Episode #401 Topics: what’s changed & what’s staying the same in the NEW Balanced Bites Podcast, what you need to know to move forward, & how to get YOUR questions answered.
Transcripts are automatically generated, so may not always accurately reflect the words/phrases used or the individuals speaking.
Welcome to the new Balanced Bites Podcast! I’m your host, Liz, a nutritional therapy practitioner and best selling author bringing you candid, up-front, myth-busting and thought-provoking conversations about food, fitness, and life. Remember: The information in this podcast should not be considered personal, individual, or medical advice.
I have spent YEARS researching whether a good multivitamin is truly necessary for overall health. The truth is, there are a LOT of opinions out there, including from people like me, who love to ask lots of obnoxious, overly detailed questions. But the truth is, if I’m paying attention to how I FEEL, my answer was clear: I will be taking my multivitamin, and it will be from the brand Needed. Needed third-party tests EVERY batch for performance and quality, which is incredibly rare in the supplement industry and incredibly important to me! To get started with Needed, head to thisisneeded.com, and use code balanced for 20% off your one-time order or your first three months’ subscription. While you’re at it, add Stress Support to your cart. I’m loving that one, too.
Liz: Hi, friends. Welcome back to Balanced Bites. I am so excited to be back with new episodes of your favorite podcast, because of course, this is your favorite podcast, right? The Balanced Bites podcast was this. Dave Bull I know in many of your earbuds for many years, eight years to be exact, and I am now bringing it back with new content, new interviews, and a fresh perspective after some regenerative recharging and re-energizing time off, which by the way, those words all pretty much mean the same thing.
But that’s fine. We can’t all be on all the time, and after eight straight years of weekly episode, , it was time for a break, an authentic, just a breather where I spent some time reevaluating, let’s see how many res I can throw in here today. And now I’m thrilled to be back and making this amazing podcast happen again.
[00:01:00] So, okay. In lieu of any. Personal day-to-day updates today, which I know were sort of also a staple of the Balance Bites podcast. I will back up and do a quick introduction to myself for any new or out of the loop listeners, and considering it’s been several years, I think pretty much everybody is out of the loop.
So, hi, I’m Liz, and I’m your forever host here at the New Balanced DWIs podcast. I am married, I have two little kids. I live in Kansas City. I. Water being by water like the ocean and lakes not drinking it, although I do drink it, of course, and I just started listening to Taylor Swift, thanks to my seven-year-old and the bluey soundtrack, thanks to my two-year-old.
Both are quite good. I wear a lot of black. . I love burgers and steak, although I probably like burgers more than steak, but I don’t like making them for myself. I love ketchup. I love Indian food. I love cheese. I eat what makes me feel best, which sometimes includes vegetables [00:02:00] and other times it includes white chocolate peanut butter cups.
I’ve been a nutritional therapy practitioner for more than a decade. having accumulated various other certifications during my career, but none more important than that one. And I’m in the process of becoming a personal trainer based around my experiences being the catalyst and quote unquote fitness model for the athletic mom series of fitness programs.
And on that note, I think it’s important to say I exercise for longevity, not for aesthetics, and that has been the best thing I think I’ve ever done for myself besides buying a minivan. That was definitely the number one best thing. So speaking of vehicles, we also have a converted sprinter van, which I talked about on my other podcast, Liz Talks, but the jury is still sort of out on that decision.
My favorite movies that you’ve never heard of are Road to Tradition and Spanglish. My favorite movies that you have heard of are Top Gun Maverick, which I, [00:03:00] sorry. I can’t help it. I’m married to a military pilot. It’s just required, even though I love being contrarian and hating everything everybody else likes, I, I loved it.
I loved it so much. And of course, princess Bride, my favorite childhood movie that I’ve been rewatching lately with my Is Hook Such a classic and. I think that’ll probably be sufficient on the personal information for now, so where I can be there for you. This is where I expand a little bit on my professional credentials.
Again, I’ve been in the health and wellness industry for over 10 years, and I’ve been a nutritional therapy practitioner, certified by the Nutritional Therapy Association, second to none. Amazing, amazing association for over a decade. And I’ve run the gamut of bad and toxic decisions when it comes to how I treated my body.
For the last five to seven years, I’ve really settled into a place of self-love, of peace and of curiosity when it comes to food and my body, which is a really, really great place to be. . I’m a bestselling author, as I said in the [00:04:00] intro, my book, eat the Yolks, which was published in 2014, made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, and I will ride that wave until I die.
I’m also the creator of several educational programs at Centerra around various angles of health and wellness, including baby making and beyond, which is a holistic fertility and pregnancy course. How she Grew, which is a business interview series for women in the wellness industry, an athletic mom, which again is the workout app I helped design and played a fitness model for, which by the way is so freaking good.
And you can get links to all of these things in the show notes. I also built an audience years ago around holistic skincare, way before it exploded back when if you wanted a skincare oil, you had to go to the cooking section of the grocery store. And I’m not joking, and I still do a lot of work there, sort of behind the.
Not like at the grocery store, but in skincare, particularly in the melding of holistic skincare with scientific innovations for anti-aging, which again is really just another [00:05:00] form of saying longevity of optimal function, and there might be opportunities to talk about that. Here. We’ll see. . Now for my longtime listeners, you might notice that something is missing here.
And yes, I feel it too. Diane Sano, who was more than my co-host for eight years, she was the entire reason this podcast existed. Yes, we started it together from episode one, but without her vision and her organization, this podcast never. Would’ve established itself and grown as it did. So Diane is with us in spirit.
She’s blessed this next evolution of the podcast, but she’s out of the podcasting world and she’s holding that boundary, and I respect that completely. We might be able to pull her on for some episodes in the future though, so hold onto that thought. And I personally and prioritizing interviews and conversations here.
So we will not generally be without a co. Type entity situation for long periods of time. So we’re gonna be working people in as a [00:06:00] priority on this podcast. . So why am I back? Because I really started to miss this podcast and the topics that we tackled under its umbrella. Sometimes I feel like I have to step away, and I’ve done that in my career several times.
It’s just been those authentic moments when I needed to step away. I will never try to force something because in the end, when you’re trying to force something, you don’t end up being genuinely helpful to anybody. But it’s not just that. What I’ve also noticed is that I really don’t. There are enough resources out there that help people sort of diffuse that stress of the modern wellness world.
The modern wellness world oftentimes is sort of presented as an answer to stress, but if we’re all being honest, in general, I think 90% of the time it’s actually adding stress to people’s plates. The sheer number of podcasts is growing by like the millisecond, but the podcasts that are truly dedicated to unraveling the tangles and the layers involved and just being a human mostly [00:07:00] working to be their best is still not really enough for my liking.
we have the standard like weight loss, conventional thinking stuff, and then we have the folks who have drawn that hard line and said, I am fully done looking at any of this. Everything is diet, culture, move on. But I personally don’t think we’re done grappling with a few things. I don’t think we’re done grappling with what’s real and what’s marketing, and that’s a really simple thing.
What’s possible and what’s wishful thinking? . And most importantly, why some of these wellness trends that are popping up sort of under the guise of like, not just like, yeah, this is healthy wellness trend, but like the wellness trends that really, really seem to be an answer to diet culture that in the end are actually not even healthy or feasible.
And there’s a lot of that. Some of those are sort of under the umbrella of biohacking and we can talk about. . But most importantly, we still have connections to make. We still have myths to bust. We still have questions to [00:08:00] ask, and every day there’s something new that promises to be that thing that plugs into the exact right spot, whether that’s a supplement or a protocol, or a biohack.
And it plays on hope. And hope is human. That’s not gonna go away. There will always be questions to answer, and I don’t wanna duck out on those questions because I’m interested too, and it’s not just information and science that I’m interested in. I’m also interested in people and in how they process their experiences, especially now that the wellness world is just flooded like never before with protocols and supplements and plans.
If this one doesn’t work, then try this one. And I’m interested in. Reflexive reaction to these new things and ideas, and I don’t think enough podcasts are doing the work of, first of all, and maybe last of all too, I don’t feel like there are enough podcasts doing the work of diffusing that. [00:09:00] Sense of urgency as my friend Michelle Shapiro calls it that feeling that you need to be doing the thing you’re supposed to do right now yesterday to feel better in your body.
So that could be taking this supplement or doing this protocol, whatever. , there’s that sense of, oh my gosh, I have to do this now that causes us to buy things, click things that might not serve us best just because of that sense of urgency, which is not my phrasing, it’s Michelle’s, and I think it is spot on.
And maybe most importantly, I don’t think that there are enough people out there giving the reminder that nothing works like that. And I say that in finger quotes, nothing. quickly, like a magic bullet. Nothing is the overall supreme answer of answers to the age old questions that we’ve all been grappling with since the beginning of time.
We can unravel and understand what’s going on all we [00:10:00] want, and there’s such value in that because it increases the sense of ownership, that feeling that we know the why. and that we’re in control. Yet still, there’s no biohack, no protocol, no plan that’s going to solve the problem of the overall imbalanced approach to life that just pervades every corner of wellness culture.
I swear. Every new hack or protocol is just another. Mad Dash to solve problems that either exist mostly just in our minds, or that were created or at least teased out in marketing departments. So nothing works for everyone. There’s no magic bullet, there’s none. If we can be honest about that, we can make inroads, and that’s what I wanna do.
We can optimize health to a degree that is manageable on a reasonable timeline and on an individual basis. And note that optimizing health to a degree that is manageable on a reasonable timeline and on an [00:11:00] individual basis is very different from, say, a sort of one-dimensional so-called. To lose weight, which we’ll be talking about in detail a little bit here and in the next episode.
So in my opinion, emphasizing over and over again that manageability timeline, individuality reality, are factors that we ignore at our own peril. Is the only way to do this, you can spend your whole life trying to disprove that by entering into one lopsided contract after another. And by that I mean buying of this, you know, starting this protocol, buying that supplement, joining this wellness challenge and going for the same one-dimensional wellness promises that are dressed up in these new trendy clothes.
And you’ll end up right back where you. You can do that, or you can accept that there are [00:12:00] complexities. Learn to recognize them and start moving forward like the self-actualized badass that you are. Okay. Another reason I’m back is I realized I’m interested in having the types of conversations we had for our entire run at the Balance Bites podcast.
Again, with the audience we already built. I’ve been doing another podcast for over a year. It’s called Liz Talks, which is a little more general. I talk anything from like parenting to girls trips to friendship, and I love that. But here I’ll be talking more traditionally wellness centered topics like food and fitness as well as topics to which I’d like to just bring awareness and a more balanced perspective.
Topics that I think might blow your mind. Balanced is the name of the podcast. It’s the name of the game. . So here’s how this is gonna work. I’m your host, but as I said, I’ll be emphasizing interviews here more so than solo episodes where I just talk your ear off. I think it’s more fun, it’s more dynamic listening when you’ve got two people on board.
So to wit, I have a few really amazing interviews already in [00:13:00] Queue for You interviews with Michelle Shapiro, who is a registered d. She is blowing up both sides of the current narrative on Instagram and in her private practice. Dr. Jolene Brighton, who is the queen of knowing your body and advocating for it, and survivor and victim’s advocate, Kara Chamberlain, who has absolutely changed the way I view and consume the true crime genre, which didn’t I tell you.
I’d be bringing on topics that I’d like to bring. Awareness and a balanced perspective to this episode will blow your mind. And I’ll also, at least for the moment, be doing this like on a one to two episodes per month schedule, because while my other podcast is settling into a more personal narrative type format, this podcast will hopefully tackle certain topics much more in depth, which requires the input of a research team.
And that takes time and lots of back and forth, and quite frankly, more than a week to prepare. And it’s also what’s feasible for me right now, and my personal belief is [00:14:00] most folks would say, Yes to fewer episodes versus no, don’t record any episodes at all, and I’m not all or nothing in my personal life, so I’m not gonna be every week or nothing with this podcast.
I also wanna say there are inherent limitations to this endeavor. I’m just me. I work and I am a full-time, full-time stay-at-home mom. I do not have time nor opportunity to reflect on every possible perspective, to analyze every possible angle, to gather every possible point of view. I will miss. By default, I will probably be mostly reflecting perspectives that are informed by my own demographic experiences, age and economic bracket.
Two people who are probably in some way or another similar to me, and I don’t see that as like a fatal flaw. I see that as reality. I’m doing the best I can to show up. Thoughtfully, conscientiously, compassionately, but just as it’s impossible to [00:15:00] say all the right things all the time in our daily lives, it will also be impossible for me to get this thing right, say all the right things, turn over all the right stones, be a conduit for all the right voices.
And I personally don’t think that’s a reason not to do it at all. It’s tempting to feel otherwise, especially right now, that if you can’t perfectly address everything, you shouldn’t even try. But I’m gonna silence that voice and go for it anyway. And I’m gonna do my best with the available resources I have, which include finances, energy, and time.
But all of these things, you know, taken together, I’m really, really excited about where we can take. . And on a lighter note, I’ll probably be sharing one or two favorite products or brands in each episode. So keep in mind that these are genuine favorites and companies I trust generally, I don’t get paid from those companies unless you actually buy something.
So it’s not a company that’s just handing me gobs of money and saying, talk about us. It’s actually a company [00:16:00] that I care about that I have to stand behind. And so I’d share about these. Products or brands because it’s what makes this podcast and the research and the time spent possible in the first place.
And I’ve said before, we love the brands that support this work. So I promise to keep those spots short if you promise not to fast forward through them. And of course, to trust that I don’t recommend brands unless I really, really love. Okay. A bit of what I’m planning to tackle and the myth bust coming up.
I will be talking about, well, everything, but I’ll be talking about intermittent fasting, not today, but in upcoming episodes, vegan versus carnivore, hormonal health, healthy aging protein. What actually happens to your body and your fat cells when you lose weight, and why you need to know about it.
Anti-aging as. Prolonging optimal function of your body because no anti-aging is not a dirty word, and it’s something most of us would benefit from thinking about and planning for. [00:17:00] From the perspective of quality of life over time. I’ll be talking about fad diets and frankly, they’re all fad diets, but we still need to talk about it, especially so that we can tell the difference between a worthwhile intervention because those do exist and just a nowhere road.
So body image, pro metabolic eating anxiety. And beyond. It’s all fair game. Now remember with this podcast now and forevermore know that nothing I say will apply to everyone all the time. Some of what I say, I will say something entirely different in the future. If evidence changes or if my opinions change and this is reality, I have no shtick and that’s what both probably makes what I do less marketable, which if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.
And also. The best choice in real. Talk about real life. I will not send you down a path that you’ll turn around in two years and say, that was insane. Why did I do that? This is about balance, self-knowledge, having [00:18:00] sometimes difficult conversations, digging deep and getting into the thick of things I’ve said many times over.
I am large, I contain multitudes, which by the way, that’s not my, I didn’t make that quote. That’s a quote. But I mean it, I don’t think shifting perspectives means anything other than, we all contain more thoughts and ideas than we could ever fully grasp. And depending on the connections we’re making in our lives, the context we’re living in, at any moment we might pull one conclusion or draw one map over another.
So if I say one day that I’m like loving working out and doing red light therapy at 5:00 AM while the kids sleep, and the next episode I say, my kids are my alarm clock. That’s a very basic example of what I’m talking about. That’s because I’m flexible, not because I’m inconsistent. Good. All right. All right.All right. I hope you’ll stick with me on this journey. I am so, so excited. And note that you can always submit questions to me for this podcast by going to balanced [00:19:00] with liz.com, and let me know what you wanna hear about and who you want me to chat with. I am so excited to be back. I will see all of you in the next.
Thanks for listening to the new Balanced Bites Podcast! Before you shut down your podcast app, PLEASE take a moment to subscribe and leave a review! It’s a small thing you can do that I appreciate more than you can imagine! And speaking of what we can do for each other, if YOU have a question you’d like to have tackled on this podcast or an interview you’d like to hear, submit the details at balancedwithliz.com. Let’s keep unpacking, unraveling, contextualizing and nuance-ing the important questions together so we can be empowered, informed, active participants in our own health and happiness.
