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If you've tried every health plan, program, and idea under the sun, but feel like you're nowhere near your healthiest and happiest self, then "How to Reset Your Health" is just what you need. This isn't some detox diet or outlandish program promising to melt the pounds away. But instead, cookbook author and experienced registered dietitian Staci Gulbin breaks down for you what it takes to truly be healthy inside and out. And spoil alert: it's not just about diet and exercise. Once you see the connection between these factors, you will find that being healthy comes easier, and your best self is not so far out of reach.
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Seitenzahl: 157
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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By Staci Gulbin, MS, MEd, RDN
www.lighttracknutrition.com
How to Reset Your Health
changing the way you see health to help you improve yours
Copyright © 2024 by Staci Gulbin, MS, MEd, RDN
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, investment, accounting or other professional services. While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional when appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, personal, or other damages.
Book Cover by Staci Gulbin via Canva
Diagram by Staci Gulbin via Canva
1st edition 2024
ISBN: 979-8-218-54542-0
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
Part 1: Pillars of Health
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Pillars of Health
Chapter 3: Healthy Consumption
Chapter 4: Healthy Movement
Chapter 5: Mental Health Management
Chapter 6: Environmental Health
Chapter 7: Rest-Results Balance
Chapter 8: Creating a Healthy Foundation
Part 2: Getting Ready for Your Health Reset
Chapter 9: Building a Healthy Relationship with Food
Chapter 10: Dealing with Diet Culture
Chapter 11: Fighting Away the Fear of Food
Chapter 12: Learning to Listen to Your Body
Chapter 13: Letting Go of Food Rules
Chapter 14: What is disordered eating?
Chapter 15: Upgrade your thinking and be accountable
Chapter 16: How to Reset Your Health Behavior
References
PROLOGUE
Many of us long to be healthy. This is especially clear every time the new year rolls around and resolutions of weight loss overwhelm the internet. The problem is that many of us vow to be healthy in January, and then by February the excitement of this new goal seems to wane. In turn, our goals become lost until the end of the year rolls around again and we try to commit to the same or similar goals as the year before.
Why do you think this is?
In my extensive experience as a registered dietitian who has counseled thousands of people over the years, I can tell you the one thing that many of them had in common. The clients and patients who were successful in their health goals had a healthy relationship with food and with themselves.
Why is this important you ask?
We’ll get into more detail in the chapters of this book. Basically though, if you see food as a means to an end instead of something of value, then you will not enjoy it. You will not embrace the benefit it can provide your body and mind. You will not see how food is not inherently good or bad, but how each food has its place in providing benefit to our lives in some way.
And if we do not have a healthy relationship with ourselves and our bodies, we will not be able to enjoy health benefits fully. If we strive merely to use our body as a vessel to impress others, or as something tangible to abuse in order to deal with difficult emotions, for example, then we will never be able to become our healthiest self.
As you read the chapters in this book, you will learn how to reset your health-related behaviors so that you can have a healthier relationship with food and with yourself. So, what are you waiting for. Let’s get started.
Part 1: Pillars of Health
Chapter 1: Introduction
During my work at the medical weight loss and bariatric surgery clinics, people would tell me stories of how their spouses helped to care for them. In the next breath, they would tell me how those same spouses were the ones making it difficult for them to eat healthy.
This frustrated me.
I was frustrated for them and wanted to see if maybe I could write a guidebook on how these people could see how they were hurting their loved ones. I had a hard time coming up with content past the first chapter though because I soon realized that this need to write about this topic was not coming from a truly personal place. Until I started dealing with the stories and feelings that came from deep within me, it would be hard to find the right way to write a book that felt authentic and natural. That flowed.
I realized that if I was going to write a book, it needed to come from my heart. If I was going to share my story, I needed to silence the naysayers in my life and in my head and be real.
My story was not all rainbows and sunshine, it wasn’t always inspirational at every turn, and it wasn’t full of bright and beautiful imagery. But what it did provide was a real story of my real experiences that inspired me to love myself truly and authentically, no matter how imperfect. And if I was going to share it, I needed to do it without worrying what people thought. No sugar coating.
I tried this approach on social media to try and build a following, but soon found that the genre of health and wellness on this forum did not align with my values. This audience was not interested in authenticity, evidence-based research, or learning anything outside of their comfort zone or ingrained beliefs. Most of the health and wellness world online was based on uncredentialed, unlicensed influencers; psychiatrists and IT specialists posing as nutrition experts selling unregulated supplements to vulnerable people looking for answers to their health problems.
Foods were labeled good, bad, toxic, and poison. Fearmongering was at an all-time high with followers flocking behind their every word and publicly shaming dietitians, doctors, and anyone who dedicated their life to educating themselves and others about health and nutrition. After several attempts to share my advice and tips, backlash from trolls made me realize that perhaps a book would be better for my message.
By telling the story of my health journey alongside my advice, I can make my words real. I can help people to hear that I am human. I can make my messages feel as authentic as they truly are. And unlike the influencers I often saw online with millions of unknowing followers, I will not need fear, intimidation, people shaming, or food shaming to lure you to my corner of the health and wellness world.
Not everyone is going to be ready to face the advice I will provide in this book. I had a hard time finding the words to create each chapter myself. But I have a feeling in my gut that this was my calling. And that calling is to teach others to approach nutrition in the same way I approached my mental health: one story at a time and with compassion. Compassion no matter where a person stands in their health journey or in their thought process.
The first story I’m going to share with you is one about me and how my health journey got me to the place where I am today: with the desire to help others have a better relationship with their bodies and food.
Trigger warning: disordered eating discussion ahead.
I was always a thin girl growing up, to a point where people in high school would ask me if I was anorexic. Real compassionate, right?
I wasn’t disordered in my eating at that time but started becoming more conscious about my body after such comments. When I entered grad school, after gaining some weight through my college years, I looked around at all the tiny fashionable bodies around me in New York City and suddenly felt out of place. Everyone seemed smarter, richer, thinner, prettier and just plain better than me. It was the perfect storm for developing an eating disorder, especially since I had tucked away high school memories of dance team members teaching me about how to throw up after meals to lose weight.
Two years of depressive thoughts and destructive eating and exercise patterns followed me. Luckily though, this journey led to the fateful finding of a nutrition program at the university uptown from NYU. There, I started to learn the science behind nutrition. This led to a program at another school that taught me the behaviors behind nutrition choices and how to counsel people with eating issues.
Fast forward a decade from the day of graduation from this program and you will meet a dietitian desiring to become a writer and about to get a phone call that would change everything.
Al I could process from the other end of the line were two words, “pancreas mass.” It’s amazing how a tiny mass on my pancreas about the size of a dime could have so much impact on my life and health. My body was swelling from inflammation, and foods I normally enjoyed were difficult to digest. There wasn’t any tincture, powder, essential oil or acupuncture treatment (believe me, I tried them all) that was helping me feel better, and my mental health was in even worse shape.
I was counting every calorie, weighing every portion of food, thinking that it was my fault that my body was unable to fully digest just about anything I tried to eat. I was disgusted at the swollen body in the mirror that continued growing larger as I became sicker and sicker. When I finally reached rock bottom in my depressive thoughts and overwhelming fear of food, I sought a therapist.
Through the past four years or so of therapy, I’ve come to realize that even though I was telling myself I was being healthy in my eating and that my relationship with food was fine, it wasn’t. My life was obsessed around food, just like it had been in grad school. And the common denominator of both times in my life: a lack of feeling in control.
I couldn’t control the health issue that had entered my life even after running four marathons, managing my weight and watching every ingredient label. No doctor could tell me how I got sick or why. And I couldn’t stop my weight from rising no matter how much exercise I did or how many pills or potions I ingested.
But what I could control was what food I put in my mouth or didn’t. I could control the thoughts in my head. And I could control what I posted online as I tried to find a tribe of people that could validate the fear and anger that I was feeling.
Let me tell you though that there was nothing healthy about this relationship with myself and it took a mental breakdown to finally see the light.
I won’t go too much deeper than that for now. However, in this book on how to reset your health behaviors, we will talk more about the psychology of our relationship with food and how we can get it to a healthy place. A good place to start this discussion is with the five pillars of health.
Chapter 2: Pillars of Health
Think of your body like a house. A healthy, strong house needs a solid foundation and frame, as well as a strong roof overhead. Your healthy frame consists of five major parts:
Healthy Consumption
Healthy Movement
Mental Health Management
Environmental Health
Rest-Results Balance
We’ll go into the details of each of these frame components in the chapters ahead.
A healthy foundation consists of a reliable support system, access to community resources and a healthy relationship with food and with your body.
Finally, a healthy roof over your head is the discernment to look around at the information in your environment and decide if it is true, helpful or misleading. In other words, it’s critical thinking and common sense.
Let’s start with healthy consumption. You’ll notice I didn’t say healthy eating or healthy drinking. That’s because we consume a variety of things through meals and snacks, but also in our interactions with others, the books we read, the screens we watch, the content we listen to, etc. All of this consumption can impact our health in body and mind.
Eating food that is nutrient-dense can help provide our body with essential nutrients it needs to function. Drinking enough water and other fluids like tea or coffee can keep us hydrated. Reducing intake of alcohol and drugs, non-prescription or prescription, can in turn reduce stress on the body and its organs. And reducing intake of social media, news and other anxiety-provoking, usually negative content, can negatively impact mental health.
Therefore, it’s important to consume only those things that make our body and mind feel its best. This can be difficult if we don’t have the resources to afford certain foods or to know what foods to consume for optimal health. Or it can be difficult if the people in our local environment have unhealthy patterns of consumption of unhealthy substances or information that we have gone along with for so long.
You may not know that there are healthier ways of living available to you or may not know how to learn healthier patterns. These barriers can make eating and living healthy a challenge. One way to overcome these barriers is to utilize resources in your community and ask for help.
One thing that humans tend to do is feel shame when they need help, don’t understand something, or are confused. Instead of asking for help from experts in certain fields, asking for financial assistance or reaching out to counselors for guidance, they try to “stay strong” and “proud” since perhaps in their circle or culture asking for help is seen as weak.
In turn, they may end up trying to find information online to answer their questions, which is not always accurate. On the other hand, they may become depressed or anxious which could lead to a decline in mental health, loss of sleep, and in some cases, unhealthy intake of harmful substances if healthy coping mechanisms are not in place.
Do you see how quickly one pillar can cause others to crumble?
A lack of healthy food can cause crumbling of mental health as well as physical health, and the stress from this crumbling can lead to a decline in healthy movement if there is not enough energy supporting health of mobility. This point leads us to the next pillar: healthy movement.
***
You don’t have to engage in boot camp workouts or marathon training to be physically fit. In fact, studies show that simple movements such as walking, house cleaning and gardening, for example, are enough to keep your bones and muscles strong as well as keep your heart healthy, if done on a regular basis.
Other forms of healthy movement include exercises to help strengthen your spine and reduce injury, stretching daily for flexibility or resistance exercises to keep bones and muscles in shape. Yoga or tai chi are other forms of gentle movement that can not only help improve flexibility and balance but can also help support mental health.
If you don’t take steps to engage in healthy movement on a regular basis, it can weaken your muscles and bones over time which can reduce your body’s mobility. Reduced mobility over time leads to a dependence on others to help you with daily activities of living.
If your body becomes weakened to a point where you are unable to grocery shop or cook or move on your own, then this can impact your ability to eat healthy. This is because if you’re unable to cook, you may opt for easier to prepare, convenient foods that may not be as nutrient-dense.
A lack of healthy movement can also contribute to depressive feelings which can impact overall mental health, which is our next pillar of discussion.
***
Up until recently mental health was not really something that you heard about in mainstream media. Anxiety was seen as a weakness, and you were supposed to just “suck it up” and move on from such feelings. But we all know from recent research that this is not true, and the only way to truly heal your mental health is to deal with its roots.
When I was dealing with depression in my twenties, living away from home for the first time, and feeling pressure from the fashion clad thin bodies surrounding me in Manhattan, it was the perfect storm for an eating disorder to develop.
I would see too often in the hospital people who were suffering from anxiety and depression that stopped taking care of their bodies, stopped moving, stopped eating and in turn, became malnourished.
Optimal mental health is a crucial pillar of health since without it, it is nearly impossible to create a healthy environment around you and in your relationships, which brings us to our fourth pillar: environmental health.
***
Environmental health is not just about air quality, the amount of green space in the community you live, or water quality, although these things are very important and can impact health. With little to no green space, it can make it harder to engage in healthy movement outdoors or can impact your access to fresh produce in your community. Meanwhile, poor access to such healthy food and water can create obstacles to healthy eating.
But another type of environment I’m referring to when it comes to environment is the one within your home and relationships.
If you have an environment at home and in your relationships that is very stressful, this can impact your mental health. And as mentioned in the previous section, when your mental health is not being managed and supported, this can impact your ability to engage in healthy eating and healthy movement.
I know that in those times in my life when I was in toxic work environments, or when my husband was in one, it impacted our home environment. In turn, it made home a very stressful place, stress eating calorically dense foods was common, and mental health management was in dire need. The pillars were crumbling around us.
It took years after accepting help for mental health and finding a healthier work environment to get those pillars standing strong again.
Without the pillars in place, in particular the environmental pillar, it makes creating a healthy, balanced life nearly impossible. Which brings us to our fifth and final pillar: rest-results balance.
***
Sometimes when our environment isn’t healthy, we may work ourselves beyond the limits to distract ourselves from stressors, or on the other extreme, we may isolate ourselves in excessive rest due to depression or exhaustion from living in chronic stress.
This lack of balance in rest and results can lead to a decline in health since in either extreme we’re more likely to choose less nutrient-dense foods for convenience due to lack of time or motivation to cook a healthy meal.
