As a budding holistic nutritionist, I found it quite interesting when I stumbled upon this new Podcast by Diane Sanfilippo and Abbie Attwood. I had been a follower of Diane’s longstanding Podcast- Balanced Bites- for years and which true to its name focused on Paleo living and eating well in the modern lifestyle. It is also a food brand which helps bring wholesome and easy meals to families. But to my surprise I suddenly came to find I was listening to their last episode and the newest episode of Full Plate all at the same time. Diane explains the transition into the newest Podcast as following her personal change in perspective about health, diet and diet culture. Diane is a well known and successful diet author and expert. A two time New York Times Best Selling author, Diane has written books on Paleo, Atkins and many other popular diets and has spend a large portion of her career with that focus in mind. But what I was drawn to is that having all that success and admiration for years, suddenly she turned anti-diet culture and found herself aligning with boundary setting and the concept of living true to your body. Along with her co-host, Abbie and Diane bring real-talk into the world of deconstructing diets and diet culture. They work through all the static and help people come to terms with their their right to live their own life, their own health on their own terms.

This all rings true to the idea of Bioindividuality and how you need to create the ideal diet around your individual needs. Catch all popular branded diets may work for some people, but not everyone. This is the premise behind nutritional therapy and something I continue to learn about in my CSNN program.

I highly recommend you take a listen. It may just change your perspective on health and what it means to you. It is attainable my friends.

As always

❤ Jillian

Getting to a more well balanced lifestyle while working shift work has taken over five years of trial and error for me. I’m sure if you are reading this, like me you have suffered from the low energy, bloating, poor sleep, food cravings that come with the joy of working night shift. There were some things that I tried that worked wonders for a short time but the issues of interrupted sleep, mid-day energy crashes and overall fatigue would always come back. That can be one of of the most frustrating things when trying to starve off the effects of shift work. I have created a list of the essential staples in my life that may help you along your journey. I will share a few of them with you in this 2-Part series about where I started. Now I am not saying that these things will be a cure for all your woes but simply that they have helped me with maintaining some sort of balance and if you adopt some of the principals they may also help you.

The list outlines various supplements and activities that I use routinely to help balance and control my energy levels to the point that I like to think is healthy and functioning. One thing I have learned is this lifestyle is never going to be perfect and you will definitely have times of poor sleep and stress and low energy despite everything. The key is knowing how to adjust and nourish your body so that it can rebound from the gutter. Being more attuned with your how your body feels is a must. I share these items in hopes that the insight and education allows you to better listen to what your body needs. Approaching this from an educational and experimental perspective, and gaining just a little bit of know-how into the way your body functions and what it needs will help guide you in your better balance journey. The suggestions I am making are from my own personal discovery before studying to be a holistic nutritional therapist. I am a nerd at heart, so I did do some initial research and took a few online courses which helped guide me. I read up on adrenals and the effects of stress and shift work on them and how they can result in something called adrenal fatigue. I will write a post of this in the near future, but most of my ideas listed below stem from attempts to regulate this. The best part is that they are simply lifestyle changes that you can do on your own. NOTE: These ideas are in no way a substitute for sound medical advice and treatment.

#1 One of the hardest realizations I had to make was that my dependency on caffeine, particularly espresso had to be re-evaluated. My love for the taste of coffee aside, the initial rush of energy from caffeine was glorious but short lived. I found the more coffee I drank the worse it eventually made me feel. I started drinking more and more and less and less water. Coffee acts as a diuretic and if you are not consuming water to counterbalance this you will become dehydrated. This leaves you feeling worse and more sluggish if you hadn’t had coffee. Unfortunately, the effects of caffeine don’t stop there! Cortisol is a hormone that is secreted during periods of stress. The levels of this stress hormone naturally rise and fall throughout the day along with your natural energy levels and sleep pattern. When you works shift work and unpredictable hours this can cause this natural shift to become out of sync. That in addition to the exterior stressors of working nights, your body can become inundated with cortisol that your body cannot keep up. The this dysfunction and exhaustion of your natural production processes can stress your adrenal gland to the point that it does not function properly. You enter into adrenal fatigue when this becomes a chronic problem. The unrelenting fatigue that sleep does not seem to help, inflammation, bad skin, and digestion issues are a few symptoms that you may experience. With coffee, it can cause spikes in cortisol levels. So for the many people who drink coffee first thing in the morning can actually be doing harm to themselves in the long run. What I have come to find is if you are able to eat in a way that mimics the natural cortisol pattern, namely by reducing caffeine and timing it for mid-day, it does not have as much of a triggering effect on your body and stress levels. That early morning coffee habit can be very hard to break. Some of the things that I have found that helped were herbal teas.

Herbal Element, a tea company created by one of my favourite adrenal and health gurus, Emily Schromm have a Herbal Coffee tea blend that is a great caffeine free supplement. It has that glorious sharp bitterness of coffee that quenches that need for a punch to the pallet in the morning. It goes great with a dash of milk, but I prefer it black just like my coffee. Along with being caffeine-free, it includes chicory-licorice, Ashwaganda, cinnamon, dandelion and burdock roots. Ashwa-whatttt?? You ask? It is a common herbal adaptogenic that helps lower stress and bring equilibrium and calm to your nervous system. I will save all that jazz for another day. This tea is amazing, and saved my sanity more than once. Not only is it a great supplement, the company is female owned and boasts a menu of other herbal teas for whatever mood, all while being caffeine free. No way am I an affiliate or sponsored, I just want to share the love with you all.

Check it out at https://herbalelement.com/

#2 MAGNESIUM-–

This right here…. has been a game changer for me. At one time I thought that taking a multivitamin would be all that I needed to keep my body healthy and happy. But once I started having issues with interrupted sleep and falling asleep (thank you again shift work). I knew I had to be missing something. But what the heck was it?

Similar to my post above, I stumbled across a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner named Emily Schromm. She is known for being a serial fitness and wellness entrepreneur, gym owner, personal trainer and what she coins, a Meathead Hippie. Anywho,…..While taking the Body Awareness Project Adrenal course by Emily Schromm I came across a great little resource booklet outlining the specific health needs of people who work shift work and have high stress levels. One thing I did not know was that a large portion of the population is deficient in magnesium. Magnesium is a mineral used by our body as a metabolic electrolyte. It is essential to energy production and cardiovascular health and has a somewhat symbiotic relationship with calcium. It is considered the “anti stress” mineral and acts as a natural tranquilizer in that it helps relax the central nervous system, skeletal muscles and smooth the muscles of the gastrointestinal tract. (Calcium does the reverse) It helps reduce muscular spasms which is important in reducing stress on the heart and has also been shown to help reduce symptoms relating to menstrual cramps. (BONUS!)

So I started thinking, why not try it? What do I have to lose? I began supplementing with 500mg/day in the morning and within a week began noticing a difference. I was sleeping more soundly throughout the night, I was falling asleep faster and wasn’t waking up at 3am as much anymore. As bonus for me personally I noticed a reduction in my daily anxiety levels.

Having recently just started my studies with CSNN and their discussion on water and what modern municipalities do to process our water to make it consumable; I discovered a lot of the refinement processes work to eliminate many vital minerals, including magnesium. How does this relate to nightshift workers? When our body is deficient, which most of us are, our bodies can show signs of fatigue, irritability, insomnia and muscle tremors. These are symptoms are already present with interrupted sleep patterns from shift work and a deficiency only exacerbates them. When you’re cortisol levels are all over the place with stress, working night shift and higher coffee intakes the regular deficiency most of us have is heightened. A supplementation of magnesium could be helpful!

These are just a few of the daily changes I have made and found helpful in my shift work journey. Stay tuned for PART II for more!.

❤

So, here we are….FIRST amateur mistake and lesson when it comes to starting a blog: ALWAYS save a copy of your posts. You know just in case……. Just in case you are in the middle of a cold wintery nightshift, delirious with lack of sleep and want to make one quick little adjustment to a post you spent hours writing….. and then you some how manage to delete everything with a click of a button.  GRRRR!!!! Night shift brain is a real thing. Trust me. In this age of such advanced technology you would think there would be a copy saved somewhere in the dark corners of the web. Afterall, do our phones and computers not track everything we do?  Nope not this time. I’m a little disappointed actually because I would have really liked that.

Anyways, back to the subject at hand. Since this is a blog about sharing all the trials and tribulations to me becoming a registered Nutritional Therapist, only naturally I should talk about why I chose to study this. What does a Nutritional Therapist do? And how can we be beneficial to you?

What is Nutritional Therapy?

A Nutritional Therapist is actually a designation coined in the United States. Here in Canada, upon graduating from the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition I will be a Certified Holistic Nutritionist, but they are essentially the same thing. 

Fundamentally nutritional therapy and its practices is rooted in the idea of bio-individuality.  The word HOLISTIC is defined by Merriam-Webster as “relating to holism to or concerned with wholes or with complete systems rather than with the analysis of, treatment of, or dissection into parts.” The thought that each person and their body is its own unique construct having its own unique markers, functions, sensitivities, weaknesses, strengths and most importantly nutritional and lifestyle requirements. A nutritional therapist looks at at the entire person.  They will look at all aspects of your body, lifestyle and environment and make recommendations which may include diet and lifestyle changes. They use evidence and science-based tools to help guide a client through specific health concerns and goals.   It is a holistic or well-rounded approach to healing and supporting your individual needs and goals.  

A nutritional therapist will take into consideration current lifestyle and diet habits to better identify factors such as gut health, hormone imbalances, nutrient deficiencies, sleep health and stress that could be underlying triggers.  All these factors play a unique part in a persons ability to approach the following:

• Disease prevention and support
• Stress
• Aging
• Chronic fatigue
• Blood sugar regulation
• Sleep issues
• Digestion issues
• Detoxification
• Hormonal imbalances

Nutritional therapy is not a treatment for illness or a cure for a medical diagnosis.  It can however offer you ways to support healing through supplementation, health and lifestyle balance.

How I came to discover Nutritional Therapy and how it helped is outlined in my introductory post  “New Phone, Who Dis?”.  Take a look.

If you want to learn more or just enjoy learning about nutritional therapy please drop your email below to subscribe.

❤

One thing that really grinds my gears is when you find a recipe online whether it be Pinterest or Google, and you open the link and it takes a bazillion years to find the actual recipe. Sifting through the writer’s complete autobiography. I don’t want to do that to you, I value your time and attention way too much.

(ps. I did not create this recipe, just want to share the wealth! Original link below*)

So here it is….. a versatile, scrumptious and most importantly comforting recipe that I recently discovered. I removed the fennel seeds and you can change up the meat, ground turkey or pork is best.

Enjoy! ❤

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 10 ounces ground pork sausage
• 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
• 1/2 yellow onion , chopped
• 4 garlic cloves , pressed or minced
• 2 cups chicken broth ( I used organic low sodium)
• 2 cups water
• 1 15 ounce can diced tomatoes with their juice (No salt added)
• 2 teaspoons Italian seasoning ( I used ClubHouse Italiano blend)
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 16 ounce package gnocchi
• 2 cups fresh spinach
• Parmesan cheese grated

Instructions

1. In a large pot, heat the oil over medium high. Add the sausage and red pepper flakes and brown, breaking the sausage apart. Add the onion and garlic and cook, stirring often, for about 5 minutes or until softened.
2. Add the chicken stock, water, tomatoes, Italian seasoning, kosher salt and pepper. Bring to a boil then simmer for 10 minutes. Add the gnocchi and cook until they float to the top, about 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, stir in the spinach and taste for seasoning. Serve hot with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

>3

Hey guys, welcome to my world!

I was not too sure how I should go about writing this first post.  The whole purpose of my creating this page was to show my journey of becoming a nutritional therapist and discovering the power of food so that I could one day share my knowledge and help others. I wanted to come off as knowledgeable and awesome, a nutritional Rockstar here to help you. Soooo I initially wanted to hold off on starting this page.  But then I thought, well there are hundreds of women out there already rocking that concept online. I want this to be my journey, authentic and honest. From the beginning.

So here’s the thing, I have been an extroverted introvert pretty much my entire life. Always second guessing myself but always wanting to be heard, so I usually did that through my actions and not my words. So naturally this whole writing words thing is a new challenge for me. But, I feel like it is the perfect way to get to know you, and you to know me, but still in a safe extroverted introvert way. Crazy huh?

I am a thirty something girl who grew up in a small town in Canada. So small we had to drive an hour to go see a movie, or for any kind of decent shopping.  I guess you could say a country girl. Ever since I could remember I always had this bountiful energy. Like I am talking, Energizer Bunny bouncing off the wall, Jill… go sit on your hands kind of energy and enthusiasm about life and all things in it. I would get school supplies in August and being so excited about it, I would play with the books and papers and organize them pretending I was in school while other kids were out riding their bikes and enjoying the last threads of summer. I was that girl that would save dragonflies from drowning in our pool and place them in the sun to warm up until they flew away.

Literally everything made me happy!

Not sure when it happened but when I hit the age of maybe 12 or 13 or you know…. that fun time in a girls life, I noticed a change. The overthinking, the anxiety about feeling different than all the other girls. Why with all this bountiful potential and drive did I not feel worthy? I hated it.

Eventually, after struggling with social anxiety throughout high school came university. Here I studied what I loved. Criminal Justice and politics. A woman in a man’s world. Again, I wondered why am I once again not interested by other more “feminine” programs? Well because I love law, criminal psychology and discovering the nitty gritty dirty sides of humanity.  Again, despite always feeling like an outsider by not having fun artsy things to talk about, I pushed through. Don’t get me wrong I had the best time of my life in school. I made some righteous friendships with some amazing women who I am still best friends with until this day. They are my tribe. We embrace each other’s differences and have passionate discussions about life, politics and the world. Oh and a wicked awesome meme chain. If you know you know :p

After a few years of chaining myself to a desk as a paralegal and yawning every minute of it, I took a chance on something that always sat in a tiny little box in the back of my mind. I kept it there out of pure insecurity. I dusted it off and pulled it out of the darkness.  I became a police officer.

Boy oh boy did I thrive and love the challenge. I threw myself head first and found my place. Just like every budding new officer, I took every opportunity, never said no and worked copious amounts of overtime to prove myself.  I truly love what I do. But being the ‘Yes’ girl takes its toll.

Before I was always able to eat whatever I wanted and got by. Don’t hate… but never really struggled with weight. I was super active. If anything I struggled maintaining muscle. I never had a butt. Haha.

Then came…. shiftwork. It only took about 1.5 yrs of playing that game that I started struggling with an un-relinquishing fatigue. A fatigue that I fed with candy and sugar on nightshifts. Carbs carbs carbs. They had always worked for me in the past, why not now? Well that was a hard no. And then came the no sleep train. My brain would not shut off, I tossed and turned all night, and if I was lucky I managed 3 hours of sleep before my next shift. Then came coffee… Mmmm…. Anyways, It got to the point where I spent all my down time preparing my body for the next set of shifts. Always having to be switched on and mentally and physically ready. I thought to myself… this can’t be my life. It’s no life at all. I had zero energy to socialize which when you have an insertion of depression from the sudden loss of your father and the crushing detonation of your relationship at the time, you become unable to function.

Yet that feisty energy deep down in my soul never extinguished. I wanted and needed to get my energy back. It was just who I was.

But how?

It has been quite the adventure over the last 5 years discovering what has worked for me. I discovered the power of food. The power of self care and always discovering new things. Along the way I found that I love to share what I have learned with my coworkers and watch it help them as it did me. I thought danggg I dig this! I hope through sharing and helping you with what I learn, we can build each other to a more nourished life. Lets NOURISH our LIFESTYLES.

Ps. Puppies always help! Lol.

If any of this connects with you just stick with me!

❤