Step Outside the Middle: Try Something New!

In this episode, I dive into another practice from my book 29 Days: The Self Love Leap.  I explore what it means to step outside your comfort zone -- not just emotionally or spiritually, but physically and nutritionally ... through the food you choose to put on your plate.  

Growth doesn't happen in comfort. And neither does healing. 

So many of us are stuck in the same food ruts -- eating the same processed, convenient, familiar foods over and over again.  Not because they nourish us .. but because they're predictable.  They feel safe. They're easy. 

But what if the very thing keeping you stuck in your body .. is also the thing keeping you stuck in your life? 

This episode is about a simple practical shift that you can make to feel better physically, nutritionally, emotionally, and spiritually!   And these practical wellness tips, when implemented, make it just a little bit easier to cultivate self-love!

If you're ready to bring more comfort into your daily rhythm, visit CozyEarth.com and use my code: Unapologetic for up to 20% off! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:19

Good morning. Welcome back to today's episode of Unapologetic Living. My name's Elizabeth Elliott, and I am excited to be back with you for another solo episode during the month of February. February was the month that I originally wrote my book, although it was born into I want to say nine or 10-minute Instagram videos. At that time, I believe they called it IGTV. And each morning I went live to talk about one practice or routine that I have that helps me to cultivate more self-love. And a lot of these are just small things that make up a big picture. It's like simple pieces to a puzzle that make it easier for me to love myself. I found that over time when I made decisions that didn't align with the person that I wanted to be or was attempting, or and I say attempting, when I wasn't making choices uh that were in alignment with my values and the way I wanted to live life, it was so much more difficult for me to love myself. So, and and one of those was in my early 20s, when if you if you have followed me or listened to many of my podcasts or the shows, you know, when I was 11, I was diagnosed with scoliosis. At 12, I had a scoliosis surgery. Around this same time, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she found a little juicery in in our town at that time there there wasn't really anything like it. Maybe there was one other spot. There was a a a small, maybe two health food stores. And she learned that our food was a huge part of a huge component to true health and wellness. Now, at the time, she believed that it was the antibiotics and the red meat that had given her this cancer. I I now no longer think I believe that. I think it had more to do stress in her life. And I do believe stress is the root cause of all illness, whether it's emotional stress, it's physical stress, whether and it's nutritional stress, you might be feeding your body foods that it cannot deal with. And so a stress response is occurring. And when we're stressed, our immune system is not functioning at its optimal level. And so when I look back, I don't necessarily know it was the meat because she was buying Laura's lean beef, which at the time was a really high-quality red meat. But we were not eating that very many, we were not eating a variety of vegetables. We might have some peas here, an iceberg lettuce salad with tomatoes, and some Catalina dressing, which I'm sure was laden with seed oils even back then. Um, I'm trying to think. We were we were based on Pop Tarts and these little pecan cinnamon Danish rolls, uh, Pillsberry Doughboy cinnamon rolls and orange Danish rolls as well, uh, toaster strudels, and we would douse them with the icing they came with. And then I, on my Pop-Tart, I would just pour on back and forth uh the parquet margarine, like nothing but trans fatty acids. And so diet became a huge piece for us. And then as I was going into high school, the fat-free craze became very popular. Of course, I wanted to look like the girls on Teen Magazine or 17 Magazine. Uh, the other thing I really had to like stare head on or stare right in the mirror head on was the fact that I will never look like those girls because I was crooked. I had a an S-shaped spine. So asymmetrically, I was not going to have that perfectly little uh um, you know, tapered waist with the and and I'm broad-shouldered. And I was going to have anyway, a different figure than what I was seeing. And I needed to learn to love this, and it's taken years. And now I'm revisiting it as I'm going through paramenopause. I'm having to revisit this lesson in learning to love myself all over again, which I do believe life brings us uh opportunities in a spiral. So we begin to master it, but then we revisit it again, whether it's uh, you know, for example, self-love, maybe we struggle with anger or our impatience, and maybe we learn to be patient in one arena. Maybe I'm really patient now on the road with, you know, and no longer am showing signs of road rage, but my kids still trigger impatience, right? And I become impatient with my partner or at work with work colleagues. Like that's just an example. But I do believe these opportunities continue to show up for us. It just becomes a little bit easier, first of all, to become aware, oh, this is coming up for me again. And over time, here going into my 48th year, I've learned tools along the way that have helped. And they are all in my book, 29 Days, The Self-Love Leap. That's 29 days because during 2020, when I wrote the book and created these videos, there were 29 days because it was a leap year. Now, could there be more days? Sure. I also want it to feel incredibly doable, simple yet profound, can have big results. It does not have to be like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna love myself today, because you know what, that's difficult to do. Things pop up, memories show up. Um, we might make a choice we don't like. And so when we can just begin to add in, I know right now it's also I want to talk just briefly about Lent. And many people are practicing Lent, and in Lent there's some removal, but there's also a great way to just add in or weave in something else. And sometimes that removal, like in going back to Lent for just a moment, is uh something that you would like to remove because it is a decision you don't want to keep making for yourself or your health or your wellness. We've removed caffeine. I know that I have become completely, I'd just say addicted to three and a half, four cups a day of coffee in the morning pretty quickly by 9:30 in the morning. I'm up at like 7:30 or 8. And by nine o'clock in the 9:30 in the morning, I've had three and a half, four cups of coffee. I mean, in some ways, it's got a hold over me. I don't have a hold on it. So we're going into what? Let's see. If Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, today is Monday. Today's the sixth day, no, no caffeine. So I'm just gonna open up to day eight. I just randomly picked again. I think I I dove into day nine. I dove into day, I can't remember the other days, but there's been three this month. But this one is day eight, and I'm just gonna read you a little bit about uh on right from the book. So throughout history, there have been so many different opinions on optimal food choices, and I've experimented with quite a few. When I was in high school, I was a vegan for about nine months. I was also vegetarian for a really long time. I was a vegetarian. So at 15, again, I it was prompted by my mother's breast cancer, and I really never loved meat. I didn't like getting a hold of that gristly bite. I um and feeling the texture in my mouth. So that always made me uncomfortable. So it was easy for me to give up meat. I even chicken, I think for a while we were eating chicken. We didn't really grow up eating chicken because my dad wasn't a chicken eater. So we ate mostly predominantly red beef, uh, fried ham, spaghetti, uh uh sometimes we would have steak, sloppy joe, fried ham. But my mom rarely made chicken. She didn't really start making chicken until after her breast cancer diagnosis, and she started getting the stuff in a package. I don't even think she made it uh from raw. So at 15, I remember eating my last hamburger. Uh, we were in Utah. Maybe I was a little bit older, actually. Maybe I wasn't in Utah, maybe I was in Colorado. But I remember getting a hold of a bite. I was like, oh, I don't want to eat any more of this hamburger. And so I decided to uh eliminate meat from my diet. And sometimes I can be good at this, sometimes I am an all or nothing uh kind of gal. And I eliminated the meat for a while. And then at 23, when I was pregnant with my son, I'm trying to just recall, I decided I my sister brought home some salmon from the Pacific Northwest, and I thought, well, I'll have some salmon. And I might have already been having fish oil, I cannot remember, but I had some salmon at Christmas, and that sort of opened the door to eating a little bit more foods. Tuna, I think I ate maybe, I can't remember again because I can't remember the messaging during pregnancy at that time because because I know that they um discouraged deli meat and such, which is probably a good idea. Now that's definitely it's a uh number um carcinogenic, you know, known carcinogen. Um, or processed meats have been labeled as um, you know, a huge risk for colon cancer. So I added the salmon. And then after my son was born, I was really fatigued. I wasn't feeling that great. I uh was having these daily headaches. I think some of it was environmental toxins. And so I went to see Dr. Mercola up in his group. I didn't actually get to see Dr. Mercola, I saw a physician in his office and up in um Illinois. And I was, oh, and in the meanwhile, I'd also met a homeopathic physician who was an advocate of the blood type diet, and I am no, which means lots of meat. And at that time I wasn't ready to hear her. When I went to Dr. Mercola's office, it was again concluded that I needed to start integrating um meat into my diet. I still was not certain about adding meat. Again, a lot of it was a texture thing. So I agreed to add a bison liver capsule or supplement into my regimen. And then when I was traveling to the farmer's market on a weekly basis every Saturday morning, I decided to pick up some bison, Kentucky bison. I don't know if that's the name of the company, but it was uh raised here in Kentucky. And bison was my first introduction back to uh red meat. And then I started adding grass-fed ground beef, and um I think I want to say bacon was the very last thing I added. Of course, it was pasture raised and bought at the farmer's market, but at some point I I added chicken. Now I had never eaten chicken off of a bone, I had never baked or seen my mom roast a whole chicken, I had never pulled the meat from the bone or cut open a raw chicken. Like none of this was anything that I grew up with. And so I started to get my hands a little dirty, but chicken was the last thing I integrated back into my diet. Uh, and so when I look back, there was still quite a bit of processed foods. I was eating a lot of processed foods growing up as a kid. I ate a lot of processed foods all the way through high school with the snack wells and the fat-free items to try to stay skinny, which really was just a bunch of sugar. And I always had that sort of like puffiness in my face. If I look back, I never uh looked very lean. I would imagine a lot of people back then didn't uh because they were eating the same way. Lots of chemicals, lots of fucking chemicals. So then fast forward, uh, you know, the there was probably some processed foods in our house when my kids were little, but I also started milling my own wheat around that time. So I was making pancakes from scratch, I was making muffins with fresh milled flowers, whether it was spelt or camut or soft or hard um red and white wheats. So I felt really good about that. There, but you know, we would buy the uh Annie's cheddar bunnies, and um, you know, it's it's 23 years ago now, um, but a lot of fresh juice and fruit smoothies where I would blend in the greens if I needed to. And then I was trying to make a lot of our dinners from scratch. We also had some cereal, and then at some point uh, you know, I just remember reading one article, and it makes sense that you know, the cereal box probably has more nutrition than the cereal, even if it's organic. And so I just decided we're done with cereal. We did eat a lot of oats, warm oats, seal-cut oats, and then uh brown rice cereal, which we would top with um either raw milk or uh unsweetened almond milk. Sometimes it was rice milk, uh butter, full fat, grass-fed butter, and then a little bit of maple syrup or honey, and then almonds or pecans or walnuts. So we really tried to, I tried to make that meal pretty nourishing when we would eat that for breakfast. So but again, over time, and I've you know revamped our diet multiple times, we did strictly carnivore in 2021 or 2022, maybe uh we we made it about three weeks strict carnivore, and then we added some blueberries in. And by far I was my leanest at during the carnivore era, and uh also probably had the most muscle mass, but definitely my leanest. I think. So, anyway, the message on day eight, however, is to uh try to eat from the perimeter, shop the perimeter. There's so many different uh conflicting ideas out there. I think it's important. The most important thing is to shop the perimeter and buy real whole foods. Don't buy the chips, don't buy the cookies, don't buy the crackers. You know, occasionally, you know, you could splurge and find a cracker that is maybe on the healthier side or gluten-free. But I personally think it's still best to avoid and eat avoid the boxed foods most of the time. Shopping for your produce, uh, your fresh um meats. Ideally, they would be grass-fed. You can get 100% grass-fed even at Walmart uh and Aldi and uh Costco today. I don't know about Sam's, I'm not a member there. Kroger, I would say Whole Foods, of course. Uh, most of your uh grass, most of your groceries are going to carry something. Is it going to be perfect? No, but I still think it's going to be a better choice than something out of the freezer, like a Ling Cuisine that's got a little bit of like country fried steak or or what have you. So my invitation is for you to explore the perimeter and only shop from the perimeter. So maybe it's that you need to try a new piece of produce. Maybe each week challenge yourself to buy something you've never bought. Look up a recipe. We've got so much information in our hands. You don't even actually have to have a cookbook anymore. I like to have a cookbook. I really don't turn to them that often. But I know if I pick up my phone and I go into Chat GPT and I say and I write, I need a recipe using star fruit with chicken and olive oil and citrus. I don't know if they even go together. But my point is, is if you plug that in, they're going to give you a recipe for exactly the ingredients that you have requested. And you don't have to do all this searching and digging. I I like ChatGPT sometimes for situations like recipes because I can go in, like if I know what's in my pantry, I've got coconut flour. I have, uh if I'm going to make something gluten-free and grain-free, I've got coconut flour, I've got real butter, I've got eggs, I have, I can blend up some oats to make oat flour. I can go in and write those specific things down. I've got frozen blueberries and it'll spit out a recipe. And almost every time I haven't had a bad recipe yet through ChatGPT. So that's a great way to use Chat GPT. If you're not a huge fan, I wouldn't go uh turning to Chat GPT for a heartfelt letter, but I do think on occasion it's a great way to, it's a great tool. So, you know, there is a lot of conflicting information out there, and I think it's important to uh really pay attention to this is when body awareness is incredibly important. Really pay attention to how you are feeling when you eat a certain food. I mean, it could impact your energy level, it could impact your emotions, you might notice you um feel overly full. Uh, you might notice you feel overly tired after you eat. Maybe it's that you've eaten too much. And again, oh, the other the well, the day that we we dove into was mindful eating, really taking your time to slow down. When you take your time to slow down, you won't feel as full as fast. And so you you may notice and become more aware of the fact that you're overeating when you are mindfully eating. You want to eat to about 80% fullness, you don't want to overstuff yourselves, like like if you know the feeling you have in your body around your waistline after you've eaten Thanksgiving dinner, it's so it feels so good to not feel that way. I also know when you're eating these real foods, you have a tendency to stop. Whereas some of the other foods in the boxes, the chips, the cookies, the crackers, they have added um nutrients or not nutrients. I'm gonna know retract that. They have added chemicals so that it is confusing for your brain to decipher and discern, oh, I'm full. So these chemicals that are purposefully added so that you will continue to eat that bag of chips is a thing which will cause blood sugar spikes, insulin sensitivity, cancers, heart disease, um, for you to overeat, obesity. So again, when you are getting, which I don't have here, okay. Let's what I do have in front of me is salt, and that's it, you know this is salt. If you're picking up an apple, you know you've just got an apple. You don't have to read the ingredients and try to um make sure you understand them when you're picking up and buying real food. You can even treat yourself to something like mason jar ice cream. You buy the whole cream, you get a little bit of maple syrup, you add a little bit of a bit of vanilla. Trying to think what else goes in that. That might be it. Whole cream. Oh, you could add an egg and blend it all up in your Vitamix or a blender. And then set that in the freezer. You could add real cocoa powder and you have a dairy treat for that evening. It takes like four hours to freeze that so that it becomes almost ice cream. Again, my invitation to you this week is to shop the perimeter. Now, if you've got to buy one thing, I don't know, pick one thing and maybe save it for Sunday. I know if I don't have it in the house, I don't eat it in the house. I'm not thinking about it and uh I'm not gonna go to the store for it. Occasionally am I, like a chocolate bar around the time of my cycles I approach my period. So, you know, there are those times when the food noise becomes loud and I have to go get it. But generally speaking, if I don't buy it and it's not in this house, I don't eat it, I don't want it. So when you start to keep things out of your house that you know are no longer serving you, and you begin to make these healthier food choices because that's all you have that's available, I promise you, you will start to feel better. Your energy levels will improve, your sleep quality will improve, and it will become easier to love yourself. It's hard if you've sat down with a bag of chips. I know for me, and I eat them all. The next day I feel like shit. I'm disappointed in myself. I I don't, I'm not energetic, I don't have the levels of energy I need to go to have a quality workout, whether it's a walk or a run. I've got brain fog, I'm moving slower, I'm not creating videos like these. And so I just again invite you day eight is I invite you to remove the processed foods and just chop the perimeter. Again, pick a new, go into that produce section, pick a new piece of meat or a new cut you've never had. I didn't have a pork chop till I was like 43. That's old. And I don't eat a ton of pork, but I now know I like it. And if seasoned just right, a little salt and pepper, maybe some other seasonings. I I'm pretty good and happy and satisfied with just salt and pepper, a little bit of butter or a little bit of oil. And I've got a meal with some salad, sliced tomatoes. Just pick something new and just give it a try. Plug it into your chat GPT, make something new for yourself, and then again, mindfully eat. Eat mindfully. And that's that's uh uh day eight. And then I want uh and then journal, journal about how you feel. Notice how you feel. How do you feel in your body when you are making these food choices versus uh other food choices? Try it for seven days. That's my challenge to you. Try go shop the perimeter, try eating that way for seven days. There could be maybe some potential withdrawal effects from from the junk. I did not have any caffeine on Wednesday. When I look back across my life, I was having Coca-Cola's quite a bit, probably every day through high school, middle school. That was a big, that was a staple in our home, Coca-Cola's. And then when I was 19, I started dating my kid's father. He took me to uh the coffee shop here, and I had a uh an iced mocha, a large iced mocha. I wouldn't want to say it was three or four shots of espresso. So I went from the Coca-Cola's to the large iced mochas. And I was still having Coca-Cola's I had a Coca-Cola every day when I was pregnant with my son, who is almost 24. And then the Coke when I was pregnant started, not the Coke. I did stop the Coke. No, I didn't. I stopped the coffee. It was so intense, it was making my head feel so whack. And I well, I thought it was that. I also thought it was the car I was driving and the fumes and the exhaust from the car. But I was my my taste buds, my smell was off. Uh, my I was feeling dizzy and lightheaded. So I eliminated the coffee and the mochas. And then with the Coca-Cola, I remember when my son was 18 months old. I can't remember, I was probably drinking Coca-Cola. 18 months old, we went to Waffle House. It was Christmas Eve, and I ordered a Coca-Cola, and I remember that night. I'm like, this is the last Coca-Cola I'm ever having. And that was the last Coca-Cola I've ever had. Uh, he was, again, he was about 18, maybe he's a little bit older because he was born in a May. Uh, but I made the decision to never have a Coca-Cola or soda again with that high fructose corn syrup. Again, it's been a journey. It's taken me time, and I'm still making tweaks. Uh, so the Coca-Cola's eliminated. And then I started drinking yerba mate. And when I tell you, I was having, now this is not the bottle, but it was easily this big and look probably potentially larger of a um uh French press, insulated French press of yurba mate. And I would pour honey in it. It was amazing, and I would drink it all day long while I was raising my young kids. I have not, and then started with the coffee, and I can't remember when I went back to coffee. Uh it is a ritual. I love it. I love the smell. I love pouring the water. I love making our water in our uh I mean, it was a it was a deal. I would make my reverse osmosis water, I would pour uh that water into the electric kettle, and then I would make more reverse osmosis water, and then I would heat the water in the coffee grounds, I would dump those into the French press and I would pour it. It's the aroma and then get out a little bit of full-fat coconut milk. That's what we've been drinking, it drinking with it lately, whereas before it might have been raw milk or full fat milk, uh grass-fed. And so you, you know, it was it was a whole ritual, the whole morning revolved around this one practice that right now I'm giving up, and it's been six days. But let me tell you, when you give up something, even uh like the the crunchiness of chips, hearing the sounds, the taste, the way it feels in your mouth, you're giving something up that you may feel a little bit of grief or some even detox suffocation symptoms. I had the most splitting headache. I thought my eye eyeballs were gonna burst out of my head that first day. That headache lasted until Friday morning, and it was still there, and I'm still learning to wake up without caffeine. And and it said it could take days. So I'm just I'm waiting for the other side of this. Awesome. I can't wait to feel the other side of no caffeine for 40 days and to see and become aware of what that has done for my body, my clarity, my mind, my spirit. So again, notice that when you remove something, once you let go of some of these processed foods, uh, you may have a period where you are grieving or agitated or irritable or um grumpy or you're feeling less satisfied. But if you give it long enough, I promise you, you will begin to feel better and you will thank yourself, and it will be so much easier to cultivate that self-love. So, again, I invite you to check out my book for more ideas. That was day eight. I invite you to shop the perimeter, try something new, find a new recipe. You can also, if you don't have Chat GPT and are anti-Chat GPT, right? You've got Google or DuckDuckGo at your fingertips. And then also you could go super old school, check out your your local library, find some cookbooks there, or go do all your research there, you know, on their devices uh to find and create a healthier lifestyle for you. So again, um I hope you all have a fantastic day. Thanks for tuning in and stay tuned. Uh, as I I um have a great guest coming up next week. Uh we are actually uh having our conversation this afternoon. Lee, I want to say, I don't want to leave, I think. Bow come. I don't want to. I think it's Lee Baufun, but he is a uh an author as and also an expert on relationships. So again, February, month of love, but I think it's always important to be cultivating the and and nurturing the relationships that we have. So definitely be sure to tune in next week.