foods, rather than going cold turkey.
It is important to honor cravings when we can. This doesn’t mean we should indulge with a sugary treat because your child craves one. But, if your child is craving a food that they are not able to eat currently, get creative about how to satisfy that craving with a healthier choice. My daughter loves pizza but isn’t eating gluten or dairy. We have been experimenting with variations on cauliflower crusts. After a few different recipe attempts, she started to like the project of being a food critic and talking about what worked and what didn’t. We go on and on about it at dinner and laugh about the past fails. Then, when we like something, we add it to her list of approved recipes. Her siblings help by recipe testing and cooking things that help satiate her cravings. Paleo vegan sugar-free cookies were the magic this week. Indulging her craving for cookies and acknowledging her sadness about rarely eating baked treats totally shifted her mood and outlook about her food sensitivities.
What does your kid love to eat? Are there ways to provide some of what they are craving while keeping the food healthy? Can anyone else in their support circle or family bring some energy to the project by cooking or tasting or brainstorming?
A health coach or functional health care provider can help with this as well. Sometimes we can get food fatigue when we are hustling to create healthy meal after meal within the confines of a child’s food restrictions and taste preferences. You don’t have to go it alone… at Confluence Nutrition we love to support parents and kids in finding foods that work, tackling the why, and feeling better.
by Jen Briar-Bonpane | May 16, 2017 | Brain Health, Digestion, Functional Nutrition, Nutrition, Uncategorized
Most of us know by now that refined sugars aren’t good for us and don’t serve our long term health goals. So why is it so hard to resist a stop at the office cookie jar? Understanding how sugar and sweets affect our brain chemistry and mood can be the key to making healthier choices.
Maintaining balanced blood sugar is essential for overall health. Blood sugar that swings high and drops low throws the body into a state of imbalance that can make you feel extremely tired, jittery, anxious, or angry. Excess sugar circulating over time leads to increased insulin production, increased fat storage, high blood pressure, cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, exacerbation of autoimmune conditions, adrenal fatigue, hashimotos, candida, and mental health issues. Eating refined sugar and simple carbohydrates (the “white stuff”) wreaks havoc on our blood sugar and triggers a cascade of reactions in our bodies that affect all of our organ systems.
A few powerful brain chemicals play major roles in driving us to have another muffin, a little more bread, or another quick pass by the candy dish, even when we know we shouldn’t and are committed to our health goals.
- Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that creates feelings of pleasure. When we eat something sweet, we release this potent brain opiate and it makes us feel good…like an instant reward system.
- Another player is the beta-endorphins, which are the brain chemicals known as the brain’s pain killer. They help us cope and boost our feelings of self-esteem. Eating sugar temporarily increases the beta-endorphin levels and leaves us feeling like we can manage the stress of the day a bit better.
- And, of course, our good friend seratonin is part of this as well. When we eat sugar, our insulin levels rise resulting in increased tryptophan which is a precursor to seratonin production. So, more sugar means more seratonin, which helps us feel peaceful and more relaxed.
With these powerful chemicals flooding our system with rewards after we eat sugar, choosing to pass on the treats can be extremely challenging. The good news is that we can stimulate these three neurotransmitters without consuming the sugary foods and simple carbs that can feel good in the moment but set us up for disease in the long term. Here are a few ideas:
- Tyrosine-rich foods like lima beans, avocados, pumpkin seeds, and almonds can stimulate the release of dopamine
- Tryptophan-rich foods like spinach, salmon, mushrooms, mustard greens, and tamari help increase seratonin production
- The taste of something sweet on the tongue helps these feel-good brain chemicals flow. So try experiencing the taste of sweetness without the harm of refined sugar by using low-glycemic sweeteners such as stevia, or naturally sweet low-glycemic foods like grapefruit, nectarines, pears, and blueberries.
