The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Heal Your Gut: 8 Experts Share Their Best Science-Backed Tip

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

A healthy gut is crucial for your overall health and wellbeing. In this episode, 8 health experts share their best science-backed tips to have a healthy gut microbiome and experience better digestion, sleep, immunity, mental health, and more. 1:07 Alcohol 4:39 Skin Health 10:22 Your Circadian Rhythm 13:39 Fasting 16:11 Stress  19:44 Joyful Activities 22:18 Cancer 29:51 Reducing Inflammation 35:18 Elimination Diet Alternatives 39:06 Identifying SIBO 42:25 Preventing Travel-Induced Constipation 51:25 Microbiome Tips Listen to the full conversations featured in this episode:  The Health Effects of Alcohol: Gut Health & Cancer with Dr. Robynn Chutkan & Dr. William Li Relieve Stress Now: Science To Feel Calmer & Happier with Dr. Elissa Epel Your Trickiest Healthy Eating Qs, Answered: Weight Loss, Protein, Gut Health, Longevity, And More Ask the Doctors, Energy Edition: The Surprising Things Draining It + An Exact Plan To Get It Back The Future of Gut Health: Cancer Treatment, Circadian Rhythms, Mental Health Advancements, and So Much More with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz How To Eliminate Bloat & Constipation (+ SIBO, IBS, Parasites, Period Poops & More) With Tamara Duker Freuman, MS, RD, CDN Gut Health Hacks—Quick & Easy Solutions To Your Biggest Gut Problems with Dr. Megan Rossi Healthy Eating Qs, Answered: Inflammation, Weight Loss, Hormone Health & More with Functional RD Brigid Titgemeier Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.  This episode is sponsored by: Seed: go to seed.com/lizmoody and use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first month. ZocDoc: go to ZocDoc.com/LizMoody and download the Zocdoc app for FREE and book a top-rated doctor today. Osea: get 10% off your first order at oseamalibu.com with code LIZMOODY10. Shopify: sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/lizm. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Liz Moody podcast. Today we have a very fun episode. I have pulled together the eight best gut health tips that we have learned on the Liz Moody podcast. These are actionable steps and insider information that you will not hear anywhere else, designed to both help you deal with gut issues like bloating and constipation, but also to help you keep your microbiome thriving because we are learning more and more that our microbiome is key to so many parts of our health, including having a healthy health.

Microbiome is really key for reduction of cancer risk, heart disease, dementia risk, so much more. So keeping our microbiome healthy is key, and this episode is going to help you do just that. There's a lot of information in the episode, so if you want some key takeaways when you were done listening, head over to lizmoody.substack.com and sign up for our brand new newsletter, which has action steps for each episode, as well as meal plans, workout plans. We just did a get your attention back challenge. That's still all up so you can do this. that on your own if you would like. Bonus interviews, so much good stuff at Liz Moody.substack.com. To kick things off, let's hear from Dr. Robin Chutkin, a Yale and Columbia educated

gastroenterologist. She is the founder of the Digestive Center for Wellness. She's the author of four incredible books about the microbiome and gut health. We're going to get into a lot of different ways that we can kind of support our system if we are engaging with alcohol, but I would love to talk about the microbiome for a second. I'm curious what, if any, impact alcohol has on our microbiome. Alcohol kills bacteria. I don't know if I can be any clearer than that. Before we had antibiotics, we had alcohol.

If you watch some of these shows that were pre-penicillic late 1920s, what you'll see is they used alcohol as the main antiseptic and what they used to sterilize a wound and sterilize the instruments and so in the operating room. And what's really interesting, Liz, is if you go today to get blood drawn at any commercial lab, what do they use? They use a little alcohol swab on your skin to clean the skin, to kill microbes. So antibiotics kill bacteria. Alcohol kills bacteria. Now, fortunately, alcohol kills less bacteria than antibiotics, but it is what we call bactericidal. It does kill microbes. It also seems to do something else, which is it disrupts the communication between the microbes and the immune cells.

And that communication is really essential for good immune function, which is why we see alcohol having such a profound effect on so many things. For example, our ability to recover post-operatively, respiratory infections, response to chemotherapy, prognosis from cancer. And that's because really of the effect of the gut on the immune system. And a lot of that effect happens through disrupting the communication, the signals that the gut microbes gives the immune system to sort of tell it what to do. That's so interesting. From a microbial perspective, because your microbe, bioim impacts your brain, it impacts your skin, it impacts so much more than that. What impact is killing those bacteria having? When we talk about the gut brain connection, we know that somewhere

around 70 to 80 percent of serotonin, the feel-good hormone, one of the main neurotransmitters, is really synthesized in the gut through the activity of gut bacteria. So when you are disrupting the gut microbiome, you are disrupting production of serotonin, not only can that lead to mood disorders of depression, anxiety, etc. But serotonin is one of the precursor hormones for melatonin, the sleep hormone. So it's also going to disrupt sleep. And that disruption of sleep is also going to interfere with our immune system because we know sleep is this sort of magic elixir that resets our immune system.

And when we're sleep deprived, we are less able to defend ourselves from infection. We even see a significant decrease response to vaccines when we're sleep deprived. They can be less than 50 percent. effective. And we see similarly that heavy alcohol consumption can also interfere with our response to vaccines. It really is all connected. The gut can affect things like mood and behavior, and the brain can affect gut secretion, absorption of nutrients, motility, et cetera. When you have this disruption in that bi-directional communication that occurs through the vagus nerve, one of the cranial nerves, you see effects on both, really. You see the effects on the gut as a result of the alcohol,

you also see these neurological effects. Is that why the day after drinking, I sometimes feel really sad or really anxious? Absolutely. That makes so much sense. And I want to get into hangovers, but first I want to talk about skin. When we are impacting our microbiome in this way, is that showing up in our skin? If somebody's having skin conditions or skin issues, would you say we could look to alcohol as a potential cause for that? It absolutely affects it. And we can think about the skin as sort of the outside of our GI tract, because when we ingest food, it gets excreted out, and it gets excreted through the digestive tract, but it also gets excreted through the skin. We can often see skin eruptions, allergies, reactions to food that we eat. Our skin is also an organ of elimination

and an organ of digestion and ingestion like our GI tract, and just like our GI tract, where we have that one cell thick lining, the intestinal epithelial barrier, that protects us from the outside world, because, of course, when we're ingesting food and other things, it's not really in our body. It's in this long tunnel, and it has to go through the gut lining to get absorbed. We know that alcohol disrupts that gut lining. It causes an increase in intestinal permeability. It makes that gut lining leaky. Well, it can do the same thing with the skin. It can also affect the barrier function of the skin. It can affect the skin elasticity and permeability, making it easier for toxins to penetrate through our skin. Are there any foods that can

help us from a microbiome or gut or liver perspective in the moment when we're drinking or when we're hungover? And then we'll talk about foods that might support us in a more long-term general sense. While you're drinking, probably the best thing you can do is make sure you're not drinking on an empty stomach. So make sure that you have some food that can slow down absorption of the alcohol. Because remember, alcohol is absorbed. directly from the stomach lining right into the bloodstream, and that's fast. And lots of people, especially young people, they want to get a really deep buzz on. They like to drink on an empty stomach, but it means that your alcohol levels are going to rise much faster, and you're going to be

doing the damage that the alcohol is doing much faster. So don't drink on an empty stomach, number one. The foods that you can eat are not so much things that are going to immediately alleviate, the symptoms not eating something like heavy, greasy fried food, just the kind of of food you typically want to eat when you're drinking. But not eating those foods can be really helpful because those high fat foods also slow down the emptying of the stomach. And so those can just sort of exacerbate the symptoms. They're more likely to cause reflux, which the alcohol is also causing. So it's sort of a double whammy. But in general, what you want to do in terms of foods that you would eat if you were also drinking would be foods that support the health of the microbiome.

Fermented foods high on that list. We know that foods like sauerkraut and kimchi are this sort of magical combination of pre-pro and post-biotic. So it's a fiber to feed the microbes, the microbes themselves that are being produced in the fermentation process, and then all the metabolites that they're making, like shortchained fatty acids, et cetera. And you don't need a ton. I mean, a tablespoon of sauerkraut is about 10 grams that's going to give you typically over a billion microbes plus all the post-metabolites they're making. And high fiber foods in general, really helpful. In the immediate setting of drinking, high-fiber. Fiber foods can be very filling and they can make you feel a little uncomfortable,

particularly if you're drinking at night, which is more likely. If you're drinking in the evening, the gastric contractility and really the activity of the GI tract in general slows way down once the sun sets. So for some people, whilst I'm always promoting high fiber foods and high fiber foods really help to move things in a sort of efficient manner through the GI tract, if you're drinking at night and you're eating a lot of fiber, that can have. have a similar effect to a high fat meal can slow things down a little bit, make you feel really full, predispose you to reflux.

So I'd recommend you have your fiber a little earlier in the day. And certainly high fiber foods as well as the fermented foods are things to think about in terms of creating a healthy microbiome. And then is there anything else that you would recommend somebody who's a regular drinker who wants to have alcohol be a part of their lives? Is there anything else that you would recommend they add in on a regular basis to their diet to support their liver or their microbiome or anything like that? Yeah, we know that there are some foods that can help support the liver, and those would be

the really deep green vegetables like the Brassica family. Those can really help support the liver. We also want to make sure that you're not really doing other things that are really going to put a stress on the liver. So I talked about Tylenol, acetaminophen before, and lots of other drugs. I mean, most drugs are metabolized through the liver. And so I would advise people to even look at some of the supplements or taking, et cetera, and see how you can sort of ease up. the work that the liver has to do. There are things, too, that can support microbial health and liver health, like mushroom tea using Shitaki or Maitaki mushrooms, a couple dried caps of those mushrooms chopped up, steeped in hot water, making those teas can be helpful. There are some anti-east

foods that can be helpful in this setting because depending on what kind of alcohol you're drinking, if you're drinking a lot of Prosecco and sweeter drinks, margaritas and things like that, you could be at risk for fungal overgrowth, depending on what the rest of your diet looks like. And of course, again, you're killing off a lot of healthy bacteria, sometimes allowing the yeast species to proliferate. So eating some of these anti-Canada foods like pumpkin seeds, seaweed, rotebago, coconut oil has some activity. These things can be helpful also. Next up is Dr. Will Bolshewitz, or Dr. B. Dr. B is the author of Fiber Fueled and the Fiber Fueled cookbook. He is the U.S. medical director of the Revolutionary Gut Huffington.

health company Zoe. He is the founder of the digestive support supplement 38 Terra and so much more. We're sort of like dancing around the idea of a circadian rhythm, which I'd love to talk about more in depth because I think if we're talking about the future of gut health or the future of all types of health, becoming more aware of how our circadian rhythm impacts basically all parts of our body. It's going to be more and more important. We're going to have more and more research into it. So I would love to get your take on how your gut health impacts your circadian rhythm and conversely how your circadian rhythm impacts your gut health. Our gut microbes have a circadian rhythm.

So do we. So when we think about ourselves as this superorganism, we have to bear in mind that the gut microbes have a circadian rhythm too. You could feed a person the exact same meal at different time points during the day and you will get different responses in terms of their blood sugar. Literally oatmeal for breakfast or oatmeal for dinner, higher blood sugar when you give them the oatmeal at dinner. So there's one common bond when we talk about evolution and all life on this planet.

Every single living creature on this planet evolved with the rise and the fall in the sun. There are many different circumstances that can vary, but the one circumstance that was always there is the sun goes up and then the sun goes down. That's really what ultimately led to us developing a circadian rhythm and it does affect our gut microbes. They thrive on consistency. When we shift meal times around, we're messing with that consistency that they want. When we shift sleep times around, we're messing with them, right?

When we sleep at a certain time during the week and then we go out till three in the morning on the weekend. And then you wonder why you're so hung over. It's not just the alcohol. There's these layers of complexity where our body truly thrives on a rhythm. I would go so far as to say this is our circadian rhythm, but it's also like even our gut, our gut thrives on a rhythm. Good, regular, complete bowel movements.

That's a big part of what makes our gut work best. You mentioned the oatmeal example. Are there any other things that your gut microbiome likes at specific times of day? This is research coming from this company, Zoe, that I work with. We've published more than 40 papers. One of the studies that we have, we showed that late night food consumption actually increases inflammatory markers, and they can perpetuate almost until the morning. So the idea of fasting, like time-restricted eating, this to me makes a lot of sense,

in part because we're having hopefully an earlier dinner time. and then we're avoiding this pitfall of late night snacking. Because that late night snacking again is like basically creating an inflammatory environment that your gut never actually truly recovers from because then you wake up the next morning and you hit it again. Okay. So even if you're not looking to actually fast, having your dinner on the earlier side, is there at least to get really granular?

Is there a time that you would view is cut off, like an amount of hours before bed that you would recommend having your dinner? I think in a perfect world, people are having their dinner, certainly before 8 p.m. ideally to me before 7 p.m. And then part of it is the amount of time in between. So like after you have dinner, you can drink water. You could have tea from my perspective, but you want to try to avoid eating solid food. And if you give that 12 hours and you wait until the following day, then actually our studies would suggest that 12 hours without eating food is actually adequate time to allow the gut to heal and reset itself.

Fasting is an interesting one for me because I've heard really mixed reviews. Fasting is great because it gives your digestive system a quote-unquote break, but also that fasting can be more negative because at a certain point, your microbiome starts to digest itself or digest your cell walls or something like that. What is your take on fasting in general? Fasting for more than 24 hours, it's suggested that actually is harmful to the microbiome because they actually are no longer being nourished with their own food supply.

so then they start consuming this mucus layer that lines the intestines. 12 hours of fasting is a healthy amount of space to allow your microbiome to rest. 12 hours is very easy. Many people don't even consider that in sort of the fasting space. I think where we run into trouble with, like so many things, is that when we hype things up to the point that people think this is like the shortcut to human health, then we double, triple, quadruple down on it, and we go too hard on it, and we lose sight of the fact that this is just one tool.

And it's just one part of what makes you a healthy human. Yeah, totally agree. What about snacking in terms of that? Do you think that giving your digestive system a break between meals is important? So we're starting to study snacking in more detail. What we're finding is that the quality of the snack is difference making. So when you eat a high quality snack, then it actually doesn't cause metabolic harm. When you eat an unhealthy snack, then it actually disrupts your metabolism.

And it makes you far more likely to overeat during the day. I've heard about, is it the, like these sweeper cells that come in when you have three to four hours of not eating that come in and kind of like clean out your intestines. And if you don't have those sweeper cells be activated, you can cause digestive issues down the line. Is that not true? So you're referring to our normal bowel motility and specific movements of motility that occur. So I think that taking a break between meals makes sense. Speaking to the motility like that, it's more of a theoretical take. I think the question is, like, is snacking if it's healthy food actually causing harm to our body? I have not seen evidence that that is the case.

But this is something that we're continuing to look into in more detail. Just in a very quick way, what do you consider a high-quality snack versus a low-quality snack? Are there factors that make something a high-quality snack? I would describe it as less processed. Eating a handful of raspberries is clearly a high-quality snack, right? and people don't necessarily think of that as a snack, but why not? You know, or eating an apple as opposed to eating a bag of chips. This next tip is so cool.

Dr. Alyssa Epple is not an MD or a GI doctor like so many of the experts that we're hearing from today. She holds a PhD in psychology, and she's the director of the aging, metabolism, and emotion center at UCSF. What you're about to hear is research connecting your levels of stress and the health of your microbiome. Your stress is hugely impactful, and this is a not discussed frequently enough way to take care of your gut. I would also love to talk about stress in the microbiome and how that would impact how our stomach feels, the foods we crave, all of that type of stuff. There was a point where I swore that I had IBS.

My stomach hurt so bad with every single thing that I ate. I was changing my diet. I was trying all these supplements. I was literally just eating rice and chicken at one point. And then I moved from a very stressful situation to a non-stressful situation and my stomach problems completely went away. What does the research show about stress in our microbiomes? So much of our nervous system is within our gut. And when we can change situations, change the chronically stressful source, then we can have.

have, you know, this release or relief. And not everyone can change their life situation in that way, but that is clear that the number one question to ask ourselves is, is there some way that we can really alter the sources of chronic stress? One of the most common sources of our chronic stress is our thoughts. So we talked a lot about that, how to release stressful thoughts so that we're not carrying stress with us, but there are so many other sources. We call them stressors, not stress or stress responses, but actually what's happening in our environment. So recognizing those and trying to do what we can to buffer those and change the social stressors that we're exposed to is just as important as trying to control our responses. So your question about the

guide, the bidirectional path between what signals, our body sending us and what our mind and our thoughts are sending our body is pretty strong. And so dealing with gut issues is sometimes a way to help depression in our mood because we know that there's certain biota that create depression. And then vice versa, right, as well, because it's a bidirectional relationship. So dealing with our stress, our mood can have this effect on our gut. Absolutely. So there's a lot of animal models that have shown that how chronic stress is shape in our microbiome and how it can create states of depression. Now, in terms of creating that ability to feel ease, and that's just so hard to get, one thing that we have really understood about how the mind works is that we're so geared up for stress. we're so good at perceiving stress that it doesn't just go away when we go into a relaxing

environment. We need to consciously and effortfully refocus our attention onto number one, feeling safe. And number two, seeing beauty and joy and goodness. We don't naturally go there, but we can easily make it a habit to go there. We've developed a digital platform to bring happiness practices to people. And we've just unveiled the results of that in a preliminary way. So this is a platform called the Big Joy Project and anyone can sign up for it. We've had 70,000 people sign up for it. And what we've done is we've taken these little practices from research, these little

studies that show that if we do this thing, like let's say list what we're grateful for, that it can create positive emotion that is significantly higher and it might last a few hours in the lab. So we've taken that into the real world and said, is there any ecological validity to this? Can we test out these practices and see if for people walking around in their typical day, does it create the boost of joy and does it last till that night? And do they feel any better at the end of the week? The answer is absolutely. We have big effects.

We've seen big effects in this large sample that we can shift our attention to beauty, gratitude, making someone else happy. Is it just about awareness about the good things that are happening all around you? Or are there activities that are universally sparking joy for people? I think it's both. We have so much beauty around us that we don't notice. Turning on the light of awareness is one way. way that we can shift our filter away from being attuned to threat and looking for threat

and interpreting things, ambiguous things as negative. And then really actually just seeing the goodness that's there, Ticknahan, the Zen master, said, we're so focused on miracles like walking on water, but actually the real miracle is walking on earth. Can we see the small miracles of everyday life, like eating? and having mindful eating be this joyous activity where we're thinking about all the people from the farmer to the table who played a role in this. So we're feeling appreciation, feeling connection.

And then we're actually really enjoying the food because we're focusing on the pleasure. And there's a savoring that we can have, regardless of what we're eating, that is turning on that universal reward response, that otherwise we could just be completely, blind to. Dr. Tim Specter is one of the most cited researchers in all of science history. As the geneticist

head of the long-running Twins U.K. study and author of four books about diet and gut health, he is somebody who is elbows deep daily in new studies. We're doing a big study between my group in London and a big group in the U.S. to look at these early cancers

of the colon, which have suddenly... Skyrocket. Skyrocket. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly, as you said, people aged in 20 and 40 getting all these things, which they never used to. And trying to work out how much of that is diet, how much that is pollution, how much it is, you know, driving cars, you know, whatever viruses, COVID, who knows what, you know, these things are. It's some other trigger that's come in. And usually there's more than one cause.

So, you know, you might have to have the right genes, wrong set of gut microbes, plus something else happening to you. perhaps a bit of luck as well. To my mind, if we hadn't shifted our diet so dramatically in the last 50 years, we wouldn't be facing this. There could be a number of ways it happens, but I studied twins for 30 years, identical twins, and very often one would get one of these cancers, and the other one wouldn't, and they lived their lives together. Which suggests that it's maybe not exclusively something in the environment, something that can't be differentiated between the two. It might have been some infection that one of them had at some point and the other one didn't because they got the same genes. They lived for 18 years in the same house, but they have different friends.

They might have got infections at different times. That might have affected their immune system. And we also know that their gut microbes, even in identical twins, are very different. That was one of the big sort of shocks for me when I was doing my own. And is that because of what they were eating or just they were born with different microbes? Yeah, we're born with zero microbes. so we acquire them during life. And depending on whether who had a cold virus first or second,

who got ill, who got given antibiotics first, even identical twins, things happened a bit randomly. Who got a gastro infection, who didn't. They will change the gut microbes. So they end up being really not much more similar to you and I, which is about the only thing in identical twins that's really different. Wow. So that made me think that the gut microbes.

microbes are really the key to a lot of these problems. Okay, that's so interesting. So basically it's like if one twin is getting breast cancer and the other twin isn't getting breast cancer and genetically they're exactly the same. You're looking at all these other factors, they're exactly the same. And the only thing that's different is the gut microbiome

that leads us to believe that the gut microbiome is very deeply involved in all of these cancers and things like that. Correct. And that really was the aha moment for me that made me shift from being a geneticist to being a scientist in gut health saying this has got to be where the answers are. It's not just in the genetics. Do you feel like you've gotten some of those answers at this point,

like concretely enough that you can say eat this and this will reduce your risk of cancer? I've got it broadly. Okay. Which is the 30 plants of that or anything more? Yeah. So we've got a lot of generic advice now that is getting clear that we know what a healthy gut looks like. We also have done some studies in cancer and showed that people with end-stage melanoma, skin cancer, who are on these immunotherapy drugs, which boost the immune system in order to fight the cancer,

fantastic drugs. But whether they lived or died, the main difference between them was the state of their gut microbes when they started treatment. Wow. Most oncologists don't discuss that with their patients. Wow. Is there like a crash course we can do in rebuilding our gut microbiome? Like if we wanted to do like one week where we're just trying to like go hard and be like, oh, I'm going to build up my gut microbiome

for all these benefits. I'm going to replenish it, all these things. Like, is there something we could blast it with? Yeah, well, the thing we haven't mentioned, of course, as well as the 30 plants and eating the rainbow and this stuff is fermented foods. Hitting it hard with every fermented food you've got. And this is what I tell cancer patient,

I'm not allowed to give specific advice, but I say, listen, build up your gut micro. however you can, you know, you've got a short time to do this. And many of these patients don't have time because they're so, you've got to go on therapy in a month's time, whatever. They're given no advice from the hospital because they're only worried about the drugs.

Avoid antibiotics because that could be fatal for you. If you mess up your gut microbes, they won't then respond to the drug. And, you know, improve your gut health as much as you can. They're all different because some of them don't have appetites and it's hard. but I really push the diversity of plants, but fermented foods for me,

the secret weapon for many people. So whichever ones you like, you know, there are at least a dozen of them, pick the, you know, small amounts of them all, and get as many different of these probiotic microbes into a system which we know helps the immune system. So they've done studies on this now. It's proven.

It's not just sort of folklore. And do those probiotics actually make it to the parts of your gut and to your intestinal tract where they can, They do, yeah. Populate and make a difference. There was an initial myth that they all got broken down in the stomach, and none of them made it through,

but there's no doubt now that you still get hundreds of millions or billions of them still getting through, and they do have an effect as they pass through. They don't necessarily stay there, but as they're passing through, they're having positive effects on your body. What are they doing? Do we know? We don't know exactly what they're doing.

We think they're triggering the immune system in a way and also sending signals to the existing microbes there to produce healthy other chemicals. So you're not like eating sauerkraut, and then the probiotics in that sauerkraut are colonizing your gut. You're eating sauerkraut, the probiotics and that sauerkraut are going through your body. They're sending messages to your immune system. They're sending messages to your inherent microbes and then they're going on their merry way. Yes. I mean, some of them might hang around for a few days. There's some evidence of that, but generally they're not there for long. They're not designed to stay in your body. Okay. They're designed to stay on cabbage, you know? So once the cabbage is

gone, they're out of there, you know, they're so they've got nothing to eat. They're very specialized. Is it a problem that there's only like a few types of probiotics in fermented food, like lactobacillus, I'm not sure the exact type, but that there's only a few kinds and we need this really broad diversity? Well, there's more diversity in fermented foods. than there are in probiotic tablets, which most people are surprised by. I am. You can see my face.

You've raised your eyebrows. You'll get at least 30 types of microbe in, say, a kimchi or a kombucha. Okay. Which compares to it, a yoghut, you might only get three. Milk keifers, you've got between sort of eight and 25. They all vary to different amounts. But if you mix them up, you're getting a pretty good range of 50 or so different microbes and even different makes of kimchi's will have different microbes in them and fungi

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Next up is Dr. Lee is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, eat to beat disease and eat to beat your diet. He's the CEO and president of the global nonprofit angiogenesis foundation, and he is taught at Harvard, Tufts, and Dartmouth. Can you give us three action steps we can take if we're listening to this and we feel like, oh, maybe inflammation is the root cause of my low energy? The first thing I would say that you should really, really cut down on is added sugar, especially when it comes to soda. A single can of soda has like seven to nine teaspoons of sugar, way too much sugar. that is going to trigger inflammation into your body just by metabolic overload. And that is something that if you cut down or cut out, you're immediately going to actually

have less inflammation in your body. Now, what about diet soda, non-caloric sweeteners, in a way even worse? And let me tell you why. Even though you don't get the calories with a diet soda, what we've now discovered is that those non-nutriative sweeteners are spartame, sucralose, saccharine, you name, the whole shebang of these artificial additives that taste sweet on the tongue, they damage our gut microbiome. In fact, they kill some of the good healthy bacteria. Now, our microbiome is these healthy bacteria that we know live in our gut. We talk about gut health. And when you damage those

bacteria, they can't do their job. So what's one of the most important jobs of our gut microbiome? Well, there's a lot of jobs they do. But one of the most important is that, When the gut microbiome is doing its job, it's releasing substances called short chain fatty acids. These are postbiotics made by the gut bacteria. You know what they do? They lower your inflammation, all by themselves. Mother Nature's best non-steroidal anti-inflammatory is actually in our gut. Our gut is given us like Motrin Plus all the time, as long as we're actually treating them well.

But if you poison the gut bacteria with artificial sweeteners or emulsifiers now, we realize like thickeners can also do the same thing. Hey, you know what? They're not happy. When they're not happy, they're not doing their job. When they're not doing their job, they're not lowering inflammation. Now your inflammation levels go up. One thing you could do with diet that is very simple is to cut down or cut out sodas.

Both regular soda or diet soda is a simple way of actually lowering inflammation in your body. A second way that I would actually tell you of something that you can actually do that will actually help you lower inflammation through the same mechanism, through your gut. Fiber is what the gut bacteria love. They absolutely crave dietary fiber. Dietary fiber is like candy to our gut bacteria. They love it. And when you feed the gut bacteria dietary fiber, especially soluble fiber, okay?

This is stuff that kind of dissolves and goes into our gut. they munch on that stuff and then they produce more short chain fatty acids. So what's a practical way of getting more soluble fiber? Well, if you eat foods that taste like fiber, you know, like broccoli and kale, you know that they got some fiber in them, you're going to get some dietary fiber. But there are some other softer foods you might not suspect have dietary fiber like mushrooms. Mushrooms have a dietary fiber called beta D. Glucan. If you look at a mushroom that's cooked, it doesn't look like it has a lot of fiber in it, right? It's kind of soft and bendy.

Well, that's the kind of fiber that your bacteria love to have. That same dietary fiber that you find in mushrooms is also found in oats like oatmeal. All right, so you can make a healthy bowl of oatmeal that can be helpful. And another way of getting dietary fiber is eating seasonal fruits. So in the winter, you know, you've got pears that are actually an average size pear has five to six grams of dietary fiber. All right. You're 20% of the way there

of getting your daily load just with a single pair. Of course, veggies. The third thing I would actually say for lowering inflammation is actually being physically active because if you actually are regularly physically active, now I'm not talking about training for a marathon

or an Iron Man competition, ultra training will actually cause more inflammation because you're damaging your muscles to really stretch yourself to the limit. I'm talking about staying regularly, physically active. So if you have a gym, keep it up. If you want to do cardio, high intensity training, good. That's actually good. But, you know, some people watching this might say, hey, you know what? That's not me. I just can't bring myself to do that. What am I supposed to do? And what I'll tell you, and this is accessible

to anybody. If you just go for a 30-minute walk every single day, eat some dinner, go out for a walk. And what you want to do is stay in motion because our bodies are designed by nature to actually move. That's part of what keeps us going. And by moving, we're stimulating blood flow. We don't want to be inflamed when we're actually active. Even the signals from our brain after exercise can actually calm down inflammation in your body. So three things, super easy. Okay, regular movement, eating foods with dietary fiber.

There are hundreds of foods with dietary fiber. And cutting down or cutting out soda. diet or regular are my recommendations for easy steps that anybody can do. Now we're going to hear from Tamara Duker-Froyman, a GI dietician and author of the books The Bloated Belly Whisper and Regular. She works day in and day out with patients who suffer from ailments like IBS, SIBO, dyspepsia, and all kinds of gut irregularities. She is on the front lines healing our guts every single day, so let's get right into her advice.

I think a lot of people do elimination diets because they're having bloating, constipation, cramping, they're having these symptoms and they don't know where to start in terms of getting rid of them. So instead of an elimination diet, what would you do in that scenario? You know, elimination diets, when you have no idea why you have a symptom, is like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. If your problem is fundamentally that you're completely backed up full of stool, then eliminate legumes or dairy or whatever is not going to help you. Or if you're bloating is caused because your stomach is just really slow to empty, it's not that you have a food intolerance to something that a test is going to show you. So if you're just kind of like assuming that an elimination

diet is the intervention, you're making an assumption that a specific food is the cause of your symptoms. And so I really try to encourage people not to go that route until we have a reasonable hypothesis that, yes, it does really actually look like an adverse food reaction or food intolerance is underlying the symptoms. And then to really be as pinpointing and kind of scalpel as possible rather than sledgehammer. So rather than completely eliminate everything other than like chicken and rice and build your foods back up one by one, can we develop a reasonable hypothesis, an educated guess? What's the most likely culprit is? Do we think that it might just be lactose or is it maybe just onions and garlic. If you need to undertake some sort of elimination diet,

because you're pretty sure it's something specific that you're eating, can you, with the help of a registered dietitian, narrow it down a little bit so that it's not like a sweeping elimination diet? It's a very targeted elimination diet. And really a good elimination diet, if you get it right, you only need a week or two to know if it's helping. Things are in and out of your gut within 24 to 72 hours. You don't need more. than two weeks on an elimination diet to know if it's helping. And if it's not helping, please reintroduce the food. In your opinion, if we find a food-based culprit, are we likely going to be eliminating that thing forever? Or are we going to be healing our microbiome in a way that allows

us to eventually reintroduce it? Great question. Totally depends on why you have that intolerance. So some people have what we would call a primary intolerance to something, meaning that you organically, Liz, your body does not like that food, you do not digest that food, even when your microbiome is doing great and you are well. And that's just how your body is. A good example of that is lactose intolerance. Some people just are programmed genetically to become lactose intolerant in their teens or 20s, and that's how you roll. Some people similarly could have other genetically programmed intolerances like fructose intolerance or even sucrose intolerance, which we don't hear about, but it's a real thing. Some people have celiac disease, right? Like these are things that are like

native to you that cannot be fixed no matter how much healing you try to do in your gut. For many of these food intolerances, there are enzymes available either over the counter or prescription that can help with food tolerance. So in those cases, you still may be able to reintroduce a food with the use of enzymes if they exist. But then there are these other cases where you may have a secondary food intolerance. In other words, you have developed a sensitivity to a food because of something else going on in your body that is treatable. And if we can identify what that is and treat it, your tolerance of those foods may very well be restored. A really good example of that would be something called SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

Sometimes there are circumstances in your gut where excess bacteria can really thrive in the small intestine where they don't belong. You're not really supposed to have a lot of bacteria in your small intestine. Some people have various physiological reasons, predispositions, that their small bowel gets really hospitable to excess bacteria. And if you start to get too much bacteria in your small intestine, there's a whole host of foods that maybe once upon a time you tolerated, that now these bacteria are like, oh, I love artichokes. I love beans. I love the sugar alcohols and peaches and nectarines. And every time you eat all these categories of foods, you get a ton of gas and bloating. That's a temporary food intolerance. If we can identify, diagnose, treat the CBO, hopefully correct

the underlying cause why you developed it, your tolerance of those foods should be restored, and it's not a given that you should have to avoid those foods forever. We kind of have to distinguish between, is this an organic food intolerance that is not really remediable, or is it a secondary food intolerance that is? I got so many questions about SIBO. In your mind, what are some good signs that their symptoms are pointing to SIBO? And what's the first step they should take if they suspect that they have it. So with SIBO, one of the first things you're seeing is foods that you used to tolerate fine are all of a sudden giving you a lot of pretty immediate grief. Immediately, I'd say, within the hour, maybe 90 minutes. But SIBO symptoms onset pretty quickly after eating.

And again, these are foods that you used to do fine with, right? It's not like, oh, ever since I was a little kid, garlic gave me trouble. You probably haven't had SIBO since you were a little kid. But if you could eat a certain Chinese restaurant meal all the time and feel fine, all of a sudden you're blowing up like a balloon with horrible gas, bloating, maybe diarrhea, that's one sign, new onset food intolerances to a variety of different foods, not just like one random thing. With Siba, we often, not always, but usually see a change in your stool consistency or your bowel patterns. Your poops look weird. There are weird textures. Sometimes people describe them as like sticky or tarry or hard to wipe, kind of a mess. Or some people will. kind of start to just have more diarrhea or more frequent bowel movements. Some other people will be like, I used to be totally regular and now I'm super constipated and I've literally changed nothing about my diet. So some sort of change in bowel patterns or stool consistency is pretty common with SIBO. With SIBO usually morning is your best time of day. In other words, when you're fasted, you haven't eaten since overnight and everything is clear and the bacteria haven't been active or fermenting anything

for like hours, you feel fine. And then the symptoms typically start to get worse with subsequent meals throughout the day. That's often a sign of SIBO. Sometimes we'll see people have a vitamin B12 deficiency, even though they eat their usual diet and they're not vegans. Like, why would I be B12 deficient? Sometimes we see that with SIBO. Sometimes we can see weight changes, mostly weight loss. Every so often people claim that they get so bloated and swollen that they gain, but it's usually a loss. These are a variety of the things that I'm looking for when I start to get suspicious for SIBO. and if you suspect it, you should see a gastroenterologist and ask for a breath test to confirm the diagnosis. Dr. Megan Rossi is an award-winning gut health scientist, a PhD in researcher at King's College, London, and a registered dietitian.

She's published tons of research regarding gut health and disorders like IBS and Crohn's disease. Her depth of knowledge knows no bounds, but I tapped her for something very specific, why traveling irritates our digestion so much, why it makes us so bloated and uncomforty, and constipated and what we can do to keep ourselves in tip-top shape when we are on vacation. Okay, the number one question that I got when I asked my listeners what questions they wanted me to ask you was about travel-induced constipation. There are people who said, I have tried literally everything you're supposed to do to not get constipated when I travel. It still happened. So I would love to know what causes travel-induced constipation and then what are the best fixes

that will work for these poor constipated people. Look, I absolutely understand, you know, on a personal note, a hack that I sound really beneficial, is taking some cillium husk with me. But if we go back to your original question about what causes it, it is actually different for different people because there's not one strategy

that will help everyone's constipation. So, for example, some of the basic things is hydration and fluid. Often when we travel, we aren't as hydrated. We aren't as having as many types of high-fiber food. So that's kind of a basic one. But actually, for some people, they're having all those things, and that's not impacting them. For other people, it's looking at the types of fiber.

So that's where I mentioned at the cillium husk is a really helpful laxating type of fiber that people can have. And I talk about the Cillium husk prescription in the book, but it's, you know, having, depending on how sense of you got is, maybe starting with one tablespoon with 125 mils of water. And then for other people, it's a case of not necessarily the nutrition aspect, but actually their pooping anxiety, which is a real thing. Because our boughs are such creatures of habit. So if we take them out of their normal routine of feeding, waking,

and also just the general smells of their house, then a lot of vows just shut up, shop. The muscles actually stop to work as effectively as they do when you're in a comfortable home environment. So for those people, actually, it's about thinking about doing five minutes of relaxation techniques around the toileting. Also, for those who are more nervous because of the smell, maybe that they're going in a public toilet where they don't really like that, then actually I've got this amazing recipe for poop puree

in the book where essentially it's literally just alcohol, a bit of detergent, and some sort of essence. And what you do is you spray it in the toilet bowl before you poop and then you poop, and then what it does is it traps the smell under the water of the toilet bowl. And then you flush it and it honestly is amazing. I have a little bottle of the stuff everywhere in my bag. Also makes a great Christmas present, particularly if you're on a budget, you can make them and give them to people and call it your poop puree. And yeah, it really hides any small.

You know, like toilet spray, it just is disgusting because it just like mixes with the smell and everyone knows what's happened if you've done the toilet spray. Whereas the poop puree, people don't know. It's magical stuff that you can make at home. Do you think that airplanes are actually having, or is there research on airplanes having an actual concrete effect on your gut. Like I've heard people say, look at what happens to your water bottle on a plane that's happening inside your body. And that's one of the reasons our guts get all messed up in air. Yeah. If we have a little bit of gas in our guts on the ground and we go up in the air because

of the change in the atmospheric pressure, that expands several fold. And that is often why people get tummy pain extra bloating, particularly on long haul flights. And, you know, when people go back down to the ground level, then the gas can reduce. But, actually because of it, the expansion, that can create a lot of tension. And that's why for several days after travelling, people, particularly if they've got a sensitive gut, i.e. more prone to IBS-type symptoms, then they can have, yeah, a really upset tummy around a flight time. So what I recommend for those people is actually 24 hours to 48 hours before you fly, particularly the long haul flights, is actually to reduce these fermentable

types of carbohydrates in your diet. And I talk about this Fodmap light approach. Would your audience know about the low Fodmap? They might, but I would love just like a 20 second recap so we can all be on the same page. So the low-fob-map diet is a medical diet actually, which takes out a lot of these really beneficial nutrients. A lot of them are called prebiotics, which feed the good bacteria. They take them out of the gut, out of your diet and therefore out of your gut, four to eight-week period, essentially to give your gut a little bit of rest. So in the medical world, we prescribe the low-forb map diet for people who've got really bad irritative bowel syndrome. And we know it

it absolutely works. And then after that eight weeks, it is so, so important that we actually start to reintroduce because, like I mentioned, these FODMAPs, i.e, a lot of them being pre-botics, feed the good bacteria. But when you've got IVS, sometimes you just need a little bit of a gut break. So that's why, you know, I developed this FodMap light approach where it doesn't take out all of the prebiotics. But if you've got a sensitive gut, or if you're flying, it takes out these highly fermentable foods, just like I said, 24 hours to 48 hours before. you fly out of your diet. So when you are going on the flight, there's not loads of gas, because when our gut bacteria faced with these Fodmap foods with these prebiotics, they eat

them because they're really good for them. But one of the natural waste products is gas. And for a lot of people, gas is absolutely fine. You know, some of it comes out the back end when you find, but also our body reabsorbs it and we breathe out a lot of gas. But for some people, We've got a really tense gut, particularly when you fly or you've got IBS, that gas gets trapped in your gut. And in turn, that leads to things like tummy pain. The bloating can even trigger things like constipation and diarrhea. So if you've been having issues when you fly, it might be worth just sort of looking up high

fodmap foods and then avoiding them for 24 hours before your flight. Yeah, but really important you reintroduce them because they are essentially fertilizer for your gut bacteria. You're from Australia and you're living in London, which is like, what, a 24-hour trek. I'm curious how you approach flying when you do it. Are there things that you do before or during? Do you eat on the plane? Do you eat at the airport? Do you pack certain food? Yeah. So I always do pack my cilium husk. So it's just a natural fiber you can get from most health food stores. It's actually quite cheap to get. So I definitely take that because that certainly helps

keep my bowels in their normal routine. Wait, just to get really granular on that, like how much just mixed into water. Do you do that before you fly? Do you do that every day of a trip? Yeah, no, I do it every day of a trip. And I have about two tablespoons, but my gut is very used to it. So what I recommend is that people do titrate it based on their gut sensitivities. I also do take my own snacks on the airplane because the airplane snack food is always so terrible. So I do make sure that I have them packed because your gut is already going through a lot of change in terms of atmospheric pressure, time differences, you know, your sleep regime, all of these things actually impact your gut independent of diet. So it is important that you nourish them with their favorite foods,

i.e. plants as much as you can. So yeah, I definitely take my own. If I'm quite stressed around that period, then I will slightly reduce the FODMAPs in my diet 24 hours before going on a flight. But actually, if I'm super chilled and my gut is 100% okay, then I don't even worry about that at all. It's more based on how sensitive or how stressed I am, how many books or how much work I've had to do before flying off. And then hydration, I think, is the other one that's really important in the air because your skin and everything dries out so much. I got to know what you're packing as you're playing snacks. So I make a range of legumes, so I dry them out. So I get like the four bean mix and then put them in the oven. I actually sprinkle them with a little of extra virginal

of oil, a little bit of smoky paprika, other batches I do rosemary. So I get a whole lot in and then hydrate them in the oven. So they're kind of like little crunchy nut snacks. So I love taking them. And then I always take my seeded crackers because you typically, you know, whatever you get in the plane, you can eat some of it. They've got, you know, some decent cheeses and usually there's a vegetarian meal. So I usually have my whole grain crackers that I make. They're mostly just seeds with a bit of oat flour and then like five different types of herbs and spices to really flavor them up. Yeah, they're probably my two like must haves. And then of course it all depends on like which airline I'm flying with because some of the airlines actually give away fruit as much

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masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. Last but certainly not least, we're going to hear from functional dietitian Bridget Tickmire. With a master's degree in public health nutrition and board certification in integrative and functional nutrition,

Bridget was a founding dietician at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. She's worked with thousands of patients to improve their gut health, and she's going to tell us exactly what we can be doing every single day to improve our own. What are your favorite things to do

for microbiome health. Like, could you give us a few things we could do every day? So there's a lot of things that you can do to support your microbiome through your food and lifestyle choices. And when I started lecturing physicians that worked in other areas when I worked at the Cleveland Clinic, I would routinely say to them, as more research comes out about the gut microbiome, it will become impossible for anyone to deny the significance of nutritional changes and what they can do for every single area of your health.

Because as conventional doctors, you know that the microbiome is currently being studied in every area of medicine, primarily because what they're trying to do is associate different disease states with increases in certain microbes, meaning that if a person has higher levels of certain microbes, then it would increase their likelihood of having Parkinson's disease or other diseases that are being studied because they want to be able to create pharmaceuticals that change the balance of your microbiome. So given that right now, all that we know that can dramatically change the microbiome is one, fecal transplants, which are only allowed to be recommended in the medical system if a person has resistant CETIF, meaning you're diagnosed with CETIF and your resistance to the intervention, and then you have to have a fecal transplant.

They're being studied right now for other things outside of resistant CETF. The only other way to change your microbiome, since we know the power of it, even just through some of these preliminary studies on fecal transplants is through diet. Diet is the only other way. And it's not just eating a few fermented foods. It's actually your entire comprehensive diet. This is why short-term diets don't work because the second that you go back to eating the foods that you used to eat, your microbiome is going to revert back to how it used to be.

This is the same with probiotics. When you stop taking probiotics, the benefits of the re-inoculation actually stop. So that's not to say that probiotics aren't extremely helpful for a lot of people. But it is to say that they cannot be the only intervention that you're using to actually change the composition of your gut. Diet has to be the first line of intervention, and that's predominantly whole foods that are rich in polyphenols, prebiotics, and dietary fiber as three of those crucial elements of a foundational gut health diet, in addition to then, of course, fermented foods for some of those healthy

bacterial strains. So just to make it abundantly clear, the idea is that your microbiome is impact. your entire body, but it is sort of hubbed in your gut. So you're feeding it from your gut, but then that's impacting your brain and your skin and your inflammation levels generally. It's kind of spoking off from your gut. Is that correct? Because the foods that you eat are being consumed by your microbes. You have hundreds of trillions of microbes living inside of you and you are what your gut bacteria eat. So if you're feeding your gut microbes less optimal foods,

they're going to release less optimal chemicals that create more dysbiosis, more inflammation, and actually make it harder for healthy microbes to thrive. If you're eating a diet that's higher in optimal foods, then it actually creates a increase in beneficial chemical releases and things like short-chain fatty acids that are proving more and more to be the foundation of gut health. in addition to the ability for them to compete with your less beneficial microbes. So you create an environment where you have more thriving microbes.

And a lot of times, your microbes actually drive your craving. So it's really a vicious cycle. If you're eating less optimal foods, you're feeding less optimal microbes. The microbes release these chemicals that actually change what you crave. So they pretty much sabotage you and increase the desire to eat more sugary foods, more processed foods so that they can survive and thrive and do more damage to your gut and your body. What little assholes.

I know. It's actually one of my favorite facts, though, is I think it gives people hope when they start eating well. I was a person who never crave vegetables. I didn't like any of that stuff. I was like a Ben and Jerry's Lane Quixing sugar cereal girl. And I think it gives you hope when you start going down that path that even if you're not craving vegetables now, that if you eat vegetables,

you'll crave more vegetables and it makes it feel like it'll get easier and more enjoyable because we want our diet to be enjoyable. We don't want to be sitting there with a grumpy face, chomping a carrot. But the more carrots you eat, the more carrots you'll crave. And I find that really helpful. 100%. Your taste buds crave what you feed your microbes. And so you can always retrain your taste buds.

And this is something that I see in people that are wearing continuous glucose monitors is that they can feel defeated because they're seeing so many blood sugar spikes or they have pre-diabetes or something like that. and they feel like they just need to be eating like a ketogenic diet for the rest of their life. And the really promising and hopeful thing is that because of metabolic flexibility and your ability to actually change your microbiome through your diet long term, you can change your glycemic response to different foods by changing various microbes, feeding more of those beneficial microbes and decreasing the foods that you're feeding those harmful microbes.

So I think that can be promising too that it's like your health is not a static point that you can always focus on optimizing through different ways if you feel like your labs aren't where you want them or your continuous glucose monitor data isn't exactly how you'd like it to look. Can you give me three microbe-friendly additions that we could add to either our daily or weekly diet? So some foods that you can eat to improve your microbes that help to improve your metabolic flexibility are a category of polyphenols called anthocyanins. And those are going to be found in things like blueberries, pomegranates.

It seeds, the berry family in general, things that are more blue and purple pigmented. Then also, green tea and matcha tea has been shown to do the same thing that helps to improve the microbial growth that helps to improve metabolic flexibility. And dark chocolates that you're going to find in 100% cacao. So whether you're adding cacao nibs to some yogurt or you're adding cacao powder to a smoothie or you're adding dark chocolate at the end of your lunch or dinner. All of those are great ways to increase that metabolic flexibility. What about fermented foods? Do you think that eating fermented foods makes a big difference in your microbiome? So there is research that shows that eating

fermented foods can improve your microbiome. And actually there was a 2021 study that was published by researchers at Stanford that showed that it can also help to decrease the inflammation that is created by your gut microbiome. So when you have more dysbiosis or microbial imbalances, it will increase production of chronic inflammation. This is why I'm so focused on blood sugar, inflammation, and gut health because they literally all three feed into one. So your gut health, if you have imbalances, increases your inflammation. If you're having blood sugar increases, it's going to increase your inflammation. It's also going to increase your poor gut health. If you have chronic inflammation, it's going to make you more susceptible to blood sugar rises.

it's also going to make you more susceptible to poor gut health. So it's like this triangle that continues to feed into one another. But I think that fermented foods are a very promising way to continue to re-inoculate your microbes with healthy bacterial strains. There's not an abundance of research showing whether fermented foods are more effective than taking a probiotic capsule. But I find it to be more sustainable, being able to create habits and food, and finding foods that you really love that you're incorporating into your diet on a regular basis

is a super sustainable way to feed some of those beneficial microbes. Unfortunately, that is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you have a friend who's always complaining that their stomach hurts, or just a friend who wants to take care of their microbiome, because again, taking care of our microbiome is going to reduce our cancer risk. It's going to reduce our dementia risk. It's going to reduce our inflammation levels. It is so important for our overall health.

So send it to the friend whose stomach hurts, but really just send it to anybody because we all need to take care of our microbiomes. It's really just like such an underlooked part of our overall health. And if you want to hear any more from these incredible experts, I'm going to link all of the episodes that these interviews originally came from in the show notes. Make sure that you're following the Liz Moody podcast on Apple Podcast on Spotify or on YouTube because we've got so many phenomenal episodes coming up. We've got one next week that's tackling actionable steps to deal with burnout. On Monday, we have our long-awaited life lessons from Sex and the City episode, which I promise that you will gain a ton from even if you are not a Sex in the City fan. Although if you're not a Sex and the City fan, I'm kind of like, what's going on there?

Should we talk about that? Following the podcast means that these episodes will show up right in your feed. You will never miss one. You'll never have to go search for one. And you can now watch full video episodes on YouTube and on Spotify, too. Also, we are able to bring you this show completely free because of the brands that you heard in this episode. You can save money on amazing products while supporting the show by using the discount codes that we share. There's a full list of all of our active ones at Liz Moody.com slash codes.

And remember to head over to Liz Moody. com to sign up for our newsletter, the takeaway. You're going to get action steps for each episode. You'll get that attention span challenge if you were interested in that. You can also come hang out on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody. I share how I am actually implementing everything that we learn in the podcast in my real life. Okay, I love you and I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast.

Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.