New Zealand – Clare Williamson

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:

Insulin resistance
Food sensitivity
Inflammation
Toxic load

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:

Insulin resistance
Folate deficiency
Toxic metal overload
Gut issues.

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.

Conclusion

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:

A Nutritionist for a diet plan to follow
A Personal Trainer to get exercises
A Naturopath to get a herbal tincture for better sleep

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!

It’s easy to think, when you’ve been on supplements for a while, that their effects are a placebo. When you find a good supplement that works, and you start feeling alive again, you begin to forget how bloody awful you felt without them.

In 2016 I hit a really rough patch in my health. I had a small baby who breastfed like there was an award for it and I’d not really taken much of a break between breastfeeding her and my elder daughter; I was run down, excruciatingly tired and my thyroid was out of whack. I’d taken various supplements since I’d had my eldest daughter and really started to invest in our holistic health as a family, but I’d really not felt much of a difference using them.

Then I was introduced to a brand that was not synthetic and did not contain mega-doses of vitamins, just essential nutrients, metabolism benefits, and powerful antioxidants designed to help promote energy, health, and lifelong vitality. Within one month of taking these supplements I felt a world of difference! Even my thyroid and anxiety improved, but what I really noticed was the difference in my skin and energy. My body was clearly lacking in something that it was getting back in these supplements.

Last year I got the opportunity to figure out just what I was lacking and why. I did a DNA test to find out exactly what my body needed and was potentially lacking in terms of nutrition. I was flabbergasted by my results! The biggest thing that the DNA test revealed was my body’s inability to process carbohydrates. This made so much sense. I’d eaten low carb for years (because that’s how you stay thin, right?) and I’d always struggled to last between meals, regularly got faint, suffered low blood pressure and had no muscle mass. My DNA test also revealed that my body had difficulty processing healthy, monounsaturated fats and that I also have the fat gene, which explains my lacking off switch in regards to food! I can literally eat and eat food that tastes good (so usually all the bad stuff) and the only way I have managed to get around that lack of control is to avoid junk food almost completely and stick to food portions at meal times.

In regards to micro-nutrients, vitamins, my body showed an inability to process and absorb Vitamin A, Vitamin D and Folate.

You see our DNA is like an Instruction Manual. A DNA report tells you what you have and how to work with it. Like a hand of cards, you can either play them really badly and subject yourself to chronic diseases you may have avoided, or play them well and enjoy a long, healthy life.

In general, I had been doing quite well with my hand of genetic cards, but there were definitely some changes I needed to make and fast, starting with my carbohydrate intake. In terms of my vitamins though, it seemed my choice to take a high quality, natural supplement had been a good one. In order to get enough of the Vitamin A, D and Folate my body needed, I would have been having to eat heaps of eggs, carrots, pumpkin, green leafy vegetables, asparagus, broccoli and liver, which in fairness, I do try to eat most of, but I struggle to get more than a couple of portions of vegetables a day and I am not a huge fan of fish, eggs or liver.

And it’s interesting because I’d noticed that if I ever forgot to reorder my vitamins and had a week or so without them, the skin around my cuticles would begin to peel and crack. Vitamin A is a key vitamin in skin repair. My youngest daughter, who is very fussy and eats very few vegetables unless I force feed them to her, also has the same issue if she doesn’t take her vitamins regularly either. I wonder now if she has the same genotype as me and also has some trouble converting plant-based Vitamin A (beta-carotene) to the active form retinol. There are more worrying concerns about not absorbing proper amounts of the vitamins our bodies need though:

A lack of Vitamin A can increase the risk of heart problems
Vitamin D plays an essential role in bone health, energy and anti-ageing because it promotes better absorption of calcium and lowers inflammation
Folate, alongside other vitamins fuels the body during workouts and are important in the synthesis and repair of DNA. It also enhances brain health and moods.
Several vitamins are crucial to proper immune function, which ensures that we are able to properly fight viral and bacterial infection, deal with inflammation and stress, effectively digest food and heal.

So what happened when I took 30 days off my supplements?

The first thing I noticed was my energy drop substantially. Substantially! I’m a kickboxer and a mum, so energy is vital to my day, and I started dragging my feet in a big way!
I looked awful. One of my eyes started to droop, my skin looked washed out and almost grey and I looked old and tired.
The skin on my finger nails started to peel and crack, and got very red and sore, to the point I was embarrassed for people to see my hands
I got an awful migraine
I got sick with a head cold/cough after I haven’t been sick for months
My productivity and creativity flatlined because I felt low on energy and not like my bouncy self.

Here is a before and after from my YouTube channel of daily videos:

When I was taking my supplements daily:

After I stopped!:

I was even surprised myself when I looked back to 4 weeks ago and compared to my videos now. I knew I felt different, but to see such a difference as well?

So why did I stop my supplements?

Despite my supplements being awesome and effective, I have been offered the opportunity to have my supplements personalised to my body’s needs. This means my body will get everything it needs and nothing that it doesn’t and my supplements will evolve as those needs change!

This personalisation is not done through a very non-personal one size fits all quiz like other personalised vitamin services. These supplements are personalised to your DNA and the lifestyle factors that will either activate your not-so-good genes or keep them happily dormant; therefore helping me avoid potential chronic diseases and supporting me to experience optimal health because everything within my body is working as it should be. Supplements are delivered to your door, monthly, and all the guesswork and confusion is removed and replaced with a solution bespoke to you.

I know I was very lucky to find a supplement that worked for me, but it took going through many different brands and complexes (most of which I peed out!)

But, is a daily dose of vitamins and minerals necessary?

I actually believe a “food first” approach is better, but then I am living the reality of being a busy mum with fussy children and little inspiration for healthy, colourful meals that everybody in my house will eat. I never used to need supplements because I ate such a good diet, but now my situation is very different, plus you have extenuating circumstances like breastfeeding draining your body of nutrients and extreme workout regimes and our soils lacking the nutrients in the first place because land as been overfarmed.

Health and wellbeing needs are unique. Solutions for people on a health journey need to be targeted to people’s unique needs. Many people are like me and don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables and wholefoods, but unlike me they don’t actually have the information about their own bodies that they need to know what food choices are best for them, so they can plan and be proactive, rather than fumbling around in the dark and getting frustrated and giving up.

I now know from my DNA a baseline of fruits, vegetables and wholefoods that are really good for my body and I can meal plan around them. It is easy. And I know that where my diet falls short my supplements can pick up the slack and I can have the peace of mind that as my lifestyle changes (my sleep changes, my stress changes, I exercise more/less, my mood changes, etc) my supplements will evolve with me.

If you are open to see whether this solution will be helpful to you too, click here to answer a few short questions to provide you with the information relevant to your situation.

In your high vibes, happiness and optimal health!

CW x x

Tag: New Zealand

How to Restore Balance in your body and Activate your Incredible Healing System

Conclusion

I gave up supplements for 30 days and this is what happened…