Don’t miss the forest through the trees.
We can get so excited and bogged down by lab results that we forget that we need to have a foundation for our wellness first.
I know it might be hard from where you sitting to think about building a foundation of wellness when you feel like sh*t.
When you have so many symptoms that you just want to go away already.
But we can’t get the roof on the house if we don’t have the framing done below it.
I’ve created the 8 pillars of the Simply Healthy Foundations of Wellness. (Does that sound bougie enough or what? Can I fit in with Gwyneth now?)
I sat and thought about what my goal is to teach every client and what I want you to walk away with having the tools to do, and this is what I came up with based on the modules from my signature group coaching program, Simply Healthy Academy.
Remember to share this episode if this helped you today and tag me on Instagram at @simplyhealthykacey!
Don’t miss the forest through the trees.
We can get so excited and bogged down by lab results that we forget that we need to have a foundation for our wellness first.
I know it might be hard from where you sitting to think about building a foundation of wellness when you feel like sh*t.
When you have so many symptoms that you just want to go away already.
But we can’t get the roof on the house if we don’t have the framing done below it.
I’ve created the 8 pillars of the Simply Healthy Foundations of Wellness. (Does that sound bougie enough or what? Can I fit in with Gwyneth now?)
I sat and thought about what my goal is to teach every client and what I want you to walk away with having the tools to do, and this is what I came up with based on the modules from my signature group coaching program, Simply Healthy Academy.
Remember to share this episode if this helped you today and tag me on Instagram at @simplyhealthykacey!
[00:10] Kacey K: Welcome to the simply healthy You Podcast. Your place for overcoming overwhelm with your health to reach your fullest potential. I'm your host, Casey Kane and I am so pumped to have you here. I'm a recovering burnt out high achiever who is diagnosed with an autoimmune thyroid, a condition by my early thirty s. I didn't realize that running myself ragged in the name of being superwoman and determined to achieve all the things in life was killing my body. I created this podcast so that you don't have to continue the struggle like I did for over a decade. I sat down, studied the data, and simplified what it means to prioritize your own health needs so that you can be the best for all the things on your to do.
[00:50] Kacey K: List.
[00:50] Kacey K: Everything you hear on this podcast I have tested and implemented in my own super pact, life with my family to bring you the tips, tools and strategies that will keep your life simply healthy.
[01:06] Kacey K: Hello friend. Welcome to another episode of the simply healthy you. Podcast. I'm so grateful to be infiltrating your brain with today's topic. My name is Casey Keane. I'm an integrative health practitioner and certified holistic nutritionist with a master's in Psychology and I'm here to bring you science based conversations to help you live a healthier and happier life. So if you've been following along, you know that I've been working on trying to figure out ways to record video at the same time as doing my podcast. I don't have the right set up for it right now, so I'm putting a pause on the video piece and it will come together at some point. Right now I'm working on the sound absorption in this room. So the other day I showed on my Instagram that I put some curtains up over my doorway so I have yet to build a door. When we were building this house, I told the builders, don't put a door on my office, I'm going to build a barn door because when I asked them if they could do it, it was going to cost an exorbitant amount of money for them to do it. You know how that shit works. And I said, nope, I can definitely do it for cheaper. Well, it's over a year and a half later and I still haven't built my door. Right, you've probably followed this saga if you've been here for a while. So either way though, I needed some more sound absorbing so I can tell a little bit that it's a little bit less echoey in here. The sound absorbing is working a little bit better with these big thick curtains. It definitely helps. I still have two walls that are pretty blank and I need to either put some pictures up or maybe get some of those sound boards or foam boards or something and put them on the wall to make it just a little bit more absorbent in here and not have the sound bouncing off so much while I am recording. I wanted to, in this episode, take a break for a minute from going over the functional medicine labs. I've been so excited about them. You're excited about them, and I'm excited you're excited, but I've been having some conversations lately, and I've been reminding everyone, especially over on my Instagram and on my email list, that we can get so excited and bogged down by lab results that we forget that we need to have a foundation for our wellness first. And so I wanted to break this up a little bit and talk about that for a minute. Believe me, I am as excited as you are about getting these labs into your hands. And I know the power of having this information and what it could do for your health journey, but I want to make sure we're not missing the forest through the trees. You may be one of my past clients, and you fully understand the importance of your foundations, and it's something that's kind of hard. I think we take it for granted, right? It's very easy to say, like, of course, I know the things that are important on a daily basis, but are we doing it? Is it possible for us right now in our life to have a healthy foundation and be consistent with it? Consistency is such an important piece of a healthy foundation. And while we know some of the pillars that I'm going to talk about today, they're not going to be surprised. I mean, none of them will probably be surprising to you of what I'm going to talk about. But the key here is how much are you actually focused on those? How much have you actually been able to carve a place out for each of those things in your foundation of wellness so that you can consistently check something off in each of those categories? Right? It's not necessarily going to be every day. I understand this. Some days are just so crazy and you can't possibly check everything off. But there are many days where we could probably check off multiple things from these pillars in our foundation of wellness. There are many days where we can maybe check one, and that's okay, too. This is why I created Simply Healthy Academy, my signature group coaching program in the first place, because it's a foundation. That's why I tell everyone, and I've repeated here so many times that you need to get into simply Healthy Academy. If you work with me in any capacity, that is the best place to start. And that's why I created it the way that I did. If you haven't gone through simply Healthy Academy, you really need to. I will have a one on one package available to those who haven't gone through Simply Healthy Academy, and I'll be teaching you everything I possibly can in those one on one sessions. But you don't get the same value as you do from being in a group for some of those pieces. And that might sound like I'm underselling myself here, but truly, when you are in a group of women who might have slightly different health situations going on but are all working towards the same foundations of wellness, you learn so much more than I could bring to you by myself. I have my expertise, of course, but the way that I live my life and the way that I put these things into practice is probably very different than the way that you live yours or the way that you want to live yours. Many of the things that I do are not necessarily going to be applicable to you now. Many of them will be right. Many of them you will be able to adapt and adopt into your own life. But the beauty of what I teach for foundations of wellness is that you can customize everything to fit your life and still build an amazing foundation. One of the things that I have talked about at length is how I believe there is not a one size fits all approach when it comes to building wellness. It needs to look different for each person because each of our lives are different. And this is where seeing how other women are creating their foundation can be really helpful and a valuable part of your own journey. Think of it like when you're building a house, right? All of our homes, no matter what the final product is and looks like, have the same makeup at their core. We all have a concrete foundation of some kind. We've got wood framing inside of our walls, we've got a roof, we've got insulation, we've got doors, windows, siding or stone or brick on the outside. You've got drywall paint, flooring. You get it, right? You can't build a house without all of those materials. And that list goes on much longer than what I just mentioned. And if your house isn't built with all of those essential things, you won't pass inspection, right? Your house will be inhabitable. Same for your foundations of wellness. Your body will become inhabitable if you don't have those foundations in place. And it sounds like a funny analogy, but I mean, it's absolutely true. I know it might be hard from where you are sitting to think about building a foundation of wellness when you feel like shit on a daily basis, when you have so many symptoms that you just want to go away already. And I'm not saying you can't attack those things at the same time as building your foundation, because that's exactly what we do in Simply Healthy Academy. I don't want you suffering. But we can't get the roof on the house if we don't have the framing done below it, right? So what are the foundations of wellness? In my opinion, if you've been around for a bit here, I'm sure that you can guess many of the things. And even if you haven't, again, I don't think you're going to be surprised by any of this. But I really do feel like these are important to talk about. I've created eight pillars of the simply healthy foundations of wellness. Does that sound bougie enough or what? Can I fit in with Gwyneth Paltrow now? I don't want to fit in with her. In all seriousness though, I sat and thought about what my goal is to teach every client and what I want you to walk away with having the tools to do. And this is what I came up with based on the Simply Healthy Academy modules. Honestly, that's my foundation program. It's always going to be my foundation program. And so I built out the modules in that program to reflect these eight pillars without even really knowing it. So I just pulled these eight pillars from there. So number one, I know you're going to know this one. Nutrition and hydration. Obviously, eating a well balanced diet that includes lots of whole food plants, protein, healthy fats, high quality carbs, and drinking plenty of water and herbal teas not only supports proper bodily functions, but it helps you maintain energy levels and promotes overall health. Right? We know this. We cannot survive without proper nutrition and hydration. This also means though, having a good relationship with your food and it goes hand in hand with the mental health pillar that I'm going to talk about in a minute. You need to be able to eat all the foods. I said high quality carbs in there. I said healthy fats in there. And past diets may have told you to exclude those things. If you are still walking around with fear of certain foods, that is a direct issue and problem in your foundation. That's a crack in your foundation that's going to keep you from ever being able to fully develop a proper nutrition plan for yourself. You cannot live in fear of foods. Period. You may choose to exclude foods, but I want you to do that from a place of empowerment because you don't like the way that that food makes you feel. You don't like the ingredients in it because you morally don't want to eat those foods anymore. There's lots of different empowered reasons for you to decide on what your diet ultimately looks like. But I want them to be empowered choices, not fearful choices. The second pillar here, movement and exercise. Especially as we age, it's so important we find a way to work daily movement and exercise into our life, including strength training. It's got to be there, especially as we're approaching menopause postmenopause. We need to be strength training for the health of our bones. Regular exercise and physical activity help us to maintain a healthy weight. It helps us to strengthen our cardiovascular system. It helps improve our mood. It helps boost our overall well being. I mean, there are so many benefits to daily movement and exercise. And again, this is something that is going to look different for every single person and that's what we do in Simply Healthy Academy. We have Coach Kelsey who helps each person create a customized movement plan, a customized exercise plan, depending on where it is that they're starting from and what their goals are and where their body is. Right. Because we're also not trying to do movement and exercise to a point where we're putting more stress on our body than it can handle. The third pillar is sleep. We all know what it feels like to be sleep deprived. Absolute hell on Earth. It is one of the worst feelings in the world, walking around like a zombie. Getting sufficient and quality sleep is crucial for physical and mental health as it supports various bodily functions and promotes cognitive function, right. There are so many things that happen in our sleep. We think that we are just resting, but there are so many parts of our body that are so many systems in our body that are working on replenishment and restoration and detoxification while we are sleeping. This is why it feels so awful to be sleep deprived, because our body doesn't have that recovery time. Those systems don't have that time to fully function and do their thing. It just makes everything feel terrible. Sleep is something we talk about a lot in Simply Healthy Academy. There's a lot of different things related to gut health and hormone health that can greatly impact our sleep. And so sometimes it's like the chicken or the egg, right? Which one came first? Did I start sleeping poorly and then developed these issues or did I have these issues and they started affecting my sleep? It doesn't really matter. We are going to work on all of it at the same time. I want you to be getting good quality sleep while you are also healing. And so we try to support all of that as best that we can in Simply Healthy Academy and find those answers. Pillar number four is stress resiliency. And I think this goes along with sleep a lot. It goes along with mental health a lot. Some people might call this stress management, but I think that sounds like something you have to handle, right? And honestly, I don't think we always have to have an answer for managing stress. Some stress is inevitable. Some stress helps us grow as individuals. It's the resiliency that you have to cope with stress and move past it that I find to be the most valuable and missing piece for a lot of us. We can adopt all the stress reducing techniques we want and I do think they're important, like meditation and breath work and having relaxing, hobbies, all those things, but we can't just breathe our way out of everything. I think it certainly can be helpful. I mean, we have breathwork sessions monthly breath work sessions now built into Simply Healthy Academy for that very reason to help with releasing and bringing down stress and kicking in that parasympathetic nervous system. But really why I call this pillar Stress resiliency is how do we learn to take things in stride and support our body in doing the same, right? How do we keep our body from going into fight or flight mode every time there is a perceived threat? Because, yes, there will be times where we are stressed and stress is inevitable and our body needs to respond that way. Like if we need to run from something, if we need to fight for something physically, or if we need to save our child from getting into a crash with their bicycle or something, right? Like, there are times where we need that system to kick in, but there are many times where in our heads we are creating stress and worry and our body ends up in a constant fight or flight state. And so that's that resiliency. How do we have these stressors come into our mind but not have it trigger such a reaction or have it be more of an acute reaction? We go into fight or flight mode and then we're able to get ourselves out of it. We're more resilient. We're able to take it in stride and say, okay, I'm not going to let this escalate. I have to handle this, I have to deal with this. Right? That's that stress management part. But I really wanted to focus on the resiliency piece for this pillar when it comes to stress, because that's what I strive to see more of my clients being able to do is to take things in stride and support our body in doing the same, not having ourselves operating in that sympathetic nervous system constantly. Because that just leads to a whole host of issues, much of which I talked about on the last episode when I was talking about the thyroid and adrenals and all of that. I mean, those are the systems that very easily get thrown off when we are constantly in that fight or flight mode. Pillar number five is mental health. Yes, mental health. We knew this was going to be here. We work on mental health a ton in Simply Healthy Academy. Between my degrees in psychology and coach, kathy's background and certifications and life coaching. We really support you in working on the ship between your ears. I mean, you've got to this comes out in your relationship with food, like I mentioned before, and Kathy actually has a certification in this, which is super helpful in a Simply Healthy Academy. It comes out in your relationship with your body, right, and how you view your body. Diet culture has done a number on many of us for many decades, so that is all important when we're talking about mental health. We absolutely support you with that in Simply Healthy Academy, but mental and emotional balance is so tricky right now and fragile. I think in today's world of endless feedback from social media, it's a blessing and a curse. I love it. I obviously use it for my business. I've connected with so many people that I would have otherwise never known, and I find that to be amazing. But it's also so much of a curse. We are just getting an onslaught of information at all times. Our bodies and brains don't know what to do or what to make of that constant onslaught of information. Not to mention just about every one of us comes with trauma of our own from our younger years. So not only are we just getting a constant bombardment every single day, but we also have these things from our past that we might not have yet properly dealt with. I think we're just coming to a time where we're seeing more therapists and things on social media, talking about some of these things and helping us to understand that this is not a proper way to be functioning. You don't have to continue in this cycle and you can change these things. So that's a lot to unpack. And while we are not qualified therapists, we certainly recognize the ways in which these things manifest in our physical health and when we need to do something about it. And if we have to refer our clients to outside therapists, we absolutely do. But there's a lot of work that we do inside of the program because, again, I feel like mental health not I feel like mental health is one of those essential pillars, in my opinion, to a foundation of wellness. Number six, the 6th pillar here is Social Connections. And this is why I created a group program for my signature program. Nurturing relationships with family and friends and having a supportive community can provide emotional support. It can reduce feelings of isolation and just enhance your overall well being. This is why I want you in simply Healthy Academy so badly. We are more connected than ever on social media, but there are staggering statistics for the amount of loneliness and isolation that people are feeling at this point in our history. Just because we can connect to people online doesn't mean that we're having the same social connections that we are used to or I guess what history used to have. We are not meeting up with people in the same places and having the same experiences anymore. This also goes back to the trauma that we carry. Sometimes the people we grew up with are not the right people to be in our village. As someone who has personally experienced needing to put up those boundaries with blood relatives and not speak to them unless their toxic behaviors change, I understand how hard this can be. And it's even more important in those moments that we have a supportive community around us. So social connections absolutely. Is a pillar in the simply healthy foundation of wellness. The 7th pillar is Mindfulness or awareness. This could be around food. You've probably heard of mindful eating or intuitive eating, where you're focusing on nourishing foods, listening to hunger and fullness cues and savoring the eating experience more. Not something most of us were raised to tune into when it came to food and diet culture. And this is absolutely something that we focus on a ton in Simply Healthy Academy. But I also want you to focus on overall life, mindfulness and awareness. We can't change things that we aren't aware of. I see this play out a lot with clients and their food as an example when they start tracking where they think they're doing one thing, but when they track their food, they realize they are really off the mark. And it's that awareness. There doesn't need to be shame or guilt around these things. And I encourage you to practice this in any part of your life. If we are going through the motions every day because we are so busy and filling our calendars and aren't stopping to be mindful and aware of the life that we are cultivating, we could end up in a really unhappy spot and have no idea how we got there. You just wake up one day and sees people that we see who wake up one day and they get divorced and change their life and everyone's like, wait a minute, where did that come from? I thought they were happy, I thought they were living the life that they wanted. But I think sometimes we are so steadily going through and checking off the boxes every day that we're not really paying attention to or mindful or aware of whether or not those are the boxes we want to be checking. It's okay to want to check different boxes or do it in a different order, right? This is something mindfulness or awareness absolutely applies to the food piece of it and the body awareness piece of it. But it also applies to life as well for just overall wellness. Wellness is how you feel, in my opinion, how you feel and operate in your life and your wellness, your mental wellness with your mindfulness, your awareness. Like all of that is connected. All of it is connected. That's why I have them as these pillars. So, pillar number eight is self care taking time for yourself. I know we've heard about this a lot in recent times and I think that's great. I think that taking time for yourself is absolutely necessary. Engaging in activities that bring joy and relaxation and prioritizing self care to recharge and maintain your overall well being absolutely essential. I've talked about this one many times because I think it will also look so different for each of us and depending on the stage of life that you're at. And I don't think this part is talked about enough, which is why I bring it up. If you have small kiddos like me, self care can be getting a good night's sleep. Self care can be taking a shower without interruptions. Self care can be getting to read a few pages in a book by yourself or going to the store alone. But for some of you, it may look like getting a massage or getting your nails done or going on vacation with your friends. Like, I can't wait to go on vacation again. And I know I can do those things now. But for me and self care, going on vacation right now seems like the biggest fucking project, right? Thinking about packing my family up to go anywhere just seems like something that would be for me, so much more time consuming from a mental load standpoint that it's not worth it for me. Especially when my kids are so small that they aren't going to remember this. I think one day when they get a little bit older and they would remember the vacations a little bit more. I'm absolutely all for going and doing things with them, but for me right now, that would not be self care. That would be the exact opposite of self care. Self care to me is whatever nourishes your soul and yours alone. In a world where women are constantly being steamrolled made to feel smaller, insignificant, and almost erased entirely at times, we need to take care of ourselves more than ever. Ain't nobody going to do it for us, right? We got to do it for ourselves. So those are the eight pillars of the simply healthy foundation of wellness. If you're on board for that, awesome. You're in the right place. At the time that I am writing and recording this. I'm sending our lab and coaching packages to past and current clients because they have all worked on these foundations. Some of the lab results, and I talked about this on my instagram recently, some of the lab results that you might get will require a protocol that's pretty specific and strict and that includes a nutrition plan, that includes a supplement regime, that includes exercise plan. And as I said in the nutrition and mental health pillars, if you don't have a good relationship with food or your body first, if you're not getting, I mean, not everything in these pillars has to be perfect before you can do something like lab test and have it be beneficial. But if you haven't started figuring out how you can consistently work on these pillars for yourself, it's going to be a lot harder to implement. A really strict, not really strict. I don't want to make it sound like you're going to be going into some crazy kind of boot camp. They're not that strict. But there are specific things that you might have a nutrition plan if your results come back and you've got bacterial overgrowth or you've got candida. There are certain foods you can't eat and a lot of them are going to be similar to what diet culture has told you, because they are higher in natural sugars, and sugars are what feeds Candida. It's not the same as processed sugar, right? But still, I think if you haven't worked on that mental health aspect, if you haven't worked on your relationship with food, it's very easy to fall into these protocols and have it be an additional mind fuck for you, have it just contribute to the pile of shit that diet culture has already served you. And I'm not really interested in sacrificing your mental health because it's also going to make it that much harder to heal yourself. You may see the benefits, short term of doing some of these protocols. But if you end up on the other side of the protocol and you still don't know how to eat, you still don't know how to move your body on a regular day, you still don't know how to get adequate amounts of sleep, it's going to be temporary. And I'm not interested in a temporary solution for you. I want to help you feel better, but I want to help you feel better for the rest of your life for years and years to come. I want you to leave my programs when you decide to fully graduate and not work with me anymore. I want you to leave my programs and know that you have the rest of your life set, that you've been equipped with the information and the tools to live a life where you don't have to think about, well, how am I eating this month because I'm trying to lose weight? Or how am I eating this month because I'm really fucking tired. Or how am I eating this month because I'm super stressed. I want you to know, yes, how to support your body more at times that are more taxing. But I want it to be the same foundation. I want it to be building on the same foundation. I always talk about eating more plants. That's certainly the very simple basic foundation of it. But that's my goal for you. That's the goal that I have with these eight pillars. I'm not interested in sacrificing your well being short term, giving you a bunch of lab tests, giving you a ton of results, overwhelming you with information. And then you finish all the protocols and you're like, okay, well, now what do I do? Right? Not interested in that. But there will be two introductory packages for new clients at varying price points depending on the level of support that you are looking for. I'm just finalizing logistics because if I put together a shorter package, I have to account for it taking four to six weeks for some lab results to come back. So I don't want to do a shorter package and have you get your lab results and then be like, okay, here you go, on your way. And no follow ups after that. I need to have at least one follow up with you, at least let you start getting things underway for a month before I just kind of let you go on your way, and you may decide to sign up for something else after that. But again, I really do have your best interests in mind. There are lots of people out there who will be happy to run one off labs for you, and that's just not something that I'm interested in doing. So if that's all you want, I'm probably not the person for you because I refuse to support you less. There's plenty of mail order labs that you can go get right now, and that's not the business I'm interested in creating. So those new packages will be up soon, though, and I am trying to take all the things in consideration to help you. I am probably overthinking it, I know, but again, I want to make sure that I am not doing you a disservice and kind of putting the best of what I can offer you out there at a variety of price points to be able to help you wherever you are in your journey right now. So I hope you found this helpful as you think about your own journey to wellness. If you are ready to enroll in Simply Healthy Academy to get these foundations in place and you're listening to this in real time, you can lock in for the November round for as low as $300 a month right now for the basic package with an extended payment plan. There's no additional fees. We have moved to ongoing enrollment to make payment plan options more accessible for a variety of budgets. So as we get closer to the program, as we get closer to November, the price obviously goes up each month because there's less months to spread it out over, right? So now is the time you can get it as low as $300 a month for the basic package. Like I said, click the link below this podcast for the Simply Healthy Academy application and fill it out today to chat with me about your enrollment. Otherwise, stay tuned and those new client packages will be coming out probably pretty shortly after this episode airs. So thanks for listening as always, and I will catch you next time.
[28:18] Kacey K: Thank you so much for listening to the Simply Healthy You podcast. If these episodes are resonating with you, go ahead and click that subscribe button and leave a review with all the great nuggets that you're taking away from today's episode. I promise you I read every single one of them, as your feedback is really valuable to me in creating future episodes. As your host, I look forward to having you join me for the next episode. But in the meantime, remember, keep it simple and eat more plants. Our.