During a Live Q&A on the Trust & Believe Podcast with Shaun’s Safe Space Community (now called the Unity Community), Shaun T and Shawn Stevenson broke down the need to know information for hitting your wellness goals and eating smarter. Check it out!
I can’t get my husband on board financially to buy quality meat. He won’t make the switch to grass-fed or organic meat. I work so hard to eat clean, is this one small area of meat undoing all of my hard work and still having a major impact on my health and immune system?
There is no diet aspect that is going to make or break you. It’s really about stacking conditions in your favor. For example, if you are doing 7 good things for your body, I don’t want you to be neurotic about eating some less expensive conventional raised beef.
What are the changes you made and things you have done to be healthier through the pandemic?
What I have cultivated in myself and my thought process is to ask myself, “Is this normal for the development of a healthy human being .”Anything that has us stray away from the things our genes expect of us always puts up a red flag for me. No matter what, I do what I can and maintain some modicum of fitness. For example, there is a study that showed going for a short walk boosts your natural killer cells production and mobilization in your immune system. These killer cells are your body’s natural defense for things like CoVID, and the media is not talking about that.
Watch the FULL TRUST & BELIEVE PODCAST EPISODE w/ Shawn Stevenson
The Stress and Health Journal found a direct correlation between an individual’s capacity to deal with stress and their natural killer cell activity. They found that folks who do not cope well with stress dramatically suppress their natural killer cell production and activity. It’s unbelievable the amount of stress we are under right now and its suppression […] one of the most dynamic and effective parts of our immune system that should help keep us healthy
How come when I eat some things, I am able to control portion size, but when I eat other stuff, it seems like it starts an out-of-control binge?
A lot of these things are happening in our minds, but we don’t tend to really get that. Your brain controls everything about your physiology with an important caveat: your gut. Your gut is largely determining what is happening with your brain. When we have hunger and cravings, it has to do with deficiencies. Chronic nutrient deficiency leads to chronic overeating. As we evolved, flavors actually had nutritive feedback. There is a nutritional association between certain flavors and certain nutrients our body would get. Animals in nature know what foods to go to to meet their dietary needs. Our nutritive association has been hijacked. The other part of this is the relationship with our hormones and our transmitters when we eat certain foods. Certain foods we eat have this very satiation effect and stimulate activity and sensitivity with our hunger hormones and modulating hormones.
To fix this:
We have to do what’s necessary for our unique metabolism to increase our sensitivity to satiety-related hormones and reduce sensitivity to our hunger-related hormones that play a role in us eating more.
We also need to diversify the foods we intake to diversify the microbiome and natural gut bacteria and what signals they send to our brains in terms of things we crave.
You Can Eat Smarter and Hit Your Goals
How can we look at what we consume to help with how we sleep
A whole chapter in the book “Sleep Smarter” is dedicated to “Edible Sleep.” We can do all the things, but we don’t really understand that to get all of our sleep-related hormones and neurotransmitters that enable our body to sleep, they are made from the food we eat. So if you are deficient in the things that make the hormones and neurotransmitters, you are going to have sleeping problems. Also, your body produces hormones at a certain tempo every day, and when that schedule gets messed up, your hormones get messed up. There is 400x more melatonin in your gut than in your brain and what you put in your gut inherently affects your melatonin production and storage for your entire body. We have to take care of our gut. There are also good sleep nutrients like Omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamin C that you can make sure you are getting to help with quality sleep.
Shawn Stevenson Answers All Your Questions About His New Book “Eat Smarter” | Shaun T
How do I avoid being sabotaged by an unhealthy mindset, social habits, society, relationships affecting my healthy eating habits?
How can you eat better if you don’t even know that exists. I come from an environment where we didn’t realize that there was a difference in types of food. As a result, most of the people I knew had some kind of chronic disease. Our environment determines our food choices, but also our food choices affect our environment because we aren’t just products of our environment but creators of our environment. When you become aware that this is a thing, it immediately starts to lose power over you. Set the intention of having people who are more dedicated to your healthy lifestyle in your life. Also, being more present with your food is going to be helpful. Make it a mandate because you are so powerful beyond anything you can imagine.
Listen to the entire podcast with Shaun Stevenson here!
