#112 What are some practical ways to fight psoriasis, best sugar substitutes, and gluten-free bakeries? With Allison Post!
Welcome to the podcast! Today’s guest is Allison Post. She is an Integrative Medicine Health Coach and the author of multiple books. I just had the pleasure of reading her newest book, “The Gut Wellness Guide,” and it was an amazing resource! Welcome, Allison!
Video Version: https://youtu.be/KEhG45t8QxI
Allison’s Website:https://www.allisonpost.com/
Chantel Ray: Hey guys, welcome to this week’s episode and I’m so excited for today’s guest. She is an integrative medicine health coach and she’s the author of multiple books and I just had the pleasure of reading her book, The Gut Wellness Guide, and it was an amazing resource and the funniest thing is, is the cover. You guys have to get this book, just to feel the cover. You literally will be like, oh my gosh, it’s the nicest, softest cover I’ve ever seen. And the book is amazing. Please welcome to the show Allison Post to the podcast.
Allison Post: Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me, it’s a pleasure.
Chantel Ray: Well, what I love about you is that you have been very transparent in letting people know that you were suffering from psoriasis and inflammation and all your blood tests would come back normal by conventional medical standards and now you’ve kind of healed yourself. Talk about your own wellness journey with us and how it led to you to develop your wellness coaching brand and your gut wellness course.
Allison Post: Sure. So psoriasis was the least of my problems, actually. It runs in my family; it’s a genetic strain. And as you know, being a coach, what you come in with can be triggered by so many events, so even if the event that triggers your psoriasis or your thyroid problems has nothing to do with that, it’s stress, it’s trauma, developmental issues, even bullying. You know? There are so many things that happen to us as children, as teenagers and as adults that bring on a panoply of symptoms.
Allison Post: So, my psoriasis didn’t really started and it’s so mild, until much later, but actually happened to me was I was a teenager and I had an IUD, which is an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. And the first year that I had it, I was in my late teens, and it didn’t feel right, and I didn’t know why and I kept getting infections and I would go to the doctor and my blood tests were great, and I felt not well. I was fatigued. I was getting bloated. I just wasn’t well. My skin, things were not working in my body like they had been.
Allison Post: And the doctor would kind of shrug his shoulders and say I was normal, but he’d give me an antibiotic, so you know, I have to say, I’m 63 and in the ’60s and ’70s, antibiotics were candy, so I was brought up on antibiotics and here they were like, “Oh, an infection for a young girl? That’s normal. Here is an antibiotic.”
Allison Post: And finally, at 19, when I was in college, after my first semester, I was on vacation and I collapsed in pain and I know without a question of a doubt that this device had to come out of my body and they kind of didn’t agree with me, but I had it taken out, and two weeks later, when I went back to college for my second semester, again, I was writhing in pain and I was taken to the infirmary, where I spent three days in a delirium. My fever reached over 104 and I don’t even remember a lot of it, and they took me to the hospital.
Allison Post: And there, they hooked me up to IV antibiotics for five weeks. And I stayed in the hospital, they basically said my organs were shutting down. I was losing my hair. I was a mess. And they saved my life. So Western medicine, such a lifesaver, I would not be here without them.
Allison Post: But in the hospital, they didn’t really have a lot to tell me because they took down the infection and the inflammation. They didn’t really know what happened internally to me, they just said, probably that I had a lot of scarring and it was probably from that intrauterine device. But that device was still on the market, right? It turned out that a few years later, it was taken off the market. It took the lives of 18 women.
Chantel Ray: Wow.
Allison Post: Millions of women were not able to bear children or have really, and I’ve seen a lot of these women over the years, they know that that was my problem. It just created incredible scarring in the pelvis, on the bowels, and you know, scar tissue, if the infection isn’t intended to proliferate, so you really never know kind of like with endometriosis, sometimes they’ll find it in other areas, it is a bear.
Allison Post: They had no resources for me when I left the hospital except to say good luck and we think you’ll probably be back to visit us because we don’t really know what happened to you. And I couldn’t accept that, I was 19 years old, and even though I had half or a third of the hair I have right now, and I was overweight, bloated, brain-fogged, fatigued. I just thought, “No way.” I’m a love bug. I’m a joy bubble. I want my life, you know? I want to sing.
Allison Post: And so, my college was offering a yoga class. And I thought, well, okay. You know, I was more of a tennis player and a dancer, but I went for it, and I have to say, it was the first time in a long time that I could breathe. You know? Like, I had to force myself to use my diaphragm as a singer for a while there, but here I was in yoga class realizing, oh my God, I’m actually a whole body.
Allison Post: I’m not only my pain. I’m not only my fatigue. And so, I’ve actually been practicing it for over 40 years. And it just took me on a journey why it made me feel so good and why Western medicine had nothing to offer me. No physical therapy, no recovery, no nutritional therapy.
Allison Post: I started looking into everything because it didn’t solve all of my problems and I did get married, and lo and behold, they told me I would never get pregnant, I got pregnant.
Chantel Ray: Wow.
Allison Post: Well, again, I thought, “Western medicine, man.” I’m glad they save our lives but they’re not the be all and end all. And so, I had an ectopic pregnancy because I had so much scarring that of course it couldn’t come to fruition.
Allison Post: So, I had a surgery, lucky for me, and they opened me up and said, “Oh my God,” they had never seen so much scar tissue. Luckily, they cleaned some of it up, and I left there on a mission. Like, I was in pain, and again, no physical therapy, no resources, just definitely not going to have children. Your other tube is completely scarred.
Allison Post: But again, I was born a happy kid. Like, I’m an optimist. The cup for me is always half full. And even though I had a lot of times that I got really depressed and down, and I think we all need to grieve, especially when I really got it that I wasn’t going to have children. Luckily, I work with them now.
Allison Post: I just thought, let myself grieve, let it move through, but what am I going to do? So I just started studying everything. Anatomy, physiology, I even ended up going to acupuncture school for a year. I studied every kind of Asian body work. Went to Thailand. Studied Thai massage, shiatsu, you name it, I did it, and I deeply studied nutrition.
Allison Post: And I started to understand that we were all very individual people and that we had to specialize. We couldn’t follow the diets that we learned we should follow when we were teenagers that just took off a lot of weight and then, you gained it all back. And basically, I just continued to study and my husband, bless him, he became my partner in crime.
Allison Post: He studied alongside me. He’s basically like a history nerd and a really good writer, thank goodness, because that’s why the book reads so well. But he just started to study everything with me, research everything, and we worked on each other as body workers and we were into fitness and all of it and so we developed our form of gut wellness and also we were talking about the gut because of the second brain, you know, 20 years ago.
Allison Post: People thought we were a little crazy, taking probiotics, eating the kind of food we were eating, organic, you know? I was eating organic food from food co-ops in college. So I was bringing that kind of thing along with me as my husband was and we just did a lot of hiking. We were into nature. And we wanted to educate people, so we started teaching and we studied visceral work. I studied craniosacral therapy, which is my love, which is the modality I use for the belly and for the body when people come see me.
Allison Post: And we took what we learned from Taoist abdominal massage, Chi Nei Tsang, and visceral massage and we just did it according to the audience we got. We began to see so much trauma, so much confusion, so much hypervigilance in our world that we wanted to slow everything down. Not always go in there and fix, because a lot of bodywork does that, too. A, “Let’s just iron that out.”
Allison Post: It’s like, what’s really happening here? What’s the history of the person? What’s the genetics? What happened in childhood and what we can we do really frame and collaborate with the person so we don’t only get them feeling better but teaching them how to do it for themselves? And that’s where Unwinding the Belly came, our first book. And then, this book, we wanted to educate people easily, friendly-like, for their microbiome, because most people don’t understand what it is.
Chantel Ray: Yeah, for sure. I love the quote that Hippocrates said, “All disease begins in the gut.” And it’s just so common for everyone to overlook the health of our gut, even though it contains so many more times health-determining bacteria than the rest of our body and it protects us from infection and metabolism and that’s how we have, you know, good elimination and good digestion.
Chantel Ray: Talk to us about how do you tie psoriasis with your gut and what are some practical ways to get rid of psoriasis that you have found?
Allison Post: Okay, so let’s do this in a slow fashion, because getting rid of is something that everybody wants to do. Curing is something everybody wants to do.
Allison Post: We want to give that up. We want to understand that once we’ve evidence some kind of an autoimmune disease or condition; I don’t like to really call things diseases. Some things express themselves for a reason, and if we attend to our gut, because our gut has a very permeable, thin membrane around it. The small intestine, you eat your food, and when it gets to the small intestine, it needs to assimilate the nutrients and then spread the good news to the rest of the body, right?
Allison Post: So it needs a permeable membrane, we don’t want it to not allow things to move into the system, but if that membrane gets too permeable, which happens a lot if the bacteria is out of balance, if we have infections, parasites, fungi, we’ve traveled somewhere and we’ve gotten things that don’t belong in there, the membrane, the cellular junctions kind of open up and things go into the bloodstream and into the system that don’t belong there and the body has an autoimmune response.
Allison Post: And depending on your genetics and your particular body, you might get rheumatoid arthritis, you might get psoriasis, you might get Hashimoto’s thyroid, you know, you’re an individual. So, how do we cure it? We repair the gut.
Allison Post: We understand we might have a leaky gut, which is you know, everybody talks about, these things now, but leaky gut only means that we need some reparation. We need to slow down inflammation. We need to start looking at what our diet is. What our stress levels are, because I think stress is the number one problem, actually, and that makes us grab for the self-soothing foods that may be creating problems in our gut.
Allison Post: But we need to look at what is in our gut. Test, not guess. Right? We need a comprehensive stool test. We might need a cortisol saliva test to see what’s happening on that membrane and how can we attend to it?
Allison Post: And once we find out what’s going on there, we start to balance the bacteria, first, right? We might have to kind of encourage certain of those bacterias to move out and then balance the bacteria and then we’re looking at repairing with things like bone broth, glutamine. There are really good nutrients that, you know … I don’t want to talk about too much because again, we’re so individual that I would never want to give a prescription, and I’m not a doctor, but I could recommend that you think about all these beautiful foods that will strengthen the gut and all the inflammatory foods that you might want to let go of.
Allison Post: And we know when we’re … We feel our bodies. That’s another thing that will really help you. Like, you eat something, slow it down. Chew it. Swallow it. And feel what it feels in your system. Feel what it feels like an hour later. Feel what you feel like in the beautiful bowel movement that you’re hopefully looking at the next morning. We can repair these things by attuning to ourselves.
Allison Post: And then, there are all sorts of herbal protocols, homeopathic protocols. For instance, as I was telling you before, my mom had psoriasis, and it was raging when she was older, and they wanted to put her in a box and radiate her. And so, I spoke to a homeopath and he suggested that I give her a sulfur remedy, which is kind of this skin remedy extraordinaire, and they are these little pills, sugar pills, basically, or non-sugar pills, they’re just little pills that kind of like treats like in a very, very distilled way.
Allison Post: And for the first time since she was in her 20s and she was in her 80s, she got rid of her psoriasis in a few months and she never had it again. She also lived with me, so she was eating a beautiful diet and I was attending to her. So there’s a combination of all these beautiful things, diet, reducing stress, the right exercise for you, the best sleep you could possibly have, and then working with somebody that can help you and collaborate with you to find out who you are and what would be best to kind of heal your gut, because you can.
Chantel Ray: Now, there is an article online, it’s called The Treatment of Psoriasis With An Organic Sulfur Compound. It’s very difficult to read because it’s written by a guy named Francis Thurman, MD and it’s very like, medical, so you have to kind read through it, but that might be something if our listeners want to read it. But talk to us about that sulfur pill. Where did you get that from?
Allison Post: It’s at Whole Foods. There’s remedies, homeopathic remedies, at Whole Foods, or at your local health food store. You know, I do recommend a homeopath because you have a certain constitution, but you can talk to somebody and I’ve found that through a homeopath who also recommended that I go to CVS and get organic sulfur and mix it in a lotion, actually, and I made a topical lotion.
Allison Post: But the simplicity of that remedy worked much more and it was perfect for my mother and I have now and then had a sneaky teeny bit of it and it works for me. It’s my genetics. But these are never things that we can say are going to be across-the-board packaged things.
Allison Post: I’m such an individual practitioner. Everybody is so different, so I recommend that you find somebody to work with so you can find out just what’s perfect for you. That’s why we go inside and feel ourselves. That’s what our unwinding program is about. It’s like, how does your breath tell you who you are? How does touching into belly, into your tissues, listening to your heartbeat? Feeling yourself as a whole body, so you can actually feel the inherent health that’s your birthright, you know?
Allison Post: You really are a healthy being if you tap into what’s there in a full, holistic sense.
Chantel Ray: Yes. I love it. Before we jump into our listener questions, I always like to ask to walk me through a day in the life of Allison. What did you eat yesterday and are there any foods for you that you completely avoid, and if so, why?
Allison Post: Well, first of all, I don’t eat for 12 to 14 hours a day, because for me, personally, it’s a real beautiful rest. I usually finish eating about 6:00 at night and I don’t eat until about 8:00 the next morning. I don’t know if you would consider that intermittent fasting, because I do have a long period of time, I eat three meals a day. I’m a breakfast lover and I’m a variety lover. I never eat the same thing every day.
Allison Post: Sometimes I eat eggs and toast with some spinach. Sometimes, I make a smoothie with blueberries and kale and some hemp protein powder. Lunch is usually four hours later and I have salads and I like to balance my proteins and my carbohydrates and fats. And I’m more of a pescatarian, more of a Mediterranean diet type person. I’m not big on meat.
Allison Post: But sometimes, my body says, “You should have a lamb chop,” and I have it. And I use a lot of bone broth and I make a lot of soups in the winter. That’s my lunch. With quinoa.
Allison Post: I don’t eat gluten at all. That never passes my mouth. And I do not eat sugar. White sugar. And at dinner, I have a smaller dinner. But usually, again, protein, fat, carb. But vegetables are my favorite things. Like 60, to 65 to 70% of my day is vegetables. Every color of the rainbow. And every combination and squash and sweet potatoes, these are like super foods to me.
Allison Post: I could have a whole head of kale with a sweet potato and then put some protein powder because sometimes, I’m just not in the mood for a protein but I make sure I have some protein. I love to eat, by the way.
Allison Post: And I make really fun, yummies. People say, “What do you mean, don’t eat sugar?” It’s like, don’t eat sugar? It’s poison! It robs your body of nutrients in order to metabolize it. But sweets? A good fresh fig or taking some coconut cream with cacao, organic cacao powder, and putting some yacon syrup in it? Have you ever tried yacon syrup?
Chantel Ray: I haven’t. I have to try that.
Allison Post: Y-A-C-O-N, and it’s a prebiotic, low-glycemic sweetener. It’s delicious. It almost tastes like black strap molasses or maple syrup, and I whip it up and make a chocolate mousse.
Allison Post: So, I am not anti-have-fun-with-your-food. I’m always trying to think of things that people don’t have to actually give up anything, they just have to shift to understand what foods would be healthier for them.
Chantel Ray: What other sugar substitutes do you recommend besides that yacon syrup? Like, do you have coconut sugar?
Allison Post: I don’t really do a lot of coconut sugar. Now and then, if there’s a special, I think it’s called Human, there’s this chocolate bar that I’m just crazy about. I might have a little bit. But mostly, I might have a little bit of honey, because I think it has some nutrients in it and it’s good for you in many ways. Actually, I like to put it on my figs.
Allison Post: But usually, fruit, I don’t use fruit juice ever, because it’s too concentrated. I like to keep the glycemic low, and then the treat, when it happens, is just heaven. But that yacon syrup is my … Yacon syrup and honey are my kind-of go-tos and then fresh fruit.
Allison Post: I mean, how could you not like your seasonal fruits? They are so delicious.
Chantel Ray: Yes, well, if you’re eating from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, you’re doing intermittent fasting, you’re just doing a 10 hour window, so you’re doing a 10 hour eating window. And when you’re doing intermittent fasting, we usually suggest that you do eight hours or less, that has the most benefit, because you are allowing your body to rest for a longer period of time, so you’re not dealing with digesting quite as much, but it’s still better than someone who wakes up at 6:00 AM and then they start to eat and then they’re eating all the way until 10:00 PM and not allowing the body to rest as much.
Chantel Ray: So, let’s jump right in to the listener questions. This first one is from Jenny in Texas. “I’ve been having premenopausal symptoms. Mood swings, hot flashes, very irregular periods. I also have very swollen joints that are painful, along with stiff joints. I’ve been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis recently and I’ve actually heard that pre-mature menopause can actually be caused by this. Is this true? I’m only 39, so I feel like this super early to experiencing all of this. I’m not ready to deal with arthritis and menopause all at the same time. Jenny in Texas.”
Allison Post: Hi, Jenny. Wow. That’s a lot for you.
Allison Post: First of all, as females, after 35, some of the best herbalists and acupuncturists and all those complementary medicine people will say, we really go into peri-menopause at 36 or 37. So already, our hormones are shifting.
Allison Post: And rheumatoid arthritis, because it’s an autoimmune problem, right? We need to look at the health of the gut, because if the gut isn’t happy, it’s going to be bringing things into the system that’s going to make the system inflamed, which means also that the neurotransmitters from the gut to our brain are going to cause anxiety and maybe depression. The hormones are going to not be happy. They’re going to be off.
Allison Post: So yes, it can cause problems but it doesn’t have to. There’s a fabulous book that I want to recommend to you, I will recommend my book of course, but I have a teacher, Keesha Ewers, who wrote a book called Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle, and she had rheumatoid arthritis, which was her journey. And she has just been a wonderful health coaching teacher for me.
Allison Post: Because we do first look at the cortisol, we look at the look stress levels. I cannot underline enough that our world, Jenny, is hyper-vigilant land we’re either so feeling that there’s a lion on our tail at all times. We’re up too many hours. We’re on devices for too long. We’re holding all of these trays all at once. Children, husbands. We have jobs, where we might not be treated with respect. We have situations where we’re bullied. We’re not sleeping well.
Allison Post: And so that alone, even without a diet problem, will increase the permeability of your gut. Stress, stress, stress, number one thing that I want you to understand is going to cause ill health. So, let’s look at your stress levels, Jenny, and let’s have some education. Not what the doctors are telling you, although you will be under their care, and I would never take you away from that, but can you do some reading and research in the health coaching field, in the functional medicine field, about why they think arthritis is a problem and what you can do to help yourself with your gut and with the health of your whole body.
Chantel Ray: So good. It’s so good. It’s so true and the thing is, we all are in such … like you said, it’s just like, sometimes you just don’t even know how to get yourself out of it, because you’re like, “Oh my gosh,” you might have a stressful job.
Chantel Ray: And you’re like, well, my job is so stressful and you’re like, but I have to eat, I have to get paid. You know? And it’s just like, a vicious cycle, for sure.
Allison Post: So many skills that you can learn, no matter what your situation is, because honestly, a lot of times, we can’t change our situation, and I really understand that. I’m not telling you to quit your job if it’s too stressful. But how can we relieve the stress?
Allison Post: Another reason why we even made our book into an online program with video and audio, because we want to teach people that they can use their breath, in the morning, they don’t even have to get out of bed. They can actually breathe, slow it all down, and get themselves to learn the pace that will best serve them. Then, they will be reactive, they will be less available to be put into that lion on my tail or that overwhelm, where your body starts to shut down and can’t even function.
Allison Post: Because when the lion is chasing the gazelle, eventually the gazelle’s like, “Oh my God, that lion’s going to outrun me,” and it just collapses and plays dead. And your system does the same.
Allison Post: If it’s too much, you’re not only becoming hypervigilant, which means you are shunting your energy to your arms and your legs and you are not digesting. You can’t. You have to fight or flee. But if you can’t fight or flee and you’re stuck? You just collapse. You get overwhelmed and then there’s really starts to be serious problems.
Allison Post: So again, for me, my whole thing is about how do we reduce the stress? What’s really going on? And is there somebody in your life that can ask, listen, love you? Because we all need that. We need somebody to ask us who we are, what our problems are, and to really, really listen, not according to our protocol or how we’re going to treat them or get them out of our office quickly, but really, what’s their history? Why the rheumatoid arthritis? What happened? How can we put this picture together and then how can we have self-love as well as love coming to us, so that we can heal these things?
Chantel Ray: All right, this next one is from Hannah in Dover. “I’ve been getting really bad cramps and feel terrible lately every time I eat anything with gluten. I decided to start cutting it out of my diet and I’ve noticed a little bit of a change. Is there any treatment for this? I know there are people who are lactose intolerant. They can take things like Lactaid whenever they have dairy. Is there something like that for people with gluten is there anything that you recommend for dairy allergies? Hannah in Dover.”
Allison Post: Hi, Hannah. Wow. First of all, as you heard before, I don’t go near gluten myself. I don’t think it’s a good thing to eat. It’s a binder and it makes things sticky. Your liver doesn’t like dealing with it. It’s very hard to digest, and unfortunately, it’s in so many things, so they can have these things, these foods, if you want to call them foods, will have a longer shelf life that it causes inflammation.
Allison Post: And I think the best thing to do is to listen to your body. If you eat gluten and you feel that it doesn’t serve you, don’t eat gluten. It’s the same with … I wouldn’t use Lactaid if I was lactose intolerant. I wouldn’t use foods with lactose. I think it’s so important to know who we are.
Allison Post: There are all these beautiful foods on the planet we can have … You can have beautiful, fabulous bread that does not have gluten in it. There’s so many things you can do, so I would invite you to love yourself and to maybe listen to what your body’s telling you and to celebrate that when you don’t have gluten, a lot of your symptoms go away.
Allison Post: But I wouldn’t look for something to cure anything or treat anything. I would just say give it up.
Chantel Ray: Okay. And let me ask you a question, do you personally eat any dairy and what’s your favorite gluten-free bread?
Allison Post: I do eat a little goat dairy. I never eat cow dairy. It’s just something that … I don’t know if humans do very well with that with the way we digest food, but certainly, I don’t. But I do use some goat’s milk. Sometimes, I have goat milk kefir, which my body really enjoys. Sometimes I have some goat cheese. It’s not a big part of my diet, but I do have a little bit and enjoy it.
Allison Post: And you know, I live in northern California in the Bay Area, and we have so many bakeries. We actually have a gluten-free bakery near where I live.
Chantel Ray: Oh, wow.
Allison Post: Really beautiful, fresh, gluten-free bread. But in the supermarket, they’re usually frozen, and what I look for, and I will tell everybody to do this, is the least amount of ingredients in the bread. It shouldn’t have more than three or four ingredients. A lot of people tell me they go to Europe, and I have to admit, I’m the same, and they can eat some bread there, and nothing happens to them.
Allison Post: Well, my husband took a bread-baking workshop in Paris when we were there, because one of our book, our first book is being translated into French and coming out this fall. Very exciting. We visited the publisher and [inaudible 00:34:48] we don’t eat gluten, but they use four ingredients in their bread. That’s it. And they farm their bread, their wheat differently. They don’t do additives.
Allison Post: So, the least amount of additives that you can find. And experiment! Eat the food, that’s part of Unwinding teaches you. To breathe, to be in your body, to slow it down, to enjoy chewing, to enjoy eating your food and seeing how those foods really are responding and nourishing your body.
Chantel Ray: Is there a particular brand that you particularly like?
Allison Post: Well, the bakery that I go to is called-
Chantel Ray: Oh yeah, that’s right, the bakery. What’s the name of it?
Allison Post: Flourcraft. F-L-O-U-R. It’s in San Anselmo. There’s one, I think, in Mill Valley. We have a lot of gluten-free bakeries. But yeah, I can go to my refrigerator, I also have this other brand. Grindstone Bakery. They use quinoa, sometimes they use millet. They have really good, very few ingredients, great gluten-free bread.
Chantel Ray: Awesome. I love that.
Allison Post: But I do love fresh food, I got to say. Whole, fresh food. Yummy yummy.
Chantel Ray: Well, I can tell you I’ve had so many people tell me about the whole thing about going to Italy and going to France and being able to eat that, and one thing I have not done yet that I keep saying I’m going to do, I went and bought, from online, if you go to Amazon, you can buy organic flour that’s made in Italy.
Chantel Ray: And I’m going to try and I’m going to make my own bread. I keep saying I’m going to do it; I haven’t done it yet. And then taste it, because I can’t eat gluten either. I feel awful. But I’m going to make it with like very simple ingredients from wheat that’s made in Italy and it’s organic and I’m just going to see how do I feel when I eat it? But I haven’t quite done it yet. But I’ll let you know how it goes.
Allison Post: Great experiment.
Chantel Ray: All right, next question. This is from Mary in Sioux City. S-I-O-U-X City. A lot of these places, I didn’t do well in geography and I’m always like, where is this? So.
Chantel Ray: “For the last year, I’ve had a lot less energy. I feel achy and I’m irritable a lot. And in general, I feel like there’s something off. I went to my doctor. He ran a bunch of bloodwork and everything is normal. Do you think I should cut out any food groups out of my diet or see a nutritionist to see if that helps? What else do you suggest?”
Allison Post: So as you heard with my story and you’ll hear with many, many people’s story, you can go to the doctor for a long time and your blood tests can look p good. It takes a long time to develop things that take you out of range, but what you’re feeling is you’re probably sensitive. I mean, that’s my nickname. “Miss Sensitiva.”
Allison Post: And that’s a good thing. It’s actually a gift. So you’re feeling something’s off, which means you want to welcome your body to talk to you about what can I do to understand what the problem is?
Allison Post: So, there are things you can start on your own, like an elimination diet. You can Google elimination diet and you will find that there are hosts of free websites out there that will talk to you about it.
Allison Post: You want to look at what we were talking about. How many hours do you not eat? And let your body rest? How many hours do you sleep at night? What’s your stress levels like? And are you exercising? And are you doing the right exercise?
Allison Post: I’m 63, and I used to be a tennis player and a dancer and now? I walk for 40 minutes every morning, good walking. I do resistance training twice a week and I hike once a week for three or four hours, and when we’re on vacation, I might hike eight hours a day for a week. But you have to find the things that aren’t going to cause that hypervigilant in your body.
Allison Post: Sometimes, it’s just due to stress that you’re not feeling so well. So look at all the cornerstones of health. Which is stress, sleep, nutrition, and exercise. These are really important and is there any trauma in your background that hasn’t really been dealt with?
Allison Post: Can you go talk to somebody, if there’s something that your heart hasn’t healed from? Because your body compensates for that. But you can also start experimenting with eliminating foods and then adding them back. Just go on a nice … Take one thing out a time. You know, especially the inflammatory foods: corn, soy, gluten, dairy. There are many, many foods that you can also see a list of those and if you get yourself on a nice, anti-inflammatory diet for a couple weeks. You’ll probably feel fabulous; we all need to do that from time to time.
Allison Post: And then you can start adding things back one at a time for three or four days and you might feel like wow, this is the food that just was not feeling good to me.
Chantel Ray: Awesome, so you said you eat goat cheese, but you’re fine with goat cheese, just not any cow’s milk cheese?
Allison Post: I don’t have anything cow’s milk period, end of sentence. I’m not a cow person in general. I think they’re sweet. Maybe because I’m so into yoga. But I really, really like pecorino Romano, which is a sheep cheese. And so that’s something that I usually have in my fridge to sprinkle a little bit on a salad, so treat now and then if I have some whole grain rice pasta.
Allison Post: But not a lot. Because yeah, even when I eat yogurt, I’m usually going for the coconut yogurt, which I love. There’s just so many varieties … Almond milk yogurt, there’s just so many varieties of food. And I think a lot of people get into trouble because they eat the same thing all the time. Because we like it.
Allison Post: It’s like people who eat sugar every day, it’s like, wow. Your poor body, right? Variety, variety, even if you eat kale every day, your body’s finally going to go, “Excuse me, I’m just not having a good time here. Can you give me some spinach or some chard?”
Allison Post: So variety is a really good thing.
Chantel Ray: Awesome. This is the last question. Dan in Boulder: “I’ve had constipation, joint pain, eczema and headaches for years. I thought they were all separate problems, but lately, I’ve heard a lot about leaky gut syndrome. How can I tell if this is the cause of all my problems? Is there a test I can ask my doctor to run? And if I have it, is there a medicine I can take to fix it? Dan in Boulder.”
Allison Post: Well, I’m definitely not the go-to person to ask about medicine, because what ends up happening is that doctors, you go in with a symptom like constipation or diarrhea, they give a diagnosis of constipation or IBS, and they give you a pill. And you’re masking the symptoms of what’s really going on.
Allison Post: So like I said before, comprehensive stool test. You can find a functional practitioner or a functional or integrative health coach that can give you a test so that you can see exactly what’s going on in your gut and you can really look at, even a cortisol test will have a sepratory IGA very often, which will very often tell you what the lining of your gut is like.
Allison Post: But honestly, Dan? I think we all have leaky gut. I think we all have … within normal limits. Like, 20 years ago, it was candida. Well, we’re born with candida. We come through the birth canal and we get it. We just want to keep it in balance. We want to keep our … SIBO is the new punched up thing, everybody has SIBO. It’s like, well, we all have gases, but how do we keep the bacteria and all the things that live inside of us in balance so we don’t get a condition?
Allison Post: So we need to look underneath for those roots. What are our genetics? What kind of situations have we been in? Maybe travel. Maybe not a great diet. Maybe we haven’t been sleeping well at night for a long time. Maybe we have incredible stress in our marriage or at work, or we have a child that needs a lot of attention. There are so many reasons why we’re getting leaky gut.
Allison Post: But as I said before, lots of wonderful things that you can do for it. But I would really invite you to consider doing those things before taking a pill.
Chantel Ray: Awesome. Well, I am so excited, because our guest today, the Gut Wellness Guide, she’s giving one away for free. So, one lucky listener.
Chantel Ray: If you go to our Facebook page, you can go there and enter to register to win, one lucky winner will get one. And you’ve got to make sure you feel it. It’s so soft and it’s such a great read.
Chantel Ray: So, where can our listeners go to follow you and your work?
Allison Post: They can go to my website, which is AllisonPost.com, A-L-L-I-S-O-N. On that page, there’s lots of interviews with me and videos and there is an Instagram link and a Facebook link that they can follow me on, and also there’s a page about my audio/video program, which is a really comprehensive, guided way for you to understand what this unwinding technique I’m teaching is in the book, and it’s very supportive, so that you can listen to things that will slow you down and teach you techniques that will help your beautiful belly.
Allison Post: Because you are a healthy being. You have the birthright to be healthy, and I welcome you to join me in that health.
Chantel Ray: All right, well, awesome. Well, go to AllisonPost.com, and go to our Facebook and you will be able to possibly win a copy of this amazing book. Thanks so much for joining us, Allison.
Allison Post: My pleasure, Chantel. It was so nice to meet you.
Chantel Ray: And if you have a question that you want answered, go to questions@chantelrayway.com. We’ll see you next time. Bye bye.
***As always, this podcast is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure any condition and is for information purposes only. Please consult with your healthcare professional before making any changes to your current lifestyle.***