 I'm so glad you're here with me tonight at the class or class self-care for rejuvenation detox and weight loss. So I'm a nutrition and lifestyle consultant and often you know in this time of year summertime often is a time for more rejuvenating things sometimes. Sometimes it's a nice time for reflection and rest. Other times you know some families are busy with different events and all sorts of things. As a teacher even as a student college or getting my master's degree I was you know we're just always work work work in May and June and it feels like it's so easy to grab the cakes and the goodies that are in the break room and you know it's just it's so easy to just feel like we're working really hard and we feel sort of really toxic and we just can't wait to rest and relax and that's something that I often would think about and so hopefully this summertime there is some space for some self-care and just to rest and relax and I will provide you some really great strategies to help you to take care of yourself and hopefully some things maybe you haven't thought about before. So often if we take care of ourselves really well in the summertime then when it's time for the autumn and that shift then we can be more kind of well equipped. So it's all about self-care and oh by the way I'm not a doctor medical doctor therapist I come as a nutrition and lifestyle consultant and I'm here just for educational purposes only all right. So and if you need to see your doctor if you're going to take on any any different changes for your health or your pharmacist with different medications so um when you hear about self-care what do you think of that's the first thing that comes to mind that's right that's it it's true right it's time to breathe do you think in our society people take enough time for themselves no and I feel like especially new mothers people with a lot of kids it's often a very stressful and they kind of balk at the idea of self-care like I have no time for that so but it's so important for us to take the time to nurture ourselves so that we can give to others so here's the definition from Oxford Dictionary Online the practice of taking an active role in protecting one's own well-being and happiness in particular during periods of stress. So I just want to let you know more about Mesa. I'm a nutrition and lifestyle consultant and I often work with people either over the phone or I can go to people's homes or or they're chosen places. I have a more holistic model that I work from I look at the whole person often they call that kind of functional nutrition where you look at the whole person you kind of I kind of look at what people are eating but also what their lifestyle activities are whether they're moving how their sleep is how their stress is and I promote more fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and looms and things like that in the diet. I think as a society we don't incorporate enough of those into our diets and in nutrition school I worked on my thesis and it was about chronic stress and weight gain especially in women so that's something that's near and dear to my work and that's why I especially like to speak about these kinds of topics so I will today we'll learn biochemistry of stress on the body and how it can impact weight gain how self-care practices can help us come into balance and shed excess weight how to detoxify through self-care practices and dietary changes so detoxifies sometimes is like a trendy kind of a word but we can you'll see how it ties in the stress so again thank you for being here and taking the time for yourself many of us if we're working or taking care of others we often have to balance the number of pressures we try to do it all maybe have our career we're trying to get something other things done all at the same time we might feel stressed and weighed down kind of with the pressures of what's going on but also physically if we're overeating things like that so some of us use caffeine and calorie-rich snacks and meals to get through the day uh and that's often a common thing to go for sometimes you feel tired in the morning and wired at night is that does that happen for any of you it's like you get wired in the name yeah sometimes you make sometimes the opposite sometimes I can get it yeah and then at the end of the day that's right yeah I actually I was watching something very interesting a lecture the other day we're talking about like that that afternoon's slump is like even for anybody for morning lark or night owl or anybody in between that that's slump is what's hard and then you know maybe we pick up during the evening hours or we you know want to go to sleep so and dealing with stress sleep issues so and sleep if we have issues with sleep it can really um it can impact almost every system in the body probably every system so and in my research I was talking about women especially so I'll just go into a few of the uh details about how women deal with stress differently than men so if you have partners who are males um they might push through stress so they might keep going and for women sometimes it's very difficult so there's a gender gap with women reporting a greater amount of stress in comparison to men so women are more likely to report physical and emotional symptoms of stress than men and then there was a study in Sweden more than 3,800 people that were followed over 20 years and it was found that women with the most demanding jobs actually gained more weight compared with male participants that were in the same roles so and they had not gained weight so it's a very interesting thing so what is stress so often stress is uh something that's viewed as negative and it can be fraught with tension and overwhelm versus you stress which is the more positive form of stress maybe there's a puzzle that you want to put together or you're knitting a blanket or something like that that's a more positive form of stress often if we look at stress as a a positive challenge it can help us um it so the way that we respond to stress um can be more positive and less of an impact on our bodies but uh so it in the autonomic nervous system in our bodies we have the sympathetic division and we have the parasympathetic division it's the sympathetic division where that's where the stress is that's the stress response it's kind of a constricted very tense kind of feeling but the parasympathetic is where you have relaxation and calm and in that same system we have the vagus nerve that runs from the neck and goes down to the abdomen it also connects with the anterior nervous system which helps us to digest our food so that's why so many of us tell our our clients to chew slowly so that we can digest really well and assimilate the nutrients so we take the time to just chew our food and relax and if we're in a state of relaxation it's really helpful for us to be able to digest really well and what else do i want to say about that and that leads to the next slide well soon sometimes when we are in a state of stress it's called allostatic load but when it becomes too much there's just so many things tugging on us from all over the place we become overwhelmed and just can't deal with anything anymore it's known as allostatic overload often it gets certain terms like adrenal fatigue especially in like the holistic zone have you ever heard of adrenal fatigue you have often it's connected with chronic fatigue in a way but if you say hba axis dysfunction it's a little bit more more correct because it's like this whole kind of axis that we'll talk about and it's not just the adrenal but it's other things so in the stress response we have to fight or flight or freeze response so we might be fighting with somebody or we might want to just get out of the situation we go for a walk or we might just freeze and not know what to do just kind of procrastinate for a while so those are the kinds of responses that we have a mask that sympathetic nervous system kind of goes into action there so the whole hba axis is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis what happens is when we have a stressful situation the hypothalamus releases a chemical which tells the pituitary gland to produce another chemical to tell the adrenal glands to pump out stress hormones and often the stress hormones are cortisol, epinephrine which is adrenaline and norepinephrine and so cortisol you might have heard a lot in the news where it is kind of a fat storage hormone where it will promote fat around our midsection around our internal organs because if we're in a chronically stressed state um are that fat is designed to protect us any questions so far so there's some simple self-care practices that we have today so it should really be a cornerstone in our lives these to take care of ourselves and be mindful and check in with ourselves during the day one thing to do at the beginning of the day is to set the tone for the day so if you have a hot cup of something or a cold cup of something that you like to prepare these days I like to just make my tea and then these for ice cubes the ice cubes ready and I just pour my tea on top of it but anyway a good thing to do is to take your beverage and you can go outside or on the porch or just open the front door and gaze up at the sky right when you wake up and you don't look into direct sunlight but you just have the light enter your eyes and this is really helpful for circadian rhythm uh it promotes the sleep in the wake cycle and if we take 10 deep breaths that's really helpful to be in that parasympathetic part of the day part for parasympathetic state to start the day by taking the deep breaths we um we engage the diaphragm and when we engage the diaphragm we um enter into the parasympathetic but also we um activate the lymphatic system so there's different the lymphatic system can help us to detoxify our bodies and move the things around so that's one thing that you can do and if you have set it up as a practice that you do it every morning it's really helpful and we connect with nature we create a connection with the seasons and the cycles of the year so that can be very helpful and grounding and gratitude so one thing that you can do is before meals you can stay um you can think of three things that you're grateful for and that helps us to be relaxed and set the tone for our meal so that we can be in that relaxation state what I have here is a jar I started on January 1st and what I wanted to do was continue it every single day I do it sometimes but I should really do it every night I was doing this every night I would write down what I was grateful for I'd pretty much fill up a little card and fold it up and at the end of the year what I can do is take it out on New Year's Eve and go through everything that I was grateful for for the year which is a really great kind of treat and a good way to start the new year another thing is I have this it's called one line a day it's a five-year journal so have you ever heard of a five-year journal before so well I just actually started it so what you do is you fill in so like the first sorry the first day of the first year that you start this you just right here there's only enough for you know what you did that day some things that happened maybe how you're feeling or anything that was monumental that happened you just keep going and then you fill it in year after year and then you can look back and go oh well today I did this but three years ago was the day that I brought home my new puppy year something like that so just a nice way to mark time you can even write down grad tunes as well and laughter it's really important to laugh do you all like so watch funny movies and so those that's really helpful um laughing can help um so many things the relaxation response but also it helps the body to produce endorphins and dopamine and serotonin which are our happiness hormones um and it also boosts and strengthens the immune system so some of the same benefits of laughter is with music so this can really help in so many ways and it releases serotonin dopamine oxytocin that's the the bonding hormone prolactin it decreases stress hormones it can help us have better sleep and a reduction in symptoms of depression there's a lot to be said too about making music in a group like choral music or even a drumming which I I do some drumming classes sometimes um and it increases self-esteem so dancing also is very helpful so if you happen to wake up and you're not feeling so great you can put on some music and kind of dance as you're preparing your breakfast and things like that and that can really help also personal connection um for females especially there's a lot of research that says that you know a way that females respond to like the the fight or flight situation is that they go and find another female friend and they can can um talk to them and converse with them invent and that way there's a bonding that happens there's a oxytocin that is released and it makes you feel a lot better that's something that's really unique with women especially so there's a male tier one of the one one thing that you can do is take a bath um with epsom salts and a couple drops of lavender they have little essential oils of lavender downstairs have you ever used essential oils that would be nice actually I had my lavender in the car before I came in here so I was using a bit of that but hey you get a cup of the epsom salts and you put it in your water and then a few drops of lavender the epsom salts are actually magnesium as we might know and magnesium is something that um in our diet these days I think people are really deficient in so this is a really great way to actually absorb the magnesium through our skin and the way that we absorb magnesium the best is actually through the skin so using epsom salt baths is just a really wonderful thing and you've got lavender and it smells really nice and you can relax and take your time in there so one thing um I should say is in my research I found that that there's so so much that has to do with weight gain when the when we're stressed like I said cortisol other stress hormones really uh inspire us maybe inspire is not the right word but we end up storing a lot of weight and we put on weight and it's harder to get off so in this way these practices can help us to relax and calm down so that we can actually have a moment and we might be able to shed some weight that way and it's interesting there's so many different diet plans out there and ways of eating but what often is not part of it is stress management if that was part of it that's often the root cause of why a lot of people will overeat um so that's one way and if we use a lot of these practices this helps to toxify the body because stress uh encourages uh free radicals in the body which are toxic um and if we have these calming practices it really helps us out um you can do some journaling uh these have just a little space for journaling but that often gets people started but you know if there's a day where you've been dealing with a lot of things going on or you have people in your family that are ill or not doing well you can you know take a moment to write things down sometimes i'm in the car and i'll be just i'll just talk loud instead of writing things down sometimes that's helpful too and detoxifying the diet really uh we can do a lot by removing some things so if we minimize caffeine now i'm not saying to give up coffee if you really enjoy coffee but if we're able to minimize it or replace it with green tea which has a lot of antioxidants that can be very beneficial and uh if we minimize or avoid alcohol because alcohol can deplete something in our body called glutathione which is our an antioxidant in our body and um that's helpful for detoxification so if we don't have uh so much of it because of our alcohol consumption it can make a real difference so we try to take out the refined sugar and oils and flowers so with the oils especially sometimes people don't get good quality oil often uh have different kinds of vegetable oils that can be really processed uh a lot of the packaged foods and processed foods do you know that canola oil is absolutely poison it was not meant to be put in the human body it was meant for machinery and it clogs your system every time i eat canola oil by mistake i get pains in my chest when i go to a restaurant you know i have home fries and i walk out with pains in my chest oh oh that's terrible i know and it's so processed that actually they have to add a deodorizer kind of thing to it because it smells so bad the rapeseed plant was not meant for exactly to a human body or any any animals or humans yeah that's right yet it's in everything we eat almost mm-hmm and it's a shame and others more like cold pressed canola oils i just stay away from it to begin with but um doesn't matter just go to a restaurant yeah it's yeah anything um because it is it goes through quite a processing and they have to deodorize it and everything else uh also they hydrogenate it often to keep its shelf stable because it and so what they call a polyunsaturated fatty acid so it's something that's actually really fragile with heat so if they oxygenated the molecules it can be shelf stable but very processed so um and flowers as well there can be a lot of a lot of flowery products that can really be inflammatory as well processed and packaged through so many additives and different things um also some of these things uh it's helpful to eat organic produce for sure um yes and uh if you um see that you have some food allergens or sensitivities canola oil or maybe even dairy or uh sometimes people have soy issues or any other little things um it's best to try to avoid them um that way you can just feel better i mean of course today we learn the biochemistry of stress on the body and how it can impact weight being how self-care practices can help us come into balance and shit access weight it's that thing just to hammer home the fact that there's so many diet programs out there cut carbs cut sugar cut fat cut this cut that but nobody's really looking at the stress factor like if everything's going great in life i don't really want to hold it deep and i have to be really mindful about my decisions with food but if you know something's going on it's easier to want to our metabolic rate raises and we want to need more that's one thing i didn't go into but um that often the stored glucose becomes more available in our body and so if we have this ongoing stress response over and over again our our body seems to be stuck on a in a fight or plight um situation it can create you know high blood sugar all the time where we kind of get into a pre-diabetic or diabetic state the fatty acids and like cholesterol and triglycerides go into the bloodstream more often so that can be a reason why some people might have high cholesterol um and a lot of other issues a lot of immune issues and things like that but through these self-care practices we can kind of reverse or put the good stuff into our heads so yeah and then how to detoxify all right so we did it um and if you have any questions at any time feel free to to email me so that's p-a-n-e-t-t-a dot amy at gmail.com or amypanetta.com and also on facebook and on instagram people instagram i can't do it no beyond me sometimes i do classes with kids or yeah i was one time i was at the very senior center that was one we had a class with local local food so it was more like in september no that actually was in december but of course the harvest was still around so a lot of squash soups and things like that