The Liz Moody Podcast - Ask Liz: MY Morning Routine, Attachment Styles, Book Recommendations & More

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

On this week’s super casual conversation, I’m doing my first ever Q&A! I’m a little nervous so please be kind to me! On this episode, I answer YOUR questions, including: What’s my morning and evening routine? What books have changed my life? What’s my attachment style and what’s Zack’s? How do we make it work? Can you eat meat and still have good gut health? What’s my favorite place I’ve traveled to? What diets did I try in the past that didn’t work? What are my thoughts on intermittent fasting? My healthy soda trick And more. Let me know if you like this format, and I can throw a few more Q&A episodes in. Enjoy! PS: Healthier Together is officially a number one best-seller! You can get your copy on Amazon or at lizmoody.com/cookbook. Please keep sending me your creations on Instagram—they make me so happy! This episode is sponsored by GoMacro. For all of May, GoMacro is going above and beyond and donating 10% of their net-proceeds from their Peanut Butter MacroBar to Farm Sanctuary. As one of the nation’s largest animal sanctuaries, Farm Sanctuary has rescued thousands of animals and has cared for them at its sanctuaries in New York and California. You can get a whopping 30% off your order PLUS free shipping by using the code “healthiertogether30” at GoMacro.com. I highly recommend you try the peanut butter, the double chocolate peanut butter chip, and the oatmeal chocolate chip cookie! Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends and welcome back to the Healthy Year Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I am the author of the Healthyer Together cookbook. And I'm also the author of Glopops, which I need to mention more often. It's like my little first cookbook that I'm not as excited about, but I should be more proud of and I'm working on that. And I'm a longtime journalist living in Brooklyn, where I'm holed up in my teeny tiny little apartment with my cat and my husband. We've been in self-quarantine here for about eight weeks at this point. So like many of you out there, we're just kind of hanging in there, learning new things about each other all the time, playing lots of games. Lots of would you rather. Would you rather has become a fun game? We also have a game that we do when we go out on walks where we try to guess what each other's facial expression is under our masks using just our eyes, which is a fun, very time-specific game. I just keep picturing what's going to be like in like five years. And I'm like, oh, remember when or 20 years when you can like tell the kids.

Remember when we used to play that game where we guess what our facial expression was under our masks? We're using it as definitely a time to connect to each other, to connect to people near and far, and to stay sane and keep our routines as much as possible, which I definitely will talk about in today's episode. So today's episode is going to be a Q&A. I've mentioned this before, but I've gone from doing an every other week schedule to an every week scheduled during this period where so many of us are trapped indoors and maybe need a little bit more joy and entertainment in our days. So a lot of you requested I switch to weekly and I've been trying to do that. So every other week we're keeping our totally normal type of episode.

We're doing the lengthier interviews with some of the most amazing people in wellness. I have an Ask the Doctor gut health edition coming up next week, which I know you guys are going to love. There's so much gut health information packed into this episode. So that's next week, normal episode. And then the in-between weeks, I'm doing just sort of more fun, you know, just less structured content. So we had a couple's Q&A with that two weeks ago. If you guys want to hear about how our relationship is doing during this time of self-quarantine,

go listen to that. And then this is just a Q&A with me. So I asked you all on my Instagram to share some fun questions that I could answer during this episode and you mega delivered. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get to them all. You ask so many good questions. But yeah, let's get right into it. Okay, so the first question is, what is my morning and evening routine?

Which makes sense because I've been sharing the morning and evening routines of a lot of the most inspiring women in wellness. I have two morning and evening routine episodes if you want to go and check those out. But my morning routine, it's interesting. Okay, so the first thing that I do that's like a little bit weird is I never wake up with an alarm. Like if I have a very important meeting or something I absolutely can't, a flight, something I cannot miss. I'll set an alarm, but other than that, I would say 98% of days in my life, I don't wake up with an alarm. And that included when I was working a full-time job. And there's two reasons for that.

So one is that you have these sleep cycles that you go through every night. And if you complete a sleep cycle, you're going to wake up feeling so much more energized and so much less groggy than if you wake up even 10 minutes before that sleep cycle is complete. And I don't drink any caffeine. I don't drink any coffee because of my anxiety. I always recommend anybody who has anxiety, cut caffeine out and just see what a difference that makes in their life. Experiment with it, play with it. There's more about that in the Ask the Doctor anxiety episode of the podcast if you're interested. But I don't drink caffeine in the morning, so I really need to rely on other things to wake me up.

So if I start at that sort of deficit, a little bit groggy place, it's a lot harder for me to wake up in the morning. So I don't wake up with an alarm. When I had a full-time job, I would sort of adjust my morning routine. based on exactly when I woke up. But thing too is that you can pretty much train yourself to wake up around the same time every day. You get into a circadian rhythm if you sort of follow your body's natural sleep cycles. And then you will tend to fall asleep and wake up around the same time every day

even without setting an alarm. So for me, that's a little bit late. I've always been a little bit of a night owl. So I go to bed around midnight, I would say 1230. and then I wake up at 8.30 or 9. And then when I had to be at work, I had have to be at work by 9.45. And my office is 15 minutes away, which, or it was 15 minutes away when I worked there, which is something huge. They did this really interesting study about the best ways that you can spend money for your happiness. And one of the ways that was absolute peak, like top of the charts, was cutting down your commute time and turning your commute into a walking or biking commute.

So we did that. We actually moved in Brooklyn to a different part of Brooklyn so that Zach worked in the same neighborhood as I worked. His office was in the same neighborhood as mine. And we turned our commutes into essentially a 15-minute walk down a really beautiful street. And we were able to do that. It was more expensive. But we cut out spending in different parts of our life because we knew that this would have

such a drastic impact on our happiness. So I would adjust my morning routine and make it into work on time, maybe a little bit late sometimes. But now, of course, that I work from home, I am able to do all of the other steps in my morning routine, regardless of the exact time that I wake up. So I wake up when I wake up, usually around 8.30 or 9. And then I go to the bathroom and the very first thing that I do, I'm like, I go to the bathroom and you're like, the very first thing I do is take a huge poop. No, I do my brushing rinse. Brushing rinse is essentially a hydrogen peroxide and essential oil blend. You can buy it whole foods or online, pretty much anywhere. It's pretty reasonably priced.

But the thing that it does is it kind of kills all of the bacteria that accumulate in your mouth overnight. So you know when you wake up with really funky morning breath, that is because you have had all of this bacteria accumulate in your mouth overnight. And it's not just you. We all wake up with very funky morning breath. So you've had this bacteria accumulate in your mouth overnight. And I don't like to swallow that. So I always kind of get grossed out when people you know, drink a lot of water very first thing without brushing their teeth or eat food or drink coffee. I think it's better to get all of that gross stuff out of your mouth and then to consume whatever you're going to consume in the morning. There's also been some people in the wellness world

think that those bacteria can go down to your stomach and they can sort of impact your microbiome. You're just kind of like accumulating bad bacteria in different parts of your body. The thinking is still out on that, but I still think it's better like why not get it out of your mouth? Also, this is my secret to white teeth. People ask me all the time, how do you whiten your teeth naturally? And 100% it's the brushing rinse. It's magical. I just do it every single morning. So I brushing rinse, spit it out. And then I brush my teeth and come to the kitchen and I drink a really big glass of water. And then I work out. And at this point, I still have not looked at my phone at all. I have a rule for myself that I'm not allowed to look at my phone until after I work out in the morning. And it's just a way to sort of force myself. I need that extra motivation to work out in the morning. I used to say I was going to work out in the morning and then I would lay on my couch. I'd like have my workout clothes on, but I would lay on my couch and scroll through social media and read emails and start replying to emails. And then once you get into the work mode, it's really hard to just sort of turn that off. So I

set a rule for myself that I cannot look at my social media and I cannot look at my phone until after I've completed my workout. And it made a huge difference. just because it took away that sort of lolly gagging time between when I woke up and the workout. And I do work out every single day, which if you had asked me two years ago, if I would ever be a person who worked out every day, I would have literally laughed in your face. I would have just been like, who do you think you are? I was a very late person to the workout game. I ate healthy. I did supplements.

I meditated. I did all these things before I worked out. And I do think it was, I don't know, is like a body thing. partially where, you know, the phrase, abs are made in the kitchen, not in the gym or something like that. And like, I had just internalized that the way that I looked and even the way that I felt to a certain extent, that working out didn't matter for those as much as the other wellness activities that I did. And then I went through this excruciating period of really, really bad insomnia a few years ago. I didn't sleep for three nights. And then I had, you know, just that

fear around sleeping for quite a long time. And that's around the time that I stopped setting an alarm too, because I found it really hard to fall asleep when I knew I had a set time to wake up in the morning. And I could see the clock sort of counting down to that time. But during that time, my friends, I was working at Mind, Buddy Green. So all of my friends were like wellness editors. They were some of the healthiest people ever. And they were like, Liz, you need to work out. It will help you sleep so much better. So they drag me to a year. yoga class. I was terrible and I loved it and I started working out. So it makes such a huge difference in my mental health. I sleep better. I have less anxiety and more energy throughout the day. I know

that these are things that everybody knows and I was just very late to the party, but I find it miraculous. So I force myself to do it every single morning. It honestly hasn't really made a big difference in how I look. So I think the saying is sort of true that most of what you look like comes from what you eat and sort of other lifestyle factors like reducing stress to reduce your cortisol levels, to reduce your belly fat and things like that. But it has made a huge difference in how I feel and I would trade the 20 or 30 minutes that I spend working out to feel that good for the other 23 and a half hours of my day. Any day. I just, I've grown to. I've grown to crave it and love it. So I work out. I do a home workout every day and I did this before I was in

self-quarantine. So I just find it easier. I think when you go to a studio, which is fun to, and going to an actual gym is fun too. But when you like lose the 30 minutes or an hour getting there and then you have the hour class, it just is so much out of your day. And I find that I start to resent working out if it takes up this really huge chunk of my day. So I really like to do home workouts because I just feel like you can you finish you're really sweaty you hop in the shower you're good to go so I alternate between a few different types I love the rachel's good eats rachel devos um she does like hit mixed with weight workouts um and she has a ton of free ones on her instagram page and i just do those they're really really really good so i love those um so alternate

between those and then i'll do yoga glow which is the yoga website They have thousands and thousands of yoga classes. And that one's subscription-based. I think it's $15 a month, so less the price of one yoga class in New York City. And I love Catherine Buedig's classes on there. And then Tiffany Kruikshink, I'm pretty sure I'm pronouncing her name wrong. But they both do really fun and dynamic and interesting movement. And they just, the yoga classes make me feel really, really, really good.

And yeah, so I'll just alternate those different ones. And sometimes I'll sneak in like a, oh, and then I do one other one. I do dance church on Sunday. So dance church is a donation-based online dance class. They also had it in person, obviously, before we weren't allowed to do anything in person. And I'm sure that will come back in person someday. But it's donation-based. And you go to a website.

It's either go.ddancechurch.com or dancechurch.com. And you just dance for an hour. They give you like a little bit of structure. They'll be like, dance with your head or like dance low, dance with your butt, with your left hand. But other than that, it's pretty freeform, but you're just really moving and the music is good and the energy is good and the vibe is really good. And it's so incredibly cathartic. And it's made me feel really, really, it's just been one of the highlights of myself quarantine. I found it at the beginning of this period. And it's just been really helpful for me to get through.

I've also had a really hard time differentiating between weekdays and weekends during this time. My job can be done every day. And I also always feel like I'm a little bit behind in my job. I feel like there's always stuff to do that I should be doing. So I've basically been working all weekend every weekend, which isn't ideal for my mental health. I'm just like, what else am I supposed to do? We can go on walks in New York. But there's so many people out, especially on the weekends, that it's really hard to social distance, even on a walk.

So that's been frustrating. But dance church is one of those things that I'm just like, oh, it's Sunday. I get to do dance church. It's one of the highlights and joys of my weekend. So I finish my workout. I go shower. I wash my hair like every four days. So hopefully it's a day that I don't have to wash my hair in the shower because those are the best days.

I'm just like, ah, like if I didn't have hair, my morning routine, my whole life would. I feel like I just gain back days of my life. but I shower and then I come to the kitchen and I make a green smoothie or I will drink a leftover green smoothie. So whenever I make a green smoothie, it basically makes like three servings with the size that I make it. I use a whole sort of clam shell of green. So Zach gets a smoothie. I get a smoothie and then I have one smoothie leftover for the next day. Zach doesn't like the leftover smoothies. I'm not just like trying to deny Zach his second day smoothie. But smoothies maintain I think it's either 82 or 86% of their nutrients for 24 hours.

And then they maintain close to like 50 or 60% of their nutrients for 48 hours. And you can also freeze smoothies. So you can just freeze them. You can make, I don't know, a month's worth of smoothies, freeze them in their mason jars. And then the night before you want to consume it, transfer it from the freezer to the fridge and then drink it. I don't do that. If you saw my freezer, you would understand why. If you haven't seen my apartment therapy house tour, you should go.

look at it because you can see how ridiculously tiny my fridge and freezer are. They are smaller than me and I am pretty small. But I'll just make my leftover smoothie so that I can have one morning, every other morning where I don't have to make smoothie. I am, if you haven't heard my green smoothie rant yet, I think that green smoothies are 100% the best breakfast that you can have. They take five minutes to make. You will feel really good. You'll feel energized but full. You won't feel that sort of like sluggish heavy feeling that you feel when you eat more, I don't know, like carb heavy. Like when I eat a bagel, I feel like there's a rock in my stomach and I just feel sluggish and tired and not good. And smoothies make me feel the opposite of that. I just feel like my digestion,

my digestion is running good and I feel energized and I feel awesome. And they also, you've consumed more vegetables by 10 a.m. than most people will consume an entire day. So you can pat yourself on the back and you can feel really, really good about that. I just love them. So I'm a big fan of green smoothie in the morning. And then I just kind of dive into my work and go about my day. I don't meditate in the morning. I got into a habit of meditating in the afternoon when I worked at MindBody Green.

We had a meditation room. And again, because I don't drink caffeine, I was trying to fight that 3 p.m. sluggish, tired feeling that you get after lunch. And so I'd go into the meditation room and I would do my meditation there for 20 minutes. which was so nice, such a luxury. I have friends, though, who don't have meditation rooms at their office and they will, like, sneak away to a church that's in the neighborhood, or they'll even go to the bathroom and meditate or a storage closet or something like that. So there is a way to sneak in a little meditation at work, even if you don't have the luxury of a meditation room, but that

habit just kind of stuck. So here, I'll do my meditation at home. I'll do my meditation at around three in the afternoon, which I really like because it just makes me feel completely recent. and refresh for my day. And then as far as evening routine goes, I, what do I do in the evening? I feel like we try to shut down our work around maybe seven or eight. It's a little bit on the later side again because I tend to start a little bit on the later side and also because I'm really bad at stopping myself from working when I feel like that there's work to do. I'll make dinner or Zach will make dinner. And then we've been doing a lot in quarantine. We'll do game nights instead of watching media, like watching Netflix.

And that's been really fun for us. It just feels like a little bit of something different. It feels like it activates my brain in a different way. I just find when I'm watching TV, I'm always on my phone too. And I'm never totally engaged in either thing. And then at the end of the time, I feel like my brain is rotting away from my body, which isn't a good feeling. So we've been doing game nights, and that's been really, really fun.

We either play code names duet or boggle is a huge. huge favorite in this household. Dat keeps winning, which is very annoying. And then we play lost cities, which is also a really, really good two-person game. And then Spot It is also a classic. So those are all good two-person games. And then we've been playing a lot of games with friends over the internet, which is also really, really fun. There's a site called Jackbox that lets you play a bunch of really fun games together. And then there's another site called Playing Cards.io that lets you play like cards against humanity type games together, which is really, really fun. So we've been doing that. And then I water pick in the evenings or I floss.

I love my water pick. It essentially just shoots really fast streams of water through your teeth to get rid of the plaque. And it makes your teeth feel like you have just been to the dentist and I am obsessed with it. So I water pick or floss, brush my teeth. And then I will read myself to sleep every single night. I cannot fall asleep unless I'm reading. I've been like that since I was a little kid. I remember when I was backpacking, I would always look for a little light on the hostel beds. And I would, if it had a light, I'd be like, okay, good, I'll be, I'll get a good night sleep here. And if it didn't have a light, I want it. I just need to have my brain be distracted in some way. And I'll read until I basically actually fall asleep often to the

point where Zach needs to take my book from me and turn the light off. And then I go to sleep and I start all over again. So I hope that was helpful. I feel like all the people I interviewed had so many more interesting morning routine and evening routine things, and I'm trying to work on mine, hence the point of the interviews. I really want to incorporate Kelly Levick's very highly specific gratitude practice that she talks about. And also the cutting veg talked about doing little cleanup sessions, which I would really like because I would like my house to be cleaner and I am not innately a clean person. So both of those sounded very appealing and I'm working on incorporating them for sure. Okay. Next question. Attachment styles.

what is yours and what is Zach's? How do you make it work? So if you don't know what attachment cells are, basically there's a theory in psychology that everybody has a different attachment style that they develop when they're, I think when they're quite young, like two or three years old, and it's based on how you were parented and then those patterns sort of carry over into your adult relationships later in life. So Zach is securely attached, as you guys might guess. He's just dandy. His parents love each other very much. They have a really good, healthy relationship. And I think they had a really good healthy relationship with Zach when he was growing up, which is wonderful for him. And I am anxiously attached, as you might also guess, if you know about attachment styles and me.

I have sort of an interesting situation where when I was two years old, my mom was in a very serious accident and ended up being in the hospital in a coma for almost a year. So at a time where I couldn't understand anything that anybody was explaining to me, I went from having my mom there with me every day to not being with me at all. And, you know, when I would see her in the hospital, I don't even know if I, I'm sure I visited her when she was in a coma, but she obviously wouldn't respond to me in the way that one would expect a mom to. And I think my dad, did an incredible time during that period. And I had really good babysitters because he was having to work both time to pay all the medical bills and things like that. So I do think I felt as loved and as

taken care of as one could in the circumstances. But I also think that if you're talking about forming attachment issues during that time, it's certainly hard to have your mother there one day being this caretaker person and then gone essentially for a year with no explanation that your brain at that age can conceive of after that. So I definitely have had a harder time, I think, in relationships, and I've learned a lot in my relationship with Zach. I think the second half of the question was, like, how do you deal with it? And we deal with it by me trying to work on patterns and him being very patient with me. I had to learn a lot of, I hadn't had really any long, long term relationships before Zach. I'd had sort of boyfriends for a few months here and there, but Zach had been in a number of

quite long-term multi-year relationships. So I feel like, and then also had, you know, good models growing up. I remember when I first met his parents, I like had never spent a bunch of time with a healthy couple before, really. Like, I just didn't have that example in my life. My parents ended up getting divorced after the accident sort of as a result of it in some ways. And, they didn't have ideal relationships on either of their sides after that. Like my dad got into a very long term, very unhappy marriage. And then my mom sort of cycled through a period of a series of different boyfriends and husbands. But I've had to learn a lot of things.

I've had to learn, I'm working on how to say sorry better and how to just love yourself enough to let your partner love you and how to feel safe and comfortable and secure. I think that's the whole thing with attachment styles. It's about feeling secure that when a person leaves you, they will come back to you and that there's nothing you can do that will make a person sort of leave you forever, which again, if you, you know, with my childhood the way it was, I think having to internalize that somebody is not just going to up and leave me one day is is trickier. So having that confidence and security and comfort in a relationship is definitely something I had to, I had to actively learn. But I think I did.

And I feel very confident and secure in my relationship with Zach now. So I do think it is possible. You're listening to the Healthier Together podcast. I've tried pretty much every bar on the planet, food editor life, you know. And the reason that go macro is always my go to is because it's the only one that actually fills me up. I eat them after a hard workout or when I need a snack and I'm sick of cooking because we're now cooking. three full meals a day, and it is a lot. For all of May, Go Macro is going above and beyond and donating 10% of their net proceeds from their peanut butter macro bar to Farm Sanctuary.

First of all, this is one of the best bars. If you love peanut butter, you are going to be obsessed. There are housemade peanut butter chips that are so addictive. Second, Farm Sanctuary is just an awesome organization to support. As one of the nation's largest animal sanctuaries, Farm Sanctuary has rescued thousands of animals and has cared for them at its sanctuaries in New York and California. And I love that you can help animals by eating delicious snacks. It's a win-win, my absolute dream situation. You can get a whopping 30% off your order plus free shipping by using the code healthier together 30 that's healthier together like the name of this podcast and then the number 30 at go macro.com. Definitely try the peanut butter or you can try the new

double chocolate peanut butter one, which I am absolutely obsessed with. I also think that the oatmeal chocolate chip is a must try. And of course, Zach and his question, consume the most coffee on the planet loves the mocha one. Again, that is go macro.com using the code healthier together 30. I cannot wait to hear what you think. Now, let's get back to the episode. Okay, next question. Can you eat meat and still have good gut health? And I would say my answer is yes, but I have a few caveats to that. First of all, your diet should be made largely of plants, whether you are plant-based or an omnivore. Plants are singularly the best thing for your microbiome. good bacteria. So as many vegetables, herbs, fruits, just those types of foods that you can eat

throughout the day, the better gut health you will have no matter what. And definitely include a lot of prebiotic foods, things like asparagus and leaks and Jerusalem artichokes. Those are going to give you huge results for your gut health. Second, if you do eat meat, it should be largely from grass-fed cows and pastured chickens as much as you can afford. It's just you're not eating a ton of grains via the grain-based diet that conventionally raised animals are fed. And you're also getting higher levels of omega-3s and vitamin K and just you're getting more nutrients out of the meat products that you're eating. So I think if you're eating it, having it not just sort of be a dead weight in your diet. And obviously also there's the ethical

considerations of factory farming to consider. So if you can at all afford it, I always encourage people to eat, you know, pasturized eggs, pasture-raised chickens. and then look for grass-fed butter, grass-fed beef, things like that. Third, and I think this is a little bit more nuanced and interesting. There is the gut-brain connection. So we talked about this a lot in the Ask the Doctor Anxiety Edition, which is if your gut is distressed, it can lead to anxiety. But also if you have anxiety, that can lead to gut distress.

So a lot of people will get anxiety issues because of blood sugar issues. So if their blood sugar drops precipitously, they will feel anxious in their body, which will make their brain misattribute the fact that they're anxious. And then they might get an upset stomach because that's a symptom of anxiety for them. So they might actually be having worse gut health by having these blood sugar drops. So some doctors will say that you should add me into your diet if it's an okay, ethical, an environmental choice for you personally. I think it's such a personal choice for every single person.

but if that's an okay choice for you, some doctors will say that if you struggle with anxiety or gut health issues, you should mix in a little bit of meat into your diet just so you can keep your blood sugar super stable throughout the day so you don't experience those issues along your gut brain access, if that makes sense. That said, there are definitely ways

to keep your blood sugar super stable without having to incorporate meat products. That's just sort of an easy way to quickly add in some really good fats and proteins. But number one, most important thing for gut health is diversity of plants, diversity of plants, diversity of plants. And then what you're doing with the other small percentage of your diet, I don't think impacts it as much if you have that diversity of plants element solid. And speaking of diversity, somebody else asked what my favorite non-healthy

junk food is, which is one of my favorite topics. A hundred percent fruity pebbles. I love fruity pebbles so much. They are just so delicious. Also, Kit Kat bars are so good. I do eat. I don't, there's nothing that's like off the tables for me to eat. Like I just don't function that way and I don't think that functioning that way is healthy. I think it's healthier to let yourself eat a bowl of fruity pebbles when you really,

really want a bowl of fruity pebbles and all you can think about is a bowl of fruity pebbles rather than making some facsimile of fruity pebbles that's quote unquote healthy where you're just like, this doesn't satisfy this at all. Like I think there's, I always say that I think wellness is about your, your mind, your body, and your soul. And if something is genuinely feeding your soul and that means like that's not shoving chips in your face because you've had a hard day and you're watching, you know, sex education on Netflix and you're just like sitting there crying and not feeling good about yourself as you're eating junk food. But if it's going to really make you feel good on a core level to eat fruity pebbles, eat fruity pebbles, you know, you're feeding. eating your soul. And I think that's as important as feeding your body. So I'm a huge fan of that. Also, Tater Tots. I love Tater Tots. Although recently, they have been making my stomach hurt when I eat

them. So I have, you know, I'm trying to be aware of that. And that's the other thing. Like I do think part of intuitive eating, which I think is so much harder than people give it credit for, is figuring out, like really tuning into how you feel after you eat anything. So if you, like, you like go to eat a McDonald's sandwich and afterwards you feel so tired and so depressed and your skin feels greasy and your lips feel greasy and you're just like bleh, then like pay attention to that feeling really zero in on it. And I think with time, you'll stop craving the McDonald's sandwich because you'll associate it with feeling really, really crappy. So I've been tuning in to how I feel after I eat junk food. And honestly, after I eat a bowl of fruity pebbles with some

delicious oat milk from Calphia or something like that, I feel fine. Like, you know, probably not as good as after a green smoothie, but I feel pretty darn good. But after I eat tater tots, I've been getting some stomach pain. So I have stopped eating tater tots right now and I'm not thrilled about it. But definitely, I would say don't put anything off the table, but really pay attention to what you feel like after you eat anything. Okay. Looking through other questions.

favorite place you've traveled to. I would love to hear more about your travel experiences. Yeah. So travel was a huge part of my life. Basically, the day I graduated from high school, I flew to Europe with all of the money that I'd saved for the last three years. And I backpacked around. I deferred college for a semester. And I backpacked around for eight months before I went to starting, before I started college. And then throughout my college, I would essentially do one semester on and then I do one semester backpacking around South America or Europe or northern Africa or something like that. I was able to do this because at the time I wrote a newspaper column. So it was sort of like creating content for myself by taking these trips. And also I

traveled bananas cheap. Like my dad came to visit me in Europe and I'm not like from a wealthy family. Like I didn't go to Europe with my family literally at all growing up because that just wasn't the type of vacation we did. We did, you know, we'd go to like camp at a lake, an hour from our house, which was also wonderful, although I did not like nature until he's quite a bit older. And I was like, oh, there's like so many bugs and so dirty. And now I'm like, that sounds dreamy. But my dad came to visit me in Europe and he was like, why do you look so skinny? And I was like, well, you know, I'm trying to make sure my money lasts. So I've just been eating the roll that they give you the hostile breakfast and then I'll like take a boiled egg and eat that like I'd basically and he's like

oh well how much money have you spent and it had been four months and I spent nine hundred dollars which is not really enough to live and it was not at that time either so I traveled very cheaply sometimes too cheaply for my own good but it was honestly so awesome I traveled by myself largely my dad would come and visit me and sometimes my mom would come and visit me to um for like a week during a six-month sin of traveling. But by and large, I was by myself. I stayed in hostels and I didn't really make a plan. I would just sort of go where I wanted to go and do what I wanted to do.

And it was one of the most magical times in my life. And I'm so glad I did it because it's so much harder to do that type of thing as you get older. And I also think that solo travel is transformative. And I think that anybody who can do that even later in life, like my mom has done solo trips recently and she's in her 60s, I think that that is an incredible thing that you can, it's a gift you can give yourself. It's just so much time with yourself, thinking by yourself. Like, I think some of the most transformative moments that I had during my trips were when I had like a 24-hour bus ride between, again, traveling very cheaply, you know, between Amsterdam and

Berlin. And I would just be sitting on the bus by myself. We didn't have smartphones. So that was probably part of it. We didn't have smartphones or iPads or anything back then. So I might have a book. I might have, I think I had an iPod at the time, although don't quote me, but I do remember like listening to music quite a bit or maybe CDs. I'm 33. So I don't know if that. I'm like, what was there when I was 18? I do remember I worked at a hostel in Amsterdam for four months when I was traveling that first stint. And I remember people had Discman. And there was this one song I had stuck in my head. It's the crash test dummy song that's like,

once there was this girl who. And the chorus is just the guy going like, okay, I'm not going to do this to you. But it was stuck in my head for so long. So everybody coming in the hostel, I'd be like, do you have the crash test dummy CD? And then finally one person did. And I listened to it.

And I was like, oh, the best feeling in the world, which is a feeling that today's youth will never, ever, have, which is probably better for their sanity. But yeah, the feeling that you get when you're just like on a bus by yourself alone in your thoughts, it's almost like a very cheap, very dinky meditation retreat. And you really get to know yourself in a different way. And I really think, and when you wake up in the morning and you're not with your family or with your partner, with your friends, and you have to say, what do I want to do today? What would make me feel good today? What do I want eat, where do I want to walk, what do I want to think about, who do I want to meet, who do I want to

talk to, who do I want to spend my time with? I think asking yourself all of those questions is huge to figuring out who you are and really meeting yourself. So highly, highly recommend solo travel. In terms of the question, my favorite place I've ever traveled to is definitely Syria, which is really sad given the state of Syria. Now, basically when I graduated from college, my dad as my graduation present. We went to the Middle East together for a little over a month. So we started in Egypt. And then we went to Jordan and then we went to Syria and Lebanon. And then we went to Israel at the end because you have to go to Israel at the end because you can't have an Israel passport stamp and go to any of those other countries. And it was literally the fall before

Arab Spring. So if we had postponed the trip by six months, we went. not have been able to do this trip in the same way ever again, which is crazy to me. But it was so magical. I'm obsessed with Middle Eastern culture. The people are so friendly. Damascus, which is the capital of Syria, it's, you don't like drive in the city because it's all these really narrow cobblestone streets. Occasionally a car will come through, but it's like the car is almost scraping the sides

of the buildings on either side. and their whole city smells like citrus because there's citrus trees and all the courtyards like oranges and lemons and limes and the food is so good and it just is this like beautiful medieval walled city and it's separated into four different quarters and the four quarters feel really, really different

so there's like a Muslim quarter, there's a Armenian quarter, there's a Jewish quarter and there's one other one Christian and people will like dress completely different depending on what quarter you're in, the food will be different. And it's really, really interesting to go, you know, from seeing somebody in a full hijab to then you go to a different quarter and somebody is in like a miniskirt. But the people are just so incredibly nice. You cannot walk down the street without somebody coming out and insisting you come in for tea

with them and talking to you about their one grandkid who went to the United States for a week, like two years ago or something like that. It's just, it's the culture is amazing. the food is amazing. The city is the most beautiful city I'd ever been to. And then Aleppo, which is up north, they have one of the oldest markets in the world, I believe, one of the oldest running markets. And it was just so, I don't know, this like piles of spices everywhere and beautiful textiles. And again, just like the nicest, loveliest people. It's a level of history that's almost hard to comprehend its history that isn't, you know, in the U.S. we get history that's a few hundred years old. And then we get the indigenous history that goes back further than that, obviously, but is often

harder to just sort of encounter as you're walking around New York, like, city. And then in Europe, you obviously get a little bit later history. You start to get buildings that are a thousand years old. And you're like, oh, my gosh, buildings, a thousand years old. But then in Syria, you would go to, like, the dead cities, and they're from, you know, two or three thousand years ago. It's just such a different level. And they had such evolved, complicated civilizations even back then. And it just makes you feel like a little blip on the great long march of history, which is a very comforting feeling, at least for me, that everything sort of happened before,

everything will happen again, that it's all cyclical. I really liked it. And it was a really lovely trip with my dad as well. And, yeah, it was just really magical. And it's been, obviously, the worst part of the situation in Syria isn't that, you know, there can't be tourism anymore. There's so much more devastating stuff going on there. But I do, it is, like, sad that I can't bring Zach there and share that place with him maybe in my lifetime. And that I, it just, and I often think about all of the people that we met on that trip.

And it's, yeah, it's sad. But Syria was super magical. The rest of the Middle East is super magical too. I love Morocco. I love Egypt. Egypt, I mean, talk about like old history and also their market there. I think it's Conal Khalili in Cairo is one of those places that you can just get lost for days. It's fascinating and super cool.

And there's an island in the middle of the Nile where you can, it's called, I think, banana island. It's called something else. But they call it colloquially banana island and you can just go and pick bananas. and eat them all, which I found really charming and fun. It's like, oh, you can take a boat to an island and have all you can eat bananas. So I thought that was really fun. I also love Brazil, but in terms of just a country, I think the culture is incredible. And in terms of like sheer beauty, it is so gorgeous.

I stayed in this place called Florianopolis, which it's like just off the coast of Sao Paulo. It's kind of part island, I think. This was a very long time ago. so I might be misremembering. But there was just flat, it was so verdant and lush and beautiful. And the ocean is so gorgeous. And it's just,

it's such a mix of like mountainous jungle meets ocean. And I'm very into that look generally. But I also feel like Brazil really did me wrong. I got mugged there a few times. I had my seizure there, which was not ideal. And which I talk about if you're like, what seizure?

that was a huge part of my anxiety journey. I talk about it in my Instagram feed. So go to the anxiety highlight if you want that entire story. It's just like a hard play. Like I feel like Brazil did not like me, but I liked Brazil. And then last two are Iceland. I think just simply one of the most beautiful places in the world. I did not like Reykjavik, unpopular opinion. But I love the countryside. So I would say if you go to Iceland, get out of Reykjavik, go to the countryside, do all hikes, find the little tiny hot springs that nobody else goes to and go to those instead of the Blue Lagoon or the bigger ones. And then also Banff and Jasper, which is where Zach and I got engaged. I think we told our engagement story in the couples. Did we call it? Yeah, we did. So if you want to hear

our engagement story, go to the couple's Q&A podcast, which was a few podcasts ago and listen to that. But definitely Banff and Jasper, they have these lakes that are bright blue. and stunningly gorgeous, so I highly recommend. What brand of bitters do I use for my mocktails? I think I talked about in one episode that I like to make sort of my own healthy sodas by mixing flavored bitters and sparkling water. And I drink alcohol, but I will do this just when I want something special to drink, when I want something that feels like a, it feels more like a LaCroy type vibe.

But I use scrapies, which they have like, they're organic, I believe. And they have like lavender and orange and carbs. artemom and those types of flavors. And then I also use dram apothecary. And they have sort of more, I don't know, like woodsy fun. They have like a Palosanto flavor and a sage flavor. And so those ones are really, really good too. So I highly recommend you just literally take some sparkling water and put a few drops of bitters on it and it tastes delightful. Okay. I'm going through the questions. Any book recommendations on the topic of anxiety? Yes, for sure when panic attacks by David Burns. is a psychologist and this is and he works with like pretty severely mentally ill people by

and large and when panic attacks by David Burns is one of the number one books that he actually will buy it and give it to his clients because a lot of his clients can't necessarily afford to buy books um he works with a lot of medic Medicare medicade clients but it it's just the go-to in psychology in the psychology world particularly in CBT for anxiety and I've done it myself it's almost more of a workbook and it really, really, really helps. And then when I was super anxious, like when I was completely agoraphobic and just at my absolute worst, I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Toll and I read it probably 12 times. And I just, I almost clung to it like a life, a life fast.

It made a really, really big difference in my life at the time. It just made me feel safe and comforted and whole. And I think a huge part of the lesson in that book is that you don't know what the future is. None of us do. And all of anxiety is about future projecting and projecting a future just that exists only in your head. And so I think really trying to ground yourself into this present moment was critical for me. And I think the power of now is a really great. It's a really great book for that.

Okay. Did you try any diets in the past that you realized don't work? like I ask, which is intermittent fasting. So I actually like intermittent fasting. I don't think of it as a diet. I think of it as just like a tiny tweak that you can make in your day while still doing everything else.

So Kelly Levec talks about the benefit of fasted workouts in the morning. It's part two of the morning and evening routine episode. And I've been doing fasted workouts. I was doing them a little bit before I talked to her, but I've been doing them pretty much religiously since then just because it's such a small thing you can do that has a huge impact on your overall health.

So I'll do an overnight intermittent fast. I'll try to have like 12 to 13 hours between my last meal and my first meal, which we talk about more in the gut health episode, is sort of the ideal amount of time. You really just want to have some time in your body where you're not spending the incredible amount of energy that it takes to digest your food. And you can free up essentially your body's energy to do other things. And I think particularly while you sleep, it's nice. to do that so that your brain can just do all of its other repair work that you want your brain to do.

So I do an overnight fast and then I do a fasted workout. But in terms of other diets, I had to try a lot of different diets back when I was working in journalism full time just so I could write about them. So I would like try the keto diet and I would try paleo or vegan or stuff like that or even like trendier, you know, weird ones with strange fast. and fiber and all of that kind of stuff. Weird detox diets. I did a detox diet that's really popular with celebrities that I shan't name. And I have truly never been hungrier in my entire life. Like I woke up every day hungry and then I would grumpily eat the tiny amount of food that

they gave me. And then I would just go through my day being ravenous. And I was like, if this is what it takes to be a celebrity, then I don't want it. But none of them are good. Like, spoiler alert. I don't recommend diets unless you have. a specific reason for doing a diet. Like I think if you are epileptic, definitely experiment with a ketogenic diet.

That is sort of what it was designed to be therapeutic for. If you are celiac, obviously be gluten-free. But as we talk about way more in the gut health episode that's coming up next week, the limiting foods from your diet is only going to hurt your overall health and your gut health. And more importantly, your mental health. So I'm a huge fan of crowding in or crowding out rather than eliminating. So if you fill your plate and fill your day with really nourishing good for you foods, largely vegetables. I talk about this in my cookbook.

I do think it's interesting also that most of the diets, the really healthy ones, at least, like the more Mediterranean diet or paleo or vegan, the ones that aren't too extreme, they all agree that 80% of your diet should be vegetables. And then they disagree on what the other 20% should be. So I try to really just focus on that 80% vegetable portion. so I have my smoothie in the morning. If I have any meal, I'm just always thinking to myself, how can I put more vegetables in this? How can I put more vegetables in this? And when you fill up on vegetables,

which have a ton of fiber and are actually quite filling, you don't have room to eat the other stuff and you won't want to because your taste buds will actually change as your microbiome adjust to all that fiber. So I don't think that limiting your food is at all a good idea. I just think eating, if you literally just went through every day, thinking, how can I eat as many vegetables as possible today, you would have an incredible state of health and you wouldn't have to worry about eliminating literally anything. So I'm a big proponent

of that. Okay, this is getting long. So I'm just going to do a few more kind of quickish ones. Why did you leave MBG? I left MBG to do my book tour and launch healthier together into the world. I did a huge book tour all around the country for that. And I was still writing for MBG at the time. I became an editor at large. I went, if you were not familiar, with my background. I was the food director, which means I headed up all of the food content for video and written on the site for MyMuddy Green for a number of years. And then I became an editor at large, which just means that I contributed articles to My Body Green while I was on book tour so that I could go on book tour and be where I needed to be for that. And then now I don't write for them

and an editor at large capacity. I still write for them in a number of different sites, but just sort of more casually as I make, you know, this podcast and my brand more of my full-time job. Novel recommendations. Well, I recommend that everybody join LM Book Club. We are reading The Heard by Andy Bartz. You just buy the book wherever or check it out from your local library and then read it. And then we'll do a live where we talk about it on Instagram and it's super fun. Book clubs are always just like they spark the best conversation.

So I highly recommend that. That's The Herd by Andy Bartz. I already finished it. It is so good. It's just like a really fun thriller, but it's about feminism and the place of women in the world. So there will be a lot to talk about. But it's the kind of like girl on the train type book that really hooks you and keeps you reading,

which I think is really nice as a distraction during these times. Other favorite books. God, I have so many favorite books. But The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, all-time favorite. I read it like seven times. Homegoing by Yaya Giasi. is an incredible book. I love it. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld is sort of a sneaky one. It's about Barbara Bush, but it's a fictionalized account of her life. And it's one of the ones that every

writer I know loves it, but they're sort of embarrassed to like it because it feels like chicklet, but it's written like literary fiction. It's really well written, but it's just like really readable and it's about a woman in her life. But highly recommend American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. all of the Taylor Jenkins reads book. So the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo is so good. It's about 1940s, 50s, like glamorous Hollywood. It's so good. And then she also wrote Daisy Jones.

Just look for Taylor Jenkins read. But it's about like the 70s rock and roll scene. And it's also super, super good. I'm trying to think if there's those are, I would start with those. Those are books that I have read that I've adored recently and definitely come join book club. All right. Let's cap it there for today.

I hope that you liked this little Q&A episode. If you did, definitely let me know on Instagram. I'm at Liz Moody. You can tag me. You can continue the conversation over there. But yeah, let me know because I've never done a little solo Q&A episode before. And if you like it, I can do more. And if you don't like it, I can not do more.

And thank you for listening. And I hope you guys are all staying well, whatever the state of your current area is. And I hope that you're safe and your loved ones are safe. And I hope that you, you know, know that I'm sending you all the positive vibes. And I'm so grateful to have you here as part of my podcast family. And for the people who are part of the Instagram family, I love you as well. Have a great one, guys. Bye.

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