Five Essential Nutrition Tips for Optimal Health Ep 79

Chris Newport, functional nutritionist, reviews five essential nutrition habits to embrace as we enter the new year, emphasizing holistic wellness for improved health outcomes.

She discusses:

• Understanding digestive system function, the nervous system and how that connects to overall health 
• The critical role of hydration (and the timeframe you need it in)
• What nutrient, and in what quantity, for health, performance and longevity 
• Importance of fiber (+ crucifers and prebiotics) from whole foods for digestive, skin and brain health
• How emotions and self-awareness are tied to nutrition and eating habits 
• Introducing Harvard's SPIRE model for holistic wellness 

Experience the breakthrough when everything finally clicks! Train with expert coaches, fuel with incredible chef-prepared meals, and connect with athletes who love triathlon as much as you do. Join us April 22–26 at beautiful Lake Jocassee for four unforgettable days of swim, bike, run, learning, and community. Spots are almost full: Reserve yours here.

Transcript

Optimizing Digestive Health for Overall Wellness

Speaker 1 1:32

Hey y'all and welcome back to the Find your Edge podcast. I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. Today is all about five things, as we head into the new year, that we can do for our nutrition to best treat ourselves. So before I jump into that, there's a couple of things that I wanted to share first. Number one is our digestive system. So our digestive system is basically one big tube from your mouth down to your anus.

Speaker 1 1:59

Right, we've got all of the things that are going on in order for your body to assimilate the nutrients that you actually take in and eat. And the reason why this is important is because when you chew your food or swallow it let's say you had a smoothie or something that's already been chewed goes to our stomach, and in our stomach, that's where we have this additional level of acid that's really important for digestion, especially for breaking down proteins and for assimilating certain nutrients, in particular vitamin B12 and iron. And then all of that is sent to your small intestines and that's where a good majority of our nutrient absorption occurs. And after we've done that and it's gone through that whole process, then we send it to our large intestines and that's where we start to create stool and where we have what's called a Bristol stool scale. The quality of your stool indicates the quality of your digestion and what's going on with your body, and the reason why I say this is that nutrition is not in a silo in itself. Nutrition is a part of the whole person, and I'm gonna introduce you guys to this really interesting acronym that I learned about from Dr Tal Ben-Shahar. He's a Harvard professor, actually the most popular professor there, and the author of Happier.

Speaker 1 3:13

But before we get into that, knowing that your digestive system is affected by a lot of happier, but before we get into that, knowing that your digestive system is affected by a lot of things and also it's on the lowest rung of your body's necessities. So your body and this ties into your resting metabolic rate or your RMR your resting metabolic rate is the metabolism or the amount of energy that your body needs in order to keep certain things functioning. Highest on the list your brain, obviously. Your heart, your lungs, your liver man, that liver is an energy suck. It's like 20 to 30 percent of your energy needs. Same with your brain. And then we also have to have our kidneys and then, as we go lower down the rung, now we have things like skeletal muscle or that lean body mass that helps you pick up that heavy weight or ride or run or whatever it is, pick up your grandkids. So we've got that. And then we also have our digestive system. That's really lowest on the priority list. The higher things again brain, heart, lungs, liver and kidneys. Those are the necessities that we have to stay alive.

Speaker 1 4:23

And the reason why I wanted to bring this up is because you have nervous systems that are operating in a certain way to be able to best optimize your survival. So if we're in a constant stressed place or if we're chronically stressed out, the body thinks that it's running from a tiger, but it also obviously doesn't know that we have evolved. We really haven't evolved, I should say. But now, instead of running from a tiger, we're on a deadline for that specific project, or our kids are upset, or we're trying to figure out finances, any number of things that can get us stressed out. But your body doesn't know the difference. And when it is tapped into that sympathetic nervous system, that's where your body is really trying to do the fight, flight or freeze. So it has to attack something. So it's got to have that heart going, it's got to have that blood sugar up. It's got to keep your brain going right.

Optimizing Longevity Through Nutrition

Speaker 1 5:24

But when we tap into our parasympathetic nervous system and here's kind of a fun way that I like to think of this, you might know the sympathetic nervous system is the fight, fight or freeze, and the parasympathetic is what a lot of people like to say rest and digest. In my third grade brain, I like to think of it parasympathetic is my poop system, and that also makes everybody sort of relax and sigh a little bit when I talk about those things and they're like oh, okay, it's okay, this is an approachable topic, we're all doing it, it's okay. But if we are constantly on alert or if we're shoving food in our face while we're in our car or we're barely even pausing to have a meal, your body is still stressed out. When you're trying to digest, it's not going to digest as optimally as possible and therefore serve your brain health, serve your mental health, serve your physical health because of all the stress that we're under, because we're not able to truly tap into that parasympathetic nervous system. When we eat in order to appropriately recover, rest, digest and poop Like I always tell my clients and I tell my kids, we got to have brown bananas and brown bananas every single day. So, just as a little reward for you guys, I will attach the Bristol stool scale so that you can actually see what should my poop look like, because that really is an indicator of the health of your digestive system and, in turn, the health of so many other things the health of your skin If you're somebody who has psoriasis or somebody has chronic acne, this matters.

Speaker 1 7:04

If you're somebody who has brain fog a lot, or your hormones are often, it's tied into your ability to digest, and digest quality foods, all right. So I wanted to make sure that understanding the process of digestion and then that ties into what you actually need to do strategically and tactically for getting proper nutrition every day, all right. So these are some of the things that I would love if you guys made these into sticky habits. We talk all about that in our 21 day nutrition reset challenge, so check it out. It's only $57. We start officially on the first, but if you don't jump in until the fifth, no problem. We've got live calls, accountability calls, recipes, meal plans. This is all about resetting your gut and teaching you how to digest properly with good quality habits. All right, so the endurance edgecom forward. Quality habits All right, so theenduranceedgecom forward. Slash challenge All right, so number one on our nutrition list, and this is something that is so heavily neglected.

Speaker 1 8:06

But we're always leaning into other things like oh, can I take a pill, can I take a supplement to fix that? You cannot fix hydration. You have to do it every single day. I'm sorry that it's not more automated or something that we can't just not think about, but we got them All right, so hydration is really crucial. So if you're sipping on your cup of coffee right now, I want you to pause, put that down, go grab a drink of water and have some of that. Your kidneys are the most efficient and effective at doing what they're doing, which is clearing out the toxins from your blood, sending them to the kidneys and then down into the bladder and, obviously, out. It is the most efficient in the first 10 hours of the day. That's the really critical time and that's probably when you might also be working or working out and kind of busier. Therefore, we sort of get in, we perhaps get into that flow state, or we have perhaps get a little distracted doing other things, and then we don't think about our hydration. So I get that. That's more of a behavioral challenge, and how can we optimize that opportunity to get your hydration?

Speaker 1 9:14

Ideally, this is from water, but I cannot tell you the number of people who have told me that they don't like water, so I would encourage you to try to find a water you like. That might sound ridiculous, but it is truly a thing. Our palates are sensitive to the way things taste, obviously, and some of us are super tasters. Google that one. It's a really fun one to go down that rabbit hole. If you're somebody who doesn't like a lot of vegetables or you're very sensitive to bitter, you're probably a super taster. But getting our water in a way that tastes good to us is really key, and this shouldn't be in soda. I really hesitate for some of those little like drink packets or things like that.

Speaker 1 9:57

If you can go more pure, that's just what your body is intended to do. Try different filtered waters, try different kinds of seltzers even. There's a lot of different options, but one way or the other, we got to get that in you, and hopefully within the first 10 hours of your waking time. That's when your brain is so optimally functioning, not only for your work or your workouts or your family, or whatever it is that you're doing, where you need that brain health. This is where hydration comes in, and it's one of the easiest and quickest things that you can do for your health. All right, so that's number one.

Speaker 1 10:36

Number two and I've seen this time and time again generally speaking, we don't get enough protein, and when I say protein, that can mean there can be a lot of things that come up for people. So I was just having a conversation with one of my athletes this morning about oh yeah, you know, I weigh X amount and I'm getting Y amount of grams of protein. Isn't that right? But I'm not losing weight. Is that because I'm eating too much of the other things? And the answer is probably yes, but one way or the other, we're not focusing on all of these other things for the moment. One way or the other, I wanna make sure that you're getting enough good quality, full profile of amino acids, essential amino acids, protein sources, so you can get a whole list of both plant-based and animal-based protein sources that goes through all of these things that I'm talking about today. Over at our website, it's our high performance healthy eating nutrition guide. You can download it for free. It will also be included in the challenge, so you can get that there. It's like a cheat sheet showing you what foods have what amounts of protein and what are the quality sources that I want to be going after, generally speaking, when it comes to protein.

Speaker 1 11:50

I like to see you those folks out there who are either endurance athletes or who are exercising and working on their fitness for a lifetime of wellness, and if that's not your goal, maybe we're not the right channel for you, and that's okay too, but what I'm thinking is I want you to be healthy and strong for a lifetime of activity. So I want you to be that 71 year old person who's in my strength training classes right now picking up a barbell and kettlebells and doing all those amazing things. Yes, you can. You can totally do that. I want to see you being the person who knows how to get up off the toilet, and we literally do this in our strength training classes, sitting on a bench and practicing. How do we get up properly? How do we make sure we've got appropriate mobility and strength in our soleus muscles, our gastrocnemius, our quadriceps, et cetera, in order to function not only now, which you might be middle-aged, you might not be, I don't know. But thinking long-term and that's generally what we as humans are not really that great at, and that's okay. That's really what we weren't bred for. We're really bred to think about what's happening in the here and now and how can I protect myself and how can I survive. But thinking long-term, I want to make sure.

Speaker 1 13:10

From a protein perspective and I know a lot of people, a lot of people, don't think in grams. So hang with me here If you don't think this way. I like to see that, generally speaking, we're getting anywhere between 1.5 and 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Now if you think in pounds, take your body weight in pounds, divide it by 2.2, that is how many kilograms you are and then you multiply that by 1.5 or even upwards of 2. Usually especially for my ladies, generally speaking, usually when I tell them these numbers, they are extremely overwhelmed. There's no way that I could get that much. You would be surprised. You guys, you can do really amazing things and if you are going to make a change, you have to make a change. So that's one place to start and maybe you start on the lower end and you work your way out and kind of find a happy place for you. But that is key if you're looking to build lean mass, if you're looking to lose body fat, if you're looking to perform optimally. This is where we want to be from a protein perspective. So that's number two on the list. Number three on the list, and these are general nutrition things that you can do to function optimally from now until the end of your life and be as active as possible. That's what I'm thinking of here. Nutrition for longevity, that one thing.

Speaker 1 14:32

This isn't like fancy supplements or oh my gosh. There's so many different rabbit's holes to go down in nutrition. Let's just zoom out a little bit. We got to get our fiber. Ideally, can we get it from whole, unprocessed foods. What's an easy place to start? Fruit and vegetables. Okay, whole fruits and whole vegetables. If possible, you can throw them in a smoothie. They're still whole, they've just been pre-chewed in a way. Other things that can give you good quality fiber, in particular, really focusing on some of those prebiotic fibers. Those are some of the fibers that you can't necessarily digest until it gets to your large intestines, and then we are requiring or asking our microbiome to have certain bacterias proliferate in order to digest and break down some of these foods. So things like onions, garlic, artichokes, asparagus there's a whole nother list. You'll get them if you join the challenge Again, that's the endurancehedgecom forward slash challenge.

Understanding Portion Control and Emotional Eating

Speaker 1 15:36

It's only $57. There's so much information. You guys in there, I, like I'm so stoked about this program. It's going to be awesome. So we know, with fiber, especially our crucifers. There's another one that I'm going to hand out to you. Those are your cauliflowers, your broccolis, your kale collards, the things that basically, if you overcook them, it's probably going to stink up the entire house. That basically, if you overcook them, it's probably going to stink up the entire house, like no lie, right, Because all of that sulfur compound is coming out. You want that in. So all that glucuronidase, all that sulforaphane, that is super power foods. Seriously, it is so amazing, especially as we have gotten into working with genetic testing and seeing certain individuals who have a harder time with their detoxification category, which is tied to quite a few SNPs or genetic SNPs. So some of these folks really need to focus on this. But those are getting your crucifers on a daily basis. Just like you would get a vitamin, you can have it in a salad, you can have them microwaved, steamed raw, and you're going to get a ton of recipes as part of that challenge if you join us.

Speaker 1 16:52

But there are quite a few other ways that you can get fiber. One of my favorite ways is beans. I'm a daily bean a day kind of gal is beans. I'm a daily bean a day, kind of gal. There's other ways that you can get fiber, but you have to poop every single day. That is your body's, one of your body's natural detoxification methods. That is where we remove toxins from your body and that's one of your liver's main jobs, and your kidneys too. But your liver man, that sucker is amazing, but again, it uses 20 to 30% of your resting metabolic rate in order to do its job. It is on overload and there are so many different toxins that we're exposed to on a regular basis, and most of it is out of our control. A lot of it is out of our control. So why not help yourself out as much as possible? Drink that water, which is going to help you poop and also get enough fiber.

Speaker 1 17:46

Remember y'all brown bananas. I know you're going to be telling all your friends Chris said that I have to have brown bananas in the toilet. Yes, please. All right. So enough about fiber, another one that we want to focus on. I kind of alluded to this a little bit in our protein one portions, so this is one that kind of ties into our bonus tip, which is self-awareness. There's so many different things that we do from a nutrition perspective that we don't even realize, so self-awareness is massive.

Speaker 1 18:21

Portions are also key. It's ideal if you consume your food off of the same plate on a regular basis. That gives your eyes something to have some sort of relational comparison. When you're eating your food, your we call them performance plates, so that's how we want your plate to look in terms of how much protein do you have, how much fruit or vegetables, how much you know additional carbohydrates or other things do you have on your plate, and what should that look like, based on if you have a heavy training day, if you have a rest and recovery day, if you're trying to lose weight. So, again, you'll get access to that and our challenge 21 day nutrition reset challenge, enduranceedgecom forward slash challenge, only 57 dollars. I will beat a dead horse, because you guys it is.

Speaker 1 19:10

This is like I'm so excited about this challenge, because I am trying to help you make nutrition simpler, and it totally can be, because, listen, you deserve boundless energy and that's one of the things that nutrition can do for you. It can improve your skin health. It can improve your brain health. It can improve your mental health. It can improve your digestive health. It can improve your physical health because, duh, we want to be amazing athletes or fitness people so that we can live as long as we possibly can, having an active life. If that's something that you value, come join our challenge.

Speaker 1 19:51

So, with portions, we want to make sure it doesn't necessarily matter in terms of like percentage of carbs or percentage of fat, unless we're getting a little bit more nitty gritty into menopause or PCOS or folks who are having a hard time losing weight. Then I'm going to look a little bit more, maybe, into the nitty gritty of what's going on with your blood sugar, because higher blood sugar can lead to higher levels of inflammation. How do we need to arrange your portions? But one way or the other, if somewhere around 30 to 50% of your plate is full of protein and a good maybe half or so of your plate is full of vegetables, and then you have a small amount of additional carbohydrates assuming that you're not doing training for ultra runs right now or training for Ironman, because that is where you're going to need some additional carbohydrates. But, generally speaking, that's what we want to shoot for.

Speaker 1 20:42

As it relates to portions, we never want to be eating until we're stuffed and never want to be eating until we're over full. But I will say this is probably the more complicated part of nutrition because, again, I'm tying that into self-awareness, but also into genetics, and that's some of the things that we see in genetic testing is the propensity for a larger appetite, and I can totally commiserate with all of you who have that, because I have it too. It's one of those things that I'm like where is my next meal? I'm always thinking about what you know. It's like, hey, you want to go out for this? Oh, absolutely. I could eat pretty much anytime unless I have really worked on consuming my protein and consuming my fiber and getting plenty of water in order to blunt that stimulus that says to my brain you need to eat. So there is a hormonal cycle between leptin, ghrelin and your brain. That happens, that is stimulated by your fat cells and by your stomach that says, hey, we're good or hey, I need some more food. So some of that we see genetically and then other things as it ties into self-awareness is.

Speaker 1 21:57

There are so many different things like habits. Like when you walk into your office and there's a candy dish, you might just habitually walk by it and grab a piece. You may not even want it, or you might, I don't know, but it's like, okay, it's a habit. Or what about your degree of hunger? Like how hungry are we? We kind of want to stay in this sort of middle ground of our hunger scale, if you will. But then there's sitting down for a Thanksgiving meal. Your habit might to be to fill up this massive plate. Your habit might to be to have two pieces of pie. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just a habit, right? Eventually it might become a bad thing if we're gaining too much weight or if our blood sugar is out of whack. Then we might need to do some additional addressing there, but also thinking about do you eat when you're bored? Do you eat when you're sad?

Whole Person Wellness Nutrition Challenge

Speaker 1 22:50

We like to call it here eating your feelings? It is especially crucial, or something that I should say, that we see more in the boomer and the Gen X and a little bit into the millennial generations is the clean plate club Eating until your food is empty or, your excuse me, your plate is empty. That was just one of the habits that we were trained to. We were also not really trained to have great emotional awareness. You know, say, for example, if our parents put us into timeout when we're being bad or acting poorly, we were asked to deal with our emotions, to deal with our feelings, instead of explaining them or understanding what's going on with us. We were asked to sit in a corner and deal with our feelings that way. So we have been trained and I'm not saying that was you necessarily, I'm just giving you an example that we have been trained to not deal with our emotions.

Speaker 1 23:47

So I'm going to introduce you to this acronym here shortly, where you're going to see how this ties in. We are not necessarily trained to sit in our emotions but interestingly, the people who sit in their emotions more tend to be happier. But when we're sitting into uncomfortable emotions, we want that quick dopamine rush and typically something sugary, fatty or salty is going to get us there, at least in the short term. So things like potato chips, things like ice cream, things like chocolate or just generally having a meal because we're lonely or we're sad. So these are some of the things that we want to dive into, and I think that's the perfect segue to get into this acronym. Again, it was created by Dr Talbin Shahar. He's the author of Happier, he's the most popular professor at Harvard, which is really amazing and he has this model of wellness as a whole. So his acronym is SPIRE, s-p-i-r-e, and this really resonated with me in terms of how I could bring it to you from a nutritional perspective, is that, again, nutrition is not just in its own little silo.

Speaker 1 24:56

So, starting off with the first, the S is for spiritual, the P is for physical, the I is for intellectual, the R is for relational and the E is for emotional. So how many of us have some sort of spiritual connection? And I don't necessarily mean are you religious? It doesn't have to have anything to do with it, although you can be spiritually connected via religion. But is this, are you truly living your purpose? Are you here and doing what you are intended to do? Are you acting thoroughly through your core values? The physical, of course, is the things that we're talking about today. Are you acting thoroughly through your core values? The physical, of course, is the things that we're talking about today. Are you getting enough? Are you getting good quality nutrition? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you getting your exercise? Intellectual are you stimulating your brain in a way that is helping you learn new things?

Speaker 1 25:48

Relational is how are you connected to others around you, including yourself? How well are you relating to yourself? How well are you treating yourself? How well are you talking to yourself? Is that self-talk productive or is it breaking you down, because the thoughts that you have and certainly the words that come out of your mouth that are self-deprecating. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's going to come back to you, but if we can flip that coin and relate to ourselves better, we are going to ask and invite in good things to happen to us, and this is also relating to our community, relating to our family, relating to our kids, relating to the folks at the gym. This is even relating to the stranger on the street.

Speaker 1 26:35

Can you offer a smile when you're at races, for example, the things that were coming up for me? Can you give a high five? Can you say good job? Can you say go or go get them to just that random person out there who might need you at the right time. And the last thing is emotional. That's that last letter in the acronym.

Speaker 1 26:56

How are you connecting to your emotions? And you might be shoving them away. We're just bringing some awareness to that. But, like I said, the people who sit in their emotions, even when they are comfortable, tend to be happier. It's amazing. So tapping into those things for example, if you're having a harder emotion and because of it you're eating, so not necessarily beating yourself up in the moment, but just self-awareness is the first step.

Speaker 1 27:26

So, again, knowing that if we're truly addressing our emotions and the spiritual and physical, relational, intellectual, all of these pieces as a whole, we're going to not only nurture our bodies and our nervous systems, which, if we're addressing our nervous system and giving ourselves that parasympathetic poop system right, our opportunity to rest and digest, you are better going to be able to take in that good quality nutrition and translate it to doing amazing things, to feeling better, to having clearer skin and tying that into those nutrition pieces that I told you about already hydrating appropriately, getting enough protein and when I say getting enough protein, I mean getting it in at least two meals across the day, not just one, because you're going to be incredibly hard pressed to get enough protein and then also to not be over full right. We don't want to train our bodies to think that way. But getting enough fiber, making sure that we have appropriate portions and then tuning into ourselves, having that self awareness and thinking of nutrition as part of a whole body wellness solution, where we're taking care of ourselves so that we can operate and really do amazing things. Because, listen, you are a stellar and phenomenal human being who is stronger than you think you are. I really and truly believe in you to do amazing things. So if you want to join me and my team on this 21 day nutrition reset challenge in order to get meal plans, recipes, resetting your gut it's really not a fad. This is all about reducing overall inflammation, resetting your neurotransmitters, your dopamine and all of those good neurotransmitters that contribute to good mental health. We're even going to tie this into your values and your goals so that you can have a healthier 2025. Also, have a better relationship with eating and with food, and again tying it into that whole person model.

Speaker 1 29:31

All right, so hopefully you got a lot out of this. I would love to see you in the challenge. It's again. It's only $57,. 21 day nutrition reset challenge. Check it out the endurance edgecom forward slash challenge and save your spot there. I cannot wait to meet you. I cannot wait to guide you on our accountability calls. We've got a kitchen detox call. We've got a kitchen detox call. We've got a goal setting call with our sports psychologist. It's going to be so good y'all. I cannot wait to see you there. Thank you again for listening. You are amazing and I look forward to catching you next year.