Nourish With Intent

Good morning, Cadre. Happy Saturday. If you were looking for me last week, I was not here because I, full disclosure, totally forgot what time it was, but I'm happy to be back. Like I said, happy Saturday. I hope everyone is making it through this week. Good morning. Dr. Leslie Davis. I don't know that I've seen you before. Hi, I'm Kristen. Morning, Jules. Give him a minute. A minute. If you saw my Cadre Live yesterday or Cadre today yesterday with jc. Thank you so much for joining us for that conversation.

I had a lot of fun, though. I think if anyone's ever interacted with jc, you understand that. But I'm really excited to keep talking about some of the concepts. The main one, the thread kind of that I'm trying to pull through is creating and cultivating community wellness through connection. I often find myself kind of isolating and retreating. And so it's my challenge to myself this year to do more outward with and for the people around me. So more to come, I think, on those topics as they continue to come to fruition and as I continue to dive into what that looks like and what some of those actionable steps are.

But for today, I thought I would just talk about. I know it's not the first Cadre after the new year, but I was reflecting on some of the most common conversations I have with my clients in my work day to day. So I have four of them that I'll share with you and just kind of expand on maybe a little bit. If you have questions, let me know. Yeah. Hope everyone's staying warm. It's snowing here after we had our little arctic freeze last week. So I am gonna be posted up inside today, so I'll dive right in.

I take that back. I want to get back into doing my questions. So let's see if you want to share with me what your favorite flower is. Mine's. I've never been able to just, like, buy them at the store, but anemone, I sound like Nemo now, but they're like the white flower with the black center. Very pretty. Okay, so number one on my most common conversations, I do have notes. Why I'm looking over here is probably that adding something does not negate anything else. And what I mean by that is oftentimes, you know, we think about building meals or like having banana bread.

I don't know, but I've heard a lot of times that, oh, okay, if I'm making myself this yogurt bowl and I put chocolate chips in it, then it doesn't count because it's unhealthy because I put chocolate chips in it and I would. That's very black and white thinking. And as JC mentioned yesterday, my favorite thing is to push the gray. Adding chocolate chips to your yogurt bowl doesn't make yogurt not yogurt. It doesn't automatically just magically make the nutritional benefits of yogurt. Things like protein, calcium, maybe vitamin D if you're getting fortified.

Right. Those things don't disappear because you added chocolate chips to them. Another one I hear in this realm is that flavored water isn't water. And again, I would challenge that in that if you're adding a flavoring that doesn't make it not water, like the water is not gone. You can have a multitude of nutrients and they will all matter. So that is number one. I would encourage you to practice that if that's something that you struggle with. Because it's really easy to let that kind of get to be the reinforcer of the good bad mentality which if you're new here, I don't, I don't believe with, believe in or comply with.

Words are hard. I did just wake up. So that's probably number one and that is a big piece of my work and helping patients break that kind of all or nothing black and white mentality. Number two is sometimes the food noise and the anxiety is hunger. And I say that with a big, big old sometimes because we know that there are genetic differences in different individuals brains and how prevalent food noise is. And with the rise of the GLP1 medications, things like Ozempic, WeGovy, that word is getting thrown around a lot.

And it is one of those things that's pretty hard for people to understand if it's not something they've experienced. Like Luke. Go Chiefs. I know everyone's rooting against us. It's gonna be a great game. And honestly I'm prepared for the chiefs to lose. Josh Allen's having a year, so. Well, we can debrief on that next week. But yeah, sometimes people will mistake hunger for food noise because that's the physiological mechanism that our bodies have to get us to eat. We have hormones that signal to our brain we are hungry and those hormones are higher.

Production is higher when we haven't eaten in a while. So the longer you go without eating, the more of that signaling you're going to get to your brain telling your brain, hey, hello, please feed me. So sometimes that food noise truly is just hunger and it might not be all the time. It Might not be for every person. And physiologically under eating is going to exacerbate the food noise regardless. So a good first step. If you feel like you are constantly thinking about food, feeling really anxious, maybe irritable, right?

That hangry hunger is to ask yourself, am I hungry? When's the last time I've eaten? Does it make sense that I'm feeling this way? That can be a really good starting point to move through identifying just kind of what's going on with your own body. Number three, nutrition matters. And it's not everything. And I'll kind of pair with this that nutrition or food is not medicine. And I with a big caveat because I know people tend to get mad at me for that one. Food is food and medicine is medicine. Both are very powerful.

However, you are not going to cure cancer by eating a vegetable, so nuance matters. Again, living in the in between uncomfortable gray matters. The food that we eat 100% impacts our health and overall wellness. And at the end of the day, it can only do so much. There are so many things that are out of our control, our genetics, that at least at this point in time, we can't really change. Maybe in the future science will come up with something else. But it is really important to be aware of nutrition for a lot of people, especially if you're managing some sort of chronic disease or trying to figure out just like what's going on with your body if you're feeling certain symptoms.

And there are people that eat, quote, unquote, perfect for what society deems as acceptable and recommended what a lot of the science would back that still get sick, that still have chronic illness. And there comes a point at which you really have to weigh. And that's a big part of what we talked about in my intuitive eating series is weighing physical health, mental health and the impact that hyper fixating on nutrition might have. We have a lot of evidence for the impacts of stress and worry and anxiety on our physical being.

So they both matter. Food matters, nutrition matters, medicine matters. They're all interconnected and we cannot try to replace one thing with another, especially at the expense of your mental state. Number four, that one's kind of heavy. I guess this one is too. If you popped into the Cadre today yesterday, I did mention this there. But number four is that your intention matters a lot. I often get questions of is it okay if I do this or is it disordered if I do this or is it bad if I do this? And my response, because I am not living your experience I am not in your brain is always going to be, well, what is your intention in asking that question?

What is your motivation behind wanting to do that thing? I think yesterday the example was using an app to like, substitute ultra processed foods in the grocery store with something else. And my response to that was, what's the motivation for it? Right. Is it because you fear those foods? Is it because the idea of eating those things maybe really love, I don't know. I think yesterday I used the example of Ritz crackers, but say you really love those, but the anxiety of eating those is outweighing everything else.

That, to me, that intention signals that there might be some work there or there might be something there that's negatively impacting you. If the intention is, well, I really love Ritz crackers and when I eat them, I notice I don't feel very good physically. You know, maybe you get constipated. I don't know why that would happen. But you never know. Everyone's different. Are you approaching it from a, I really enjoy this food and I'm not going to say I can never eat this thing again. And I'm using the information that I have about my own body to inform my choices, to avoid feeling the way I don't want to feel physically because the mental side of things gets really messy and that is often where things hide.

So I will always ask and come back with, what is your reason for wanting to do xyz? You know, it's another conversation is, are we doing this for weight loss? Are we doing this for health? Because those are different things. They can coincide and follow the same path, but at the core, those are different things. And so with that example in particular, again, you can have both reasons and both motivations. Totally. You are autonomous. I'm not judging that one bit. But if the intention behind why you're making a decision is having a profoundly negative impact in other areas of your life, I would recommend revisiting it.

And sometimes the bulk of that work. A lot of what I do with my clients is understanding or unearthing really your intention. So those were a little bit heavier. Those are my four genuinely top four conversations I've had with clients over the last, like six months or so. And I think that I see kind of in society as well. So I wanted to share them with you, give me, give you my insight on that. As always, I appreciate you all being here. Luke, I appreciate you popping in. I will happily yap for the time being as long as I'm here.

I love talking about this stuff. One last thing I'll say to add that I mentioned yesterday in the Cadre today was I'm a dietitian. My knowledge base is in food and nutrition and that is a very valuable skill that I can use and through communication and connection improve my community's health and empower people with. So I am going to continue sharing that here. I'm going to continue sharing that in my local community as much as I can. If you are noticing resources lacking in your area, whatever kind of resources, if you have knowledge, if you have expertise, if you just have a passion about something that is valuable to other people and now is a really great time I think to keep sharing or start sharing if you haven't already.

Good friend of mine said, I don't really have anything that's like not Google able. It doesn't matter. Everything I've learned in my career is on Google or somewhere on the Internet. But people don't always know what to look for or why it's worth looking at. This friend of mine is a firefighter and I was like, you know, fire safety, of course I could Google that. And I'm more likely to listen to it if you are the one telling me about it because we have, you are my friend, we've made that connection and that is very powerful.

So I would encourage you to 2025, share your knowledge, share your expertise with your community, virtual, in person, local, online, it doesn't really matter. But sharing that wealth that you have in the way of knowledge, in the way of resources or just whatever is very, very valuable. So I'll leave you with that. I appreciate you all being here. There is one more Cadre live stream later today. Think it's Dan if I remember right here in a couple of hours and then if you want to connect with me, gladly accept all of that.

I love talking to you guys. So happy Saturday. Stay warm, stay safe, stay in the gray and I'll see you back here next week, same time and we'll keep having conversations. Bye.