Heal and Stay Healed with Kelly B Haney
The Heal and Stayed Healed with Kelly B Haney podcast is for anyone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired, particularly those with autoimmune disease or other chronic illness. It's for those who are ready to truly heal, and more importantly, truly STAY healed.
Through my training as a Certified Nutrition Coach, but mostly through insight gained from my personal experience with overcoming severe Ulcerative Colitis, I want to equip you to get better, stay better, and to become healthier than ever.
I've been able to stay completely autoimmune flare-free for well over a decade, and I believe that if I can do it, then you can too! Our bodies want to heal. They know how to heal. We just have to give them the support that they need.
I'm honored to walk alongside you as you take the next step in your own healing journey. Let's heal and stay healed together.
Heal and Stay Healed with Kelly B Haney
Healing and Staying Healed with Diet and Nutrition
Ready to kick the Standard American Diet to the curb and reclaim your health? Join me as we navigate the transformative power of nutrition. In overcoming my own major health issues, I've discovered the undeniable link between diet and true healing. Together, we'll map out the four "must haves" of long-term dietary success - becoming a rebel, having an unfaltering commitment to your health, having a compelling "why", and educating yourself, along with the two "must do's" - heal your gut, and eat real food.
Challenging conventional eating habits, we'll explore how to heal from the damage inflicted by a typical diet, and the importance of consuming real, whole, unmodified food that truly heals. This journey is not about temporary change, it's about a permanent lifestyle upgrade. Listen to the end for my bonus tip that will make everything a whole lot easier.
Are you ready to redefine your relationship with food and get started on the path to true healing? Let's go...
Website: www.kellybhaney.com
Email: info@kellybhaney.com
Instagram: @kellybhaney
Facebook: Kelly B Haney Wellness
Welcome to the Heal and Stay Healed podcast, where we talk about healing and, more importantly, staying healed from chronic disease and other ailments and issues. We'll cover all the crazy things about health and life the good, the bad, the ugly and the hilarious. My name is Kelly and I am a survivor and overcomer of severe autoimmune disease, and I can't wait to share with you what I've learned so that you can heal and stay healed too. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Hello there and welcome or welcome back.
Speaker 1:In today's episode, I'm going to go ahead and talk about a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, because it is something that is essential for truly healing and staying healed from pretty much any physical ailment, but especially from autoimmune and other chronic diseases, and that is our diet and nutrition. True, healing requires a lot and staying healed requires a lot, but for both of those things, diet is ultimately what I believe is the number one most important thing. If we don't eat in a way that promotes healing and health on a consistent and regular basis, then it really doesn't matter so much what else we do. We've got to get our diet and nutrition right. Not eating a health promoting diet may be something that we can get away with for a little while, but I really don't believe that will lead to true healing, and I certainly don't believe that will lead to staying healed either, especially for those of us who want to do this without the assistance of prescription medications or with the goal of being able to get off of medications. We have to truly heal our guts and thus the rest of our bodies, and diet is an integral part of all that, so I'm really excited for this episode.
Speaker 1:This is just information that is always just wanting to burst out of me, so I'm really happy to have a format where it is socially acceptable to just let it burst out. That being said, though, I could nerd out talking about nutrition all day long, I'm going to try to keep it simplified, since this is a complicated topic. There are a million quote diets out there that claim to be the way. There are a lot of voices and opinions giving out a lot of conflicting information. Of course, it's all confusing and overwhelming, especially if you are in a position where you just don't have time or energy to waste. But ultimately, what I've learned on my own journey is that once we figure out some basic things determining what we can and should be eating to truly heal is actually fairly simple, and so, in this episode, by using what I've learned through my studies and training as a nutrition coach, but mostly by using what I've learned through my own personal journey of healing from severe autoimmune disease, I want to uncomplicate it for you as best as I can. And so, in regards to healing and staying healed through diet and nutrition, we are going to cover four must-haves, two must-dos and one big tip at the end that is going to make everything a whole lot easier. We've got a lot of ground to cover in this episode, so let us not tarry a moment longer. Let's dive in and begin with the four must-haves, and these are four must-haves that are especially important as you are getting started.
Speaker 1:Number one you have to be a rebel. That's right. You have to rebel against the cultural norms and the standard American diet. You guys, things have gone off the rails. The standard American diet, which is heavy on the process and ultra-process foods, heavy on the added sugars, heavy on the chemicals and preservatives the data is in my friends. The way we have been eating is leading to nothing but pain and suffering, as our diets have worsened over the last half a century or so, disease rates have skyrocketed. The rates of all kinds of chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes and certainly autoimmune diseases have dramatically dramatically increased. Of course, we should stand up and say I'm not going along with this madness anymore. I am going to rebel, not just so we can heal and stay healed from whatever ails us already, but so we can prevent new sicknesses and diseases from finding us in the future, because clearly that's where our current way of eating is taking us. The norm is a diet that is stealing our health, so we have to stand up and say I'm not going to do this to myself anymore. I'm going to be a rebel.
Speaker 1:Now on to number two. The second must have is you have to be committed. Using diet to heal and stay healed naturally is not a temporary solution. There's no quick fix. This is a lifestyle that may sound cliche, but I can't think of a better way of putting it. Moving from a health stealing diet to a health promoting diet is a permanent move. This is a change for the better, forever, when we make the commitment to start really supporting our body and giving it everything it needs. It's not even just a month to month, week to week, day to day. It's meal by meal. The choices that we make have a direct impact on the support that we're giving our bodies as they faithfully work so hard to heal us and to keep us healed. The more committed you are, the more incredible your results will be. Now it's not easy, especially in the beginning. I am never going to be evasive about that, but I am here to tell you. When you truly commit and you truly change your life to do whatever it takes to heal and stay healed, number one being changing your diet for the better, it will be so worth it, so worth it, and it gets easier and easier and easier as you go along. Let's move on to number three, which is something that is going to assist tremendously with your staying committed.
Speaker 1:Number three is you have to have your why Capital W, capital H, capital Y why are you going to all the trouble to uproot your cozy little diet and why are you starting on this new journey to pursue natural healing through diet, a journey that can be really challenging, especially in the beginning? Your why is the motivating factor behind why you are doing the work that you are doing, and it should always be on your mind. For me personally, after suffering for over a decade with the autoimmune disease ulcerative colitis, and then after having a severe flare that almost took my life, when I decided to take the path of natural healing, my why wasn't too hard to come up with. My why is that I want to do whatever is in my power to prevent ever again being helplessly taken down by a terrible disease and to be as healthy as I can be in order to live life to the fullest and give back as much as possible. Without my why constantly reminding me to do my best to make good choices each and every day, it would have been much harder to remain focused. That was especially true in the early years of my health journey, but I still use my why now. Your why is what keeps you going when times get tough. Returning to your why can be all the encouragement and motivation needed to press on. Keep your why always on your mind. Print it out and tape it to your mirror. Recite it to yourself every morning as part of a morning meditation. Get a tattoo of it if you need to. That's actually what I did. I got three tattoos to remind me of my why, because that's how much I needed and wanted to see it every single day.
Speaker 1:When you make the commitment to permanently upgrade your diet, you are signing up for something big, something that leads to a beautiful life. Use your why to keep you on track and to help get you there. And now for the fourth, another super important must have you have to educate yourself. You can't successfully change such a big part of your life without first educating yourself on what a diet that heals and keeps us healed looks like. The way I did this when I started my own journey back in 2011 was by finding and reading anything I could get my hands on related to natural healing. And then, the more I learned, the more I applied to my life, and that's what I recommend you do Educate yourself and apply what you learned to your life as you go.
Speaker 1:Read whatever you can find on the topic of natural healing, but it doesn't just have to be reading. Now we have these wonderful things called podcasts, such as this one, where you can listen to people give information and advice. Blogs and online articles can give great information and share inspiring stories too. Same thing with documentaries and videos. Now, as I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of conflicting and confusing information and advice out there, and some of it even some of it that pertains to certain viewpoints on natural healing unfortunately could potentially point you in the wrong direction, so be mindful of that. Your steady diet of information should come from valid sources. That goes without saying, but sometimes it's really hard to tell what's valid and what's not.
Speaker 1:Something that I do to quickly discern if I'm watching or reading or listening to something with good information is if I find that they are talking about temporary or quick solutions, or if they are making it more about physical appearance than anything else, I move along Because to me, those are not going to be resources that support me in truly staying healed. The people and the influencers I've found to be the most trustworthy are the ones who are saying this path is hard and long. It's also a good idea to pick people that you connect with or have things in common with. Fairly early on, I found a few people out there who specifically had dealt with ulcerative colitis, like myself, so that was helpful for me to be able to read what those people had to say about their own experiences, especially those who had been successful in healing and staying healed for quite a long time. Those are the people I wanted to listen to and trust your gut. If something sounds off, then move along to the next resource. So by constantly and consistently educating yourself on this topic, you are equipping yourself for your journey, and you also get a bonus by continually getting that steady diet of information where you're reading, watching and listening to health-promoting content. The bonus is that that helps you to keep yourself motivated too, and that's because you are keeping this topic on the forefront of your mind, so it's harder to get distracted or start to fall off the wagon. Even all of these years into my health journey, I am still regularly reading, watching and listening to health-promoting content, and this continues to help keep me focused and inspired, and I get to keep learning more and more, which I love to do. All right. So those are our four must-haves you have to be a rebel, you have to be committed and you have to educate yourself.
Speaker 1:Now let's dig into the two must-dos of healing and staying healed with diet and nutrition. Number one heal your gut. Three words Sounds super easy, right? Well, this will likely be one of the hardest parts of your entire journey. It is absolutely necessary, but it certainly takes time. Our guts are effed up.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's just admit that, and there are many reasons for that, but the big one is the one we are focusing on today our diets, the standard American diet. Sugar, gmos, hydrogenated oils, refined grain products, gluten-containing grains, artificial sweeteners a whole bunch of chemical additives and preservatives that have no business calling themselves food. All of these things are part of the standard American breakfast, lunch and dinner, and they all lead to inflammation, and inflammation is the source of so many of our modern-day diseases. This is certainly true of autoimmune disease. The result of chronic inflammation that is caused by our chronically poor diets is a damaged, leaky gut, which leads to sickness and disease. There is more and more evidence coming out confirming that the gut is the source of many diseases, so when it is damaged, inflamed and continuously peppered with foods that add fuel to the fire, we've got a real bad situation on our hands.
Speaker 1:The good news is, we can undo the damage through eating a healing diet, along with other resources such as supplementation herbs and some other things that will be revealed in just a little bit as part of my big tip. You can heal your gut, but if you don't start by changing your diet, you're not really healing anything. Removing the foods that have done all of this damage and incorporating the foods that will undo the damage. That is step one for healing our guts, which brings us to number two. The second must do eat real food.
Speaker 1:The author, michael Pollan, summed it all up when he described most of what we eat today as quote Edible food-like substances that are no longer the products of nature but of food science. Our bodies are crying out and they're saying WTF. They don't know what's going on with all this, because this is not real food that we're eating. This is not the nourishing, healing, restorative, supportive food we were meant to eat. So we need to take a big step back and we need to go back to real food. And what does that mean? Real food? Whole, unadulterated, unmodified, actual food. More of the stuff that you pull out of the ground and pick off of the tree and less of the stuff that you pull out of a package. More of what comes from the earth rather than the middle aisles of the grocery store.
Speaker 1:Real food is vegetables All kinds, all colors, all shapes, all sizes. Leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, mushrooms, onions, peppers, just to name a few. Vitamin, mineral, fiber. Packed veggies are the most important thing we can eat to support our bodies. Fruit, all the delicious fruit, especially berries, again with the vitamins, again with the minerals, again with the fiber. Fruit is nature's candy.
Speaker 1:Real food is whole grains and I suggest everyone do gluten-free grains, whether you think you have an issue with gluten or not, especially when you are trying to heal your gut, because our American gluten is a common irritant and provoker of inflammation. But even without whole wheat, that still leaves grains like whole grain, brown or black rice, quinoa, oats and buckwheat. All of these provide amazing nutrition. Legumes, lentils, black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, chickpeas, split peas Legumes are plant-based protein, fiber and nutrition bombs. Herbs and spices I used to think they were just tiny gifts of flavor, but I quickly learned that these little things pack an insane health punch. Turmeric, in particular, is being studied right now as a conventional medicine treatment for ulcerative colitis because of its extreme anti-inflammatory properties. Garlic, ginger, parsley, cilantro all of these things are powerful little anti-disease weapons, and they're so tasty too. Nuts and seeds, walnuts, pecans, pumpkins, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, chia seeds these are all real food and again, these are tiny but mighty warriors in our fight against disease. For all of the real foods that I just listed.
Speaker 1:Try your best to get organic and non GMO. In healing and staying healed, it's really important to keep as many chemicals, additives and preservatives out of our body as possible. Let's talk about animal products. If you eat animal products, I recommend that you limit them and it's important to be picky about the source. Go for higher quality. If you eat beef, get grass-fed beef, and if you can get it directly from a farm that is open about their practices, that's going to be a lot better than getting conventionally raised meat from a grocery store. Same thing with chicken and eggs. Go for pasture-raised chickens, which leads to higher quality and more nutritious chicken and eggs. For fish, wild caught fish is the way to go. Farmed fish is not natural and is not what we should be consuming.
Speaker 1:Everything I just mentioned are all examples of real food Raw, cooked, baked, steamed, sauteed, blended, put into countless delicious, mouth-watering recipes. All of these things are loaded with nutrients, vitamins, minerals, fiber, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, disease healing and disease preventative properties. Anything that is real food packs a powerful punch against disease, and anything that is not real food is going to have the opposite effect. Remember earlier when I said what I found is that it's actually fairly simple. This is what it breaks down to. Eating real, whole, nutritious, beautiful, natural food equals healing and health. Eating the ultra-processed, refined grains, added sugars, hydrogenated oils, chemical-filled edible food-like substances of the standard American diet equals sickness and disease. Folks, that's it. That's the big secret. That shouldn't be a secret.
Speaker 1:So I promised to give a big tip that will make everything a lot easier, and here it is Find a natural path or functional medicine provider. These are physicians who believe in natural healing. They want to get to the source of the problem and they want to treat it as naturally as possible. These are the physicians who will take the time to help you learn how to support your body so that your body can do what it knows how to do, which is to heal. So, yeah, I kind of buried the lead here, because having a natural path or functional medicine provider on your team will make your journey so much lighter. They especially will help with the two must-dos we covered, which were heal your gut and eat real food.
Speaker 1:A natural path or a functional medicine provider will do all kinds of tests on you that will help make it very clear what the best way to heal your gut is. One very important thing they will do is food sensitivity testing. Now, this is different from a food allergy. This tests for things that we may be eating every day that are healthy, wonderful foods, but when our guts are in a bad and flame state, there may be unexpected foods that are doing us harm that we may have no idea about. Another very important thing they will do is to test for nutrient deficiencies. Many of us are deficient in something and this can hinder our healing when our bodies don't have everything they need to properly heal.
Speaker 1:Natural path and functional medicine providers can also test for things like parasites or bacteria or other things that are going to make healing a lot harder if not addressed, and with them you get individualized care. They can get a better sense of what is going on specific to you and your gut and your body, and they can help you with any needed tweaks or pivots as you go along your health journey in relation to your diet. My naturopath is my angel sent from heaven. Sadly, I didn't even find her until I was a couple years into my health journey, but because of that now I can speak with authority on how much easier I know she would have made things for me if I had found her a little earlier, but that was not to be my path, so now that's always.
Speaker 1:One of my first recommendations to anyone with any health issue is go see a naturopath or a functional medicine provider as soon as you can. Now on this same topic, another great resource is a certified nutrition or health coach. Pick one who believes in and embraces natural healing. They can assist you with advice and guidance as you travel along your healing journey. They can provide you with things like meal plans, grocery lists, expanding the list of things you can eat, new recipe ideas, all kinds of stuff. They can be a great support system and they can be an accountability partner, which is something that is a big benefit to all of us.
Speaker 1:Now I will not ignore the fact that all of these things cost money. Unfortunately, the insurance industry covers conventional medicine, but generally speaking, it does not cover integrative or natural medicine at this point. So for me, every time I see my naturopath, I am paying out of pocket. This will likely be true for any functional medicine provider or integrative health or nutrition coach as well. So for some folks it's simply not feasible and that frustrates me to no end. But I will say if there's any way you can swing it. Please invest in yourself, invest in your health, make cuts in your budget wherever you need to If there's any way that you can make this happen. Even if you're only able to go to a couple visits with a naturopath, for example you could gain so much from just a couple visits and getting some testing done. Just do whatever you can and certainly if you have the means to make them a regular part of your health team, then do it, because I can say my naturopath has been worth every penny.
Speaker 1:Okay, as we wrap up, let's just do a quick review. When it comes to healing and staying healed naturally through our diets and nutrition the four must-haves you have to be a rebel, you have to be committed, you have to have your why, you have to educate yourself. The two must do's. Number one heal your gut. Number two eat real food. This is the key. And then again, my hot tip that makes everything way, way easier enlist the help of a naturopath or functional medicine provider, along with an integrative health or nutrition coach for even more support as you travel along your journey of healing and staying healed with diet and nutrition.
Speaker 1:One final note on my website, kellybehaneycom, I have a list of recommended resources that can help you get a head start when it comes to educating and equipping yourself for this journey, or no matter where you are on your journey. There's something for everyone there. When it comes to the resources that I have listed, and that's all available for free at kellybehaneycom slash resources, so we will cover diet much more in future episodes, along with all of the other essential parts of a lifestyle that leads to true healing. So there is much more to come. Thank you for listening today and if you have found value in this episode, please support my ability to produce this podcast by downloading, rating and reviewing it, and please share it with anyone who you think would find value in it as well. Remember, when we take the vital step to change our diet for the better forever, that is when our healing journey can truly begin. I'm on your team as we heal and stay healed together.