Grace & Grit Podcast

Return to Food is all about helping you develop a healthy relationship with food, your body and the planet. If you want to feel better, lose weight healthily, gain energy, increase mental clarity, elevate your moods (naturally) so you can fully enjoy life, in as little as 7 days, simply by returning to eating real food. In this awesome podcast interview, Sherry Strong, the author of Return to Food, gives us simple tips and tricks for navigating the path to optimal health with ease and wisdom.

If you are serious about optimizing your health and the health of your family, you must familiarize yourself with the very real and destructive power of chronic inflammation. In this week’s episode of the podcast, health coach Jenny Carr gives us the lowdown on chronic inflammation, as well as tips and strategies for helping to minimize inflammation that may be coming from our diet. Jenny also dishes out loads of advice for helping parents raise children with strong appetites for healthy foods.

Far too often, when I start coaching a client on improving their food choices, they will say to me, “Just tell me what to eat.” Let me be clear, I don’t ever tell clients exactly what they should eat on any given day. That is not what I do, that is what diets do. I don’t do diets and neither should you. The work I do teaches you how to nourish your best life and, of course, what you are fueling your life with has a profound effect on the “quality” of your life. So what do I do as a health coach? I educate you about food: what is in your food, how your body responds to food, and how to improve your food choices. What I don’t do is choose your food for you, ever. Why not? Because, ultimately, it disempowers you, and greatly reduces your chance of success in the long run. That being said, we all have days that we get bored with our food and we just wish someone would give us an idea or ten about how to shake things up. In light of this, I have some ideas for you to make tomorrow a little easier.

Maintaining a social life, while trying to get healthier can certainly pose some challenges due to the fact that most social events are based on less than stellar food and lots of alcohol. If you are really committed to your health, you are going to have be ok with creating some parameters for yourself when you do go out for social occasions. In this episode, Courtney introduces tried and true strategies for navigating your social life while maintaining the standards you have set for your health.

In this episode, Doctor of Physical Therapy Kat Ingalls helps us to better understand some of the most common injuries women experience when working to up-level their health. We discuss the dangers of pushing your body too hard too fast and why a foundation of basic strength, combined with smart exercise progression, is so important. Kat also dishes out tips and tricks for quicker recovery when an injury does occur.

The female hormonal system is complex, to say the least and it can make a woman a hot frustrated mess (literally) when it comes to improving health. In this episode, Dr. Jen Hawes helps us to better understand some of the most common hormonal, thyroid and adrenal issues women face and how we can best protect ourselves against hormonal warfare.

When it comes to optimizing your health, sleep is a really big deal. You can eat a clean diet and move your body daily, but if you are neglecting your recovery and dream time, your body will struggle to absorb and deliver the nutrition you are feeding it and your muscles will be unable to repair and rebuild. Your immune system will be compromised and your cognitive function will go out the window. And this is just a short list of negative consequences you will experience! Do you feel like you are doing everything you can to lead a happier, healthier and more fit life, but still don’t feel stellar? Sleep much?

The fitness industry has made exercise very, very complicated. So complicated, in fact, that many women I coach have fierce resistance to it, even though they understand the importance of it. What if the secret to feeling better fast physically, emotionally and mentally wasn’t about the latest and greatest exercise system that the fitness industry has conjured up but rather about moving your body more consistently throughout the day?

It is always the little things we take for granted, eh? And yet, it seems to be practicing the little things consistently that lead to BIG gains. In the age of complex exercise systems and hard to understand dieting tactics, it is easy to lose sight of the easy stuff you can do to gain massive benefit when it comes to your health. One of the simplest…drink more water!

You, and nearly every other human being on the planet, are on decision overload. No kidding…you are making around 35,000 decisions daily which means by lunch time you are probably already in a state of decision fatigue! You need to be sure you are making the best decisions for your health at a time when you are thinking clearly and have your VALUES governing your decisions NOT hunger, fatigue or someone else’s crisis. Improving your health should be based on a process and an effective process is NOT a spur of the moment decision or something that is slapped together at 11pm the night before. It is something you PLAN for in advance when your head is clear and your vision is strong.

The benefits of superfoods are being sold to us at every turn. And while I am all for eating the foods that super-charge health, there are some incredibly potent character traits that have the potential to nourish us just as deeply, if not more than, the foods we are hearing so much about. Absolutely, EAT superfoods, but don’t focus so much on what you are eating that you lose focus on how you are living (or should I say NOT living).

Women are hearing a lot these days about the importance of detoxing and cleansing their bodies to optimize health. Unfortunately, many programs are selling aggressive tactics and pushing a lot unnecessary supplements to aid these natural processes. In this episode nutritionist Sara Bradford and I help women better understand your body’s natural detoxing ability and simple measures you can take today to help keep your detoxing systems running efficiently.

Most women don’t consider that calorie cutting and exercise are forms of stress. They are great stressors in a system that can handle them, but to be honest most women who are experiencing come form of physiological breakdown are not in the best position to be dealing with MORE stress, they need to unload their stress. In other words, women need to heal their systems BEFORE they add stressors like calorie cutting and cardio. Just as an athlete has to fortify their system to be able to handle the demands of competition, you need to heal your system to be able to handle the demands of things like calorie restriction and aggressive workouts.

The scale evokes intense emotion in most women and it isn’t even a living thing! It is a hunk of metal that is judged, blamed and booted all for giving women a number that simply reflects their relationship to gravity. Contrary to popular belief, the scale is not telling you about the state of your health, your abilities or your worthiness as a human being. Nope. The scale gives you a very small sliver of insight into your greater health story and, if you are anything like the millions of women who loathe the scale, you try to extract your entire health story (and your worthiness and your possibility) from that tiny bit of information.

In today’s fast and furious world, staying mindful in the present moment is no small task. And, yet, awareness is the key ingredient to making choices that consistently serve the life you said you wanted to live. Mindlessness, on the other hand, truly is the quickest and most powerful way to unravel your health. Check out this podcast for more insight on what a mindfulness practice is and how to get started developing your own today.