Episode 24: Misunderstandings of the "Pro-Metabolic" Approach
If learning about the pro-metabolic approach to food and wellness has left you feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone. As this lifestyle has grown in popularity, we have seen a number of misconceptions emerge about what the pro-metabolic approach actually is. In this episode, we break down some of the most common missteps we see and offer an alternative point of view that emphasizes individual self-experimentation and reconnecting with your body. We want to help you see how simple and beautiful your metabolic healing journey can be!
Join us as we discuss the following:
Why the pro-metabolic approach is not black and white
What factors might draw us to hard and fast rules around food
Taking radical responsibility for your unique health journey
The problem with taking health advice too far and ignoring your individual physiology
Weight when switching to a metabolically supportive way of eating: when you might need to gain, when you might need to lose, and how to know if you’re gaining too much too quickly
The surprising truth about pursuing expansion in the body over restriction
Checking our perception of what a woman’s body “should” look like
Practical tips to implement if you feel you are gaining weight too quickly
Why it’s important to use your own discernment when learning from “experts”
Giving yourself grace to unlearn, relearn, and make mistakes in your healing journey
Moving beyond physical root cause and examining emotional and spiritual influences
Resources mentioned
Episode with Michale Chatham: The Big Picture of Tongue Ties
Episode with Josh and Jeanne Rubin: Has Your Pursuit of Health Become Unhealthy?
Awaken Your Bow classes
Our episode on Kitty Blomfield’s podcast: How the fitness industry has lied about realistic weight and body fat goals with Fallon & Kori
Watch @TheStrongMermaid’s “Fertile” highlight on Instagram
Addressing Trauma on Your Healing Journey with @Samantha.Naturally
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay
“When you are grounded and rooted in the foundational principles that support your physiology objectively, you have the freedom—because you are resilient—to be able to take an individualist approach from there.”
Transcript
Fallon Lee All right, welcome back to The Freely Rooted Podcast. We are so excited to dive into a brand new season and cannot wait to share all of the amazing content we've got planned for the rest of the year. First, you guys haven't heard from us in a while, so why don't we talk about our summers and what we've been up to? It's been pretty low key around here. I had full intentions of doing year round schooling. I do homeschool, and I thought I was going to be the mom who schooled all through the summer. We didn't. But that's great. It's actually the break that we needed. We did a lot of traveling and resting, and Kori and I have done a lot of brainstorming for the fall, so that's been super exciting. Kori, what have you guys been up to over the summer?
Kori Meloy Yeah, it was going to be a pretty restful summer as well, and then a bunch of amazing opportunities came up for continued education and some mentorship programs for my husband and I actually to go through together. And so we're continuing mentorship under Michale Chatham. She came on the podcast on the tongue tie episode. And then I'm continuing education with her to learn more of the fascial care technique. Besides that, it's been really exciting to plan the retreat. As you guys know—if you didn't see our announcement about this—this will be a retreat. Our first ever retreat will be in Waco, Texas in December. And so we've been planning the details of that. And besides that, just a lot of outdoor time and surfing and sun and all the good things. So it's been an amazing summer. I'm excited to dive back into this.
Fallon Lee Yeah, for sure. Also, I have to laugh at the differences in our summers. I feel like you had this very whimsical aesthetically pleasing summer, and in Texas, it's been literally 108 degrees, and it's like we can't go outside. So I feel like we've lived different lives over the summer, but I'm excited for fall. Like Kori said, we have the retreat coming up. We have not launched a lot of details around that, so you're not missing anything if you're like, "I haven't heard about this yet." Just keep an eye on our Instagram and email blast. We will be opening registration and sharing some more information on that soon. And then today we are so excited to cover what feels like a really pressing and important discussion just around all of the dogma and misunderstandings that we find surrounding the pro-metabolic sphere. Because the truth is, I feel like, Kori, you and I both have almost distanced ourselves from this verbiage because anything with an official title can easily start to feel kind of cultish. And it's too black and white. It's too exclusive. That's not what we perceive this lifestyle to be. And so we want to break down some of those misunderstandings today because in truth, there really is a lot of gray area when it comes to healing your metabolism. And a lot of the conversations in this realm need to be very nuanced, and sometimes they aren't. So we want to try to break down some of our own opinions here, and then just talk about the practical definition of the phrase pro-metabolic. Really, it can be simplified, as does this support your metabolism? Pro metabolism. That's all it means. It's really that simple. So yes, there are principles that can—across the board—support metabolic health. So things like reducing our stress load, getting enough bioavailable minerals and nutrients. And then there are some subjective ideas that will probably vary a bit based on who you are. So your personal calorie needs, your macronutrient targets. What stressors do you need to change in your life? What exercise is the most supportive and enjoyable for you? Those things are a little bit more individualized, and so we don't want to put these blanket statements on top of any of these topics that really need to be based on who you are and what your environment is. So today, like I said, we're going to cover what we perceive to be some of the most misunderstood topics or maybe misinformed approaches that we see in the metabolic sphere. Kori, do you want to kick us off with the first one?
Kori Meloy Absolutely. And I think the first thing to kind of preface this with is just how much we appreciate and honor the individual and how much we honor you, everyone that is listening. And we also want to honor where you're at whenever you're coming into this space. And so that's why we've cultivated this podcast in a way where in the beginning it is really simple and it's really practical and it's kind of meeting the woman or man where they're at as far as maybe coming out of a space where you're used to someone giving you the rules. And we kind of ease you from a place where it's rules to a place that's more nuanced and gray. And we hope you guys appreciate that process because you can honor yourself where you're at. We can't just tell you, "Hey, stop thinking in the black and white." We know where you're at because we've been there. And I actually just posted a story that Paris Hodges posted on her story yesterday. I reposted it, and it said, "Nuance is a result of being minerally balanced and metabolically healthy." To even get to that place where you can even think that way is a result of your regulation and your groundedness and your capacity. And so the first thing we want to talk about is just this idea of metabolic health and the metabolic health approach not being this black and white, all or nothing approach. However, we can see how someone might come in and then be stuck in that black and white state and then walk away from it throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as opposed to realizing, "Wait, this says more about me and where I'm at than where this approach is taking things in general," if that makes sense. And we talk about this on the episode with Josh and Jeanne Rubin if you guys have listened to that. Hopefully this is not the first episode you're listening to if you're coming in. If it is, I highly encourage you to go back to the very first episode, but then working your way through. And even where we placed Josh and Jeanne's episode— it's called Has Your Pursuit of Health Become Unhealthy? Even where we placed that episode in our seasons was very particular for the people who might have come into this approach, like I said, and then are still in that black and white state. And they kind of introduce our audience to this idea of, "Hey, when you're in a state of undernourishment and stress and when your nervous system is on fire, you're going to cling to rules, and rules help us feel safe." And it's just this idea of also coming back and examining your childhood story as well. This is why the conversation around respectful parenting and our approach to wellness go hand in hand. Because if you grew up in more of maybe an authoritarian, maybe a hyper religious household—which is many of us, many of you because our generation was was raised this way by the previous one—you might be familiar with this idea of someone being called a good girl if you follow the rules or a bad girl if you break them and just being in these very fundamentalist boxes. And the alternative to that would be if you grew up with loving and firm boundaries that are enforced with developmentally appropriate natural consequences with connection and love at the center, meaning—in practical terms—you're not teaching your child you're a bad person, you're a bad girl if you are having a hard time with these boundaries. So with the reality that most of us grew up in a black and white kind of lens to life, it makes perfect sense how we have sought safety as adults by looking for black and white rules. And this is why it's fantastic marketing for a lot of these programs that are out there and why people flock to dieting every single year. Statistically, we know that 95% of people that go on a diet gain all that weight back and then repeat every single year. And so, yeah, it's fantastic marketing. It's a fantastic approach to get people to feel triggered and fearful and then go and be in this state where you're following the rules because it keeps you disconnected to your body. You're not actually asking yourself, "How does this food make you feel?" whenever you have a list of foods that you can and can't eat, you know? So a lot of people that are coming to our pages and then coming to our podcast for the first time, you are coming and asking us, "Okay, can you just tell me the foods? Just tell me the foods? Give me the rules." And then you jump in 100 miles per hour into what you might be calling a metabolic health journey, but it's just where you're at right now. And like I said, again, we honor that. We honor the fact that you might be just swapping your old diet plan for a new diet plan and then staying disconnected from your body because your brain is going, "I have to do everything right." You have to feel safe. You have to feel like you're a "good girl," "good person" by following the rules. And so all of this to say— let's say I'm sharing a testimonial on my Instagram stories from a course student, I'm not sending people to my course even though it's a testimonial for my course. I'm actually not sending people to my course. I go, "Hey, this is where you start. You start with the podcast. You start with the free guide. Start with the very simple and practical steps that are going to kind of build up that capacity slowly." So that that way, if you do want to do a deep dive into metabolic health, you're not going in in the dysregulated state where you're wanting to do everything all at once, where that can typically lead to a lot of weight gain. We're going to have that conversation here as well. And also just this idea of maybe getting frustrated if you're not seeing results right away or you're coming up with other symptoms and you just go, "Oh, it's not working. I'm just going to stop doing it and then go back to my old way." So yeah, the metabolic health approach is not this all or nothing approach, it is an individual case by case approach, and we are teaching you how to do that, and I'm especially teaching you to do that in my course is taking an individual approach. And so yeah, just being able to say, "Okay, I may have—in the past—kind of flocked to these more orthorexic type approaches," where you're just calling any food bad. This is something you can pay attention to it. If there are accounts out there that are calling whole foods bad and toxic and calling them like "truth bombs", that might be a little bit of orthorexic thinking. And so you can see how maybe your past self might have been like, "Ooh, I got to go listen to this." Whereas now you're like, "Wait a second. Why are we doing this? Why are we calling foods bad and good?" So we just need to—like I said—just honor where we're at, and realize that if we are looking for the black and white, it may say more about where we're at right now than the metabolic health journey in general. So, yeah, this is why I care, and this is why it matters. And this is why Fallon really cares and why it matters to her. Where if you come into one of our products, you are coming in with a state of radical self-responsibility for honoring your body where you're at and realizing, "I'm taking an individual approach to this because it's my body, because it's my health, it's my wellness, and I know how to be connected to my body." So anyways, this is not all or nothing, because what even is "all"? No one holds all the answers. We are all having our own version of self experimentation, interpretation of research, study of our physiology, and then also what resonates with us as individuals. And then those who are content creators package that up for you into a product and tell you to find what works for you within that framework. So yeah, it's highly individualistic and not authoritarian. And what's funny is when I've seen people kind of slap black and white rules onto the metabolic health approach, I always think of Dr. Ray Peat—who is largely someone who has inspired a lot of this interpretation of his work into the metabolic health space—and I just think, "What would he think of this idea of—" I've seen a nutrition review that was like, "The metabolic health approach: an honest review", or something like that, and it was calling the metabolic health approach a requirement to eat gallons of ice cream and orange juice. And I'm just like, "No one's saying that. No one is saying that." So anyways, speaking of food— Fallon, you being kind of the recipe queen—
Fallon Lee Oh, thank you.
Kori Meloy Where have you seen this conversation come up with food in your own audience as far as the black and white approach?
Fallon Lee Mm-hmm. I mean to start with, not a probably day or week goes by where I don't get a question from someone asking, "Can I eat this food?" or "Is this food bad?" And it just is this prevalent thought process, like you said, that there's some list that exists out there, regardless of what sphere you step into, where you have to check off all the good and bad foods. And so that's probably the most common question I get in terms of food is, "Is this supportive? Is this not?" And then we have to get into the conversation because a lot of people stepping into this do come from dogmatic backgrounds, myself included. And so a lot of the things I'm going to talk about today are actually very much relevant to my own journey. So when you hear, for example, that raw vegetables maybe aren't the best metabolic support. What people do is then they hear that and they go, "Okay, no more vegetables now." And that's what people do. And that's what I did. I mean, I did it. And so I can say that that this is a common thing that happens. So, you know, we hear things like raw veggies and cruciferous veggies can often contain anti nutrients. It makes them a little bit harder to break down, especially when they're not cooked. And we hear things like that plant nutrients are absorbed at almost half the rate of animal nutrients. All of this is true. All of this is true. That doesn't mean that you just see kale and you see—I don't know—cauliflower or whatever, and you run. I got to be honest, I don't know that I really want to consume a ton of kale and cauliflower. But the point is here that a lot of people hear these ideas that raw veggies, cruciferous veggies maybe they're not as supportive as you thought they were. And so now they say, "Okay, well, I'm just not going to eat any vegetables." That's not really what we're saying. So again, I don't personally find myself craving a giant bowl of cauliflower or kale like I probably would have eaten in the past. But I do often hear people say that they feel guilty because they transition to a pro-metabolic lifestyle and now they're like, "Oh, I'm really craving a salad or broccoli." And I'm like, "Okay, then eat it. Nobody told you that you can't eat those things." We've just decided that because someone said, "Hey, there's a better choice." Like, here's the deal: animal products, liver, oysters, organ meats are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. Does that mean you should never look at a vegetable? No. Everything has its place in your diet. You should still include these things. You can still include these things. Figure out how to make them supportive for your personal digestion. So cook them in butter, eat them with plenty of carbs and protein. If you want to have a big salad, have a big salad. Just see how your body responds. Nobody is saying that you can't do this anymore. The problem is that these are not bad foods. The issue is our culture has this weird obsession about tons of vegetables, right? We have this weird obsession with eating salads for every meal, having these giant cruciferous veggie bowls. None of this has a historical basis. In fact, broccoli was human engineered from cabbages and wouldn't have even existed like thousands of years ago. Okay, so this is a weird obsession that we have with like trying to do this volume eating approach where all we eat is vegetables. So when we shy away from vegetables, we really miss out on things like squashes and root veggies that can be really supportive. Beets are incredible for your liver. Root veggies. Obviously, we talk about carrot salad all the time. That's an incredibly supportive food. But what happens—and I saw this happen in myself—when you avoid things like potatoes and rice and other starches for so long, you suddenly hear that they're "okay" again, they're back in that yes column and you go just wild on them. And that's what I did. That's what I see people do because they didn't have potatoes and rice and starches for so long. Now they see that they're back on the menu, and we transition to this, "I'm going to replace every single vegetable that I ever ate, and I'm not going to eat any of those again, and I'm only going to eat potatoes and rice." Again, nobody has said to do this, but it's easy to do that because, again, we come from this dogmatic way of thinking that we hear like, "Oh, you know, potatoes and rice and grains are back on the table." And so we get rid of all of our root veggies like sweet potatoes, parsnips, beets, squash. Those are all amazing for our digestion and our blood sugar. And we should still be including them. But I know that so many of you listening can relate to me in this, that we finally discovered that these things were okay to be in our diet, and we heard that some veggies are kind of maybe not supposed to have like as big of a place as they do, and we just completely flipped the script, and we completely turned the diet that we were already following on its head and do it in the exact opposite manner. So instead of avoiding all carbs and starches, I'm going to make that my sole source of vegetables, and I'm going to avoid all of the other ones. That's not what this approach is about. And then again, the other big way that I see this sort of black and white thinking flesh out is all of the messages about, "Is XYZ food bad?" So most commonly that's about, "Are beans bad? Or lentils bad? Or grains bad?" And my typical response is that I don't call real food bad. That's just not how I'm going to function on my platform. Yes, it matters how you're prepping this stuff. And yes, certain things need to be evaluated through a historical lens in terms of frequency, amount. So that's why you'll hear us say things like, "A half a cup of nut butter doesn't really have historical basis." What people hear out of that is that nuts are bad. And that's not what we're saying. And that's what I did when I entered this space. I saw all of this about too much PUFA consumption and too many processed almond products. And then I just avoided nuts and seeds like the plague. And it wasn't until recently that I started craving Brazil nuts. And I was like— I had this internal battle of like, "Oh my gosh, can I eat Brazil nuts because they're a PUFA?" And I'm like, "This is ridiculous." Like, this is not the approach that we're trying to pursue. And so I got some Brazil nuts and I've been having some and they're amazing. And like, this is the thing that we have to keep in mind is that food is about context. So nuts are not bad. Is it probably a bad choice to be eating a cup of nut butter in a week? Maybe so. I don't know. Evaluate your own body. But I get asked daily if things like cassava, liver, adrenal cocktails, bee pollen, all these things are like "okay" for this or that condition. And I'm like, "I don't know. Are they? Are they working for you? How do you feel?" But we're just not going to reduce foods to a good and bad list. It's just not helpful.
Kori Meloy Yeah. And I hope you guys can kind of see the themes of our culture within this, with the good and bad conversations and just using those words to describe anything and everything and putting things in those categories. And I really like that you said the word guilt, because guilt has been used as almost a principle, almost a virtue—I would say—in the fundamentalist way of thinking in the Western Church even of just this idea of feeling guilt. What is that rooted in? And being able to realize if we're going to bring in the religious conversation into this, so many people are hung up on the idea of sin and bad, bad, bad. And we are bad, bad, bad, as opposed to focusing on the wholeness and the Sonship and just what Jesus has actually asked us to step into and what He's invited us to step into. And we can't get out of this way of thinking of I am so bad, if that makes sense. And another thing to think about is that it's not just with the conversation with food. Obviously this goes into all areas of life. And so let's say that you find out that your running a mile a day is not serving your body right now. And so you're like, "Oh, I'm just going to completely cut out working out." No one asked you to cut out working out. No one asked you to cut out movement. That would be the same logic as maybe finding out that the water that you're drinking is not mineral rich, and so you're like, "Well, I'm going to stop drinking water then," as opposed to let's add in the supportive water into our bodies, into our systems, into our daily rhythms that is mineral rich. There is so much supportive movement that we can do for ourselves as well that doesn't have to be a mile of running a day. And it could be that once you get into a more resilient state, you want to start running again because you crave it and you crave the movement of it as opposed to using it as a stress release. If you're addicted to it because it's a stress release, that can be a window into, "Okay, what am I actually using this movement for?" as opposed to moving because you love your body and moving because you want to honor it. And so, yeah, just getting out of this idea of cutting out everything because one thing is not supportive for your body right now is a really good practice of just being able to be like, "I don't have to cut everything out." And I talked about this actually on a live that I did with my husband last week or the week before on his metabolic health journey. And something that I brought up is something that I've observed in my course students. And I said, I was like, "I don't have any like science to back this up. I just have observation." And what I've found in my course students is there are certain phases of healing where— let's say that you decide canola oil is not going to be in my house anymore. I'm going to make a big effort to cut out canola oil or vegetable oils out of my diet. And then about a month in of you cutting out vegetable oils— which, by the way, are not a food, so I don't have any hesitancy being like, hey, that's a pretty easy thing to cut out because it's not actually a food. But let's say you are about a month in of not consuming a lot of vegetable oils and then you go out to a restaurant and you have something that's laden with vegetable oils and you feel like absolute garbage. This happens so much in the initial phases of healing that I hear about in my course students, where it's like there is a season where they are incredibly sensitive to those things that they have cut out because they're not supportive of their bodies, where every time that they consume them, their body is just saying no. Like, I don't want this in here right now. I'm working on healing. This is not the time for this. And then three, four, five months later, maybe they go back to that same restaurant, eat that exact same meal, and they're like, "I feel amazing." And so that is a really great sustainable goal is keeping in mind this is not an approach where you're just coming in to cut out all the bad things. That is not sustainable. I don't believe it's sustainable at all to cut out whole foods. I think a lot of that is fueled by orthorexic and disordered eating, and it's a Band-Aid over the things that are disordered in the way that you are thinking and living, and it can just stay Band-Aid-ed? Is that a word?
Fallon Lee I like it.
Kori Meloy It can just stay as a Band-Aid over your life where you're not actually addressing it because you get to live out your life in an orthorexic approach to food. And so yeah, I don't believe it's sustainable to just have a black and white cutting of things, but I think that in certain seasons you can find that it might be more beneficial to really reduce the PUFA content, whereas months and months later, nut butter sounds amazing to you, and you eat a couple of spoonfuls, and you feel really nourished by it. And so moderation is key. Being able to realize that the whole goal is building up this rooted, grounded resiliency so that you can have freedom in your life in every area is really the goal. And so being able to understand boundaries—loving boundaries—to be able to experience joy and fulfillment and freedom through your approach to wellness is just an incredible journey that I wish for everyone.
Fallon Lee First off, I love it. You basically unintentionally defined Freely Rooted in those last few sentences. I mean, that's exactly what this podcast is about: having healthy boundaries that support you while also feeling the freedom to pursue nourishment and joy, and I love that. I have to laugh that I— basically any overly dogmatic approach that I could have taken with metabolic health, I did. All of the stuff that we're talking about today, like cutting out all cardio because somebody said that maybe 10 hours of cardio a week is bad— I was the person who was like, "Okay, no more cardio. Got it." And I was also the person— you guys know if you've been following me on Instagram or probably even listen to the podcast that I was someone who I needed to gain weight and did gain weight. And I think that I probably even crossed a boundary. It's kind of hard to say about yourself like really how much weight did I need to gain? Because I came into this approach at a weight that I thought was too heavy. In hindsight, I'm like, "You crazy." Like I did need to gain weight. But I feel like because I was that person who was like, "All right, tomorrow I'm turning my entire life around, and I'm upping my calories, and I'm adding in this." I did it way too quickly. And so my weight gain, I think— I can look at now, and I think that it was sort of slow and steady, which actually we should talk about this a little bit more like the difference between—when you're gaining weight, how can we tell if it is supportive and needed versus if it's overnight? Remind me to come back to that. But I was somebody who just really dove in and did all of the dogmatic things, and it wasn't the best approach. And I'm not saying I'm not thankful for that, because now I do get to help educate women on a more appropriate approach to changing into this lifestyle. So let's talk about the weight gain a little bit more. We can't say that everyone will gain weight or nobody will gain weight. We just can't. This is a nuanced conversation. We can't say those statements across the board. Some people will gain. Some people won't. And it's honestly just that simple. People who are more likely to need to gain weight are those who have been on restrictive diets for a long time. Maybe they were already underweight, which is usually going to be anything under like 18 to 20% body fat. And a lot of the time—don't hold on to this number too tightly because it depends on height, etc—but a lot of the time women that I see who are under like 120 to 130 pounds, they often need to gain weight. Again, don't hold too tightly to that. But I will say at 5'5", when I was 135 pounds, I still needed to gain like 15 or 20 pounds to actually find lasting health. Those numbers aren't across the board, but that's kind of a generic framework of like, okay, you might need to gain weight if you have been dieting for years and years and years and years, your body weight is super low, your symptoms are screaming that you're undernourished. You might need to gain weight in that scenario. People who are likely to gain weight but might not need to gain weight are, again, those who dive in just head first way too quickly, adding in calories and higher macronutrient ratios overnight. So if you go from eating 1300 calories to 2000 calories within a week, you're going to gain weight. Or if you go from eating 50 grams of carbs—let's say you're coming from a keto background—and then the next day, you decide, "I'm going to do more like 200 grams of carbs," you're going to gain weight. And Kori and I both talk about reverse dieting or slowly increasing your calories in, Kori, your course and in my meal plans. And it's important that you follow these not just for your weight, but your blood sugar regulation, your metabolic health. Like we have to take things slowly in order to support our bodies. So a lot of the time when we see the weight gain, it's because somebody decided, "Oh okay, I'm going to follow this dogmatic approach, and I'm going to flip the script literally within a couple of days." And then as far as individuals who don't need to gain weight, I would love to have some back and forth on this. But I mean, I would say if you're already overweight, you probably don't need to gain more, and you probably should be losing fat after you start to heal your metabolism. But here's where the conversation gets tricky because our modern women are terrible at defining what a healthy weight actually is. So I can say that, again, I personally went into metabolic health fully convinced that I needed to lose weight just because I weighed more than I historically had. And this isn't uncommon. I hear so many women say that because they're— you know, "I'm not a size four anymore and I'm not 120 pounds," that they're convinced they need to lose weight. But if we look at body fat percentages, I think that's truly the most helpful thing because I would say that anything over around 35% body fat is when we start getting into that range of, okay, we actually need to pursue weight loss. Women can really thrive from like 20 to 32, 33-ish percent. And I get that not everyone knows their own body fat number. That's kind of a niche thing to know. You know, some scales can kind of help you find a general range or even you can find fat pinch tests online to give you kind of a decent picture. But I think it's important to understand that your personal definition of needing to lose weight for yourself might be a little bit skewed. So I don't know. Would you agree with that? That that’s the scenario where you don't really need to gain weight. You can just kind of like slowly pursue and healing pounds are not appropriate at that point.
Kori Meloy Absolutely. And I mean, this is such an important conversation. Also this is a very hard conversation to hear. If you are someone that did go in really quickly and you're like, "What can I do now? I'm mad at myself." All those feelings are bubbling up. You feel triggered. This is very human for you to have those feelings while you're listening to this. In fact, I've had a few hard conversations with course students who they came in from a dogmatic approach. I have an entire module dedicated to what happens when you have been dieting and what happens whenever you add in food too quickly. This is exactly what happens. This is how fat cells develop. This is the physiology of it. But they don't want to watch that module. They go straight to the, "Okay, well, what do I eat?" And then they're wondering why they gain weight and they're realizing, "Wait, there was an entire module where she told us how to not do this." And this is why I implement a reverse diet and why Fallon talks about this is because we want to give you guys the tools to be able to avoid any unnecessary weight gain. And so the pattern that I've seen is that if a woman comes in and they understand the physiology of what it means to restrict and then binge and re-feed—which that's the exact same thing if you think about it in the terms of going on a diet and then re-feeding—it's the exact same thing as just going from your past maybe dogmatic way of thinking to, "Okay, let me go buy gallons of raw milk, gallons of orange juice, put butter on everything." Which like, yes, those are all supportive foods. And again, I've talked about this on the podcast before and so has Fallon, but this is why I really don't like to do full days of eating because people are like, okay, screenshotting every slide so they can go and implement that into their days. And I'm like, that is not helpful. That is not loving you guys. That is not serving you guys. What is so much more supportive for you guys is to get connected to your own body and be able to decide on your own when to implement those foods. And so something else I want to add is also what your body starts looking as— let's say you are someone that needs to gain weight, which we will talk about in a second. Like what is healthy weight gain? And how your body is carrying that. This is where I find that the conversation of postural alignment and really allowing your body to expand into itself is really really important. I haven't weighed myself in a few years, but if I had to guess maybe 30 to 35 pounds heavier than where I was whenever I started my metabolic health journey. However, my hips are so— like inches and inches and inches wider, whereas my waist is now tapered because I have worked on expansion in every area. And so where you can get started with that whole conversation is going and doing these $8— they're called Awaken Your Bow, and we have them linked in our tongue tie episodes. And those classes are literally you're on the floor. It's tedious work on the floor where you are kind of regulating your nervous system and allowing your body to expand in maybe a way that it never has given the opportunity to expand before. So you're actually doing kind of infant poses where you're allowing your hips to open and get wide. And I look at my hips from whenever I was younger to now, I always had these crazy narrow hips, and now I'm realizing that was restriction. I was restricted. And now that I've expanded into myself, and yes, now I'm buying sizes that are way above what I used to buy. My hips do not fit into shorts that I wore even like a year or two ago, or jeans or even my overalls, any of that because my hips have been able to expand. And when that happens, your body is allowed to fall into the appropriate proportions of where it wants to sit with these womanly curves that you have developed for yourself. And so that kind of brings the conversation of just curves into this and the fact that women, as the life givers of this world, are supposed to be curvy and soft and wavy. And this idea of women having your abs showing or a six pack or a flat stomach, like absolutely not. That is not how our physiology actually wants to express in our bodies. We want softness and roundness. And it's so interesting to see how my own—we talked about this on Kitty Blomfield's podcast—but how my own idea of beauty has changed over the years. When I was more in the fitness culture, I literally thought that being fit or having a beautiful body meant you have a flat stomach. And I'm just like, I see a fertile— go take a gander at a Greek statue of a woman. This girl, The Strong Mermaid, I think, is her name on Instagram. She talks about this. You know what? I don't want to butcher her name, so I'm going to put it in the show notes, whatever it is, because I want you guys to go find this picture. But it's this picture of this very womanly Greek statue who probably is around—if I had to guess—maybe 32%, 33% body fat. And I'm like, that is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen right there. Like just soft and curvy and fertile. Just looks so fertile and nourished and healthy. And it's not going to be overnight that your idea of beauty within your own body is going to change. It's not going to be overnight. This was years for me to be able to get to a place where I was like, I am so attracted to the softness of the way that a woman's body can hold herself. Yeah, just the idea of a low body fat percentage—if you think about that biologically—it just makes so much more sense.
Fallon Lee Yeah, for sure. And this is such a refreshing conversation because I can agree. It's taken me years to kind of shift the way that I see myself, the sort of like—I don't know—aspirations that I have. I think, like most women, I was always kind of that girl that wanted to look like—I don't know—certain celebrities or whoever. And the reality is that most of those women have severely low body fat percentages. And now I see images of women who are just— like immediately I can tell someone who's undernourished or too thin. And my head doesn't go to that space of like, man, I wish I looked like them. I find myself being reminded of the health and the vibrancy that I feel now, that I just feel healthy and like I'm full of life. And I didn't feel that when I was super super thin. And I don't look like it either. I mean, I look back at pictures of myself. And I'll only compare myself to myself. I don't want to loop other women into this comparison, but I can look back at my own images and think like, "Man, I just have gained a lot of life over this process." I did want to come back to how do we distinguish whether or not our weight gain is too much or if it's necessary? So I'll give kind of my own example first, and then we can break that down. Because I think that I can very honestly say with my own journey that I probably needed to gain maybe 15 to 20 pounds. I ended up gaining probably 25 to 30. So still kind of in that range of what was necessary. Because I did dive in very quickly, I think that I kind of combined the healing pounds with the unnecessary pounds. So for me, I think if I'm remembering correctly, my gain was over probably a year and a half, and it was never more than maybe like a pound a week, which to me feels like— I mean, that's a lot, but it's a very slow, elongated approach, right? I think that sometimes we see women who are like, "I gained 10 pounds in a month," and we're like, "What? What were you doing?" And so I would love for you to touch on that a little bit more, but I think to me that more— you know, if it's taking you a month to gain 10 pounds, I think something's off. And I say that with grace and with as much gentleness as I can, because I get it, and I understand that desire to just really separate yourself from such restrictive eating, and you want to turn around and eat 2000 calories the next day. And again, just to quickly touch on this— some of us need the quicker approach. Okay? What I want you to hear, if you're listening and you're like, "Oh, my gosh. I went in so fast and I gained weight." Some of us needed to do that. There are repercussions. But my body, as someone who was eating 7 to 10 foods in various seasons and then found this world of food freedom and eating all the foods that I "couldn't have" for years and years, I needed that safety in my body to be able to go more quickly. You may be one of those people. That is okay. We also have to pair that with the knowledge that we may gain some weight and we may dysregulate our blood sugar a little bit. And I think that, again, this idea of being freely rooted. You have to be aware of certain maybe consequences or things that could happen as a result of your choices, but you are free to do those things, and maybe it's the most sustainable approach for you to dive in more quickly. For me, it was. I was never going to be the person who increased my calories by 50 per week. That's just not what I was going to do, and it's not what my body needed. So I want you to both hear that you can have grace on yourself if that's the approach that you took or need to take, and also realize that that approach is probably going to lead to a little bit more weight gain. So you have to decide. For me, I was ready to find health. I didn't really want to beat myself up about body changes. I was ready to find freedom and health. So if that's you, carry on. Figure out what your lines and your boundaries are for what you feel like you can introduce into your diet, and if you can take it slower, great. But some of us just have that personality where we're like, okay, we are ready to go. We are ready to find health and freedom. I have rambled on for a long time about this, so Kori, what would you say? Would you agree about the sustainable weight gain versus rapid? What is your definition for rapid versus sustainable?
Kori Meloy So I think that maybe the question that would come up with our audience is, "How do we for sure, for sure know?" The answer across the board— the way that you can know for sure is by taking a look at what you're eating beforehand and then taking a look at what you're eating now. It doesn't mean you have to make sure that you track your food when you begin, although that is ideal because then you would actually know how much has been added and how quickly it has been added. What you can do is actually pull up— is it chronometer or chronometer? I always say chronometer.
Fallon Lee I never know which is right, but—
Kori Meloy We'll say chronometer. So one thing you can do is actually plug in a full day of eating from the best that you remember of what a full day of eating looked like for you back then. And then what you can do is plug in a full day of eating for what you're eating now. So two different days, and then just be able to compare calorically and then macronutrient-wise. How big of a jump did I take and how quickly of a jump did I take? And so that way you're able to know, if weight gain is happening, you can nail down why is it happening? And that way I don't have to just go, "Oh, the healing pounds, the healing pounds are hard." They may not be healing pounds. They might be your body binging after a restricted period. And this is typically what happens when someone goes and tracks their food in my course community is, "Oh my gosh, I jumped up 1500 calories in a few days. Of course, this is why I'm gaining weight now. I need to go and adjust my macros and adjust my calories and be able to be at a place that's a little more sustainable to be able to kind of taper off the rapid weight gain and then be able to get to a place where I just kind of coast with it." And so, yes, I think that people's bodies are going to respond differently as far as exactly how many pounds, like Fallon was saying. But yeah, I would say if you are gaining a whole bunch of pounds in the span of a month, then I would highly encourage you go to reevaluate this not only because you're probably uncomfortable and you're probably confused, but also because of your long-term health. And also, I don't want you to get to a place where you're having to work years and years to shed off 40 or 50 pounds that came on because of the huge, huge, huge jump. I don't know if you guys have studied Dr. Layne Norton's work at all, but he was the first guy that got me into metabolic health and the study of diets. But he was able to see that even overnight— he's in the more bodybuilding realm, and so he was more interested in these people that would go to these bodybuilding competitions— get down to like 1300, 1500 calories. Back when I did a bodybuilding competition, I got down to 1700, and then I did a meticulous re-feed reverse diet after that because I, thankfully, found his work before then where he was seeing that these bodybuilders who were getting down to this extremely low calorie amount would go to dinner that night and just binge on like a five course meal and then wake up literally 10 to 15 pounds heavier, and it was not just water weight. He was able to see that they were able to gain fat cells literally overnight because the jump was that big. And so we have to logically think, "Does this make sense to just be able to gorge on food after restricting?" And maybe some of you didn't come from the super low calorie restriction or maybe you didn't consciously, but it was still lower than what your body actually needed. And then when you add these higher fat, higher carb foods, like Fallon was talking about, that's where it can be confusing because you're like, "These foods are so nourishing, and so why would I be gaining so much weight from it?" But they are on the higher fat, higher carb side. And especially especially if you came from not eating a lot of animal products and were eating a very low fat diet, or if you were doing just your typical low fat— is that Weight Watchers? I can't even remember now. Atkins. I think Atkins is more of like a low fat. Then understanding how many calories— fat calories are nine calories per gram, so they're the most calorically dense macronutrient. And so it would make sense why when you add something like whole raw milk or butter, how the calories could jump up really, really quickly before—here's the caveat—before your metabolism is ready. So that's why we work with our metabolism and slowly increase our body's ability to efficiently utilize food while we're incorporating more food. And it is— I mean, I will say, yeah it can be tedious. And like Fallon was saying, I love that she has taken full honor— like full grace for where she was in that state of like, "I never would have done the 50 calorie increases per week." That doesn't even— like, you were not in a state where— you had gone so long, so restricted. And it makes so much sense to me why you were like, "You know what? I'm just going to feed my body. I'm going to feed my body." And so I hope you guys hear the nuance in that conversation where we just so honor where you're at, and we don't want to take an approach where we're like, "It's so bad," or "It's so wrong" to not do this tedious reverse diet, because, yes, it is tedious. And you have to choose the natural consequences for which route you want to take because you have freedom to do that. So it's your body, and you have freedom, so you get to decide how you want to move forward. And I think being able to just make a conscious decision is the only thing that matters. Does that make sense?
Fallon Lee Yeah, I think that's perfect. And then kind of as a wrap up to the weight thing because I know a lot of people do like numbers. So I think a common question, too, is like, "How many pounds is enough if I actually need healing pounds?" And I think, again, it's tricky to say anything across the board, but I feel like as a general rule of thumb, if you have started this approach and you are upwards of 30 to 40 pounds of weight gain, I don't think that's necessary. I don't think we should be gaining 40 to 50 pounds in this approach unless you started out as a 95 pound woman. I don't think that we need to be gaining 40, 50 pounds. So if you have found yourself there, I think that we can redirect a little bit and we can come to the graceful conclusion that maybe some things need to shift. But I know that people also want to hear kind of a number range. I think that kind of the standard healing pounds range, you know, 15, 20, 25 pounds might be supportive for you. I think upwards of 30 plus pounds, I think we need to do some reevaluating. Would you agree with that?
Kori Meloy Yeah. And especially what you said about where did you start? It all depends on where you start. And so, yeah, if you started at—like Fallon said—under 100 pounds or 110, 115, and you are 5'5", 5'6", and you can see— I mean, take an honest evaluation for yourself which you might not be able to see at this moment. And that's another nuanced conversation is like we don't have great perception if we're still in kind of a dysregulated, undernourished state. We don't really have great perception of what our body looks like. Back when I was super, super tiny, I didn't think I was tiny. I didn't think I was too low of a body fat percentage, but now that I'm in this healthy state, I look back and I'm like, "How in the world did I not see that?" So we understand that there is also the conversation of we may not be able to see it. And this is where that's difficult to be honest with ourselves, but I think if we are gaining weight and it's going to maybe our stomach or something that can kind of freak us out because maybe we were used to seeing our abs in the past or whatever— so like it is a new beginning of sorts of being able to be like, "What does a nourished womanly body look like? And is it possible that my body wants to step into this womanly state for the first time in my life, and am I going to allow that?" That doesn't mean you need to gain 40 pounds, but I'm saying if we are honest with ourselves and are looking at ourselves and going, "Do I look curvy and womanly and round and soft and fertile?" And if we don't, we may need to get up to that state. And so, yeah, just being super honest with ourselves is really, really, really important.
Fallon Lee For sure. And I know we need to move on from the weight piece, but it's really one of the most common things that comes up, I think, for both of us in terms of frequently asked questions. So I think as a final cap off before we move on— we still have several points to cover, but the weight conversation is really so great. I think, let's cap this off before we start the next point to give a 10,000 foot view of if you have found yourself in this place, you've gained too much, you are regretting that you dove in too quickly, let's talk about some steps moving forward. I'll kind of share some things that I would say personally. And then, Kori, if you want to wrap up, and then we'll definitely move on to the next point, but this is just such a good one. So I'd say— I mean, here's what I've done personally. When I felt like, "Oh my gosh, this weight gain is rapid," absolute number one thing: if you're not strength training, start. That was the big thing for me. When I started strength training consistently is when my weight stopped going up. Mind you, I think that was also the perfect place of peace in my body where I did feel ready to stop gaining weight because, again, I think the majority of my weight gain was healing weight. But once I started strength training consistently and intentionally— I think that that's another big thing about strength training is that this willy nilly— like, what I used to do— here's my former workout approach: like get on Pinterest, find a 30-minute kettlebell workout or whatever, find some random thing, and that's what I did occasionally. I think exercise needs to be intentional. Kori has a lot of great stuff about exercise in her course that gives you a really intentional approach. So when I say, "Go start strength training," I don't mean like find a different Pinterest workout every time. It needs to be those fundamental movements of squat, push, pull, hinge, lunge. That kind of thing should be the basis of your exercise. From then, I would evaluate your fat intake. Again, high carb, high fat is a recipe for weight gain. Because the metabolic approach does prioritize carbs as our body's fuel source, you do want to evaluate, "Okay is my fat getting into the 100 gram range?" That paired with 250 grams of carbs in a day is just going to be too much. Are you eating enough protein? If you're still eating 70 grams of protein, that's not enough. I think that we would like to aim for 100 grams plus in a day, depending on what your body weight is. Other things to consider: stress. I mean, are you super stressed out? I think I can look back at my own journey, and my weight gain was in the midst of, one, when COVID had started, and so the world was just super stressed out as a whole. Everybody we knew was stressed. We were stressed out for one reason or the other. We had a newborn at the time. Stress can play a huge part in your weight. Getting outside, regulating your hormones, daily carrot salad. Those are things that I would evaluate. Are you doing the basis? Are you meeting the needs of your metabolism at this point? When your metabolism increases, you're going to need more nutrients. So I actually have kind of discovered recently—this feels like the most ironic thing I've ever said, and I'm almost embarrassed to say it—I wasn't eating enough for a while, and I finally realized that. I cannot believe that I, of all people— I feel like I'm the queen of like, "Are you eating enough?" And I tracked for a couple of days and I was like, "That was so much food." And it was like 2200 calories, which I burn more than that in a day, even without exercise. I mean, I have three young children. Moms of young kids usually need probably 2400 plus calories. And so that's another thing, too. You may not be eating enough. It may not be that you're overeating. Your metabolism may have downregulated to accommodate that you've got high stress, your nutrient needs are higher, and then you're not eating enough. Kori, what do you want to tack on to that? I'm forgetting like a billion things, but what can we do to start prioritizing healthy fat loss?
Kori Meloy Yeah, so walking is a huge, huge one. And I know that Fallon totally incorporated that in her rhythms as well. But walk daily and make movement definitely a daily rhythm in your life. Instead of throwing out all the movement, find something that you love, find something that you enjoy, play. Add just like playfulness in your life, especially if you're a parent. Like go play with your kids outside, experience life through their eyes. Sounds self-explanatory, but you can be playing with your kids and playing with your kids. You know what I mean? There's being able to meet them in their own joy and playfulness and then just kind of being there and kind of being in your head. And so, yeah, playfulness, getting out in nature, being able to regulate your nervous system. Also being able to examine if there is a past— something that we are holding on to because if you think about weight, our body is holding on to things. And so looking at the emotional and spiritual side of what am I holding on to in my life and being able to release those things, examining that. And then also just being able to, like Fallon said, track your calories. And then lastly, I know I said this before, but working on expansion in all areas of life, even though I know you're like, "Wait, but my body's expanding. That's not what I want." What I'm saying is the time has come and gone of this era where women's bodies were being told to be made small and tighter and smaller and tighter and smaller and sucking in and sucking in our bellies. All of that is atrocious for our pelvic diaphragm, first of all, but also just not supportive of our body's ability to carry and birth children either. And so I remember— I actually just looked at this picture the other day. I had done a popular ab rehab program after the birth of Koa, my son, and that was back when I was very much into like, "Stand up straight and have a flat back and a flat stomach," and just in that mindset. And so I was attracted to this particular ab rehab program that was very much focused on tight and in and making yourself small, and what happened to my body at the end of that program is my body resembled a prepubescent boy's body. It was like straight up and down, narrow hips. Yes, I had a flat stomach, but I was just straight up and down. And then after the birth of my daughter, I was like, "Enough of this sucking in culture. Like my body needs to curve and wave and be soft." And so I did those Awaken Your Bow classes. I've been doing them twice a week, and I've just watched how my hips— my hips are actually wider than they were when I was pregnant. How is that possible? But they are, and like I've watched my body grow into my— the areas where I have kept myself in my whole life, even since I was probably a little girl. And so what's interesting is I come from a family of narrow hips and I wonder how much of that has been generational trauma that has been passed down and things that we've held on to as generations and generations. And I feel like I'm releasing literally like generations of belief systems about our bodies and also just like— this all sounds very woo woo, but—
Fallon Lee I love it.
Kori Meloy It's taking the emotional and spiritual side as well. And so if you think about a baby, if you think about a time when you've put a really, really tight diaper on a baby, you know how it makes this baby body where their bellies are big and the diaper is too tight and then their legs are big. That kind of happens as adults when we start gaining weight and we're not allowing our bodies to expand like it should. So if you think about it, you might be gaining weight into an appropriate way, but your body is not allowing for the appropriate proportions. So what if this weight gain is the first step to you being able to expand in your body as a woman for the first time in your life and grow breasts for the first time in your life and hips and a soft belly. And so our jobs can also be to examine the emotional and spiritual side and then allow the actual hourglass to grow as it should. I can't believe that I no longer have narrow hips. That's insane to me. So that's another thing that I'd like to add in. And then moving on to— can you tell that we haven't recorded in a while? We're just like, "La la la la la."
Fallon Lee Well also this topic, I feel like we always want to talk about this. So this was solid.
Kori Meloy Totally. I mean, I hope you guys just enjoy this because this is just a great coffee shop style conversation. But moving on to our third point is the idea that everyone in the pro-metabolic or the metabolic health community believes the same thing. This is not true. We are all— like, why would we believe the exact same thing? Who do you know in your life that believes the exact same thing as you? We are all individuals with our own bodies and lifestyles and resources and education. And then going back to the point I made before, the metabolic health community is not authoritarian. And if you think about it, for an authoritarian approach, that means that one person's at the top or a group of people and they're telling everybody else like, "This is the only way." And this is essentially the foundation of what I was talking about earlier with the name of our podcast. Fallon actually helped me come up with this name for my course as well, but when you are grounded and rooted in the foundational principles that support your physiology objectively—because a lot of what we talk about is objective—you have the freedom because you are resilient, like we talked about earlier, to be able to take an individualist approach from there. And so an example of this would be one person might teach that alcohol doesn't support your hormones and you should never drink it, period. Whereas another person might teach that, yeah, it's not great, but here's how you can consume it in small amounts supportively. And then another person might say, "Hey, alcohol in small amounts isn't a big deal. Here's how you do it supportively. But also"—kind of what I was talking about earlier—"there are different phases of healing, so your body might reject it right now, whereas it might not reject it six months from now." So you can see the nuance in that where everyone has their own experimentation. And also that's why I love that I have this course community because I get to just observe what thousands of women are doing and what's working for them and what's not and be able to honor like, wow, there is so much nuance in this conversation and the phases of timeline— the timelines of healing are always really fascinating to me. But yeah, I think the bigger question here is, "Are you comfortable if these people in the metabolic health community don't all agree with each other? Are you comfortable with the idea of you needing to figure out some of this stuff on your own?" And so I think that is the bigger question to ask instead of being triggered because this person changed their mind about this, and this person, this person— and they all seem to be disagreeing with each other. Maybe it's an invitation for us to take radical responsibility and ownership of kind of just taking what resonates with us from each person. I mean, that is true true ownership right there of being able to be like, "Wow, I can hold—" my mentor says this about the true side of intelligence being able to hold two opposing views at the same time instead of, "This is the only right way and everybody else is wrong." That is such a sign of dysregulation. It is not even funny, and I see it all the time in the nutrition sphere. And we can also see that with certain types of diets that are incredibly restrictive, and then seeing kind of the nervous system response that comes from being in a state of undernourishment. And so I think that's what is so beautiful about these people in the metabolic health community is that everyone is able to appreciate the nuance— everyone I've seen, at least. And so that's why there is no authoritarian approach. Everyone can disagree with each other on little things. And so yeah, just use discernment also on who you're consuming content from, including us. We haven't been studying Ray Peat's work for ten plus years like some people like Josh and Jeanne Rubin have or Danny Roddy has. We're still in our first 4 to 5 years of diving into his work specifically. Of course, I've had a fascination with metabolic health since about 2012, but I didn't discover Dr. Ray Peat until— I think it was 2018. About the same for Fallon. And so we're still experimenting. We're still learning. We're also observing. We're observing the anecdotal and the nuanced conversation of it all among our own communities. But it kind of brings me to the last point I want to make, is that Fallon and I noticed that sometime in 2021, the metabolic health community kind of exploded within a few niche holistic communities, which is incredible. I feel like it finally got to kind of like the— if they would call themselves like the "Crunchy Mom" group. And so what happened is it became— it looked like it was becoming a fad and almost cultish, even though it was still very fringe because it was just exploding within those little communities. But I do think a couple of things happened when that happened. Number one, I think certain influencers kind of made it "sexy," if that makes sense. And so I think this is where a lot of those conversations have come up where people are like, "Oh yeah, pro-metabolic eating. It's just about gummies and orange juice, right? Like that's what I see." Whereas I, personally, have never seen anybody talk about this. I've never seen someone say pro-metabolic eating is about marshmallows and gummies, but I can see how some of the influencers might have kind of sexyfied it—oh my gosh, is that even a word?
Fallon Lee It is now.
Kori Meloy It is now. I'm making up a lot of words on here. I can see how it has become to look kind of fad-ish and also why that's a turnoff to people. Like I'm with you. I'm with you there. I can see how it is that way. And then I think another thing is a whole bunch of people realized it was exploding and started using it as maybe a business opportunity without maybe understanding the foundational roots of what they're selling. And so this is where I've seen more and more of that fad and black and white language come in, which again tells me more about where that person is at versus what they're actually sharing about. It's so much more of a reflection of where they're at, if it makes sense.
Fallon Lee Yeah, that was perfectly said. And I think that it's super important that you touched on this that even Kori and I— I have watched my view of things shift, I think, in a healthy way over the years. I think that changing your opinion is not something to be ashamed of. I think it's actually a sign of health and regulation that you can actually look at something objectively and say, "You know what? I made a mistake, and I feel like I need to change this a little bit." And some of you guys know, I even reformulated my meal plans not that long ago because I think differently than I did a couple of years ago. And they were small. I mean, it's virtually the same product, but there are small changes just to, again, prove this point that we can change our minds. It is okay to morph and shift as you learn more things. And then the last thing I want to say on this before we go to the next point is that I want to encourage you, listener, if you are somebody who feels like you dive into every new rabbit hole, do not feel like you have to. And I have set this boundary for myself. Sometimes new things come up on Instagram from accounts that I trust and who have shared new information, and I have to pause and say, "I am not ready to dive into this. There may come a day where I am ready, but today is not that day." And I think that's an okay boundary to set that you do not have to go down every new rabbit hole that somebody presents. If you feel the mental capacity to do that in that moment, go for it. But a lot of us are not ready for that. We're still trying to learn kind of the fundamental beliefs that we hold. And it's okay if you're not ready for a complete 180 on something that you've held on to for years and years. So just to give yourself that grace. I try to give myself that grace. Sometimes we're just not ready to dive into a new topic or totally change our view on a certain topic. Kori, you brought this up. Such a good conversation. The next point we want to cover is that this idea that everyone's diet should look the same, and you have to include gummies, you have to drink orange juice, you have to eat marshmallows. This is something we want to break down and show you guys that it's not something that anyone is requiring of you. So I think those of us who did step into metabolic eating, again, from this dogmatic background and tend to function off black and white thinking can really easily fall into this trap of trying to exactly replicate somebody else's diet. And I can think of several people off the top of my head who eat pro-metabolically, who eat differently than I do. And I think that there's a couple of truths we can hold at the same time. One, there are certain nutrient dense foods that tend to work well and support your metabolism. That might be dairy, sourdough, orange juice, gummies, potatoes. The second truth that we can hold is that many people will need to tweak some things to fit their personal needs. I can say from my own experience that I, again, dove headfirst into this approach and started including sourdough because it was a pro-metabolic food, and my body was like, "Hey, we're not ready for this." And I had to backtrack a little bit because I wasn't long fermenting. I wasn't— you know, it was just like Costco sourdough, and I'm like, "Yes. Sourdough is on the yes list." So I just dove in and my body was like, "Hey, can we not? Can we actually step back for a second?" And I want to encourage you that that's okay. I know many people who have the same issue. They've gone from low carb to eating rice with every meal and potatoes, and they've gained a ton of weight and messed up their blood sugar. A lot of these more metabolically supportive foods are things that have been avoided in your individual diet for a long time. A lot of us stepping into this, we haven't done dairy or potatoes or rice or tons of fruits. It's going to take our bodies time to adjust. And because the mainstream health culture would say to cut dairy and cut fruit and cut animal products— if we're coming from a background like that, we need a little bit more time. We need a slower adjustment period before we can add them in. Or maybe you're not sourcing them properly. Is it really that you can't tolerate milk? Or maybe is it that you're buying conventional milk with added vitamins still? Can your body not handle grains? Or are you maybe not soaking and sprouting them first? There's a lot of things that come into this conversation, and I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty for every single food, but I just want to encourage you to leave room to evaluate, "Why is a food not working for me?" And if at the end of the day, you can't include something currently that's quintessentially pro-metabolic, have grace on yourself. If you're not ready for dairy, don't eat dairy. I have so many messages from people who are like, "Oh, I just can't tolerate dairy. How am I going to do this approach?" And I'm like, "You do it without dairy." There's room for that. And I even have a post on my Instagram feed about pursuing metabolic health and mineral health if you can't include dairy. So I just want to say there's room for you to support your body still, even if you have to introduce red meat a bit more slowly or dairy a bit more slowly or adrenal cocktails a little bit differently. If you're having blood sugar issues with adrenal cocktails, change the way that you're drinking them. It's not this like, "You just have to do these list of foods and make it work and if your body is not handling it, like, sorry, you're out of the the pro-metabolic club." We have to adjust sometimes and just figure out what's working. And I've literally had people tell me, again, they can't pursue metabolic health because, "I don't like gummies, so I can't pursue metabolic health," and I'm like, "You don't have to eat gummies. Nobody said you had to eat gummies." If you love them and they work for you, awesome. I personally love gummies and they work super well for me and for my family. But if you can't eat gummies, get gelatin through bone broth or slow cooked bone-in meats. I mean, there's just so much nuance to this conversation. And I think the biggest thing is to always make sure you're pursuing nutrients. You know, it doesn't matter what you see me eating or Kori eating or anybody else for that matter. Does it work for you? And are you consistently supporting your overall nutrient intake and your personal, subjective markers? How's your digestion? How are your temperatures? If those things are in balance, your food can be decided on an individual basis from there. So just take all of this extra out of the conversation and figure out is this supportive to me as a person?
Kori Meloy That was awesome, especially considering that, like— I love it that you touched on gummies because gummies are more of like a fun and supportive way to be able to mimic the nose to tail eating. And so, like Fallon was saying, nowhere are they a requirement. It's a way that you can incorporate and bring back nose to tail eating into your life. However, if you love making your own bone broth, that's amazing too. So there's no black and white way to approach it. And then the last thing that we want to touch on as far as a misconception is that it's only or it's all about what you're eating. And this might actually sound contradicting maybe even to how we have spoken in the beginning of our episode because we were talking about how healing food is and how important nutrition is and how important it is to build up your capacity. However, later on in the episode, when we started bringing in that mind and that spirit piece, the body and the mind and the spirit piece, you guys might have started to examine, like, "What are some stressors on my life and what are some other things that I can be viewing objectively?" And that's kind of the whole point is we can't get to a place where we can view stressors in our life with clarity and with objectivity without building up capacity first. That's why the food piece is so important as a first step element because you're building up that capacity to be able to change even our brains. And so, @Samantha.Naturally and I did a live on this, it's called Addressing Trauma on Your Healing Journey, and we talked about why it makes sense that it comes up later after you've built the foundational resiliency through your nutritional approaches and through building back up your mineral stores. Because trauma even has an effect on your mineral status. And so being able to build back up those minerals, to be able to even address your trauma is something that's really important. But I thought I would give you guys some practical tips on how I kind of examine spiritual or emotional pieces when a symptom comes up. And so the reason I mention this as a misconception is because I often get emails, messages, or even questions from my course students going, "Hey, this is my symptom. What am I deficient in? What am I deficient in? What am I deficient in?" And that seems to be the common question of just like, "What food, what mineral, what nutrient am I deficient in?" Whereas that is not always the answer. I believe that if you have built a really strong foundation, this is where those other pieces come up. So one way that I like to examine this is through Louise Hay's work. So Louise Hay has a book called— I think it's called How to Heal Your Body. I'll leave it in the show notes so you guys don't have to go off my memory. Another way to approach it is by looking into German New Medicine. So German New Medicine. The guy that started it, I believe, was a cancer physician in Germany, and he was seeing these connections between the emotional pieces and the spiritual pieces with the symptoms that were showing up in the body. And what's interesting is I read a few books about like the spiritual roots of disease, the spiritual roots of symptoms. And then also my chiropractor back in Florida was very interested in this conversation. And what I found was fascinating. As much as you guys—not you guys—as much as some people want to go, "Oh, that's woo woo. Oh, like I don't—" And also I had this conversation with somebody the other day— they were triggered because they were like, "Oh, no, I'm doing something wrong." And I'm like, "Okay, that would be a core belief that we have about ourselves of like we're doing something wrong." However, if we're able to zoom out and look at the big picture and realize symptoms express themselves as a result of all three, then we can really look into and again have the capacity to be able to examine the emotional and spiritual pieces. So anyways, this might sound all very woo woo. However, unanimously, my chiropractor, this German physician who started German New Medicine, and then Louise Hay's work all unanimously I found across symptoms are the same thing. These people are completely separate from each other, but I'll give you an example is my chiropractor, back when I was going to him back in Florida, we were talking about breast cancer. And he was like, "You know, in breast cancer patients that I worked with, 100% of them, 100% of them were in a marriage where the husband was not faithful. There was some sort of affair that happened, and the wife took on a feeling of bitterness, and that manifested itself in breast cancer in her body. And it wasn't until she actually addressed the emotional trauma of that that she was actually able to heal." And what's interesting is in German New Medicine, they even go down to like the left versus the right breast. What kind of conflict it is. You know, the right breast might mean a partner conflict, whereas the left one might mean a mother child conflict. You can really have a lot of curiosity with it. And just if it helps going into something like that where you're like, "I'm not going to put a lot of weight to this. I'm just going to have this exist and take it with a grain of salt. However, how can I flex my curiosity in a way to be able to examine with honesty? Like, is there something emotional going on here?" I'll give an example of my own personal life. Story, my daughter, when she was ten months old, I believe, the longest I had been away from her is 2 hours, and I went and brought somebody a postpartum meal like maybe like 35 or 40 minutes away, and then wanted to hang out with her and love on her and hear her birth story. And it turns out that I was away from Story for about 4 hours, so it was the longest I had been away from her, and I also felt a little bit of anxiousness of like, "I need to get back with my daughter." I felt something energetically where I was just like, "I feel like she wants me." And so I was getting home and I kind of felt like a little frazzled in that way of like, "I need to get back to her." And what's interesting is that night she developed thrush, oral thrush. And that was at her only symptom of any kind of like thrush or like Candida type thing. But whenever I looked up on German New Medicine, what does oral thrush mean? It said oral thrush is— the emotional meaning of why that symptom would present itself is actually distress that they will not get breastmilk. And I thought that was so interesting that the longest I was away from Story, and also we do this thing— I'm sure you guys do the thing with your kids too, when they can't quite communicate yet you still set an intention where you're like, "Hey, I'm going to go here and I'm going to be back." Even if they don't understand you, I really do believe that they feel that. And I was in a hurry when I left the house too, and I never had that exchange with her where I just really set that intention with her. And so I wasn't surprised at all. And also, Kyle, my husband, said she had a really hard time the last hour. And that's interesting because I was feeling really anxious about getting back with her. And so I just find that very interesting that like for German New Medicine to lay that out as like this is thrush, and that was the longest time I was away from Story, and she was hungry, and she did want milk, and that would just be a personal example in my life. I use German New Medicine all the time as a parallel with Louise Hay's work because they like to complement each other a lot. But I do think that we have to also be in a pretty healthy and objective place to be able to examine these things. So again, going back to the idea of building up capacity with food and nutrition first, our lifestyle first. Kind of water we drink. Are we grounded? Do we get good sunlight? Are we in nature? And then being able to be at a place where we can examine those emotional pieces without getting triggered and kind of spiral and go down maybe a different type of rabbit hole where we spiral into core beliefs about ourselves and then maybe even distress about our relationship with our child and blah blah blah. So yeah, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that, but I think any time that you find yourself constantly looking to food of like, "Well, the food must be the problem," or "The lack of food must be the problem." If you're at a good place now where it feels like it resonates to you, I would explore those additional pieces of the emotional and spiritual symptoms.
Fallon Lee Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that's beautiful. And I think that's something that keeps coming up on my own health journey, too. You know, I've worked with a couple of metabolic nutritionists and dietitians who have looked at my stuff on paper. And I'm complaining about whatever symptom, and they're like, "You shouldn't change anything. Your nutrition is perfection. Don't change it." And then the question is, "What else is going on? Are you stressed? Are you having fun? Are you playing? Is there emotional baggage that you're hanging on to?" And so even for me, personally, I started implementing more EFT and tapping this past week because I think that the brain component of this, the neurological component of this, the spiritual, emotional, all of it is just at play. And we can't ignore that. We can't just say, "Oh, it's just the food." The food is important. Like we've said, like, yes. Do the food stuff. The food stuff is so important, but there probably is some other stuff going on. And I think that this is just such a great conversation because I think so many women do feel like, "Hey, I've checked all the boxes and something is missing." And so I think this could be a fantastic next thing to dive into. If you feel like my nutrition is fantastic; there's nothing else for me to do, maybe start looking at your emotional health. Maybe start looking at the recurring messages that you are saying to yourself in your head. Even with the weight stuff, if we're constantly saying, "I'm too heavy. I'm never going to lose weight. This symptom is never going to go away. I'm never going to have enough energy," whatever it is. You repeat that to yourself over and over and over, and it will become your reality. This is not— again, we keep saying like, "This sounds kind of woo woo." It's not a woo woo thing; it's neuroscience. This is the way that our brains work. We form pathways based on the repeated information that we give ourselves. So I think that, yeah, if you're stuck in a rut, you're doing all the stuff nutritionally that you could possibly be doing, don't ignore the rest of it. Don't ignore the messages that you're telling yourself. Don't ignore the stress component, the spiritual, emotional component. And I love— Kori, I feel like this is a still a new conversation to me, the German New Medicine connection, and this emotional link is just so interesting. So I'm really glad this came up today. Yeah. I feel like we just have to step back sometimes from all the rules and look at our body as a whole.
Kori Meloy Mm hmm. Yeah, and I think the last thing I'll say about the whole emotional and spiritual side is what I found 100% of the time that I've introduced someone to— like if they ask me a question of just like, "Do you know what's going on?" And I'm like, "Well, let's look at this from German New Medicine." If I know that they're in a place where they could examine this, 100% of the time they have come back saying, "Whoa, this is exactly what it was. And when I addressed it, everything went away." And so I think that this is similar to even the nutrition concept of just like, yeah, this might sound very out there and not something that you are— not a familiar territory to you, but self experimentation is where I just— we keep coming back to this idea of self experimentation being quite literally the most important part of your healing journey. So just self experiment with it. Like I said, take it with a grain of salt if you want. Just be curious about your body and basically what your body is trying to communicate with you. And so when you look at the German New Medicine pieces, it makes sense with the ideas of the kind of symptoms that come up. So yeah, I just really appreciate and I just love the conversation of the emotional and spiritual pieces. But to wrap that up, thank you guys so much for listening to this first episode of season four. Now that we're on YouTube, this is kind of fun to be able to do a video version as well. And make sure you check out the website for show notes and links and our transcripts, and then follow and subscribe to the show. Leave a review. We love to read your reviews, and we will see you guys next week.