With Covid-19 taking its hold across the world, now is a great time to consider the lifestyle factors that might be affecting your immune system!
A great way to keep a check on these lifestyle factors is to track them using a wearable technology. If you’d like to know what I choose, reach out!
I was so blessed 3 weeks ago to take part in a Workshop to improve my Public Speaking.
Here you get to hear my story of Biohacking my Emotional Trauma and get to listen into a unique interview that lets you go deeper into my story and why I am so passionate to help other Mission-Driven entrepreneurs get out of their own way and start changing the world in the way that is their Soul Goal!
I am a fighter. For 9 years I have worked hard to stay within a weight band that is optimum for my fighting. That number on the scale has meant everything. Partially, in my mindset, an indicator of my “success”. However, I want to share with you an experience that proved for me that whatever I thought it was an indicator of, it isn’t an indicator of what is on the inside of me or my state of health, however “slim” I thought I looked.
My weight nowadays generally sits at about 52 kilos. Pre-pregnancy and babies I used to sit at around 50 kilos. Do you know why? Because I used to relate my positive body image to no more than 8 stones on the scales. Nothing to do with my health or feelings of energy and vitality. It was just a number I related to my body image at a particular time in my life where I felt good. Every time I have dropped under 52 kilos for a fight camp since having my babies, I have piled the weight back on almost immediately after fight camp has finished. Because my body has been deprived of what it needs and the consequence of this has been cravings and binge eating, and after 6-8 weeks eating clean and restricting my calories, eating badly and over-eating makes me feel like shit, and so the cycle starts again.
Have you found yourself on a similar rollercoaster?
A few months ago I got the opportunity to fight for a title at 48.9 kilos. I wasn’t worried because I have dropped to this weight before. I knew I could do it and about a kilo of it would be just water weight anyway. The difference this time was that for the last 12 months I have been on an incredible journey. A personalised journey to find out what my body needs in terms of macro and micro nutrients. I have been feeling awesome, better than ever before actually. My energy has been off the charts. Some of the health issues I have suffered for years just went away and I saw muscle on my body I have literally never seen before, in spite of training at high intensity 6 days a week for as long as I could remember! It was like this layer of ‘puppy fat’ that I had always had and always felt subconscious about had just magically melted away. I looked lean and I looked strong.
Right before I began my weight cut this time I got on my Smart Scales and looked at my body composition. I looked at my muscle mass, my visceral fat and my body fat. Everything was in good, healthy ranges for me. I looked at my resting metabolism, i.e what my body needs to survive in calories, so I could add on my calories burned through exercise and movement through the day. I felt in control. I felt good and I looked good! I had a diet I could follow and feel confident was providing my body with what it needs! And I no longer had all those annoying cravings that drove me to make stupid decisions. In fact, I was eating more than ever and adding on no weight at all. My metabolism was on fire.
Faced with the challenge to lose weight fast though, I made a terrible decision. I made the decision to go away from everything I had learned in my journey to personalise my diet to my body’s actual needs to what I knew would move weight, fast. Cutting carbohydrates. I want to share with you the results of this and share with you the lessons I learned, the hard way.
In a couple of months I lost 2 kilos.
This was my aim – 250 grams a week – comfortable, safe weight loss. However, a couple of weeks in, my training got really hard. I felt my muscles screaming at me during training sessions and I felt fatigued after them. I felt fatigued in general! And my tummy was completely messed up. Without being completely ‘TMI’, it felt like I had the runs every day, and it was horrible. And I looked terrible. A friend actually reached out to me by messenger and asked me if everything was OK! I felt rubbish.
4 weeks before my fight I decided to pull the pin. Well, to be more accurate a doctor signed me off and told me I would be stupid to try and cut any more weight and over-exert myself when my body clearly wasn’t holding onto and benefiting from what I was putting in it already. At this point I had also found blood in my stools and I was chronically fatigued.
So what was going on?
I got back on my smart scales and found I had lost a whopping 600g in muscle mass. My resting metabolism had dropped by a couple of hundred calories. My body fat percentage hadn’t moved at all. From this information alone I could see that all I’d done with dumping carbohydrates and creating a calorie deficit was tell my body it had to go into survival mode and preserve fat and sacrifice muscle. A number of the other side effects would have followed on from here. Others perhaps not, but this was enough information for me to commit to sharing the new way I had found, the better way, to lose weight and keep that weight off sustainably.
For 8 months previous to my awful decision I had been following a diet personalised to my genetic makeup.
75% of generic diets FAIL. That means that 75% of people on a diet that has not been personalised to their actual needs will FAIL. You might see an initial weight drop like me, then it will plateau. You’ll give up, or reach the end of your target time on the diet and all the weight will go back on. You will have lost muscle and affected your metabolism in a bad way, and this yo yo dieting will put pressure on your blood sugar balance, mess with your hormones, mess with your self-esteem and energy levels and who knows what other damage on the inside of you.
To refresh my health after I dropped my title fight, I took up a mostly plant-based diet, went back to my recommended macros and saw my energy quickly FLY. I realised I could satisfy my body’s needs for high carbohydrates with a mix of plant-based foods over traditional breads, wraps and rolls AND eat in a way my body found easy to digest. I cannot tell you how good this has felt.
There are 2 tools you need to personalise your weight loss journey like this and I would love to be able to share them with you. They are what have me now at a place where my energy is high, my mood is good, my blood pressure is normal and my weight is back at a healthy number. Not that I believe this number means much at all now! It’s what’s on the inside, how we feel and how we are eating, moving and living in favour of our long term health.
To find out how you can get insight like this on your own body to meet your weight and health goals, click here.
Or come and join me at my local event week, Nov 11th – Summer Refresh in Tauranga!
If you have enjoyed this blog and are ready to make a change; this event is definitely is for you! Check out the event on Facebook here
Our body’s life forces, microscopic energy factories called Mitochondria, are under attack. These are the Superheroes of our Wellness and they are under attack from bad sleep, bad diet, lack of exercise and the toxins flooding our lives.
This causes mitochondrial dysfunction and is a characteristic of ageing and all chronic diseases. For example, loss of function in our mitochondria can result in the excess fatigue and other symptoms in just about every chronic disease you can imagine. I became a veritable ‘mitochondriac’ when I realised the importance of these superheroes on my health!
Here is a list of 7 ways that your Mitochondria play a part in your health, (and why you should become a Mitochondria too!)
Your heart muscle cells contain far more mitochondria than any other organ in your body! About 5,000 mitochondria per cell that need to be working efficiently to to keep the heart pumping 24/7 over a lifetime. By comparison, the tissue of the biceps muscle has about 200 mitochondria per cell.
You’ll hate me for saying this (although it won’t come as a shock)… the typical nutrient-poor western diet filled with sugar and processed, fried, and hydrogenated oils is one of the BIG enemies to our Mitochondrial Superheroes. Bruce Ames, Ph.D., a respected molecular biologist and ageing expert at the University of California, regards the common nutrient deficiencies generated by the American diet as a profound cause of mitochondrial decay and accelerated ageing and disease.
There are countless shakes and diet plans on the market today that claim to be the answer to weight loss and better health, but it can be overwhelming to choose the solution that is going to work for you. And I believe the answer lies in real food and that your body has all the answers you need.
Everybody’s body is unique in how it responds to certain foods and what it is lacking. Companies out there certainly have great solutions. There are real green tea (as opposed to teabag-tea) and coffee (rich in polyphenols) MLMS, shakes like Isagenix and Herbalife and intermittent fasting techniques, as well as products to experience therapeutic ketones and ketosis diets. These are great “mito boosters”! But what if you could eat real, whole food that is tailored to your chemical makeup? Click here to see exactly how
Many types of exercise are mitochondria-healthy. Walking is great. Weight training is great. Yet, the best type of exercise for your mitochondria is high-intensity interval training. This is where you do something at a high intensity for a short amount of time , take a break and then repeat. This has the amazing effect of burning fat even after you have finished exercising! And it is GREAT for your Mitochondria. It’s like revving up the little engines of those powerhouses so that they work at their best potential! What you need to see though, is how the exercise you are doing affects your heart rate. If your heart rate isn’t up sufficiently, it isn’t high intensity! There will also be other exercise that is suited to your lifestyle and your goals. The first step is understand your DNA.
Stress is bad for our Mitochondrial Superheroes, so get your stress under control. I know that is easier said than done, but believe me, I have a lot of experience in this area! A great place to start is to understand your triggers of stress. It might not be obvious and it might be a surprise that what may feel like a little stress on the outside is causing a whole heap of damage in the inside! Tracking your mood and how you are responding to daily events is key, and if you’re open, I can then help you relieve the stress you are feeling with coaching, aromatherapy, supplements (see below), and more.
Did you know you have a magic sleep number? We hear we should sleep 6-8 hours a night, right? Not true. Each of us has an ideal There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Many factors (like age, our body’s base or innate need for sleep, age, sleep quality, pregnancy, and sleep debt) play a role in establishing our particular “magic number.” Plus, many things contribute to whether our sleep is quality sleep. We can sleep for 10 hours, but it is not necessarily of quality enough to support our mitochondria. The first thing to do is identify the quality of our sleep and understand our sleep trends, so we can see what makes us sleep well and what makes us sleep badly.
We encounter toxins daily and the organs that help to filter toxins are overloaded. It is really important to start reducing the toxins we expose ourselves to by eating clean and removing chemicals from our daily routines, but there is one damaging threat to our mitochondrial health that you can’t see and it”s everywhere. Read more here!
Nutritional supplements can make a big difference in our mitochondrial health, but not all supplements are made equally and many are synthetic versions of the nutrients we need, which the body cannot process and so, are waste of money. A multivitamin is great, but I’m learning MORE is not necessarily BETTER! Every micro-nutrient has a level at which it’s useful and a level at which you get too much. And one size does not fit all, so what you need will be different to the next person…The particular supplements you need should be tailored to your body’s particular needs. For how, click here
Hope that was helpful. For more info reach out to me!
Dr Mark Hyman, Medical Director at Cleveland Clinic’s Centre for Functional Medicine, Founder of the Ultra Wellness Centre and 10 time #1 New York Times Best Selling Author believes we all deserve a life of VITALITY.
Does this word describe you? How do you feel day to day?
Vitality…. Energy & Strength
Are you living a life of vitality? Or are you lethargic, moody, tired and needing to lose a few pounds?
If the latter, there might be a good reason. Our body has a precise operating system. There are 37 billion billion chemical reactions happening in our body at one time. And yet, people are working on hope, guesses and off the shelf generalised diets, workouts and health programmes to stay well.
One size does not fit all.
Just like a car, we all need to use a fuel that we are made for. If we fill up with diesel when our car runs on unleaded, it breaks down. Even if we use the wrong octane, it affects how the car runs.
Dr Hyman believes that we all have the power to improve our health by following simple principles that optimise our biology. Effectively, nutrition and exercise that is personalised to our unique needs.
So the question is, what nutrition and exercise?
This is where Dr Hyman advises finding out where the body is out of balance in order to have a roadmap to rebalance.
Nutrition
He is clear that DIET is the #1 place to start because food is linked to all the key things that put our body out of balance in the first place:
He suggests that a mostly plant-based diet with good fats, meat and fish in moderation is a good place to start, but we do need to understand in what proportions our macronutrients will serve us best; based on our genetic metabolism.
We also need to know what to supplement.
Our bodies are made to naturally be able to get what they need from our food and the environment, but soils are depleted and plants are bred for yield and resistance nowadays rather than optimal nutrition, so we don’t actually get what we need from our fruit and veg anymore, compared to years ago.
Dr Hyman compared a wild dandelion to farmed spinach and suggested the dandelion would do more for us in terms of nutrition! But we aren’t grazing on dandelions for dinner, or eating other wild food and wild fish that has what we need to thrive (with vitality)…
We don’t get enough sun. We spend our time indoors or smother ourselves with sunscreen. We don’t sleep enough. We are bombarded with environmental toxins. We are chronically stressed.
So basically, most people need some sort of supplementation, and different needs will again depend on a person’s genome, lifestyle and environment.
Exercise
Exercise is positive to weight management, our brain health, anti-aging, but also our emotional state.
Depression is not a prozac deficiency.
There is a reason we feel low…
It might be:
Vigorous exercise has been shown to be as effective as anti-depressants. People who walk have been shown to have less Alzheimers.
One reason is that exercise creates BDNF in the brain, which is like Miracle Grow. It is proven to improve mitochondria in the brain. Generally, the best way to generate it is through HIIT workouts, but we can find out the exercise type that most serves us through the analysis of our genes.
Traditional medicine would take symptoms like lethargy, mood, fatigue and weight gain and find a reason for them. They would give them one label.
Maybe you go into the doctor with lethargy, but you’ve also got lights in your eyes and headaches. Maybe the doctor would say you have Migraines.
But what your body really has is an imbalance. Maybe your gut bacteria is out of balance because you’re eating foods that your body can’t digest and you have food sensitivities and deficiencies. Our bodies and those 37 billion billion chemical reactions are too complex to believe one label can provide a permenent fix.
There used to be only 12,000 official diseases in the medical books. Now there are 155,000, but are people better off? Is there more vitality in the world?
Just because a disease has a label doesn’t mean it only has one treatment, but doctors and Pharma are not willing to pay for system trials.
So what is our alternative?
The proactive will visit multiple practitioners to avoid the traditional route of a medical label and medication:
These remedies might work in combination, but at what price? Most people can’t afford such a holistic approach, so they either do nothing or they take the medication, which takes away the symptoms that are actually red flags of a body that is out of balance and could be at serious risk of chronic disease down the line.
What if nutrition, exercise, lifestyle changes and supplements (where necessary) can be used together, along with a roadmap personalised to the individual, to get the body back to its natural balance so that it’s own incredible healing system is activated?
If you would be interested in this kind of approach to your wellness; to your vitality, click here to answer a few short questions!
Clare Williamson 