Nourished Living

14 - Conquer Inflammation Naturally

• Courtney Podany

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In this episode, Courtney dives deep into a topic that affects nearly every aspect of our health—chronic inflammation. From persistent fatigue and bloating to stubborn weight gain and joint pain, many “normal” symptoms could be your body’s way of signaling it needs support.

What You'll Learn:

  • The difference between acute inflammation vs. chronic inflammation
  • Common signs of underlying inflammation you might be overlooking
  • Top inflammatory foods to watch for
  • How to read food labels for inflammatory ingredients
  • Simple swaps and anti-inflammatory foods to add to your diet
  • Why stress management plays a big role in your body’s inflammatory response

Whether you’ve been feeling foggy, irritable, bloated, or just “not like yourself,” this episode gives you practical, empowering steps to take today—no extreme diets required.

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Connect with Courtney: 

Welcome to the Nourished Living Podcast, where I'll be diving deep into nutrition, holistic wellness, and practical tips to help you live your healthiest, most vibrant life. I am Courtney Podany, a nutritional therapist, certified personal trainer, type one diabetic and mom. And I'm here to help you take charge of your health with ease and confidence. Together we'll explore how to nourish your body, mind, and soul in a way that feels good and sustainable. So grab your favorite beverage. Take a deep breath, and let's get into the episode. I. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Nourished Living Podcast. I'm your host, Courtney Podany. I cannot believe that we are in the middle of May already. My daughter graduates from preschool next week. And then it will officially be summer. I honestly feel like it was just yesterday that I was researching and looking into where I even wanted to put her into preschool, and now that's been over two years. So it really is just crazy how fast time flies. And I am definitely looking forward to the summer, the heat, and all of the summer produce. We went to the farmer's market this past weekend and there were already some cherries out. Lots of berries, so that will be fun. But I will have my kids at home. All the time with me, you know, except for a few random camps here or there, but it will be hot and we will have to spend a lot of time indoors. So I'm gonna have to get a little creative with our activities and keeping them busy. If you know of some well loved activities for an almost five-year-old girl and almost 3-year-old twin boys, please let me know. I am not very creative. Usually my go-to is just going outside, which we do. Do as well, but we have to do that quite early in the morning to avoid the heat. So basically from like 11:00 AM onwards, a lot of times we are inside, so help. Anyway, today I wanted to talk more about inflammation. My friend Dr. Daniel McClelland and I touched on this a little bit last week, which was such a wonderful episode. Dr. Daniel cleared up so many misconceptions when it comes to chiropractic and his unique approach. If you have not tuned in yet, I would definitely go back and listen. But I see so many posts on social media regarding inflammation and anti-inflammatory diets, so I just wanted to dedicate an episode to this to break it down in a way that actually makes sense, and more importantly helps you know what you can do about it. You know, I love dropping tips and tricks you can get started with right away. So per usual, I will have lots of those as well. Okay. First, let's talk about acute inflammation. Acute inflammation is totally natural and necessary. This is our body's way of healing from injury or illness. It's why a cut will get red or swollen, or why your throat hurts when you're sick. That is our immune system doing its job, but chronic inflammation, that is another story. This happens when the body continues sending out those inflammatory signals, even when there is no actual threat. There's no infection, no injury, yet your immune system is a still in fight mode day after day. I like to think of this as electricity. When you leave your house for the day, you turn the lights off. This would be like your inflammatory response turning off when there's no injury or illness present. However, chronic inflammation is like leaving every single light on in your house when you go on a two week vacation. It is not necessary and quite expensive, energetically speaking. W. So why should we care about this chronic inflammation? Well, chronic inflammation is the number one leading cause of most chronic disease and conditions, and it can be very sneaky. So it is not always seen on the outside, but it can lead to serious health problems if ignored. It has the potential to lead to heart disease, Alzheimer's, and dementia. Type two diabetes, cancer, arthritis, digestive orders like IBD, inflammatory bowel disease, or Crohn's Disease, obesity, and lots of autoimmune diseases. I. So this is why it is so important for us to tune in with our body, check in, see if we have any signs of this underlying inflammation, and then go ahead and work to reduce it. So some signs that you might be inflamed, since inflammation is not always seen from the outside, here are some chronic. Inflammation signs. These symptoms sometimes get categorized as normal or common, but symptoms are always your body trying to alert you of something, which is why we need to learn how to listen to our body. Dr. Leslie Korn says, symptoms tell a story of nutritional or emotional challenges, and I couldn't agree more. Okay, so here are some signs that you might have some underlying inflammation, joint stiffness that lingers. So it's not just present when you wake up, and then you kind of work it off as you move around. A feeling of heaviness in your body, like it's hard for you to just walk throughout the day. Moving your limbs kind of feels like you are walking through water or quicksand. Weight gain, especially around your stomach, brain fog, or memory issues. Bloating, heartburn or irregular digestion, trouble sleeping and chronic fatigue, getting sick frequently, feeling hangry or irritable between meals and anxiety or depression. If a few of these sound familiar, it could be your body's way of saying, Hey, I need some support over here. So what causes chronic inflammation? Chronic inflammation can be triggered by poor nutrition, gut imbalances, stress, environmental toxins and chemicals, lack of movement and habits like smoking or drinking in excess. But for now, let's focus on nutrition and the gut because this is where we can start taking action today. I have a whole episode, episode seven, dedicated to talking about fats, including which ones are inflammatory and which ones are healthier for you. But we are going to go a little further into detail here. So we've talked about seed oils. If you have not. Listened to that episode. Seed oils are the ones that are known to be most inflammatory, and these include vegetable oil, soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil. And these are very rampant in processed foods, but they are highly unstable, meaning they go rancid easily, especially in clear plastic bottles sitting under store lights all day. And once they're in our body, they contribute to inflammation. Many of these oils are high in Omega six fatty acids. Now Omega six fatty acids are not bad. We do need them, but we need them in the right ratio compared with the Omega-3 fatty acids. Ideally, you want a four to one or one to one ratio. But the standard American diet, the sad diet, the ratio looks closer to 25 to one. So you are intaking 25 more times the amount of omega sixes compared with omega threes. So when you're looking on labels, you would like to look for the oils that I just mentioned, plus margarine or shortening. Also you will look for anything that says hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated. These are typically the ones we would like to stay away from, or at least limit them. They can be in everything from salad dressings to taco seasoning, to broth to crackers and chips. And I'm not saying never eat them, but awareness is key, right? So what can we eat then? Healthier sources of omega sixes include sunflower seeds, walnuts, chia seeds, almonds, coconut oil, and avocado oil. So if you are cooking, I would use these two oils. And healthy sources of omega threes include flax seeds, fatty fish like salmon or sardines and grass fed dairy or ghee, olive oil, which is a healthy option, is rich in omega nines, which is also helpful to us and helpful in preventing inflammation. That's why variety is so key. We've talked about it with our produce, trying to include as many different colors as possible, and it's the same here. We need to include a variety of different fats. I know it can be easy to get into a routine of buying the same foods over and over again, especially when we are short on time. But if within that go-to list of yours, if there is only one or two sources of. Fat. Hopefully you can begin to broaden your horizons and include sources from both the Omega six list and the Omega-3 list to avoid unnecessary inflammation. I will even list out those healthy sources in the show notes so you have easy access to them and can screenshot them to have them with you whenever you visit the grocery store or put in your online order. Sometimes I hear that people don't really know how to incorporate fats into their cooking. So some suggestions include roasting your vegetables in the oven with a drizzle of avocado oil on them, or sauteing vegetables in a pan with olive oil. Adding nuts and seeds to your salads, putting chia seeds or flax seeds into your smoothies. Incorporating avocado onto your sandwiches or burgers using olive oil and balsamic vinegar as your salad dressing. Or if you have a recipe that calls for heavy cream, you could swap that for coconut milk instead. Other foods that will lead to inflammation that you'll want to look out for, especially on processed foods are MSG or preservatives, artificial colors and flavors, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, refined sugar, gums like guar, gum and xanthan gum, and also processed meats like deli meats and bacon. Again, I'm not saying to cut everything out today, but learning how to read the ingredient list and not just the nutrition facts is a game changer. So since we talked about inflammatory foods, now let's flip the script and let's talk about anti-inflammatory foods. Four vegetables. We have leafy greens like spinach and kale, also broccoli, beets, carrots and mushrooms. Four fruits include berries, cherries, oranges, and bananas. The healthy fats that are anti-inflammatory we talked about are olive oil, avocado, raw chia, and flax seeds, and raw nuts. For proteins, we have salmon, tuna, sardines, chicken beans, and lentils. Then we have our probiotic rich foods like yogurt, kefir, cottage cheese, fermented vegetables, kombucha, and miso. And then for herbs and spices, we have ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, garlic, and black pepper. And if cooking isn't your thing or you are unsure of how you could incorporate ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, or garlic into recipes, you can try teas or supplements to start easing into these. They are all available in various forms. So what about the gut? As Hippocrates said, all disease begins in the gut, and this is true. We've talked about gut health and how it plays a massive role in our mental and physical wellbeing. I. And when the balance of good and bad bacteria is off, so bacteria, or you might have heard flora, this is known as gut dysbiosis. Basically just an imbalance of the bacteria in our gut. This can cause anxiety and depression. Skin issues like acne or eczema, brain fog, sugar cravings, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, new. Food sensitivities and frequent illness. So focusing on nutrient dense, anti-inflammatory, real foods will regulate this amount of good flora versus bad flora that you have in your gut. This will also bring down the inflammation. Like Dr. Daniel said in the previous episode, the healthier we eat, the less pain we feel. So focusing on good nourishing nutrition will decrease your risk of developing chronic pain as well. To summarize when buying processed foods, look out for the pro-inflammatory omega six fats. Include good sources of Omega-3 fats to try to keep your omega six versus Omega-3 intake relatively the same. Incorporate anti-inflammatory foods into your regular routine. Watch out for preservatives, artificial flavorings and colors, refined sugar and gums. Keep your gut happy by eating nutrient dense real foods. And as far as stress goes, I will have a whole episode on stress, but chronic stress can contribute to chronic inflammation as well. Stress disrupts our nervous system, which signals to our body that we need to release inflammatory cells. But remember, we only want our inflammatory cells on when we are at home and we need the lights on. Working to reduce stress in and enjoyable way will do wonders for your inflammation. That will look different to everyone. But some common stress reducing activities include exercise, walking, outside, spending time in nature, journaling or meditating. Building sustainable anti-inflammatory habits now will greatly reduce your risk of living with underlying chronic inflammation and also reduce your risk of more serious chronic diseases later down the road. Start with one thing. Swap your cooking oil. Add in a probiotic rich food. Look at your food labels a little differently. Tiny shifts add up. So if you're dealing with low energy, brain fog, stubborn weight around your midsection, joint pain, or if you just don't feel like yourself lately, it might be inflammation. But the good news is, is there's a lot you can do about it. All right. I hope this gave you some clarity and encouragement today. If you found it helpful, please share it with a friend who might need this info too. And until next time, take care of yourself. Eat real food and listen to your body. Thanks for hanging out with me today and tuning into the Nourished Living Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and found something you can start implementing right away to kickstart your nourished transformation. If you loved this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who could benefit from these insights. You can also connect with me over on Instagram at Nourished Living for more resources and support. Until next time, stay nourished.