Nourish With Intent

Good morning, Cadre. Happy Saturday. It is a gloomy, gray day here in Denver. It makes me feel like I'm back in Minnesota. This is the first. This is the first Saturday of the year, so Happy New Year as well. My time frame has just gone out the window, see, since the holiday season. Good morning, Jules. Happy New Year. Happy to see you back in. Good morning, Sue. I assume Newfee lover Sue. If we haven't met before, I'm Kristen. I'm a registered dietitian based out of Denver, and I primarily work within the intuitive eating.

Eating disorder, Disordered eating space. So happy to have you here today. I wanted to talk a little bit about the nutrition hierarchy and if you've been around for a little while. I know I say this every week, but I really go back to the same tools because they've proven to be helpful for my clients, and I want to share them with you. So. So I want to talk about the nutrition hierarchy and how if you are somebody that has New Year's goals or sets intentions or resolutions, how you can kind of integrate the hierarchy into your goals so that they're not feeling like a failure.

Because I think that's something that I. I still see in people. Even when we reframe and use different language around, like, New Year's resolutions, a lot of times, there's still a lot of pressure that we put on ourselves to meet those goals, whether in a specific timeline or having them look a specific way. And that can be really hard. So good morning, Speak Wonder. I like to ask questions. So what is something that you are looking forward to in the year 2025? That's what I want to know. Share with me.

Blizzard boundary. Ooh, I hope you're staying as warm as you can. And off the roads we were tracking, we being me and my husband, he works for weather people, and we were watching all the radar with the. That really long strip that's hitting, like, Kansas eastward, and it's wild. I think we might get an inch of snow here, which Denver hasn't really had much snow yet, so I would like it. I think it's pretty, but we'll see. One of my resolutions intentions is to visit someplace new each month. I love that.

Does someplace new mean like a state or like. Like just a. Like a restaurant? Or was it bigger than that? Running my second marathon in June. Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. Jules. I have run two marathons, and I to this day, am unsure how I did it. I have no idea. I don't think I could do it again. That's incredible. Yay. I love that. I think something that I'm excited about is being more creative, leaning into my creativity and how it can support my long term goals and business ideas. So I'm feeling really pumped up and rejuvenated with that new state or new attraction site.

I love it. I'm excited. Hope I get to see you back here to hear more about it. So Nutrition Hierarchy if you are at all familiar with psychology or Maslow's hierarchy of of psychological needs, this is probably not going to sound too foreign and I will put the picture the graphic in the community tab for you to reference. Can't like screen share or any or like green screen on here. I wish I could the base of the pyramid is nutrition adequacy, which means adequacy, balance, variety and individual foods.

And the reason that I feel like this can apply to pretty much anyone is because it's not specific rules for eating. It's not like a specific diet, it's not anything like that. What it is doing is allowing you to build the foundation of specific habits or really just learning about how day to day things might affect your mental space and how we can continue to kind of support ourselves with the foundation. So nutritional adequacy means first and foremost before we think about adding in this one food that will X, Y, Z, which maybe has validity to it, maybe doesn't, is making sure that you are eating enough food to fuel your body so that it can appropriately function.

Under fueling tends to Sorry, I feel like I'm gonna sneeze. I hate that feeling. Under fueling not eating enough. Your digestion gets impacted, your mental clarity gets impacted, your ability to do other things that allow you to take care of yourself. Maybe that's going to the gym, walking your dog. Those things all get impacted. Hormones get impacted. So first and foremost, before anything else, you want to make sure that you are eating enough food to give your body what it needs to do all of its metabolic processes.

Once you're there, and I would say most people are there, not everyone is there. Once you're there, then we start to think about adding in balance. And balance in this case means you've heard me talk about the balanced plate. Having carbohydrates, proteins, fat and fiber on your plate, having a little bit of everything that carbohydrates are going to give you energy. They're also loaded with B vitamins. Oftentimes your carbs are also plant proteins. So you're going to get some protein from that protein, which is important for muscle maintenance as you age, muscle growth, it's important for immunity, it's important for a lot of things in your body.

So we need our proteins. Satiety is another big one. Blood sugar stabilization, fat, we need for the absorption of fat soluble vitamins. Vitamins A, D, E and K are all fat soluble. Fat is also essential for hormone health, among other things. Every cell in our body has a fat casing essentially called the phospholipid bilayer. Not that anyone probably cares about that. I just really love science. And then fiber or your fruits, vegetables, whole grains, like I said that plant food, the plant grains or plant proteins kind of cross over into this as well.

Nuts, seeds. Fiber is so essential for GI health. Helps you maintain normal cholesterol levels, normal blood sugar levels, satiety, fullness, all those things. So balance is aiming to get, most of the time, all of those components on your plate. Next up from that is variety. And variety is referring to the variety within each of those categories in balance. So a variety of different proteins. You may have heard that plant based proteins are lower quality proteins because they are not complete proteins, meaning they don't have all of the essential amino acids, which is true for the most part.

And when you're eating a variety of proteins, that doesn't matter anymore because you're getting all of the essential acids, the essential amino acids that your body needs for muscle building. For all of those things I referenced earlier about protein, you're eating a variety of them. So variety within your proteins, variety within your carbohydrates, variety within your fruits and vegetables, Right? Going back to likely what someone has heard as a child, eat the rainbow. There is validity to that.

Different colors have different levels of vitamins and minerals in them. So your bright yellows, orange reds are really high in vitamin C. Your dark greens are really high in vitamin K. Making sure you're eating the variety within there. And I'll give a little side note here too. A lot of times when I'm working with people, variety doesn't have to be meal to meal, day to day. If, if you are grocery shopping and you are thinking about, I'm trying to be efficient with my money, I'm buying ingredients that are versatile and I can use in different meals throughout the week.

Broccoli, incredibly versatile. Peppers, incredibly versatile, things like that. If you're shopping in that way, think about your variety week to week or even month to month, depending on how often you go to the grocery store. Speak, wonder. This year I am continuing on Emotional healing journey via talk therapy. It's hard work, but so worth it. I let that speak Wonder. That's a hard thing to do. So proud of yourself, Tippy. Top of the pyramid of this nutritional hierarchy is individual foods. And most of the time, these individual foods are not going to matter if you're not doing all the other things.

So one of the things that I am seeing more often now is, for example, wild blueberries versus not wild blueberries. Wild blueberries tend to be smaller. I've only ever found them in the frozen section of a grocery store. But blueberries are blueberries. All blueberries are great, right? Blueberries. High in fiber, high in antioxidants. Wild blueberries do contain a little more fiber and a little bit more antioxidant capacity, so you get a little marginally more bang for your buck. They are also more expensive.

So it's not worth spending your money on the more expensive item that has marginally more fiber and antioxidants if you're not even gonna eat them right. We haven't figured out how to incorporate that into the balanced plate. So building from the ground up really allows for those things to really be worth it, in my opinion, from what I see working with people and what I see in the research. Freeze my hand, pick blueberries every summer. I love that. I want to get some fruit plants this year. That's one of my goals for the year, actually, is be a little more intentional with my gardening because historically I just like, pick whatever and throw it out there and half of the stuff never grows.

So I'm working on it. Let's see another, like, individual food, I think I see people kind of forcing themselves to incorporate is something like cottage cheese. It had its moment, I think, really for the last couple of years. People blending it up into like sauces and cheesecake and whatever it is, which it is a wonderful source of calcium. It's a dairy product, lots of protein. If you don't like cottage cheese and and you're not going to eat the cottage cheese, that individual food is not going to matter for you.

Maybe it's Greek yogurt, pretty similar product. You might like the taste better or texture. So when you're thinking about this hierarchy and how it relates to your goals, what I would encourage you to think about is meeting yourself where you're at every day, because not every single day is going to feel the same. We have different levels of capacity in how we show up in the world day to day, because we are humans, we are not robots. You might Be having a day where you are feeling so on top of it, you're feeling so like, I woke up on time, I maybe did my workout, and I'm feeling really great.

And now I want to make this beautiful, beautifully balanced meal. It's got lots of variety. I'm gonna sprinkle on my wild blueberries. And the next day, maybe you slept really poorly. Maybe it's a bad mental health day. Maybe you're really struggling. Being able to have grace for that and compassion for yourself and take it back down to a level on this hierarchy that matches where you are at. And your capacity for that day does not mean you've failed. It does not mean that you are doing something wrong.

It means you're going back to the foundations that do positively benefit you and your overall health and wellness and honoring the mental health side of things. And we, every single day and day to day and week to week, will oscillate between the levels on this hierarchy. And that's okay. That's great. We should be doing that because we should be human. And so I. I think it's a helpful thing to look out and for the visual of, okay, here. My capacity today is to just make sure that I'm eating, and that's it.

I don't know what I'm gonna eat, but I know that I need to eat. That is still an incredible thing to do. So that's what I've got for you Today. I will post, like I said, my little graphic of it in the community tab. I should say I did not make this up at all. This is just a tool that I like to use. But, yeah, I hope that this is helpful to some degree. I'm still kind of brainstorming what I want my Saturday sessions to look like on personal development Personal growth day. And I really was kind of toying with the idea of, like, new and nutrition news or something, and I don't know how much that fits into the personal development day.

So TBD on if I'll have another kind of series like I did, the Intuitive Eating. But for now, if there's any requests, let me know. I appreciate you all being here and showing up and interacting. I love when I get to actually talk to you guys. So, Jules, gardening is one of my favorite things to do in the summer. It's very peaceful. Might need to talk to you about gardening tips because I'm doing something not right. I hope you all, like I said earlier, stay warm, stay safe, and I'll see you back here next week for another installment.

Of nourish with intent. Bye, guys.