Do you know that 90% of the cells in your body are bacterial and that those bacteria are actually good for you?

Do you know that those bacteria help you maintain a healthy gut terrain and that an imbalance of the ‘friendly bacteria’ versus the ‘bad bacteria,’ has everything to do with how good or how bad you feel?

Do you know that the common root cause for all disease is a breakdown in your gut wall, and that the first line of defense in your gut is actually bacterial — your friendly flora?

So what does it mean to you if your gut wall breaks down? (Think gluten, sugar, alcohol, prescription drugs like antibiotics and birth-control pills, heavy and hard to digest foods like animal protein and stress from the modern diet and lifestyle.)

Your body can no longer produce Vitamin B-12 or the enzymes that would normally destroy harmful bacteria in a healthy body. Your body can no longer fight off bad bacteria, yeasts, mold and fungi. Your body can no longer digest properly. And to boot? If these bacteria pass through your irritated and broken digestive wall and enter your bloodstream, they can induce strong inflammatory responses by your immune and nervous systems.

Think imbalance. Inflammation. Overproduction of mucous. Poor to zero absorption of nutrients and depression. Think toxic waster matter backing up in your cells and tissues. For example.

Think breakdown at the foundational level of your whole body.

Consequently, as a result of this breakdown, you may suffer from symptoms ranging from the everyday, seemingly common, seemingly trivial allergies to digestive symptoms, to auto-immunity to more serious chronic and degenerative diseases, which is why I always recommend taking a probiotic everyday.

Probiotics, the good bacteria, boost your immune system, increase absorption and assimilation of the nutrients in your food, and even impact your cognitive and emotional wellbeing.

Without a healthy balance of friendly flora in your gut, your body is at risk of poor absorption and poor assimilation of all the good nutrition you are eating.

Yes, if your gut health is off, you might not even be absorbing the nutrition from the very best organic produce you buy!

With today’s modern diet and modern lifestyle, a probiotic is non-negotiable to create a healthy inner-terrain. 

I also highly recommend including fermented vegetables in your diet everyday, like raw-fermented sauerkraut and kimchee to inoculate the gut with food-grade probiotics. While pill-form supplements are very useful in rebalancing your health, your body will recognize the food-grade probiotics in fermented vegetables much more readily. You can buy raw-fermented veggies at Whole Foods Market or natural health food store, or you can make them yourself.

If you’re ready to start healing your gut, seriously, you’ve must know that my first recommendation will always be, you’ve got to remove inflammatory foods from your diet.

Then, to start healing your gut, click here for a very high-grade probiotic, and if your ready to whip up batches of live-fermented veggies yourself, grab  a copy of the quintessential book on fermentation, Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz.

Start supporting friendly-flora growth by one, eating whole foods, and two taking probiotics and you’ll see them return the favor manifold!

Only Dead Fish Go With The Flow

I recently read a quote that caused me to laugh out loud, on the spot, “Only dead fish go with the flow.”

With a slightly different angle, it reminded me of a quote I had on a poster years back from the Book of Paul, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed.”

Both quotes remind me of the larger ‘get healthy’ conversation that I am so committed to because of the transformative benefits I experienced from going against the flow of common thoughts and ideas about to heal a sick body, my sick body.

I never knew anyone who went to an alternative doctor or healer — c’mon, I was an Irish-Catholic, middle-America, roast beef and mashed potatoes suburbia-girl!

But my doctor’s advice just didn’t make sense to me. Like taking a Zanax 3 times per day to stop the chronic anxiety and IBS symptoms I experienced. So agreeing to eating ‘weird’ food, read as unprocessed, nutrient-dense, live foods didn’t require a second thought.

Living life like a “dead fish,” going with the flow, not breaking from mainstream medical diagnosis and treatments didn’t make sense to me one bit. It was an easy decision to break from ‘the pack.’ I was sick and the symptoms I was experiencing were taking over my life. But know fully well, things like plant-based, high-raw, eating in ways to heal and nourish my body were as remote to me as the planet Pluto is to Earth.

In the spirit of breaking from the pack, and even more, in the spirit of discovering if there is a blind spot, a thing that you do not know you do not know blocking your understanding of what is really best for you, I offer you these questions to consider:

• Do you eat in ways, do you do ‘things’ in ways that are familiar, comfortable and more in line with what everyone else in your world does, yet you intuitively know does not work for you?
• Do you indulge in eating foods that you know are too heavy or just flat-out not good for you, but breaking the habituated patterns of ‘this is how everyone eats,’ is just too daunting for you?
• Are you sick more often than you’re willing to deal with now? More tired than you know is ‘normal?’ Symptoms and care-for-symptoms more a prevalent than “seizing the day” mode of operandi?
• What impact do you think avoiding these sorts of questions has on the your quality of life?

If you want to break from the pack, break from unhealthy and addictive eating habits, to look and feel your very best, to revel in all the benefits that are part-in-parcel with feeling best, you’ve got to, we’ve all got to,  challenge why we do what we do.

Is ‘it’ the best choice for you? Or is ‘it’ the choice everyone else is making?

Breaking from the pack, breaking from familiar ways of doing things, breaking from all that felt safe and sure to me at one time in my life was the best thing I could have ever done for myself.  Indeed, it was in those scary moments of uncertainty and change that I began to heal my body, and as I healed my body, a whole new world of possibility began to rise …

Only Dead fish go with the flow. Is that the best posture for you?

Who Chooses?

I recently met someone who was 50 pounds overweight. They said they wanted to lose weight. They said they wanted to look and feel their very best selves again.

But, they did not want to stop eating all of their favorite foods.

I totally get it. I remember when my ideas about what to eat came from my family’s traditions, from my friend’s and their families’ traditions, from the larger social moré traditions. Even from the ways every mood, emotion, thought and idea defined the foods I craved.

And the irony is, the modern economy continues to get better and better at satisfying our every want and desire.

As fast-food nation and the consumer economy grows, we get to satiate the complexities of everything we think we want or need right now, with what our inner world demands, what every impulse, thought and desire insists upon, rather than move closer to what we intuitively know is healthier for us, what is best for us.

So who chooses for you? Your traditions? Your friend’s and your communities traditions? Your world at large, or you?

As in the metaphor, “is it better to give a man a fish, or to teach him to fish,” do you think it is better to order a healthy meal when you are out once-in-a-while, or do you think it is better to create a lifestyle of healthy habits that ask you to reconnect to the basic laws of nature and your inner-knowing of what best fuels and nourishes your body?

If you want to lose weight, if you want to look and feel your very best, you have to deliberately choose what you want, so you can put into action a winning game-plan. Thinking about it, like the person I met, is just that, thinking about it, which ultimately leaves you in default-mode.

Need help choosing your get-heatlhy game to finally look and feel 10 years younger with results that last? Join me here: Let’s do this!

You want to lose weight.

So, you start another diet.

You count calories. You portion and track your food. You spend hours on the elliptical.

You know how to lose weight, you’re following the diet and exercise plan, you’ve so got this.

But the scale doesn’t move.

And you are flat-out baffled.

You feel frustrated. Defeated.

Because no matter how hard you try, you always find yourself back on the couch 10 pounds heavier than when you started.

So what gives?

You ask yourself, all the time, “How does exorbitantly successful me find myself continuously on the hamster wheel of weight on, weigh off, weight on… again?“

You are not alone.

You are among the growing rank of 100 million dieters in the United States.

Yes, the annual revenue of the U.S. weight-loss industry, including diet books, diet drugs and weight-loss surgeries is a whopping 20 billion dollars per year.¹

The one thing the annual revenue of the diet industry makes very clear, or at least one very important thing it makes clear is, they are very successful … because diets do not work.

The diet industry sells you books, pills, programs and even surgery to get you looking how you want to look, for a moment. The diet industry offers recipes to last you five lifetimes, smoothie challenges, juice challenges and detox programs to keep you busy for increments anywhere from 1 day to 30 days, plus approaches to weight-loss that give you knowledge akin to a Ph.D. in weight-loss theories, tenets and principles, with no lasting results!

But the books, the programs and the pills don’t teach you about the psychology of success and how it directly impacts the weight loss you produce, or not! {Tweet It!}

Yes, losing weight is a psychology game, a mind-shift training game, a ‘you are what you think game!’

Losing weight with lasting results is like any and every other successful endeavor you’ve ever achieved, you’ve got to clearly define the result you want to produce, why you want to produce it, create a plan to get you to your end game, and by taking one step toward your desired outcome each and every single day.

Ask yourself these questions to create your weight loss success plan:

• What outcome or result do I most want? (How much weight do you want to lose? What is your ideal, healthy weight? Be very specific.)
• Why do I want this result? Why do you want to lose weight? Go deep with this question. Look for the lowest-common denominator, the most basic, underlying reason, like what will being a lower weight make available to you? What will life be like for you at this ideal weight? Will this change impact who you are and how you treat yourself and others? How will that feel? For you? For those you love? For those closest to you everyday? Go deep for your answers here — you will be able to hang on when “the rubber meets the road” if you get to the gold of why you really want to lose weight!” If you don’t, the superficial responses can not possibly hold you steady when habituated ways of doing things come ’round to pull you down!
• When will I achieve this result by? Be very precise when you will win your game by, when you will achieve your ideal weight! Your unconscious mind will begin to support you in creating success!
• What is my plan? Create a solid winning plan, like what days will you prepare food for the week? What time of the day will you make your juices and smoothies. What time of the day will you workout? Success happens when preparation meets opportunity, and you are create a winning opportunity by preparing, by preparing again and by preparing even again with a solid plan, as solid structure of fulfillment!
• What is one thing I can add in every single day, to move me towards achieving my result?
• What is one thing I can omit every single day, to bring me close to my desired result?

Let’s simplify this approach to weight loss with a few applicable questions.

If you were going on vacation, would you plan ahead of time? Would you pick your location ahead of time? Would you book your hotel or cottage ahead of time? Would you book your travel plans ahead of time? Would you schedule your time off from work ahead of time?

Think of losing weight with lasting results like planning that vacation. You incrementally go through the roster of ‘things to do,’ and in this case, the things you need to DO to lose the weight is to clearly define the result you want to produce, why you want to produce it, what your plan is and what the one thing you can add in and what the one thing you can omit to get your game started and moving you closer to your result, your outcome. Of course once you create momentum with your one first healthy habit, you add in another, and another, and another.

Indeed, the thing that differentiates those who are successful and those who are not are the habits they create with straight-up, no-joke commitment and consistency.

In his 1968 classic, The Greatest Salesman In The World, You Can Change Your Life With The Priceless Wisdom of Ten Ancient Scrolls Handed Down For Thousands Of Years, Og Mandino says that until we become ‘a slave to our good habits,’ our bad habits will run the show!

And when we create good habits, we literally obliterate the bad habits!

Your every-single day commitment is non-negotiable IF you really want to arrive at your end-zone with solid results in hand!

AND if you’d like any support in achieving your weight loss goals, I’d love to support you in creating new healthy habits. Just email me at carol@carol-egan.com.

Game face on… and cheers to your success!

¹ABC News