Episode 293: New Year, New Paradigm: How to Make Health a Priority in 2024
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One of the most profound shifts we can make this year is to place our health at the top of our priority list. It's not just about reacting to health crises; it's about nurturing a consistent, proactive approach to our well-being. This means making time, space, and budget for our health, and recognizing that we are worth the investment.
Our latest episode challenges the status quo and invites you to build a new health paradigm. We're talking about prioritizing health, taking responsibility, and embracing our whole selves. Listen on to hear about the official launch of the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective – and exactly WHY Erin created it.
In this episode:
Big news: The Funk’tional Nutrition Collective is live [1:16]
Reflecting on the current health paradigm – and the need for a new model [4:56]
The five pillars for the new health paradigm [15:08]
Move beyond the diet culture / anti-diet culture dichotomy [30:43]
Breaking down the 4 bodies of health [43:28]
Journal prompts for personal growth and change [55:54]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Collective
Eat to Achieve™ (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Carb Compatibility Project™ (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Your Hormone Revival™ (Only available within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Body Intentions Breakthrough (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Ned Natural Remedies (get 15% off your order with code FUNK)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Learn more about Functional Nutrition and Mindset
Related episodes:
276: The What & Why of Intuitive Functional Medicine™
269: What I Eat in a Day (& Why)
263: How to Listen to Your Intuition
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is The Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect.
Erin Holt [00:00:39]:
So I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school and mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review, and share because you never know whose life you might change. And of course, keep coming back for more. Hello my friends, and happy new year. And boy, do I have a big announcement for you. So I'm just going to get right into it because we have a brand new offering.
Erin Holt [00:01:24]:
As of today, the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective is live. So this is an education portal. It's a holistic health community. It's an annual subscription where you get access to pretty much all of our courses. So that's Eat To Achieve, the Carb Compatibility Project, Your Hormone Revival, Body Intentions Breakthrough, The Boundaries Course. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you're probably familiar with some of those.
Erin Holt [00:01:50]:
If you haven't, basically, there are functional medicine, functional nutrition courses, and we will also be offering live classes through the collective. Every single month. We'll have a class on nutrition that's going to be taught by somebody at Team FN. We'll have an intuitive functional medicine class workshop with me, and then we'll have mind body medicine classes with different visiting teachers, energy workers, healers. Like my favorite people, the people that I go to, we're pulling them into the collective. These are going to be restorative classes for your nervous system. And we also have a community, and this is the most important thing to me and something that I have really been thinking about and wanting to build. We have this community here on the podcast, but it's kind of one way, there's no interactive nature.
Erin Holt [00:02:39]:
There's no way for us to talk to each other and meet each other. And so this is the place and the space to do that. If you are anything like me, you love to take classes, you love to learn. And maybe you've taken a class or two in the past and you left feeling so activated, so lit up, so alive, so aligned. You're inspired, you're ignited, and you're like, this is going to be the start of something great.
Erin Holt [00:03:06]:
And then you leave the class, you go back to your normal life, and that flame kind of like gets a little bit blown out. And the more time that passes, the more you forget that feeling of that activation, that initiation, that inspiration when you took the class or the course or the workshop. But I want to tell you that that feeling, that's your soul spark, that's your aliveness, it's there for a reason. So much of our modern world is set up to kind of snuff that out. And it's our goal in the collective to keep that activated, to keep that alive, to keep your energy source turned on, your life force turned on, to keep that inner flame burning bright. And we do this by returning to community, by returning to the live classes throughout the month, throughout the year. So you get access to all of the different frameworks that I've built that are tried and true frameworks. Thousands of people have used them with success.
Erin Holt [00:04:01]:
These are the functional nutrition, functional medicine programs. But you're also, in addition to that, able to plug into a new energy source through community and through ongoing live classes. I recently heard a stat, and I tried to fact check this. I don't know where it came from.
Erin Holt [00:04:16]:
But 97% of goals fail if you don't have accountability.
Erin Holt [00:04:22]:
So it's so important to bake in this community, to bake in this accountability in this way. And the best part about it, and what I really worked to make happen, is that it is super affordable. It's only $149 a month, or as I like to say, it's less than the cost of my husband's CrossFit. So stick around. I'm going to tell you more about the collective, but I want to talk through why I arrived at this decision, because it's such a huge shift for my company and our offerings. This isn't going to be a conversation about business. It's going to be a conversation about health. And the purpose of today's episode, which is the first one we're releasing in the new year, is to reflect on what health paradigm you've been operating in.
Erin Holt [00:05:08]:
And to ask yourself, is it time for you to build a new one?
Erin Holt [00:05:14]:
And if you decide, yes, it is, if that's the case, what does that actually look like for you? So I'm going to talk about what it could look like. I'm going to talk about the health paradigm that I'm building, and I'm going to invite you into it. But part of the way that we can retrieve this information for ourselves is through the process of reflecting. And so I'm going to weave that concept into today's show. And even at the end of the show, I'm going to give you actual prompts that I want you to write down, like pen to paper and think about this, reflect on this journal through these questions for yourself. And I encourage you, if you don't have a reflection practice, I really encourage you to start one. I learned a lot about the research behind reflecting and why it's so instrumental and why it can help us grow and change and evolve through my trainings at Stanford. And I'm going to share some of that with you at the end of today's show.
Erin Holt [00:06:08]:
So paradigm. Paradigm is essentially a way of looking at something. It's a belief, it's a perspective, it's a set of ideas. And oftentimes paradigms are really more assumptions than they are truth, than they are fact. But it can feel to us like a truth because so many people buy into it, so many people believe it, so many people perpetuate it and live it as though it is truth. A lot of my work in my career over the past, like 13-14 years has been looking at current health paradigms or beliefs or perspectives and figuring out why they're not serving us and how can we change that.
Erin Holt [00:06:58]:
Now, there are some people that go in and make change from the inside out, and that's so commendable. We absolutely need people doing that. We need policy change, we need structure change, and bless up. If you're one of those people, like, bless you. That's never really been my vibe. That's not my mission. I don't have the patience for navigating all the red tape that that requires and all the time, quite frankly, that that requires. Since day one, I've just decided to kind of sidestep the whole thing and build my own way.
Erin Holt [00:07:29]:
That is part of the reason for those of you know who, my education background, that is part of the reason that I did not go on to become a registered dietitian. I was like, I've got work to do over here. But so much appreciation for the people that are going into the framework and trying to change it from the inside out.
Erin Holt [00:07:51]:
Now, at the end of 2022, so just about a year ago, I read this book called Clockwork. It came highly recommended by a mastermind that I was in, and the author talks about this idea of having a big promise for your business, for your offerings. And for a few weeks, I sat in reflection with this because I really wanted to think about what is my big promise? What has it been? What is it going to continue to be? What does that look like? And I had a team meeting at this time last year, and this is where I explained, like, hey, this is our big promise. .
Erin Holt [00:08:19]:
This is like everything we do boils down to this one big promise. And the big promise is we will always bring you new ways of thinking about your health. Now, you might have heard me say that over the past few years. If you haven't heard me say that, you just might have experienced it, you know like, oh, I've listened to Erin on the podcast and I've changed the way that I think about myself. Great, good, great, grand. That is the intention. Now, we can say this slightly differently where I am bringing you a new way of looking at your health. We can say it a little differently even where we are building a new health paradigm.
Erin Holt [00:08:48]:
For the past few years I've spent a lot of time educating and creating resources to showcase how our health and wellbeing extend beyond just the physical body. I've completed a lot of trainings, a lot of certifications, including that year long intensive training that I just mentioned at Stanford. This year I created, or this past year I created and led over 100 women through Manifest Your Health, which is a one of a kind program that I created and taught.
Erin Holt [00:09:22]:
And this made me question, especially through the past year, am I going to completely pivot away from nutrition work?
Erin Holt [00:09:30]:
I've spent so much of my career up until this point, focusing on the physical body. Will I spend the next chunk of my career focusing on the other bodies instead? Emotional, mental, spiritual, energetic? So I spent a tremendous amount of time in reflection to determine my own next steps because I really wanted to have some clarity around that. But even while I was talking about emotional body, mental body, energy bodies, all of the while I was saying we cannot bypass the physical body, right? We can open up our purview to see all four bodies. We can open up our healing to encompass the other bodies, but we're not completely bypassing the physical body that we live in. There are some camps that will say well, it's all mindset, it's all emotion, it's all trauma, it's all energy, it's all the subconscious.
Erin Holt [00:10:28]:
And the more I think about this, the more time I spend in reflection around this, the more people we interface with in our business, the more clients that we see. What I am understanding more and more is that it's not all one anything. These things, the mindset, the energy, the emotions, the subconscious patterning, these things can all be portalways into the physical body.
Erin Holt [00:10:55]:
And the physical body can also be a portalway into the other bodies and into the other dimensions. I'm going to talk about this in a little bit. But creating a devotional, sacred practice for my physical body is what allowed me to heal from over a decade of eating disorders. And we know that eating disorders are not really a physical issue. More often than not, they're an emotional, mental issue. But I was able to access emotional and mental healing through the portalway of my physical body by focusing on my physical body.
Erin Holt [00:11:40]:
And on the, I guess, flip side of that same coin, by me deepening into my spiritual practice, really sinking into energy medicine, really sinking into belief work, brain rewiring, subconscious repatterning, all of that allowed me to heal from autoimmunity.
Erin Holt [00:11:56]:
Which most people would agree is really an issue with the physical body.
Erin Holt [00:12:00]:
So I say all of this to explain it's not a this or a that it's an and both.
Erin Holt [00:12:06]:
And so where I've netted out with all of this is really this idea of building a new health paradigm where we don't have to forfeit one body for another. We're working them all, all the time, collectively. And honestly, I would even add a fifth body, which is the earth, because we are not separate from the earth's body. And so we have to have reverence and respect for the earth as well.
Erin Holt [00:12:35]:
And understanding all of these five buckets, and having reverence for all five, and having tools and even devotional practices for all five, is really how we build health. It's really how we build a new health paradigm, a new health framework, recognizing that it all gets to be an opportunity for healing. So ultimately, I decided, no, I don't want to move away from teaching and practicing functional nutrition and functional medicine. I want to weave them all together.
Erin Holt [00:13:07]:
Because that is the new way.
Erin Holt [00:13:10]:
And I also was thinking, what meets the needs of the collective right now? What is going on collectively?
Erin Holt [00:13:18]:
And how can I respond to that?
Erin Holt [00:13:21]:
Where are people struggling? And do I have tools and resources to alleviate that suffering? And that's how I came up with the idea for the collective, where we get to collectively, together, build out a new health paradigm. Through the collective, we can make healing more accessible for the greater collective, more opportunities for healing.
Erin Holt [00:13:51]:
Less confusion, less chaos, more community, less conflict, less friction, less nutrition battles and more community and understanding, and being willing to play in the gray area. Not looking at health and nutrition as black and white, and being in a place where that actually feels accessible and acceptable. People, we're so inundated with information, people, we feel isolated, we feel alone, we're overwhelmed, we're confused. We need a place to land. We need to bring back rituals and bring back devotional practices to ourselves. We need to make ourselves matter. And I believe at the end of the day, so deeply in the power of food and functional nutrition. And I want to make that type of support more accessible to people, more available and more affordable.
Erin Holt [00:14:42]:
So that is the intention behind the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective. We will share all the information with you in the show notes. You can sign up anytime.
Erin Holt [00:14:53]:
We always have live classes going. And like I said, you can join at any time. But now I'm going to share with you what I think is the new health paradigm. To build the new thing, to create the new thing, to strive towards. This is my working framework, so subject to change, but this is how I see it. I've broken it down into like, five pillars or five agreements, and the very first one at the tippety top is this. We agree to put health on our priority list.
Erin Holt [00:15:26]:
During, throughout the pandemic, I kept thinking.
Erin Holt [00:15:30]:
Like, gosh, this is really going to be a turning point for people. This is going to be the turning point where people start to prioritize their health, not just when something goes bad, not just when shit hits the fan, not just in reaction to a health crisis, but to really have deep reverence for our physical bodies and our health.
Erin Holt [00:15:51]:
And it wasn't, it wasn't a turning point.
Erin Holt [00:15:54]:
Maybe for some people, but not for the collective. So the new health paradigm is one where we actually do collectively prioritize our health as a concept.
Erin Holt [00:16:04]:
Not just when things go pear shaped, but all of the time, it is a working priority. And then more specifically, to the women, to the moms, to the caretakers, to the people pleasers out there. We put our own health on our priority list.
Erin Holt [00:16:22]:
That's a big one. Because we are collectively okay with women feeling pretty shitty. We're collectively okay with women being underresourced and overtaxed. It has become accepted as the cultural norm, part of the paradigm. When I was postpartum and dealing with a lot of health struggles.
Erin Holt [00:16:41]:
I went to my doctor all of the time and I went a lot of different doctors.
Erin Holt [00:16:44]:
And I kept bringing in my list of symptoms and explaining and pleading with them like something is really not right. And they just kept telling me, yeah, this is normal for a new mom. This is just kind of how it goes. So my situation, my diagnosis, went overlooked because of the paradigm that it's normal for moms to feel this way. It is okay for moms to feel shitty. This is the norm. This is what it's all about.
Erin Holt [00:17:15]:
Pop a pill and get on out of here, right?
Erin Holt [00:17:18]:
That is a hard no for me. Something was actually really wrong with my physical body. But because we all collectively believe that it's totally okay for women to be strung out, exhausted, run down, maxed out, underresourced, it completely went overlooked again.
Erin Holt [00:17:36]:
Hard no for me.
Erin Holt [00:17:39]:
And up until this point, if you've gotten really good at ignoring the signs that your body is unwell, and you've been doing it for a long time because you've been too busy to tend to it, it's okay. We can give ourselves grace. We can give ourselves forgiveness if we need it, and we can choose something different. We can choose something new. Part of building out a new paradigm is to choose something new. And I'm going to tell you the truth. If you want to get up to big things in your life, you've got to heal your body. You have to heal the function of your body, optimize your body.
Erin Holt [00:18:15]:
And sometimes this requires understanding the body in order to do that. That's one of the things that we're really going to bring forth in the collective. I've always referred to Your Hormone Revival as, like, a user's manual for your female body, because I really believe if we understand the whys behind things, it makes it change so much easier. And I want you to feel alive again. So many people come to us, and they're like, I just don't feel like myself. Let's turn that light back on. Feel good again, feel alive again, feel like yourself. Because honestly, we sometimes don't notice how shitty we've felt until we start to feel alive again.
Erin Holt [00:18:52]:
And we're like, ah, yes, this is it. Making your health a priority also includes making the time, the space, and even the budget for this.
Erin Holt [00:19:07]:
So this is where the actual life change comes in. And I've always been extremely honest with all of you that making change requires change. I'm not saying this is a cakewalk. I'm not pretending it's easy, but how bad do you want it? How badly do you want to feel good again? Because it's going to require you to shift some things. That's one of the big things that we do in YHR, Your Hormone Revival is do a life audit and really talk through what needs to change in order for me to do this to reach my goals. I know that I said the B-word, budget, and I know that money can be a tough one for women because we kind of default to like, what should I spend my money on? We can feel guilty about spending money on ourselves. And I just want to, for whoever needs to hear this right now, you are worth spending money on.
Erin Holt [00:20:02]:
You are worth investing in your health. You deserve to feel good. You are worth that. You deserve that. That is your right. Feeling good is your birthright. And so it's okay to invest money in that. And we don't want to just default to money feelings.
Erin Holt [00:20:27]:
We want to really look at the money facts and really write down expenses.
Erin Holt [00:20:34]:
And figure out how to work them in, figure out how to make it happen for you. I know for me, part of prioritizing my health was to create a budget for myself, like a health budget, a healing budget.
Erin Holt [00:20:48]:
And I give myself now a pretty big health budget because it is a priority to me.
Erin Holt [00:20:55]:
I understand that so much of my life, like my lifeblood, comes from prioritizing my health. And this is also why we have priced the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective this way. You're getting access to thousands of dollars worth of courses and teachings, but you get access to it for $149 a month. That accessibility was just so, so important to me because again, I know how wonky the money stuff and the budget stuff can come when it comes to prioritizing our health.
Erin Holt [00:23:41]:
Okay, so number one kind of feeds into number two. Part two of building a new health paradigm is we stop waiting for somebody to swoop in and fix it. For somebody to swoop in and save us, for somebody to swoop in and create the time on our schedule for us to actually caretake ourselves.
Erin Holt [00:24:26]:
This requires responsibility. And I want to say right out of the gate, responsibility is different than blame. We aren't blaming ourselves. We are taking responsibility for ourselves. Because if we don't do it, nobody else will. If you don't prioritize your health, who is going to do that for you? Nobody is, right?
Erin Holt [00:24:47]:
That's your job. That's your job. And again, speaking to my moms and my caretakers, this is modeled behavior. I want my daughter to see that I take care of myself. I want my kiddo to see that I prioritize my own health, my own well being, because how is she going to learn it for herself if I'm not modeling that? This is something I believe so fiercely in. And if you think about the ways that many of us have been taught and conditioned to think about our health is there's like this idea that we have no control.
Erin Holt [00:25:27]:
We're sitting ducks. Things just happen. We're taught to constantly seek answers outside of ourselves. We're taught that we couldn't possibly be the authority on our bodies, so we have to go to other people to be the authority on our bodies, which is a little bit ridiculous conceptually. Common sense wise, it's like a little bit of a ridiculous concept. But one thing this can do is lead to burnout. A huge factor in burnout is lack of autonomy, right? So if you think about how we've been taught to think about our health, it is lack of autonomy. Autonomy is self ownership.
Erin Holt [00:26:04]:
We have not, as women, been taught that we own our own bodies. Everybody else has an opinion. Laws tell us what to do with our bodies. Self ownership is just like, not something that we've really been in lock step with. But I am here to remind you that that is a really important part of our health, is remembering that we own us, and it is our responsibility to caretake that.
Erin Holt [00:26:32]:
Sometimes that can feel a little scary, but I promise, the more time you hang out with me, the less scary it feels. I promise. I promise that. So that's number two.
Erin Holt [00:26:45]:
Number three is we recognize that we are more than our physical bodies, and we recognize that we are, in fact, involved in a lifelong relationship with our bodies. So both are true. We're more than just physical bodies, and we're involved in a lifelong relationship with our bodies. And on top of that, in the new paradigm, we have a desire to make this relationship the best that it can be.
Erin Holt [00:27:11]:
And so I used the word lifelong pretty intentionally there. Our body is literally how we move about our life. It's a BFD. It's a big freaking deal. Our life is not separate from our body, in being in relationship with our bodies, with our physical vessels.
Erin Holt [00:27:33]:
It's sacred.
Erin Holt [00:27:42]:
Sometimes we have to reclaim this relationship to our bodies after being separate for a while, after having an adversarial relationship with our bodies, after going through experiences where perhaps our bodies didn't feel like a safe space to exist. And so I do want to acknowledge that. I like to talk about embodiment practices. We bring in so much information, whether we're listening to podcast information about health or TikTok or Instagram, we bring in information that way. Our brains are just bringing information all of the time. There's so much stimulus, there's so much inputs. And what I always say is that we have to embody that information for it to affect change. We can't just read a book about changing our diet and then the next day our diet is completely changed.
Erin Holt [00:28:31]:
We have to put that into practice. We have to embody that. So embodiment practices, to me, is really part of creating a new relationship to our bodies and to our health. And I recognize it can be challenging to have an embodiment practice if our bodies still feel like a hard, scary, or unsafe place for us to inhabit. And so this practice doesn't have to be overnight. We don't have to flip a switch and say, great, love being in my body. But in the new paradigm, we are committed to working on that relationship and to building out practices that are designed to help us facilitate that. This is one of the things that I'm going to get into in an upcoming workshop, Where Science Meets the Sacred.
Erin Holt [00:29:24]:
So this is going to be part of the collective. Like I said, there's going to be live classes, and on January 25th, that's a Thursday, I will be teaching this workshop. So if you are in the collective, you will get access to that. An invitation to join us there.
Erin Holt [00:29:40]:
Now, I also use the term lifelong, or the word lifelong relationship to counteract the messages of quick fix. The old paradigm taught us to believe that change should be fast and easy.
Erin Holt [00:30:00]:
And if it's not fast and easy, then we're not doing it right. You're the problem. The old paradigm says that you are the problem. Your willpower is the problem. Your body is the problem. But the new paradigm is geared toward sustainable, regenerative change, growth and progress. I think recognizing that we're in this lifelong relationship takes some of the pressure off of us to get it right in 21 days, to fix the problem in 21 days. Because if you're starting from a frantic, chaotic, and frenetic place, don't be surprised when you get frantic, chaotic, and frenetic results.
Erin Holt [00:30:43]:
That's the old paradigm, and we're not doing that anymore. All right, number four. Now, four is a big one for a lot of us, you guys, so buckle up. Number four is we recognize that caretaking ourselves, and tending to our physical body is not always an automatically disordered or diet culture.
Erin Holt [00:31:09]:
Woof.
Erin Holt [00:31:10]:
I started my career almost 15 years ago, and I started at fundamentally rejecting diet culture, I had been dealing with eating disorders for over a decade at that point. And that was really part of my healing process, is fully rejecting the paradigm, the belief, the idea that tells us we can only be accepted, we can only be loved, we can only be valuable by looking a certain way: skinny. And then we have this whole anti-diet culture movement that swoops in and is like, F that, what I look like doesn't matter. I have more to offer and I have more to contribute than just my appearance or just my jean size.
Erin Holt [00:31:56]:
My value isn't in how tiny my. waist is, which is absolutely, fundamentally true. But what I've seen in my space.
Erin Holt [00:32:06]:
Is that over the past few years.
Erin Holt [00:32:11]:
Decade, let's say, is that we've almost overcorrected to the point of insanity, which is an Africa Brooke quote, that I love.
Erin Holt [00:32:20]:
Like, we've gone so far, the pendulum has swung so far, that we've actually started to ignore the physical body, to ignore our symptoms, to ignore how we feel, to ignore the signs that our body is struggling. Things like wonky digestive capacity, headaches, skin issues, acne, anxiety, aches, pains, poor sleep.
Erin Holt [00:32:39]:
We've ignored them because any attempt to rectify them has been labeled as diet culture. And we're like, well, diet culture is bad. We don't want that. So I guess I'm just going to put my head in the sand and kind of go dark on this whole thing that is my physical body. This is where people, and I'm not suggesting that this is the intention behind the anti-diet culture movement at all, but I am saying this is how it lands with some people, and I know that, and I say that with conviction, because I'm having the conversations with the people where it's landing this way. This is where people get trapped. This is where people feel stuck. And this can end up leading to unnecessary suffering.
Erin Holt [00:33:27]:
And I've seen this with hundreds of people. So I know that this is true, and I have to speak into this. Even though it might upset some people to hear this, I have to speak into this. This is not what we're doing with the new paradigm. I have a colleague, friend, mentor, who does a lot of work in the perimenopausal, menopausal space. And what she has seen, what she has found, and research supports that there's a lot of mental health shifts that happen during this time, and it can be a huge time for eating disorders to surface or resurface. She does a lot of work in the eating disorder space.
Erin Holt [00:34:14]:
She does a lot of work with the anti-diet space. And she was in a group that was, for lack of a better term, we'll just label it anti-diet, an anti-diet group. And she was talking about a client of hers who was going through menopause and her body was changing, and she wasn't feeling great in her body, like, physically wasn't feeling great in her body.
Erin Holt [00:34:34]:
And so she came to my colleague, my mentor, talking about wanting to lose weight.
Erin Holt [00:34:45]:
And so my mentor brought this up in the group that she was in, the group of practitioners that she was in. I'm like, how do we navigate this? She was looking for resources, she was looking for support. And the head of the group said, if you are working with people who have any weight loss goals whatsoever, you are not welcome here. This is not a place for you.
Erin Holt [00:35:02]:
And that is what we are seeing quite a lot. It is like, pick one, you're either in or you're out.
Erin Holt [00:35:15]:
And that binary black and white thought process or paradigm might work for some people that might feel really good, but there's a lot of people that just kind of get caught in the crosshairs.
Erin Holt [00:35:24]:
And this is kind of what I mean by overcorrection, because telling women that you cannot lose weight, that cannot be a goal of yours. There's something wrong with you for wanting that. You are just a cog in the diet culture wheel. That is actually not body autonomy.
Erin Holt [00:35:44]:
It's just more of the same.
Erin Holt [00:35:45]:
It's saying, I'm the authority. I'm going to tell you what is acceptable. I'm going to tell you what you're allowed to want. I'm going to tell you what you're allowed to desire. It is the same paradigm in a different cloak. Like, what if somebody doesn't want to eat gluten because it gives them raging brain fog, even if they don't have a test to prove that they're sensitive to gluten?
Erin Holt [00:36:04]:
Is that diet culture?
Erin Holt [00:36:06]:
Or is that maybe self respect in a devotional practice to the body? What if somebody has a goal of putting on muscle mass because they left a mentally and emotionally abusive relationship and lifting heavy weights makes them feel a sense of capability and power they've never felt before?
Erin Holt [00:36:23]:
By the way, these are real life case studies.
Erin Holt [00:36:28]:
So would we label that as diet culture because she wants to change her body composition? Or is that self respect in a devotional practice to the body?
Erin Holt [00:36:35]:
What if somebody wants to lose weight because it makes their knees feel better and then they can walk with more freedom? They love nothing more than walking, and because they have weight on their body. It's making it really hard for their knees to carry them through their favorite activity.
Erin Holt [00:36:53]:
And so they have a goal of losing weight so they can do the thing that brings them so much joy.
Erin Holt [00:37:01]:
Is that diet culture or is that self respect and a devotional practice to the body? What if someone wants to change their diet so they can feel more energized and bring more vitality to their life, their relationships, their children, their career, their passions, whatever?
Erin Holt [00:37:13]:
Is that diet culture because they want to change their food? Or is that self respect and a devotional practice to the body? I'm going to tell you what. I am devoted to my body.
Erin Holt [00:37:25]:
And as I devote myself, as I have a devotional practice to my physical body, it allows me to be more connected to my soul, to my spirit.
Erin Holt [00:37:35]:
Doing that can help me support my mental health. It can allow me the resourcefulness and the resilience to make decisions that are in my highest interest of my overall well being.
Erin Holt [00:37:50]:
Looking at my physical body, prioritizing the needs of my physical body, caretaking my physical body, allows everything else to thrive. So I am devoted to my health.
Erin Holt [00:38:00]:
And I'm going to say something that's potentially a little controversial. And it's why I don't really talk about my eating disorder recovery often or ever. But this is 100% my truth. And as I always say, just because my truth conflicts with your beliefs of what is right and wrong does not mean it's any less my truth. This is what happened. This is my story. Having a devotional practice to my body is how I healed from eating disorders. So at the time, I was really struggling with my recovery and I wanted to start running.
Erin Holt [00:38:32]:
I left a relationship. There was just a lot of change going on in my life. I had graduated dietetic school. I had no idea what the next chapter had in store for me. I left a long term relationship. I was like rebuilding, started a new job, was like rebuilding some social stuff. There's just a lot of change going on. And I started running because it made me feel so much better mentally and emotionally.
Erin Holt [00:38:32]:
And I'd always been a runner, but I started running more. And because of that, my hamstrings got really tight. My mom had been practicing yoga and was like, hey, come to this yoga class with me. So I started going to yoga two days a week before, it was like a 6 am class because it was before work.
Erin Holt [00:39:15]:
And I started going two days a week.
Erin Holt [00:39:18]:
And I realized that if I binged and purged the night before and I went to yoga class, the next morning, I had so much acid reflux that I couldn't do the class.
Erin Holt [00:39:32]:
So having a devotional practice to my body, to running and to yoga, allowed me to actually change the behaviors, the actual eating disorder behaviors. Now, obviously, there was a lot of mental and emotional work that came with that. But running and changing my life and doing yoga was a big part of that.
Erin Holt [00:39:55]:
So I tell you this story because from the outside looking in, this can look like restriction. This can look like disorder.
Erin Holt [00:40:06]:
I was running and doing yoga a lot. I was devoted to those practices. This can look like disorder. This can look like dieting. This can look like diet culture.
Erin Holt [00:40:15]:
Right?
Erin Holt [00:40:15]:
From the outside looking in, it can appear similar. The difference is in my approach, the difference is in my internal driver, my internal why. Why I was doing that. And the reality of this situation is, nobody knows that but you. This is where we come back to. You are the authority on you. You are responsible for that. So we can absolutely accept and love our body as is, and we can have practices to help us get there.
Erin Holt [00:40:47]:
And it is also okay to recognize when you feel awful in your body, your digestion is off. You have headaches, you have fatigue, skin issues, acne, you're uncomfortable, achy, exhausted, feeling deflated all of the time. If your body doesn't feel like it's functioning properly, it's okay to get help.
Erin Holt [00:41:05]:
It's okay to get support. Your body isn't here to be an ornament for somebody else. But it's also not here to just feel like shit all the time either. And there is a middle ground here. There is a middle ground. And with the new paradigm that we're building, that's the thing that's going to get us there.
Erin Holt [00:43:28]:
So number five, I already alluded to this, but number five of the new paradigm is we honor all of the bodies plus the fifth body, right, the earth.
Erin Holt [00:43:39]:
So we're not going dark on any of these aspects. We have reverence, we have devotional practices for each one, and we can even do like a little daily check in for our four bodies. This is my PEMS framework. P-E-M-S. I love a framework. Love a good framework and an acronym.
Erin Holt [00:44:01]:
But we can check in with ourselves at the start of every day or at the end of every day. Like how am I doing physically, how am I doing emotionally?
Erin Holt [00:44:08]:
How am I doing mentally? And how am I doing spiritually or energetically? Kind of just choose the term that feels best for you there. So I'm going to go, in case this concept is new to anybody, I'm just going to drill into the four bodies a little bit more and what they all represent. So physical body is pretty self explanatory. But this is like our deep targeted nutrition frameworks for nutrition, digestive health, metabolic health, hormone health, healthy recipes, connecting you to good food brands.
Erin Holt [00:44:43]:
That's the nutrition, that's physical body.
Erin Holt [00:44:45]:
Sleep hygiene, movement, hydration, reducing exposure to environmental toxins. It's maybe functional medicine modalities, functional lab testing, maybe the use of nutraceuticals and supplemental protocols. Right? That's how we can support the physical body. It's a huge, huge pillar of the work that we do here.
Erin Holt [00:45:07]:
I'm going to tell you what, our modern world is pretty anti-body. I've heard one of my mentors say that we used to be fed and nourished by our environment, by nature, by circadian rhythm, by cycles, by the soil, by nutrient dense food. And now we are depleted by our environment. And so we need to have practices that replete the physical body, that nourish the physical body, that support the physical body, which is all of those things that I just discussed. I also really think about nervous system support here. Obviously, our nervous system is deeply influenced by other bodies. Getting our physical body into a relaxed state, shifting out of the chronic stress response, is so important and foundational for the rest of our physical health. A regulated nervous system communicates a coherent, harmonious signal to the internal environment.
Erin Holt [00:46:02]:
So those are all the cells, the tissues, the organs, the system inside your body. And so that's why we are prioritizing having those mind body medicine classes in the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective. So you have opportunities to practice this. This is something we absolutely have to have, like an ongoing practice for. And then we have the emotional body. What we know and understand is that repressed emotions can be one of the main drivers of chronic, ongoing mystery health issues, because the body expresses whatever the mind suppresses. And many of us were not taught how to appropriately deal with, recognize, metabolize our emotions. And so when we see all of these symptoms pop up, it can be a sign that something has been suppressed emotionally, just because we didn't have appropriate channels to deal with them, essentially.
Erin Holt [00:46:57]:
And so bringing that online is so important for our overall health. We understand there's so much research about trauma, and we understand that if trauma goes unresolved, it can really get stored in our body systems, and that can impact our health long term.
Erin Holt [00:47:17]:
But even beyond all of that, I think it's just as simple as what I said earlier.
Erin Holt [00:47:22]:
We deserve to feel good, we deserve joy, we deserve pleasure, we deserve peace, we deserve happiness. And so just kind of taking stock of our emotional state every single day. Just having a practice to check in and be like, 'how am I doing emotionally' is a big deal. And it's something that not a lot of us take the time or even have the skill set to do.
Erin Holt [00:47:41]:
Now, the third body is mental, so obviously this encompasses our mental health, but it's also our beliefs about ourselves. It's our beliefs about our bodies, our beliefs about the world, our health, our ability to heal. It's the thoughts we think. It's our mindset, the mindset that we bring to anything. I think that the mental body can include subconscious repatterning in brain rewiring and utilizing neuroplasticity, which is so much as what we do in Body Intentions Breakthrough.
Erin Holt [00:48:16]:
That program that I created a couple of years ago.
Erin Holt [00:48:20]:
We have to be willing to look at the beliefs that can potentially block us from healing or getting better. This is a big one that I find to be pretty under discussed. This is part of what I'm going to be teaching in the upcoming workshop that I mentioned earlier. Thursday, January 25 Where Science Meets the Sacred. These are just going to be ongoing workshops that I teach exclusively to the Collective.
Erin Holt [00:48:47]:
But this is one of the things that I want to drill into for January is like, are there any beliefs whether they're conscious, you're aware of them, or they're subconscious, you're not aware of them, that could potentially be holding you back from feeling good, from thriving, and from just getting healthy. And then finally we have the energy body, often referred to as the spiritual body. I just kind of like, let you pick the term that resonates most with you. I personally have been studying energy medicine for 15 years now, so I'm pretty much obsessed with this stuff. I also just enrolled in another certification course. I can't get enough of it. I love it so much. And so energy body can refer to our energy anatomy like the chakra system.
Erin Holt [00:49:32]:
But it's also a big part of my work is teaching people to tune in and connect to your own energy, your own frequency. The more you understand your own energy, the more you can feel into it, the more you know yourself and you can make decisions in alignment with your highest self. You can start to understand when your energy is being pulled on, when it's being compromised. You can recognize that and understand it sooner before it gets to the point of a problem, before it gets to the point where it's impacting your physical health. So I kind of think of it as like, we're tuning our instrument. We're just learning how to fine tune that instrument. And so we can recognize when things are a little flaky and shaky, things are a little amiss, something's a little bit out of sorts, something's not right long before it becomes, like, crisis mode. And I also kind of think about this as, like, connecting into something bigger than ourselves.
Erin Holt [00:50:33]:
For some people, that might be God, other people, it might be the cosmos or the universe, it might be ancestors, bloodline, it might be communing with nature. It could be any type of devotional practice. It can be all of the above. But I do feel that that's, I don't know, pretty important part of our health. So that's a little summary of the four bodies. And again, we are honoring all of them in the new paradigm. So let's talk about how do we actually do this? How do we create a new paradigm for ourselves? We first have to start by recognizing the one that we're currently operating in, and then we have to get really honest with ourselves.
Erin Holt [00:51:15]:
Is this working for me?
Erin Holt [00:51:19]:
Is this useful for me, operating in this current paradigm? Is this useful for me?
Erin Holt [00:51:26]:
If not, why not?
Erin Holt [00:51:28]:
And what needs to change? And so this is where the process of reflection can be so helpful.
Erin Holt [00:51:39]:
And this is such a great time of year to reflect, because you can look back on the previous year in its entirety. You can also revisit any goals or intentions you set for yourself, because it's such a common time at the start of the year to set goals. So you can say, like, okay, a year ago, what was I telling myself I was going to do?
Erin Holt [00:52:00]:
And if you didn't do those things, if you didn't reach those goals, it presents such an opportunity to get honest with ourselves about why. And not for the purpose of berating ourselves, just to data mine, to learn and to ask ourselves why, so we can learn something about ourselves, so we can do something different next time. And that's essentially what reflecting is. It's allowing our brains and our bodies to pause, to sort through, to make meaning of, to integrate important observations, insights and experiences. And we're kind of collectively so resistant to that one. It's not a familiar practice. It's not something that most of us are taught to do. We don't prioritize it. It can feel a little self indulgent, like taking the time to pause and reflect, can feel a little self indulgent.
Erin Holt [00:52:50]:
But what I can tell you is that some of my best ideas, my biggest learnings, my biggest progress points, my biggest growth, has come out of reflecting. And it can play such a huge role in growth, learning and change. Now, reflecting is not ruminating, it's not replaying the same scenario over and over and over. It's not being stuck in the past. It's not just another excuse to self flagellate, to judge ourselves, to judge other people, to lay shame, to lay blame. It's really creating a new way of looking at our experiences so we can view them in a different light. It's not just defaulting to that automatic judgment that has a tendency to pop up. And this is why it can be such a big part of creating a new paradigm, because it creates a new perspective it creates a new way of seeing things and thinking about things.
Erin Holt [00:52:49]:
It takes any experience that we've had, especially the meaningful experiences, because, of course, we can learn from the less than positive experiences, but we can also learn from the meaningful experiences and embed them into our brains and our bodies.
Erin Holt [00:54:01]:
Our brains and our bodies can very easily recall difficult, painful, challenging experiences. I probably don't need to tell you that. You're probably like, yeah, no kidding. We have a tougher time with the positive experiences. They're encoded in our brains and bodies differently. It takes more time. We actually have to sit with it for a little bit longer.
Erin Holt [00:54:26]:
If you have a positive experience, taking the time to really sit with that, to embed that into your brain and your body, allows for easier recall in the future. One way to do this is to celebrate any type of win, even if it feels really small. If you're anything like me, I blow past my wins. I hit a goal, and boom, I'm on to the next. And one thing that I'm really trying to practice doing is anchoring into positive experiences. We've spent a lot of time with family, and so when I'm in, for me, that's a positive experience most of the time. And so I'm just really trying to encapsulate, take a snapshot when it's happening, so I can build that framework into my body in my brain, build that feeling into my body in my brain so I can access it easier. So that way I'm changing the structure and the patterning of my brain to not just be able to recall the negative stuff, but also recall the positive stuff. And when we do this, we're able to integrate all of that into wisdom, essentially.
Erin Holt [00:55:26]:
And we can take that wisdom and make better decisions, make better choices, make better behavior. So in this way, reflecting can really be a catalyst for change, which is what many of us are trying to do with our health. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess if you're not, you might not have made it this far into today's show. So I promise to give you prompts, and I'm going to give them to you right now. I would love for you to actually write these down. So if you're driving, just listen to me talk right now and then come back to this part. Take a little timestamp for yourself, come back to this part and write these down and give yourself, create some space, some reflection space to pause and reflect. So the first question is, what is health?
Erin Holt [00:56:20]:
What does it mean to you?
Erin Holt [00:56:18]:
And why is it important to you? So you don't have to look at the dictionary's definition. What does health mean to you and why is it important?
Erin Holt [00:56:31]:
Question number two.
Erin Holt [00:56:29]:
As you reflect on the past year, what is an experience, a practice or information that has made a personally meaningful or transformative impact on you?
Erin Holt [00:56:45]:
And you can, as you write the answer to this, try to feel the feelings that come up when you think about this. Try to embed that experience.
Erin Holt [00:57:00]:
Number three, what's one thing that you're doing differently today for your health that you were not doing at the start of last year? Let's really anchor into those wins, however big or small they might be. So you can write about what you used to do and what you're doing now. And if you're like, honestly, nothing, that's okay. That's okay. That's information too. Number four, reflecting on your journey through the past year, what is an experience, a practice or piece of information that you believe would be valuable to share with others or that positively impacted others?
Erin Holt [00:57:35]:
So by you having this experience or you implementing this practice, or you receiving this piece of information, how has that benefited other people? Or what's something that you could share with somebody else? Number five, this is a good one. At the end of this year, what would you like to be writing in response to these very same questions? Isn't that good? That's a juicy one. So let's say it is December 2024. What do you want to be writing in response to these very same questions that I'm asking you?
Erin Holt [00:58:21]:
And then number six, what do you predict for yourself for the next year? And I say predict because evidence suggests that making a prediction increases engagement and increase the overall learning experience. So if you're embarking on anything new this year, making a prediction can help with that. If making a prediction stresses you out, you can say, what do you hope for yourself for the next year?
Erin Holt [00:58:54]:
So you choose, choose your own adventure here.
Erin Holt [00:59:03]:
And if you say, what do you hope?
Erin Holt [00:59:01]:
Or what do you predict? Then the second part of that is, what do you need to do differently to get yourself there?
Erin Holt [00:59:10]:
So those are the prompts. I encourage you to sit with them. Listen, if you actually do this practice, let me know. Send us a DM. Myself, my team will receive this. And I love hearing about you guys putting these things really into practice. So let me know. And if you want to take this a step further, you can join me in the New Year, New Paradigm breathwork class.
Erin Holt [00:59:38]:
That's on Wednesday, January 10th. It's going to be in the evening 7 pm eastern time. Yes, it will be recorded, so don't worry if you can't make it live. Attending live is always the vibe. I always encourage you to do that. But then we also make everything available by replays, too.
Erin Holt [00:59:52]:
But this is how we're going to kind of anchor in and supercharge our intentions for the upcoming year. And that class will be made available through the Funk'tional Nutrition Collective. So I super duper hope you will join us. That's where I'm going to be spending most of my time and would love to have you over there so we can really build out that community. You can head to funktionalnutritionist.com/collective to join, or you could also just go to the show notes because it's going to be there too. All right, I love you guys and I will check you next week.
Erin Holt [01:00:27]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
