Meet the women of the book, Make Your Mess Your Message.
This week (December 21st , 2021 2PM PST/ 5PM EST) I speak with Teri Harmeyer (Chapter 28 – Enhancing Wellness and Longevity Through Functional Nutrition). Watch here!
During our conversation, Teri shares her personal story of the loss of her father at a young age to heart disease and her journey from working for a big pharmaceutical company to finding her passion in integrative functional nutrition and wellness . The perfect conversation to listen to as many of us our looking towards implementing healthy lifestyle choices in the new year!
Teri can be found at: https://www.teriharmeyer.com/ – her site is currently being updated; however, if you click “get notified” – you can connect with Teri and she is offering a free 50 minute discovery coaching session where you can work with her to identify and get started on your healthy goals, as well as receiving a green smoothie recipe with specific instructions just for you!
Teri’s 3 health action items that you can begin implementing today!
- “The first one and that is eat empowered, know what you’re eating and know why you’re eating it, what are the benefits to it? So takes a little bit of research and knowledge, you know, read labels, figure it out, come up with a menu plan and you can do that with a health coach, or you can do that, just searching the internet on your own, um, but know why you’re eating, what you’re eating and how it benefits you. And you’ll see, as you, as you become more intuitive with your body – you’ll see that your body responds with better functioning. And then you have a new, better lifestyle based on healthy choices, which will improve your longevity and your vitality. So I would say number one would be eat empowered.”
- “My number two recommendation – and coming off the pandemic, as you just mentioned, Shari, would be to control stress and learn to decompress. Um, you know, our bodies need a certain amount of stress to move us forward. There’s a certain amount of stress that just needs to be there. But then the undue stress becomes anxiety. And we can start to respond to people from a place of fear, rather than from a place of calm and from a place of love. And that increases cortisol in our body, which makes our bodies crave carbs, and it increases our appetite and it makes our bodies store fat. Um, so you can even, in your midsection, gain weight due to stress without changing your diet or your exercise. Stress contributes to every major disease category and no doubt it shortens life. So stress needs relaxation. You can’t have stress and you can’t have relaxation together. If you’re relaxing, you’re not stressed. So you need to figure out how to relax. And there’s so many different methods out there and one of my favorites is what I call box breathing. Actually, I didn’t coin the phrase somebody did. I don’t know who, but box breathing is just something, a simple little thing – to breathe in a box, if you will. So four counts when you breathe in, hold it for four counts across, breathe out for four counts down, and then hold it again for another four counts across. Um, that’s one method. There’s lots of breathing methods out there. Meditation, one of my favorite meditation apps is Insight Timer. It’s free. It has amazing meditations and the spectrum of meditations out there on Insight Timer is great. So that would be another recommendation. You just kind of need to try a number of things and see what works for you. You know, some people like to journal in the morning, some people have a ritual when they get up, they get their cup of tea, they journal, they read some scripture. Um, you know, there’s lots of different ways to find relaxation and to do quote unquote your own meditation. You just have to try a few things and see what happens. So that would be my number two to control stress and figure out how to decompress.”
- “My third would be gut health. Your gut is your second brain. And some people, some physicians, um, will now say that your gut is your first brain and it’s the gateway to all disease or to health. 70% of your immune system lies in your gut. So controlling your microbiome is super important to our health. Everybody knows about probiotics. This is another one of those categories that is controversial. As you mentioned, Shari, there’s lots of controversy in the news, the world of nutrition. I happen to like probiotics, but I like the probiotics to be specific to the patient or to the client’s microbiome. So I like to get diagnostic tests again, because then you’re just not like throwing spaghetti at a wall you’re, you’re targeting what you’re trying to accomplish in the gut. And so if we’re going to go with a generalized probiotic for now, I like spore based probiotics because they have a much higher survivability through the GI system and getting to where they need to go. But, it’s important for our microbiome to be both diverse and to also have high counts of the microbes in there. So knowing what your makeup is of your microbiome by getting a diagnostic test is I think super important. So I would recommend – of course, working with a good naturopath or MD or whoever your health practitioner is. I had a wonderful nurse practitioner for a number of years who was amazing. It doesn’t matter who your practitioner is, but, but somebody who focuses on the microbiome is super important. So that would be number three, for me, focus on your gut health.”
