Well with Arielle Lorre - 69: Dr. Ellen Vora - A Functional Medicine Approach to Mental Health + How Our Nutrition Affects Our Minds 

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

In this episode I talk to Dr. Ellen Vora, a holistic psychiatrist who uses a functional medicine approach to mental health and whole-being wellness. We discuss how her approach differs from traditional western psychiatry; what factors are most important in being a truly fulfilled human being; how to shift from living in a chronically stressed response to one of relaxation; and overcoming scarcity mindset. We also talk about nutrition, how specific foods mimic drugs when we ingest them, and how to learn how to eat intuitively and trust our bodies. www.publicgoods.com/BLONDEFILES for $15 off your first order! www.blublox.com/BLONDE for 15% off your order! Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Sonderger Go to your Reisadviseur Orsonicars. The following podcast is A Dear Media Production Hey, welcome to the Blonde Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits.

I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all and live your best life. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show. I have such a good one for you today. I think this is a conversation that we all really need right now. In fact, this was originally going to go out like in the end of August, but I talked about it on Instagram a little bit and the response was pretty overwhelming. So I think hopefully it'll be really helpful. I personally was not in a good place mentally when I went into this interview. In fact, everything in me wanted to reschedule because I was in the middle of a crisis with school. and just overwhelmed by life. But that little voice inside me said to just do it. And I am so glad I did. So in this episode, I'm talking to Dr. Ellen Vora.

She is a graduate of Columbia University Med School. She received her BA from Yale University and is a board certified psychiatrist, acupuncturist, and yoga teacher. Dr. Vora takes a functional medicine approach to mental health, considering the whole person and addressing the problem at the root, rather than reflexively prescribing medication to suppress symptoms. She specializes in depression, anxiety, insomnia, women's mental health, adult ADHD, bipolar, autoimmunity, and digestive issues. So in this episode, we talk about a functional medicine approach to psychiatry. We talk about

what factors are most important when it comes to being a fulfilled human being. We talk how to set boundaries and avoid burnout, how to stop operating from a place of scarcity, which was huge for me. And at the end, we talk about specific foods for mental well-being, how certain foods mimic drugs, which is fascinating. And she also tells us what we should all stop doing and what we should start doing. So enjoy the episode. All right, so welcome, Ellen. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Ariel, thank you. I'm glad to be here. So to begin, can you tell us a little bit about your training and how you came to merge, like, holistic wellness with kind of a more traditional Western approach to mental health?

Sure, yeah. So I am a physician. Like, I went through a medical school and psychiatry residency. And I went on to do additional training and all of the different holistic approaches. like I studied functional medicine and I became an acupuncturist and studied nutrition and Iyerveda and became a yoga teacher like you always do in one of these processes. And for me, the journey was that I really was a disenchanted bed student. And the whole time I was in med school and residency, there was like this one particular Beck lyric that was going through my mind, which was, I think it was something like this.

town is crazy and nobody cares. It just felt like, I kind of just kind of constantly felt like we were not thinking about health properly in alopathic medical training. It was very much disease care. It was very much reflexively like everything just gets a pill. And there wasn't a lot of support of asking the question why. And to me, I'm like a Jewish psychiatrist from New York. For me, all I ever want to do is ask why. Like everything is about why and then deeper why. And And it's like, I remember one time being on my surgery rotation. I was in an appendectomy where someone's getting their appendix taken out. And we're kind of shooting the shit over the patient like you're doing while you're in a multi-hour operation.

And I at one point just trying to make conversation, but it was what was on my mind. And I asked the attending surgeon, it's like, so why do you think people get appendicitis? And the surgeon, I was like so excited for like to pick his brain on this. I'm sure he spent hours and hours and hours over epidectomies pondering this very question. But instead what he answered was he's like, we don't ask why. And that was his response. And I was like, okay. He's like, we just cut.

And so I knew surgery wasn't the right solution for me as a specialty. But I think that that just felt kind of resonant with the whole experience of conventional medicine was that there wasn't a whole lot of why does this happen. What are the big sweeping epidemiological factors that contribute to why? Everyone in the United States, for example, is unhealthy these days, that there's such epidemic levels of autoimmunity and chronic inflammatory diseases. And it's a kind of just a resignation that people get sick, but we have pills and surgeries to sort of slightly fix it, but never really an acknowledgement of like, could there have been something we could have done to prevent this in

the first place. This year, I've really been making a concerted effort to clean up the products that I use and to be more environmentally conscious. I just had this realization that like I'm all about eating clean and meditating and doing all these things to balance stress and hormones. Then so many of the products that I use have hormone disruptors and not so great ingredients in them. So how can I really expect to make progress? So I know that it's so overwhelming to try to overhaul everything, but public goods makes it so easy to start. And I feel like I have my household and my personal care products on lock. Public goods is the one-stop shop for sustainable, affordable, healthy household products ranging from personal care to household items to supplements, pantry

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including tree-free paper products, and their packaging is sustainable too. Public Goods uses a membership model to keep costs low and ensure maximum savings for their customers. They worked out an exclusive deal for you guys to receive $15 off your first order with no minimum purchase. Yeah, they are so confident that you'll love their products and be a lifetime member that they're giving you $15 to spend on your first purchase. you will be obsessed. So head over to public goods.com slash blonde files or use the code blonde files at checkout. That's P-U-B-L-I-C-G-O-O-D-S dot com slash B-L-O-N-D-E-F-I-L-E-F-I-E-S or use Blond F-I-L-E-E-F-I-L-E at checkout for $15 off. It's interesting because I have a lot of doctors on the show and they all have similar experiences. And so I like to ask everyone like what their theory is. I mean, why do you think we're at this place where we treat symptoms and not root causes? Yeah, the reasons are deep. And some of them are like, you know, truly like there's nefarious forces. And some of it is a little bit just emergent and accidental. A little bit has to do with like human. in biology and accountability.

But basically, I think that there is a factor, which is that big pharma and big food, have powerful lobbies and call a lot of the shots of what our lifestyles look like in this country. And so we don't question that that's just the way life is, that you eat processed food and fast food, that you take a bunch of meds. We just sort of accept that at this point as normal.

But I think that there is also something to be said for the fact that as humans, And agency and accountability kind of sucks. You know, it's hard to be like, it's on me to take care of myself. And if something's off, like, that's kind of up to me to do the work to get my body back into balance. We much prefer to say something is genetic. It's out of our hands.

There's nothing we could have done to prevent it. So there's no blaming and shaming, you know, and we just, that's a much more comfortable thing to sit with and to, like, admit that we. have some agency in our own health. And so, yeah, I remember growing up and for some reason, like, I was convinced that I was going to be diabetic. In my family, that was the lore. Was that because I was always thirsty, that I was going to become diabetic? Whatever, we can go into how that was misinformed. It's all good. And I remember my mom saying when I was little, she's like, don't worry, they'll have the cure for diabetes by the time you're an adult. And that's just it, right? It's like a

don't worry, like let yourself get sick. Once you're sick, they'll have a cure for that. And cure is so not a part of alipathic medicine, but we do have pills for things. We have surgeries for things. We have biotech for things. So it's very much like a let it happen. And then Western medicine will swoop in like a day of sex mocking it to fix you later. And that's much easier because then we're not asking anybody to do anything different. So how did you land on psychiatry and holistic psychiatry? I mean, the real dream, was to become like a Beyonce backup dancer that was like woefully unrealistic. But I think that going through med school, I was a little bit just avoiding harm and like avoiding pain. And I was just thinking like

what can I survive. So I was looking at different like so-called lifestyle friendly specialties. But I never fell in love with any of them. It was really much like I was trying to force it. And then I had one advisor in psychiatry named Deborah Cabanist who really influenced me. she kind of showed me a life that I could see myself having that life and feeling like a happy doctor. She had also been an English major as an undergrad just like me. And English majors who end up in med school, like we're bound to end up in psychiatry. Because if you like to explore the human condition and the gray areas of what it means to navigate being a creature on this giant rock barreling through space, like, nephrology is probably not going to fully satisfy your interest. And so like, so I, and she was a psychoanalyst.

she was passionate about what she did. You know, I could see her kind of having this, like, really profound, meaningful, fulfilling career. And it kind of offered what I suspected was a little freedom to practice the way I wanted to practice. It turns out that's what ended up being the most important thing about what I do. And so I chose psychiatry, which, like, felt like a whole fraught difficult choice. But looking back, it was actually obvious from, like, long before I ever even went to med school.

And it has been true that I have a lot of freedom to, practice the way I, what feels in alignment for me, what I believe in. And I look around at my peers in medicine who have like the kind of specialties where they pretty much have to be plugged into a system, whether they work in a hospital setting or in a group practice and like just the overhead of things like radiation oncology. You can't do that as like a sole proprietor in private practice. And I think that it's really nice to have that freedom because I see them really burned out and practicing according to these really big externally imposed rules that have a lot to do with like medical, legal, nervousness and sort of eking out the most money they can make for the

system within which they work. And I don't see a lot of fulfillment or autonomy. And so I've considered myself so lucky. I love what I do. It's like challenging and fulfilling and it's just deep, meaningful work. It's really great. Yeah. So can you kind of of break down exactly like how, how the way you practice, it differs from like traditional Western psychiatry. Yeah, it's pretty much like night and day. Like what I was trained to do was translate, someone comes into my office and they say, here's how I'm feeling. And I kind of translate those symptoms to a diagnosis. And then I translate the diagnosis to a medication. Or often you take someone down that path of like you start them on lexipro for their depression.

or whatever, and then they lose their sex drive. So you add, well, butrin, then maybe they're a little bit more anxious, and maybe you add Xanax, and now they're struggling to focus, and you might add Adderall, but now they can't sleep, so you might add Ambien. But then Ambien eventually makes them, like, sleepwalk and eat in the middle of the nights, then you switch it to Trazodone or Seroquel, and then they gain weight, and so on and so forth, and it just goes on and on and on and it reminds me of, if you've ever seen like the business of being born,

how the sort of seemingly innocuous steps we take in the process of like our medicalized birth so often lead to C-section. It's like there's this path that's actually very predictable. But each time someone goes through it, they're going through it for their first time and they're like, oh, this was unavoidable. You know, but it's actually each of these steps kind of leads to the next.

So that's how I was trained. That felt off to me. I would see my patients and I would see them being maybe slightly less. symptomatic, but very medicated and rarely thriving. And so what I do instead, I mean, it's, it's weird. It's different. I mean, at its most cut and dry, it's like functional medicine approach to psychiatry, so like a root cause resolution, trying to think rather than just, okay, so this is your depression. So we'll start you on an antidepressant. I think, well, this like low mood and low vitality is a symptom. It's not a diagnosis. It's not the answer. It's just a

symptom. It's a clue telling us what might be out of balance. And then we kind of look under the hood. Is somebody's thyroid out of balance? Is it a gut inflammation issue? Is it a hormone dysregulation? Is it that they're in a toxic workplace or a toxic relationship or they're completely alienated from nature or, you know, sort of different lifestyle aspects? And then we'll just kind of keep chipping away at anything that might be out of balanced physically while supporting with nutrition and sometimes some supplements. But then there is also a kind of energy component to the work I do. I call it jokingly, but not so jokingly, like witchcraft. So basically, like, you know, what's really here? Like, what is on a psychospercial level being asked of both of us and why we came together? What am I here to learn from this person? What are they

here to learn from me? What is this about us coming together in this room and this moment? Like, part of shifting the whole enterprise towards light. And so there's like a little bit of a witchcraft component too. I probably sound like such a broken record by now, but I cannot tell you guys how much of an impact blue light blockers have had on my life. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the wellness hack that's been the most transformative for me this year is protecting myself from blue light. So I first learned about this when Andy Mant, the founder of Blue. Blue Block's light therapy glasses came on the show last winter, and since then, I cannot go without their glasses. So here's the deal. Blue light damages our eyes. It leads to digital eye strain.

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blonde. That's B-L-U-B-L-O-X.com with the code blonde. That's B-L-O-N-D-E for 15% off and make sure to tag me when you get a pair. You know, those things you are too embarrassed to talk about when it comes to dating, like when to say I love you, how to define the relationship. Well, we met at Acme touches upon all of those subjects and more and we get right into it with our guests and talk about their dating lives and also what not to do when it comes to dating because we're all kind of confused together. So you can tune in every Sunday to We met at Acme and maybe you can learn a thing or two while I learn a thing or two. Just going back to the cycle that you were talking about in the beginning, I work with so many women who are trying to get sober and I can't even tell you how many of them

started on this cycle when they were so young. I mean, I think you could probably speak to this, but kids are getting prescribed Adderall at such young ages. And, you know, I have so many people who come to me in their mid to late 20s, early 30s, who have been medicated since they were like eight. And it started with one thing. And then they just kept adding layers because they were, you know, they would start one pill, have a side effect, then take another pill. for that side effect and so on. I mean, do you think that we're being over-prescribed medicine? And what do you think about prescribing these medications at such a young age?

Oh, yeah. So I'm always like, say the caveat first, which is that, like, I never am interested in shaming anybody for taking meds and people that feel like they take their meds and it's helped them. Like, to me, that's a reason for a celebration and not something to say, like, you should second-guess that. But putting that aside, I do think as a population, we're over-medicated. And I think, yes, starting in childhood, to me, that's much more just a push from the pharmaceutical industry to create lifelong customers than like a really sound, thoughtful approach to the challenges of what it is to be a kid in our education system and in our overworked, stressed family systems. I think it relates to addiction on so many levels. And one of them is that when we say you have a condition, you're depressed, you're anxious, you have ADD, you have bipolar, whatever it is.

And we say, here, you have to take this med for it. We've kind of communicated like, you're broken and you need this to fix you. And we don't give people the felt self-efficacy creating experience of riding their feelings. of basically, you know, could you imagine, like, if parents across the world were really good at holding space for and showing and modeling for kids and showing them a path for like, yeah, you're having big feelings right now. Have them. Like, I'm right here.

I love you. I accept you. You belong. And you can do this. And basically, like, reflecting and mirroring back to them. It is sad that that kid doesn't want to be friends with you. It is hard to sit down and focus in school, like to sort of just hold space for the challenges and show kids that they can move through it, that a tidal wave can come and then it resolves.

And I think when we show people that you need these kinds of like training wheels or like crutches to just go through life, it gives people a narrative of themselves as meeting something and that it also, I do think, takes physiology and rather than pushing it gently back into balance, it kind of stretches it further out of balance, which in my opinion creates the condition for addiction. It's one of many, many, many things that does. But I think that whenever we sort of snap, like stretch the rubber band of our physiology further away from homeostasis, it creates the conditions for a kind of oscillation and back and forth that's very tough. And we seek out, I think, wisely, like ways to self-medicate for that to try to bring our physiology back into balance.

The only trouble is most of the things we reach for just, you know, end up putting us even further out of balance when we're in withdrawal from them. So to shift a little bit, I would love to hear what you're seeing often in your practice. What are the issues that you're seeing the most of right now? Anxiety. And I would say people don't come with like their chief complaint of insomnia, but I see a lot of people struggling to sleep well. I've always seen a lot of depression and a lot of people having difficulty focusing. We're sort of calling it ADD and ADHD. And I do think there's like a growing amount of bipolar.

And I think a lot of what I'm seeing these days is what I would call iatrogenic bipolar, which is a really fancy term for this is bipolar disorder that was caused by medication, usually an SSRI antidepressant medication. And yeah, I think a lot of these things are on the rise. And then because I'm sort of a little bit broader in how I'm thinking about like who's coming into my office, like digestive issues and autoimmune disease and fertility issues and just female hormone snafu like that's what I see often and I think a lot of people that I guess that may be the right word for this is trauma where it's like because of some form of childhood whether it's like

capital T trauma or lots of little micro trauma it's just hard to feel well in adult life and that's a that's a whole journey into itself. So with those issues that you're seeing, I mean, is it normally something like we're kind of lifestyling our way into these issues and therefore we can lifestyle our way out? Or is it kind of a combination of that and maybe genetic factors or like you said, some big tea or little T traumas when you were younger or throughout your life? I guess I'm wondering how much of it is lifestyle. Yeah, the fun thing is that it's always all of it. And so everyone's a slightly different spot on the spectrum. Like I've had patients come in who are like, nothing's working. You know, I don't poop.

I have acne. I can't get my period. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. I can't sleep. I can't focus. And we like took them off of gluten and dairy and did a little bit of gut healing. And then they're like, thanks, doc, bye bye. And they just fly off. Right. And then I've had patients who are like, I'm already doing everything extremely perfectly. Like I've been eating this way forever. I knew about glyphosate before it was cool. Like I pulled through my water. I'm doing everything. But I just don't feel well.

And sometimes it's actually being obsessive about all of the practices to be well that's making people unwell. But often it's something deeper. It's a way that they're, I mean, often with patients like that, if you already knew about glyphosate since before it was cool, there's a good chance you're highly sensitive, whether that's that you have an MTHFR mutation or something in how your body detoxifies with the same.

Basically, these are our folks who are like our canaries in the coal mine who are particularly sensitive to the assault of all of these different chemicals and aspects of modern life that for some people it's no big deal on their bodies and other people it totally floors them. And then a lot of people, like if they're really, everything is in balanced physiology, but they're still not feeling well. Like often I'm looking at trauma or I'm looking at those psycho-spiritual factors. Like how the sort of the basics of what it is to be a fulfilled human, which is community. relationships and fulfilling work, some connection to nature, some feeling of meaning or purpose in

our lives. And it's not so uncommon that people are really missing like a couple of those major categories in their life. Yeah. So what do you think are kind of the pillars of living a fulfilled, healthy, balanced life? I think that it is somewhat standard, actually. I think that for most of us, we need community, we need good relationships, we need fulfilling work, we need some connection to meaning or purpose, we need some connection to nature. And I do think, like, I wouldn't be me if I didn't point out, we need like nutritious, nutrient dense, non-inflammatory food. And this wasn't like, we evolved in conditions where this was somewhat of a given. You were either like literally starving or the food that you were eating was real food and it was nutrient

dense. But I think these days it's very much an uphill battle to eat well in a way that the body can recognize it as food and get all the building blocks it needs to function properly. So I think some of those are the basics. I think like there's an interesting discussion to be had around the balance between being in a stress response and a relaxation response. And I do think that like we evolved where the split was more like 90% relaxation, 10% life or death stress. And these days it's more like 99% low-grade chronic stress, 1% shavasana at the end of a yoga class. And so it's like we're almost never in a true relaxation response. And our physiology gets pretty haywire when it doesn't get that signal that now is the time

to relax and do repair work around the body. Yeah. So I'd love to get into that a little bit. I know that personally I fall into the 99.999% stress response. fight or flight. Some of that is circumstantial. Some of it I think is old trauma that I'm working on. But I know that a lot of people who follow me and who listen to this are dealing with that too.

And everybody seems to just be so overwhelmed, so chronically overwhelmed. So what are some ways that we can move into that more relaxed state? Yeah. So there's maybe like two main ways to skin this cat. I think that there's the one that we all talk about all the time, whether or not we do it, we talk about it, which is like meditation, breath work, you know, the mind-body practices like yoga, energy work like craniosacral, all these lovely things. And I think they do a great job of putting us in a relaxation response.

And they're pretty amazing how they work. Like breath work, for example, our brain is kind of gullible. And if we're truly relaxed, our breath is slow and deep and diaphragmatic and our exhales a little bit longer than our inhale. that happens like never, right? But if we just actually make our breath that way, take long, slow, deep, diaphragmatic breaths with an exhale long relative to the inhale that can tell our brain that we are relaxed. And our brain is actually kind of convinced by that. So it can put us in a relaxation response, just breathing in that particular way. That being said, I mean, I've been lecturing on burnout and the relaxation response for years and years. I've probably told thousands of people to meditate. I've probably convinced. ones of people to meditate and to do it sustainably, right? So what I think is maybe a more important message for most of us is to truly do less and to make our choices about how we spend our time consciously. And for me, I work on this one a lot in my own life, which is just like I used to, like I remember I had this conversation with a friend of my name Sarah. And she's like, well,

let me know when you can meet up for a walk. And I said some kind of weird self-pity, frantic thing that was like probably a little bit thinking like, oh, my friend Sarah, you know, she doesn't have kids. She has some discretionary time where she can just meet up for a walk. And I was like, oh, my God, Sarah, I don't know when I'm going to be able to. Like, I don't have enough child care for how much work that I have. And I have all these fires to put out and all these things going on. It's just like, so I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to meet up for a walk. And then...

A little resentment, thank you. All the feelings. And she said, in the loving, beautiful way that my very wise friend Sarah can say, she's like, take a look at that scarcity mindset. And so I took a look at that scarcity mindset. Because anytime Sarah says anything, she's always right. So what I realized is that there were a lot of choices that I was making to live in this mindset of scarcity. So what I started to do instead was like a little bit of essentialism, which I mean by that,

that is like saying no to things and just doing less, choosing the three things that I want to make a mile of progress on rather than the million things I want to make a millimeter of progress on and really actually saying no, even when things are kind of tempting, I check in with my internal compass and that kind of inner feeling of true yes or true no. And if it's a true no, I just say no, even if my mind sort of on a cerebral level wants to say yes to something like, ooh, that would be impressive or that would earn money or whatever it is, if my gut kind of clenches and says no, I say no. And then I started to carve out like 10, 15, 20 minute intervals of time where I would just drop what I was doing and go outside and take a walk. And not because I had 20 minutes to spare,

but because I basically realized it's kind of all a little bit of an illusion, like the scarcity mindset. And what I would do is I would reclaim 20 minutes. And it just meant I was 20 minutes less productive that day, 20 minutes more behind. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. And what I was doing was with those 20 minutes, sending the signal to my brain of like, you have some spaciousness in your schedule. You have some spaciousness in your life. There's some abundance and not just scarcity.

And I suspect that was transformative for me. So a lot of things started to sort of like muscles became less tense. I just go through life now a little bit more spacious. And I've found a little bit of a better balance of when I say yes and when I say no and when I carve out time for leisure just for the sake of leisure. Not like productive leisure, but just like stare out the window and listen to music. And I'm really starting to notice that it's the guignan. Like we need 50%, 50% like 50% young doing productivity, but also 50% of. true rest and not just so that we can be like more productive worker bees when we're working,

but just so that we can be happy, vital, thriving humans. I love that. That was like transformative for me just hearing that. I started school again this year and it's been really intense. And I mean, even today, I was like I got up at five to do three and a half hours of this math thing. And then I have an exam. And I always have that attitude of like, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time. And I'm saying no to the things that I should be saying yes to because of that scarcity mindset. And you're right. There is always time.

So I'm definitely going to be implementing that. I'm going to go for a walk after this actually. I think women in particular, like there's a people pleasing aspect to this as well, which is that like I get a lot, a lot, a lot of emails. And I'm still working on this. I'm not fully rehabilitated in terms of like how compulsive I am and wanting to respond to people and wanting to respond well and like grammatically correctly and all this. But like basically, you know, it's like these are the tradeoffs that are happening in our life. Do you want 30 extra seconds hugging your child or do you want 30 extra seconds working on a proper response to an email? And sometimes it's actually that we need to ignore things.

And even though the world doesn't make that so easy and it's sort of like, but you're a nice woman. won't you respond to me friendly and won't you like do some emotional labor for me? And could you point me in the direction of all these resources that I'm asking you for? You know, and it's like instead it's more like, I don't know, I won't say it this cruelly ever, but like you can Google that. Right. And thank you. And I think that it's tough.

Like I just mostly want to point out to women like just examine what the world is asking of you and recognize that rather than just knee jerk reflexively doing the everything that people are asking of you, sometimes don't do as good of a job of it and carve out more time for what really is your life and like what deeply fulfills you. Yeah, it's interesting actually. I was emailing with somebody regarding work and this person is a male and I emailed him something on Saturday morning and I just got a response this morning at like nine and my first reaction was, wow, that's so impressive. Like if that were me, I would have emailed five seconds, after I received it on Saturday morning, you know, and it's like there is this kind of feeling

like, I know for me, I think I know the root of it for myself. It's like I'm overcompensating for the years that I was just such a hot mess when I was, you know, before I got sober. But I think that that gender aspect of it is really interesting too. I think this is, there is kind of a tendency towards perfectionism and and probably overcompensation for other reasons among women. I think that's so astute. And yeah, I think that in a way, like, boundaries is the word of the moment. And I think that if you need the shift, it's like right now if you're overcompensating for previous years as a hot mess by being like punctual and really professional in all responses, maybe the shift is now I am so far from being a hot mess because now I set really healthy boundaries for myself. Like I don't respond on weekends. And like I carve out time when I batch my email and respond. And this is me treating myself with respect and balance. and to sort of feel proud of that as the progress away from hot mess times. I love that.

So my audience is very into nutrition and food, and we kind of touched on it earlier, but I would love to just hear kind of what your food philosophy is and how nutrition can support our overall well-being and especially our mental health. Yeah, I get a little bit less dogmatic each year that I do this work when it comes to nutrition, but what still sort of has stuck around as my philosophy is to encourage people to generally eat real food and avoid fake food. And so I think that the more we can use that as a compass and kind of combine that with a little bit of like an intuition of what the body needs. I love the study that looked at a bunch of, I think it was malnourished orphans and they had blood work on them and knew what particular nutrients and vitamins and minerals they were missing.

and then they gave them a very nutritious buffet of food with different options. And the orphans intuitively went to the foods that repleted what they were deficient in. And I think that that's really, like, we just want to get back to that intuitive relationship to food and drop some of the like years and years of baggage and headlines and conflicting media messaging around what's good food and what's bad food. And it's more like your body will tell you, right now I need a juicy steak. Right now I need a whole mess of vegetables. Right now I need some starch. And if we can listen to that and not really second guess our bodies, but actually just honor it, I think we would get into a much more harmonious relationship with our bodies with food. It's not always easy to acquire good food. Like that's, it's one part of the process is like, oh, my body tells me I need a nice piece of wild salmon with the skin on it, with a lemon squeeze, and I need some sauteed kale and some plantains. And I'm like, okay, I know exactly what body needs, but then how do I do that? And our world is not designed. We don't live on like whole 30 island. And so we live on like, you know, processed, convenient food, drug-like food island. And so it's really tough to make it possible to eat real food in modern life. But there's a lot of hacks that I've certainly used in my life. Like we do batch cooking. We do meal delivery services. We'll sometimes hire a task rabbit to help us chop so that cooking is easier. And we sort of have a really loose.

hand, like a loose grip on all of it, like trying 80% of the time to eat the food that serves our bodies. And then that remaining 20% maybe we'll go out and really just have a relationship of pleasure and ease related to eating like so-called like not clean foods rather than of like, oh no, what is this doing? This is getting me back, you know, many steps. So it's like a real mindset shift around when you can eat food that serves your body, you do it as a radical act of self-love. And then when you can't or you don't want to anymore, you indulge as an act of radical self-love and you remind yourself your body's not that fragile. And that mindset itself can sometimes go a long way to not being affected by certain foods. But I think like the real cut and dry they

are set for my patients, I'm often having them look at gluten in their diet, dairy, sugar, vegetable oils like canola oil. I find myself more often encouraging people who don't eat meat to reincorporate some amount of meat into their diet than I do telling people to go vegan. I think that we're also different. I think they're ancestral factors in terms of what our body's needs are. But I find that there's a lot of really conscious, usually women in my practice who, you know, like have a visceral connection to animal suffering and don't want to eat meat as a result. But sometimes what I see is that they're pretty inflamed and deficient.

So there are better ways to eat a vegetarian or vegan diet, like more ghee, well, a vegetarian diet, more ghee and more egg yolks and eating like sprouted lentils and sprouted rice and combination. I think all that can be helpful. But often I'll see that if my vegetarian, anxious, deficient patients, like, incorporate even just a little bit of red meat every week, it goes a long way to helping them feel more energy, get their periods and balance. So I see that a lot, it's a little bit of an inconvenient truth, but I can't really deny it. It was also the case for my own body after years of vegetarianism and then a little bit of veganism. My body needed meat to get back into balance. Yeah, so I'm by no means an expert, but I did go through years of eating disorders and then disordered eating, including kind of orthorexia and restriction of certain foods. And I came to a place of really learning how to attune to my body and eat.

intuitively and and so I talk about it and the issue that most people seem to have is that they say well my body is intuitively telling me to eat the whole sleeve of Oreos or whatever it is which you know I'm sure could be traced back to some kind of imbalance why they're having these cravings in addition to an emotional component but what would you say to somebody if that's their experience yeah it's so many of our experience. So basically when we use like an intuitive relationship to eating, there's an important discernment that has to take place. You ask yourself the following question is what my body telling me to intuitively eat a real food or a drug. And if it's telling me to eat steak, irregular mashed potatoes, salmon, whatever it is, like basically a real food, something that grew

in the ground or was once a healthy animal, then green light, full speed ahead. If it's telling us to eat some combination of gluten, dairy, sugar, or something processed with flavor crystals or for vegetarians and begins anything that is a nut butter, then it's probably a drug for you. And so like gluten and dairy break down to something called gluteomorphine and casomorfin, which basically, if you hear the root of that word morphin, it's like it's behaving like an opiate in the brain. Sugar has its own sort of more dopaminergic, cocaine-like effect, whatever flavor crystals are added to processed foods. I don't know.

Maybe it's a glutamate effect, but it's very excitatory to the brain. And then for vegetarians and vegans, I think the nut butter binging has to do with like a deep need for protein. And so if your body's saying, oh, my intuitive call is that right now we need to eat a pizza, that's a combination of gluten dairy and sugar and it's probably a drug craving. And it's not to say like bad body, you know, you don't want to like punish yourself in response. you just sort of laugh like an attitude of amusement. And you're like, okay, body. Like we, you're telling me you probably want some comfort.

You want to feel grounded. You want to feel connected, loved. Like I think that that relationship to the opiate effect of dairy goes all the way back to breast milk. It's like when you could feel in your mother's arms like completely safe and taken care of and loved and nourished and you had all your needs met and you weren't adulting or figuring out mortgages and taxes. It's like that's a. nice thing to get back to. And so in a way, rather than eating the pizza, can you call that one friend that you have who's actually good at holding space and making you feel like you can be witnessed in everything that you're dealing with? Or can you cuddle with somebody, a dog, a partner,

a friend, a baby? Can you sort of get that need met in a different way that's not going to send your physiology on a roller coaster? Okay, well, now I'm just curious, are there any foods that act like benzodiazepines on the brain? That's a great question. I haven't thought about that. Let me see. Gabba. I don't know. I bet somebody out there does. I think that you could probably make a loose case that starch maybe is going to have some GABA activation, but I don't know. I don't think anything quite does the trick. I mean, Kava Kava, right? There's like herbs like red, but yeah. I don't know about the GABA food. That might explain my starch cravings. Yeah, starch I think does play a role with serotonin. I wouldn't be shocked if it somehow also modulates GABA. Well, to close out, I would love to hear what is one thing you think we aren't doing that we should be doing and maybe something that we're probably all doing that we should maybe not be doing if that makes sense.

Oh, yeah. Let me do the second part first. So maybe like a small one and a big one. The small one is that we all have our phone on our bedside table because it's our alarm clock and we read it before bed and we feel like we can't exist without it within six inches of our heart at all times. So basically get the phone out of the bedroom if you haven't already done that. And it makes dramatic impact on the quality of our sleep, on what we dream about, on our circadian rhythm, on how early we get to bed because it keeps us kind of falsely awake. It has an impact on how we start our day. you can sort of set your own attention for the day

rather than just going with whatever was the notification that pushed to the top of the screen. So get the phone out of the bedroom. Set up the charger somewhere else. Kiss a good night at like 9, 9.30. Go into your phone-free Zen bedroom. That's a small thing that we're all doing that we shouldn't be doing. And I think the big thing is probably relates to what we're talking about

with schedules and scarcity mindset and just being too busy. I think like we're just doing too much. And so we just need to do less. like that we don't have to say yes to every obligation. We don't have to schedule things as soon in our calendar as they can fit. We can build more spaciousness into our lives. And then what are we not doing that we should be doing? I think it really just comes down to community and nature.

And so if we don't, and like, well, nature, that's really just prioritizing it, right? Like rather than sitting around watching TV, sitting around looking at our phones, like just get up and out and find the nature that you can get to and ground in it, take off your socks and shoes, and literally let an ion exchange happen between your body and the earth. And then community is a tough one right now because we're recording this in the middle of a pandemic. But we were already struggling with this even before we were told to socially distance

in quarantine. But we are social creatures as humans and we're getting more and more isolated and siphoned off into our SUVs and our McMansions and our sort of like connected to our computers and our screens rather than to each other. And now we're even being taught that like we might be each other's vector for a disease. And so I don't know. I think that we have a long way to make up for this. But the only thing that really matters is our relationships. And we want to basically like learn how we can live like as an expression of love. And that's about how we show up for the other people in our lives. And that's really the only thing that totally matters.

But we're kind of heading in the wrong direction right now rather than closer to that. I love that so much. Such a good reminder. Well, thank you so much. This has been a revelation. So where can everybody find you? I'm all over the internets. I'm at ellivora.com and I'm on Instagram at Ellenvora MD. And same thing for Twitter and now even TikTok. Oh, God. It's kind of laughable. Like I'm a boomer trying to figure out TikTok.

And then Facebook and all that. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Ariel. Have a wonderful day. You too. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it and if you like the show in general,

please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there, or over on my personal page at Ariel Lorry.