EP 51 Supporting your body with nutrition in Midlife with Annie Gaudreault

In midlife, we start to notice changes in how our body metabolises food, how we recover from exercise and how we are able to deal with stress in our life. No longer can we drink lots of alcohol and pull up OK the next morning. Maybe there are a few sneaky kilograms piling on. This is because as we enter perimenopause, our hormones start to shift how we metabolise food and this impacts on many areas of our health.

Annie Gaudreault, who is a Licenced Nutritionist and Health Coach from Toronto, CA, joins me in the podcast to talk about the impact of nutrition on our life as we move into our midlife. Annie specialises in working with women in midlife to make sense of all the wellness information out there and to make sustainable changes to their health and wellbeing.

Annie has her own interesting midlife transition story. She started running in her 30s and as she approached her midlife transition she really trained hard and found emotional and mental resilience expanded and she was able to deepen her running expertise to run marathons. From there she moved into competing in Iron Man Triathlons. For Annie her midlife transition was an awakening. An awakening to becoming her true self and pursuing a new career in nutrition that created more meaning in her life.

• In the podcast we talked about:

• The lack of education around menopause and how this impacts our lifestyle choices,

• The impact of estrogen decline on other hormones in particular our metabolic health,

• How estrogen decline impacts on how our body can process sugar and simple carbohydrates. The impact on insulin production and how this may cause insulin insensitivity and pre-diabetes health issues,

• Strategies to deal with addiction to sugar and carbohydrates,

• Fibre and Protein in our diet and how eating more of these in midlife supports our health,

• How internalised cultural belief systems impact our perception of midlife and the impact of it on our life.

You can find Annie at www.veev.ca or on instagram @veev_wellness. Annie works globally online, so if you would like to book a time to talk to her about your nutrition needs at midlife you can book a call via her website.

Ep 38 The energy chiro, on nervous system healing with Dr Kathryn Theodosis

Dr Kathryn Theodosis joins me for this fantastic podcast where we are talking about our amazing bodies, in particular our nervous systems. Kathryn is a chiropractor who works with clients to allow their nervous system and energy system to move out of a state of stress and fear and into one of greater safety and connection. This shift allows a greater sense of safety to be held by the nervous system and the energy system, giving space for us to connect with parts of us we have not felt safe to prior

Kathryn started off as a traditional chiropractor and was introduced to network spinal analysis a gentle mode of adjustment using contact points on the spine. This transformed her own healing experience and she then completed further professional training in network spinal analysis, a modality of chiropractic care created by Donald Epstein. This then lead her to two years of professional training in Integral Energetics with Dr John Hare and Dr Fred Swan, who have created this modality that works with the body’s energy system.

In the podcast we talked about:

• Different nervous system responses and how they show up in our bodies,

• How our life experiences and our life story are held in our muscles and organs and we can often see this in a person’s posture and stance,

• How network spinal allows the body to unravel, reorganise and integrate its life experiences in a gentle way allowing it to continually adapt and become more flexible,

• That our brain loves novelty and new experiences and this helps our brain stay young and have capacity to create new neural pathways as we age, this means we can keep on learning and this is supportive of good mental health outcomes as we age,

• How repressed emotions and old trauma and stress are held in the body and how that can sometimes manifest as pain,

• The heart and its energetic field are another area where we pick up on the emotions and energy of the environment around you. Often it is our heart reaction picking up on the emotions of others that reacts before our conscious brain,

• Different body holding patterns such as rigidity of the spine and what the somatic story behind that is,

• What practices suit what nervous systems. We talked about meditation and it not being for everyone and how in fact it can for some people, reinforce a trauma pathway of avoiding their body,

• Why creativity is so important for our emotional well-being,

• The current trend in cold water exposure and heat through saunas and why they don’t suit everyone,

• Women’s bodies and listening to our cyclical natures, taking queues from our body and not punishing ourselves for not able to be ‘on’ all the time.

You can find Kathryn on her website www.theenergychiro.com or on instagram @drkathryn.theenergychiro

Ep 37 Skin magic with Richie Angelo

Today my good friend Richie Angelo joins me to talk about skin through the major rites of passage we go through. Richie is a beauty therapist who is a skin guru. She has incorporated further study into her practice and uses both kinesiology and energetic work to treat her clients.

In this podcast Richie explains how our skin is more than just the boundary of our body, it is part of the detoxification system of our body and it interacts with all other body systems. That our skin is part of our immune system and often represents on the outside what is going on in the inside for us. How we can tell by our skin whether it is hormone changes or toxicity in our body based on where our skin is changing on our body.

We decided to frame the conversation around our rites of passage: Maiden, Mother, Maga, Crone and how our hormonal changes drive significant changes in our skin.

if you want to skip through sections to get to content that is relevant to your life stage, the time stamps are:

17:10 Maiden, the teenage years

21:50 Mother - the impact of pregnancy on our skin

28:45 Maga - midlife and the menopause transition

45:55 Crone - Our early 60s onwards

Of course there are lots of gold moments throughout, Richie’s knowledge and wisdom about skin is incredible.

You can find Richie at www.madebyself.com.au or on instagram @_madebyself_

Ep 32 How experiencing more pleasure in your body can be a pathway through pain

This week I’m talking about pleasure and how experiencing the expansive energy of pleasure in our body can be a pathway through pain. When we have trauma and stress stored in our body it has a very constrictive quality to it. You would know this be either a tight jaw or pelvis, or maybe tension in the shoulders and the back between your shoulder blades.

In this episode I talk about:

• How it can be tricky when we start doing somatic healing work at first because we might be stuck in a constant state of constriction so to feel anything other than this can make us feel unsafe,

• The different survival responses in our nervous system and what they are,

• How some food and drinks can actually mimic the constricted state we are in,

• How we all learn to push through the boundaries of our body and come to ignore its messages to us all the time,

• How pleasure expands our capacity in our body and that gives us more choice and breadth in our nervous system and how this improves our ability to be with our emotions,

• Why micro doing on pleasure is more effective at slowly building your orientation toward it,

• What some pleasure practices are.

At the end I mention my free Feminine Embodiment course and my ReConnect course. Reconnect is on sale all through December 2022 for AU$149.50.

Ep 29 The power of Slow with Casey Hall

Today I talk with my friend and colleague Casey Hall, who is a sensuality coach, about the power of slowing down. Casey is both a sensuality coach and holistic wellness coach and has studied and worked in the wellness landscape for many years. She is the best person to talk to about this subject because not only is it the centre of her work but it is her life story also. She learned that slowing down was helped her heal and grow after many years of living a fast paced life.

In the podcast we discuss:

• How Casey moved into corporate wellness and realised that 90% of the cases Doctors deal with are related to stress,

• That sensuality is a key to helping us slow down and live a life with more presence,

• That the emptiness and loneliness many of us feel is a disconnection from self and slowing down helps us to reconnect with ourselves,

• How pleasure is a great tool to help us to slow down and be more present in our lives,

• That many of us have internalised cultural belief systems around slowing down and pleasure that stop us from pursuing both and this lives largely in our unconscious so most of us are not aware of our blockages toward pursuing both,

• Our bodies speak their own language and they are talking to us all the time, we just learned to ignore their messages,

• Slowing down helps us to make better conscious choices and decisions in our life.

You can find Casey at her website www.sensualitycoach.com on instagram @sensuality_coaching. Casey does a podcast with her Business Partner Elizabeth Menzel called “Slow the F Down” you can find it on all major podcasting platforms.

Ep 28 Breathe to Create Flow with Timmy and Jackie

People have been asking me to do a podcast on Breathwork for a long time. So finally here it is. Today I talk to my friends and colleagues Jackie Verinder and Timmy Noad who are both Breathwork teachers about Breathwork. Jackie and Timmy have a great story about their own journey to breathwork and how it has helped them release trauma from their body, connect with their emotions and feelings, grow into emotional adulthood and how it has improved their overall sense of wellbeing, self-acceptance and self-love.

Timmy and Jackie between them are trained in a number of different modes of breathwork including , Oxygen Advantage, SOMA breath, XPT Performance Breath and both are Zen Thai Shiatsu (level one) practitioners.

In the podcast we talk about:

• Jackie and Timmy’s own story and how breathwork has helped them in their lives,

• What is breathwork?

• What are the different styles of breathwork and how do they help,

• How you might go about picking a style that suits your needs and what questions to ask of your potential teachers,

• What to expect in a group session and one on one sessions and how to determine what might suit you between the two delivery methods,

• Questions you can ask potential teachers to work out if they are a good match for your needs,

• How our current culture impacts on how we experience our emotional lives.

Jackie and Timmy are based on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. They do individual and group sessions there, on the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Melbourne. You can find them at www.create-flow.com.au on instagram @createflowbreathwork and facebook at Create flow Breathwork