The Anti-Inflammatory Blueprint

In this episode, we break down the difference between acute inflammation — a normal, protective response — and chronic, low-grade inflammation, which accelerates aging, weight gain, hormonal imbalance, and disease. Chronic inflammation raises cortisol, disrupts insulin and blood sugar, weakens the gut lining, slows mitochondrial function, and contributes to cravings, water retention, bloating, and stubborn fat. It also intensifies menopausal symptoms like hot flashes and mood swings.

You’ll learn the core pillars of Jolie’s Anti-Inflammation Protocol: a protein-anchored, green-forward diet rich in herbs and anti-inflammatory compounds; sleep and stress regulation; and the often-overlooked medicine of joy, pleasure, and restoration. These practices work synergistically to calm the body, reset metabolism, and restore energetic clarity.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Jo Life Podcast. Today we are going to talk about inflammation, and it is the perfect time to talk about this as we are heading into the holiday season because we all want to look and feel our best. We want our immune system to keep us well and energized so that we can enjoy family and friends and celebration. And it is also a time where our immune system and the inflammation response is challenged due to overeating, excess sugar consumption, and plenty of eggnog. So let's dive into what I call the anti-inflammation blueprint. The anti-inflammation blueprint is here to help cool inflammation and when you cool inflammation, you not only feel better today when you wake up in the morning, when you go through your day, but you also invest in your future. You invest in your metabolism, making it easier for you to maintain a healthy weight.
(01:26)
You invest in your hormone balance, making the transition into menopause easier, to making your transition into menopause easier and your ability to focus and remain energized. And you also benefit in slowing down the aging process because inflammation drives aging because inflammation is damaging to cells, which is a huge driver of aging. So let's dive in. If you are struggling with stubborn weight, fatigue, brain fog, hot flashes, skin issues, bloating, frequent illnesses, slow rebound, this podcast is for you because inflammation is playing in the background and is affecting your health. So let's define inflammation because all inflammation is not bad. There is acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation is the swelling you get when say you jam your finger into a door. That is an inflammatory response to an injury. It's acute because it is pinpointed to an event. And once that event, the damage done by that event has healed, the inflammation is going to go away.
(02:57)
When we have surgery, we have an response. That inflammatory response helps us to heal from our surgery. It helps our jammed finger to heal. So we're not looking to reduce that type of inflammation. Instead, we're focused on chronic inflammation. Sometimes chronic inflammation is referred to as systemic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is inflammation that is always present. So that response that says, Hey, we have an emergency here, it never gets turned off. It's like your fire alarm in your house when the battery is low and it just keeps beeping and beeping and beeping and beeping. That is chronic inflammation. It is sometimes referred to as systemic, and you could even call it silent inflammation because it is low level inflammation throughout your whole body that is wrecking damage before you realize that disease is taking root, silent inflammation, chronic inflammation, systemic inflammation is a driver of disease.
(04:18)
It turns out with no obvious symptoms, it might be that you're just bloated all the time or you're puffy, you have water retention, you just don't feel right, you're lethargic. It feels like you're moving through sludge, your joints are stiff, things of that sort. You have brain fog that is inflammation throughout your body and the discomfort that it causes is usually low level, not enough to really prompt you to change, although you are going to get the most benefit at this point in terms of it's easier to turn back the clock. But the problem with silent inflammation is that because it's low level discomfort, it can persist for a very long time before we actually realize what's happening. And by the time we realize it, oftentimes it's due to autoimmune disease or getting sick frequently or just not being able to get a hold on our weight, for instance.
(05:24)
I think that inflammation is really important to address because of what it does to your vitality. Inflammation is like a vitality leak, and with that vitally leak, vitality leak, it not only shortens your enjoyment that you have in the moment, but it shortens your overall enjoyment of your life. I want to discuss how inflammation weight, because I think that that is a really important thing that women in particular struggle with as they get older. And men struggle with this as they get older too. So why does inflammation cause weight gain or why does inflammation make it hard to lose weight? The main reason is that inflammation raises cortisol levels. Cortisol is a vital hormone that is involved in ratcheting up inflammation. When cortisol is high, our blood sugar has dramatic swings because cortisol causes more release of insulin due to its increasing, or I should say decreasing our insulin sensitivity.
(06:56)
So when we have high cortisol levels, we need more insulin to do the job. And because of that, the higher our insulin levels are overall, the more fat we store and the harder it is for that fat to get out of our fat cells and be burned as energy. So with high cortisol levels, we are on a pathway of storing more fat. And at the same time when we want to use those fat calories, our fat cells are on lockdown. They're not releasing any more energy from them because of the high cortisol. Cortisol also, or inflammation also impacts your gut lining, which directly influences your weight. Inflammation in the gut is a source of leaky gut where things get through the intestines into the bloodstream that should not. And when we also have high inflammation, it distorts our microbiome. And due to that, we tend to have a lot of cravings for sweets and or for salty, we tend to increase our bloating.
(08:21)
It really, really wrecks our digestion. And so we have more bloating in the abdominal cavity, but we have more bloating all over because we have increased water retention. So when we have bloating, increased water retention and we have cravings that sets us up for weight gain. And for that puffy look, which makes you look bigger than you actually are. In addition, inflammation slows down your metabolism because the efficiency of your mitochondria. When we are inflamed on a cellular level, think of inflammation as when we have an inflammatory response. We have all of these molecules that come to help. We have our white blood cells, we have different kinds of white blood cells, we have extra plasma, plasma, we have all of these parts of ourselves, parts of our immune system coming to the rescue. So think of your kitchen. We can do this. Thanksgiving is coming up, think of your kitchen.
(09:31)
You're trying to get Thanksgiving dinner out, but you have all these other people in the kitchen with you. When that happens, guess what? It's harder and harder and harder to actually work efficiently because you're bumping into people. You're saying, excuse me, people are interrupting you, they're talking to you, you're laughing, you're drinking, you're doing all these other things, making it very difficult to get that Turkey out on the table. This is what happens when we are inflamed. We have all these immune molecules floating in and out of our cells, and it makes it very difficult for our mitochondria to run efficiently. And that's why we have a metabolic slowdown when we are inflamed. That's another reason why we have brain fog. We have inflammation. It's getting in the way of neurons passing information one to another, and it's also getting in the way of the metabolic processes that happen in our brain.
(10:30)
And if you didn't know it, I will tell you that your brain is a very, very energy hungry organ. And so when our metabolism is slowed down in our body, that manifests in our brain by loss of cognition, brain fog, having difficulty recalling information, shortened memory or more difficulty in remembering things. And so it's important to realize that when we are inflamed, it affects our weight. And the mechanism through which it affects our weight is it causes excess bloating, it causes higher cortisol, therefore more sugar storage, and it slows down our metabolic activity. So one huge way that Jolie clients begin to cut their inflammation levels is by changing how they eat changing so that the food that they're eating is not feeding weight gain. So the food that they're eating is giving them the right macronutrients to begin to slim down. And the added benefit of this is when you lose fat, you cool inflammation throughout your whole body.
(11:57)
So weight loss has the appearance benefit, it has the cardiovascular benefit, but it also has the benefit of lowering overall inflammation. Now I want to segue into inflammation and hormones because again, we run into one of our star characters, cortisol and inflammation. As we discussed when we talked about weight is linked to increased cortisol levels, inflammation is a stress event in the body. When cortisol is up, guess what else it throws off besides insulin, it throws off estrogen, it throws off progesterone and it throws off testosterone. So in menopause, inflammation also will magnify our hot flashes. It will make our night sweats more intense and it will definitely make our mood swings more dramatic because the high cortisol levels further distort the balance between estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. And one thing to be aware of is whenever we have a hormone that's out of whack, so we have elevated cortisol levels, it is going to affect all the other hormones in your body and it is going to throw those off too.
(13:25)
So there's no such thing as just fixing one hormone. All the hormones work as a beautiful orchestra. And so one being off is going to impact the others. And this is why it's so vital that we get a hold on. Inflammation. Inflammation also will affect your thyroid. And when your thyroid, another hormone is inflamed and your thyroid levels go off, you have sluggishness, you have getting cold, you have becoming resistant to weight loss. So it's really, really important that we think about an anti-inflammatory diet to address our weight, but also our overall hormone levels, our sex hormones, and our thyroid. And one of the, in terms of practical tips for you that you can do as it relates to inflammation is there are foods that we eat that are naturally more inflammatory than other foods. So for example, wine can be more pro-inflammatory. It's high in histamines.
(14:33)
Histamines are part of the inflammation response. Instead of a glass of wine, you can try for some tea at night. Dairy also is very inflammatory. Many people don't realize they have a response until they take dairy out. And this is true for not all people, but for a good number of people. So one thing you might do to help lower inflammation levels is to swap out your cow milk for almond milk or for oat milk or for, I personally love to make my own walnut milk. It tastes wonderful to me and it's super simple. That's a swap to produce a more anti-inflammatory diet and taking your refined carbs out, those not only are inflammatory by throwing off your gut microbiome, but they also tend to raise insulin levels. So swapping them for root vegetables, for sweet potato, for carrots, for something like that is going to very much help your body to cool inflammation.
(15:39)
And as we cool inflammation, we begin to enter what I call the 10 years younger program. And there is so much more in this coming the 10 years younger program is to help you decelerate aging. Inflammation is aging so much so that many people have coined a new phrase, inflammaging inflammatory aging just because of how destructive inflammation is. The destruction of our cells is what causes aging. And when we are very inflamed, we accelerate the formation of wrinkles, we accelerate the breakdown of collagen in our skin, so our skin becomes more saggy, we create more hair thinning, we create more fatigue. We talked about the brain and how it impacts metabolism within the brain, so we create more brain fog. All of these things are associated with accelerated aging. The other aspect that we don't necessarily see happening is our telomeres become shorter. There was a lot of information telomeres before.
(17:00)
They're like the little shoestring ends to your DNA as they fray, your DNA becomes less and less stable. One inflammation causes that F frame to happen more quickly, therefore they shorten. And your DNA becomes more or susceptible to changes that will massively negatively impact your health. The other thing, what we talked about before is collagen breakdown and brain fog all due to implement aging. And that is why a lot of what I focus on is at the cellular level, how do we improve the cell health? Because in doing that, we improve everything including one's beauty and the rate of one's aging. Because addressing the health of the cell means we are addressing cell turnover, we're addressing collagen production, we're addressing hydration levels. We are addressing all of those things. So when we cool inflammation, we don't just add here to our life, but we add beauty and energy to those years.
(18:18)
We add vitality, which there's no reason. And being 98 years old and not being able to do anything, we want to be 98 and still able to enjoy our life. And that's why it's so important that we reduce the inflammation right now. So here are the three pillars for reducing inflammation, nutrition, lifestyle, pleasure and joy. Nutrition is the cornerstone of course, and that starts with how you eat. Let's begin the day with protein and some greens. We sneak greens into all things, even our muffins and our love bars. They have greens in them. Anything you get from Julie for breakfast is going to have some greens in it. Why? Because it helps to kickstart your metabolism and helps to kickstart your bowel movements. It helps you begin the day with detoxification and antioxidants to help bring down inflammation. And we start with protein. We start with protein because we need to do some repair here.
(19:32)
We need amino acids to make our hormones. We need to have that energy on board so that repairs can be made easily and so that inflammation levels do not need to increase. The other part of our blueprint is to reduce our sugar. Sugar, huge driver of inflammation. Fat cells are inflammatory here, so we're trying to keep our weight down. A key aspect of that is keeping sugar down and then add in anti-inflammatory agents. My favorite add-ins for anti-inflammation are herbs and tea. We use herbs at Jolie, like they're going out of style. We put them in everything. Why? Because herbs help you to lower your inflammation. Tea, we talk about tea so often. Why? Because it helps you to lower your inflammation. And so if you want to start the anti-inflammatory blueprint, begin with having a really good breakfast of protein with some vegetable, cutting your sugar down as much as you possibly can and adding anti-inflammatory foods. Top picks for me are herbs, my fabulous broth, lattes, greens, and your daily salad.
(21:06)
Let's move on to lifestyle. Lifestyle. The most important key to your anti-inflammation program is sleep. And sleep is so important because it's when your body gets to repair. And when we don't get enough sleep, we have shortened repair time. So there's a lag and that lag begins to build up and up and up and up. And then we get so behind in our repair practices that we fall into a disease state. So our sleep is so important. Our sleep is so important. It's like continually maintaining your house versus doing nothing. But once every 10 years doing a complete redo. It is so much better for your body that you can continue to maintain your house day by day by day so that there doesn't have to be a complete renovation every 10 years because our bodies don't work like our homes. And that renovation is going to be painful.
(22:17)
And most often when we neglect the body, it causes a for alarm fire. And we don't always get back to the level of health where we were. And so in the interest of maintaining health and making it easier to get to greater and greater heights of wellness, we need to daily take care of ourselves. We need to daily sleep. The other lifestyle key is stress management. I am one who does not believe you're going to have a stress-free life. I don't have a stress-free life. I don't know anyone who does really. But stress is part of life and stress is natural. It's like the wind pushing a tree over. Pushing at a tree makes it stronger. So stress is normal. The only thing we need to do is we need to manage it well. And how do we manage it? Well, we find ways of emptying ourselves.
(23:21)
Maybe that's through exercise. Maybe it's through prayer. Maybe it's through journaling. Maybe it's through talking to a friend. Maybe it's through sitting outside. Maybe it's through meditation. But each and every one of us needs to find a way to help release stress out of our lives for our health, for our mental health, as well as our physical health and to cool inflammation. Other lifestyle things that you can do are saunas and coal plunges, which I absolutely adore. Those help on a cellular level to reduce inflammation. But if you're going to pick one thing to do lifestyle wise, it's sleep. Sleep trumps everything. And lastly, I want to talk about pleasure and joy because sometimes we forget the power of joy and that we are made for pleasure and joy. And there are biological reasons why we should have pleasure and joy. And one of those biological reasons is it helps to accelerate healing.
(24:28)
And by accelerating healing, it helps to lower inflammation. It also helps us to manage our stress. Joy is the antidote to stress and to the damage that stress does to the body because joy is reparative. Joy releases good endorphins that help you to reset, that help you to recalibrate, that help your nervous system to stabilize. Joy is a tonic of life. And so in your anti-inflammatory blueprint, we have eating really, really well. Our nutritional base, we have sleep. And lastly, we have joy, pleasure activities. So I like to remind myself because I'm very busy as I am sure you are, that joy is not optional. Pleasure is not optional. It is restorative. It is medicine. It is necessary for my health. And so I challenge you to come up with three action points. One that's diet related, one that's going to help you to sleep, and one that's going to increase your pleasure, enjoying your life and over this holiday season to begin to implement those things and see the difference that it makes in your inflammation levels.
(25:57)
And during November and December, there are lovely pockets of time where you can do a reset, where you can do a Jolie program and see what it feels like to eat in an anti-inflammatory way. So that's all I have for you guys. I hope you have the most fabulous Thanksgiving ever and that you thoroughly enjoy it. Remember, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Get lots of rest and eat really, really well. When you think about Thanksgiving, it is a time of celebration. It's not a time to be stressed out. So have your Turkey, have lots of veggies, and then have one little treat that makes you feel like, ah, this is Thanksgiving. So if you want to go deeper, join one of our Jolie programs like the 10 Day Reset or the program coming up in January, which will be the 10 years younger plan. It is going to be phenomenal, by the way.
(26:55)
And thank you for spending this time with me and share this with a friend who wants to hear it. Download the podcast, listen to it again. But lowering inflammation is a wonderful way to improve your health this very moment, this very day. And it pays back dividends for a very long time by increasing your overall wellness, your overall vitality, the ease of movement, your ability to think clearly, recall information, learn new things, and to really have a vital long life. And that in a nutshell is what living beautifully the joly life is all about. So thank you. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, the Jo Life Podcast. And if this podcast helped you in any way, I invite you to share it with your friends and your family and whoever you come across that you think might be helped by this podcast, I would love to hear your comments. And you can contact me at julia@thejolielife.com. And please follow us on Instagram, the Jo Life. Our website is the jolie life.com. And it would be lovely if you would subscribe and if you would rate this podcast and go back and share this with someone. Let the ripple effect happen. Let the Jo life be the beautiful life that keeps on giving. Bye beauty. Lot of love.