Holistic chef Jen Wright guest stars!

Free audio post production by Alphonic.com Hello, hello, hello gorgeous people. Welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to your new listeners. And I am super excited today. Today I have my first guest on and it is the amazing Jen Wright. She studied at the Living Might Columnary School in California. She's a certified holistic chef and chef instructor. She is quite simply amazing. She's a close friend of mine. She is the fabulous, the delicious, the irreplaceable, the incomparable Jen Wright. I hope you enjoy this episode and I will check in with you after lots of love. Hi Jen, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast and so I'm just going to let my listeners know that you and I actually live together in Ireland for a while. And when I really got to know you, you were deeply in the kind of vegan and raw food world. And first of all, I love that. I love your whole background. And my first question to you when we were talking before was what do people, what do women really need to know in the fertility world about food? But I also want to hear a bit more about your background and what got you into this world. Sure. So, it's one of my very best friends dating back 20 years now, 20 plus years now. We have grown together as practitioners, as women through a lot of the health fields that love research and sharing our research with each other and helping each other through our clients and the extension of our knowledge together is one of the things that we really love to share with each other on daily basis. So, dating back to the beginning of my personal journey, especially when we were living together at Ireland, for example, I got into the health and wellness field at a straight up curiosity. I could see the trend towards our life-selling choices and the West were obviously causing a lot of disease and dysfunction. And I was very curious about how food interplayed with health and well-being. Now, at the time that would have been the early 2000s, at the time the big talk back then was about health plant-based foods. We had this remarkable ability to cause detox in the body. And a lot of people were reporting improved health conditions, including fertility, including regulating their blood sugar losing weight, reducing heart disease. We thought it was quite remarkable and that's one of the reasons why it started to dig in populistic perspective to the promises of plant-based foods. Now, a fast forward a few decades of experimenting in the plant-based food realm. What I found, our research over a long period of time, found that people who stayed on an strict plant-based diet for prolonged periods of time began to decline so they went through this period of this phase where their health was increasing rapidly. And then the health began to decrease after a certain period of time. So we found that people, majority of people who were on long-term very strict plant-based diets didn't do as well as they did in the beginning. And you know what is interesting because that was, I feel like, you know, especially in any healing journey in the special episode, it's never a one-size-fits-all. And in my experience, like plant-based, even going vegan for a while was super beneficial as a kind of reset, as a kind of a bit of a detox and a clean-out, a cleanse. But I also felt the need, like after we stopped living together, I felt the need definitely for a bit more protein. And again, you can definitely get plenty of protein on a plant-based diet in a vegan diet. But I was starting to crave things like eggs and meat again. And I know that you kind of went back on meat even fish for a while. And like, I think it's also very important to listen to where our bodies are at certain times. And again, as women, we're kind of seasonal and cyclical. And you know, we're not meant to maybe be the same all the time. And do you think, like, I remember when we were living together, the whole plant-based world was getting quite kind of extreme. There was a lot of kind of judgment on the internet. And a lot of like, you know, I personally felt like if you weren't plant-based in vegan, then you were kind of ruining the planet. And you were, like, you know, like, and I just think that any extreme is not necessarily healthy either, right? Yes, I agree with you. I think that we're coming to a much more regulated place and our understanding about what is and what isn't health. And we can get off our soap boxes for trying to tell people in general what they should and shouldn't be doing. We can take a book at research and find consistencies that have remained throughout God's as long as they've been doing research, not human health, as it relates to food and how we create a key part of the energy system and how that relates to the body being able to detoxify itself and being able to regulate its blood sugar, which is a big topic now. We have more and more research at it and it's interesting to be sure. And you and I talk about this all the time. It's the more research that we get, the more it points back to simplicity. The more simple we are with our foods, our lifestyle, our diet, the more stable we are, the more healthy we are. I absolutely agree with that. I know I went through a phase, not just with my creativity, but in general, whenever I've had a bit of a healing crisis that I needed to handle, and I had a tendency early days to either add in a lot of stuff all at once or take out a lot of stuff all at once. And it took me while, I mean, maybe I'm a bit blonde, but it took me a while to realize like, you know what, let's go through this step by step. Like if you're taking anything out of your diet or anything, adding anything back in, you know, taking a pause and just gently, you know, going through things one step at a time is way better than trying to, you know, eliminate everything all at once or adding in everything all at once. Like, you know, for my, for my fertility clients, I start off with saying, listen, what am I mentors would love to say, like, if you want to feel more alive, eat more things that are alive, like eat more fresh foods, plant-based foods, right? That's just such a simple step and I love that. Like, just adding a bit more food that's not processed, that's not overcooked, that's more alive. Like, start with that. Add in some more colorful foods, right? Like, eat the rainbow, as we say. Like, and of course, you know, can always go into like a deep dive and that's important as well. Like, I love working with clients very much individually and going through exactly what they need. Like, does this one particular person in front of me need more protein, need more vitamin D? We can definitely do that, but in general, my thing simple, like, it's all about the balance, you know what I mean, but that's my lever side, right? But I think sometimes the food will kind of get a bit extreme and over complicated and I love the fact that you've always been very balanced about it. Yes, though, because I've done the extremes for myself, my own research and my own assassination with this topic, I can see to what the consistent research points to from a middle ground, because I would always say, as you were just rightly pointing out, that we can experiment with ourselves and we can take in all of this information, but that in itself requires a process of elimination, finding out what actually works for us as individuals. Right. Absolutely. Yeah, we're on a fertility journey, and in particular, it's really wanted me more just what ourselves, because as you get a correctly pointed out so many times, there is an overwhelming amount of information. And then, and then, but women who are on fertility journey are already dealing with eternal judgment and internal issues in addition to trying to educate themselves, trying to figure out what is actually going to work for them. And one of the simplest ways that we can do this, to be supportive of our personal health, to get really basic about that is very consistent, that as, you know, I'm, I'm messed with this possible. So, what we do, is always going to be better and biologically, we're the same now as we were thousands of years ago in our lifestyle and our habits that have changed. So, when we get very simplistic about what doesn't, doesn't work for our bodies to be able to, I don't really like to turn the talks anymore, because I think we're reused and I think that it implies that we have to do an excessive thing. And also that maybe we're broken and we're not necessarily broken. You just have to kind of work through things in the right way. Exactly. Exactly. I don't really like the term detox anymore. I think we can kind of let that one go unless we're dealing with significant health problems that we're being overseen about. Right. Like serious hormonal issues, ecos, for example, that does require some deliberate intervention from a diet perspective and hormone perspectives. We're not dealing with anything like that. And we can be more gentle with ourselves, take it from a much more simplistic perspective. And so that being said, what we're looking at is making sure that we're getting the right kind of proteins. We want a diet, as you said, full of rainbow fresh fiber foods. We love the foods that have lots of colors. And we want to make sure that the body is getting sufficient about on a daily basis of calories and the bright kinds of calories, so you're protein, your carbohydrates, etc. What we do know is that highly processed foods, period, are not a great idea. The people who are on a fertility drain. We don't have a hormone training of any kind. And you know me and you and I both on the same page of that. If you can, for the most part, make sure it's as clean as possible and as real as possible. Cut out the fake food. Cut out the franken foods. Yeah, cut out the franken foods. It's right. So we're talking highly processed or highly refined sugars, highly processed or highly refined carbohydrates here in North America, even things like our flour, our commercial flour, and bread that you buy at grocery stores, you can't even purchase that kind of low quality in the EU. It's just something that, yeah, I mean, like bread has 16 ingredients here. So I think you have to really kind of search it out a bit more or make your own at this point. I mean, we're not too bad over here in France, but still, I mean, like you said, even some basic breads now, I mean, previously would have been more like a sourdough with even some proper probiotic stuff in it. And so the bread was much more alive almost. And now it's just pretty plastic, right? But you can still either find it or make it, but you have to kind of search for it, I think, which is kind of sad. But I also, I can see people waking up to that. I feel like people are learning more and more about that. And also, you know, again, taking, taking charge of your own food, your own health, your own body, a lot of people now even growing their own veggies. And it depends. I address like my Miracomama groups as like, I know very well, there are, you know, my five-minute mamas that don't have a lot of time to cook, you know, they just want what they want, and they want the health and nutrition, but they're busy. We're all busy, right? That no judgment, absolutely not. Then, you know, you have like, you know, our meat-free mamas as well, that want to go plant-based and that's great. And I'm definitely down for making sure they get a lot of nutrition as well, even if they're meat-free or plant-based. And also, our Michelin star mamas like you, who love being in the kitchen, who are creative in the kitchen, and will probably do, you know, their own veggie gardens and stuff like that. I mean, I do my best to kind of provide something for everyone in those groups. But, yeah, I think you're right. I think we have lost a lot of the nutrition in farming, in big agriculture. And so we need to find ways to get back into our system, into our bodies, basically, as well, right? Makes that huge. Yes, it's huge. And so, you know, some of the foods that are particularly great for fertility are in like wild-caught or oily fish, DHA and EPA for people who are not interested in consuming animal-based DHA and EPA, you can get that from plant-based sources, or even like some people who are on a plant-based site, don't might take a krill or algae. So, organic organ meats, particularly like beef heart, for example, is our richest source of co-cutie 10. And then we have our dark leafy greens and cusious vegetables, like spinach, and ale, and rougola, and broccoli. So those are foods that are packed with your fiber, your nitrates, and your solfers. And then we have one of my personal favorites, which I love making for you all of the time made it together, anything with broccoli cow. I saw this. Have a mockery, baby. Exactly. Honestly, you're smoothies, and all you. I mean, just, I miss all of it. I'm just having my private chef living with me. I'm not going to lie. We, like soybeans, for example, the super high-end plant fennel, or polyphenols, and they signal the body and the cells to build you mitochondria. Right? So we had. We want to build healthy cells, and we also want the body to get rid of cells that aren't healthy, or in a more efficient way. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's super, super interesting as well. And I have one thing I remember about living with you is how you would quickly find ways to bang a bunch of high nutrition into something simple, and quick, like a smoothie, or even just, like a simple thing like sprinkle some chia seeds over a snackie to add a bit more energy and protein into it. Like, you were so great about that, and it inspired me as well. It's like, you know, you can. There were a lot of things you can do, you know, quick and easy tips to actually increase, you know, your nutrition. And let's face it, it is, you know, our food is like our building block. We need, you know, our trace minerals. We need our protein. We need our vitamins. Like, I look at it like house building, and okay, some people want to build a house out of wood. Some people want to build their house out of bricks. And it's all good, again, if you're meat-free or not. Like, great, but like, you have to make sure that you have those building blocks. And I want to quickly circle back to one point. You were mentioning a bit about metabolic health, and the other thing is, like, if you, you know, metabolism isn't up to speed, you know, then you're not going to be absorbing what you need to. So I think before we do things like detoxing, and I agree with you, I'm facing that word out, because if your metabolism isn't up to scratch, and then you go through detox, that's going to create a monoma sum out of stress in the body, and cortisol spikes, and things like that. And so I think it's actually the reverse. It's about rebalancing and stabilizing the body before, you know, anything harsh, any harsh cleanses or anything like that. And let's face it, the body is pretty amazing at detoxing itself, right? I mean, the liver will clean out most things, and so will the kidneys. But I think it's about getting back into balance before, you know, putting the body back into stress. Not, you know, I think that's a huge key. Yes, I think so too, Sharon. And, you know, the part where there was a little, and there is validity to what we refer to as a detox diet. There is validity to it because you want the system to be able to flush out what is preventing it from being able to function normally, not make sense. One of those things that we look at is inflammation markers, right? No, if there's a high amount of inflammation in the body, that the body cannot process, or create mitochondria correctly, or self-device correctly. We know that, and that's well documented. So, in terms like detox, there are actually referring to that process of like helping the body to get rid of eliminate toxins, or eliminate cell debris, which is stopping it from being able to function properly. Now, I did look this up, and I was trying to find references for your listeners that are very specific to like fertility and like cooking for fertility. And I did find a couple of cookbooks which I read through, and I think they're pretty rad. One is the end quality diet by Amy Roth. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it. She is amazing. I read that on my PCT journey, and I recommend that. So, it's funny. When I'm just finished writing my book, and there's a section of course on what we need to eat blah, blah. And half of me was like, "Why am I even writing this chapter? I should just be like, go and read Amy Roth." Because I don't think I can top that. Her book is amazing. Yes, Amy Roth, the end quality diet, highly, highly recommend. I totally agree with you. It's rad. It's totally rad. Yeah. I was really impressed with the information that she offers. And there I felt like it was an easy read. I actually went through and I read hundreds of pre-read issues because I'm a nerd. And I like things like that. I really wanted to make sure that not just from my perspective, but also from the perspective of multiple readers, who were using it in real time for their fertility issues. And I found consistently that there was a lot of people talking about, quote, "miracle pregnancies for on-explained infertility or for women aged 38 to 43." And then people saying that they, that who were tracking their systemic inflammation journey. Thanks for joining. saying that they were able to dramatically reduce inflammation and increase their egg retrieval numbers which is remarkable. And huge. Yeah, and as we'll be in your book, Shar, there's touching graphs there on male fertility. So I love that he's including that in there because you need to talk about male fertility if we're talking about the not fertility, it's the other half of the equation. Right. And not necessarily the same food either. Right, absolutely. And I mean, I'm going to be diving into male fertility as well. There's definitely, and there's a whole other podcast episode about that. But like, for sure, she and Amy Watt was diving into not only that but the equality. And when I read that, it was one of the first books that I read that was like not negative. Like once you have, you know, your AMH has crashed and you go to the doctor's like, yeah, you have no more ex-except it's all over, it's all done. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, you actually can within two to three months improve your egg quality and especially if you're going through IVF, improve the egg retrieval numbers as well, which is just insane and it's incredible and it's so hopeful and positive. So yeah, great recommendation. I'm really glad you brought that up. Yes, and then I'll go really excited for your book coming up, sir. So the last little question is just a bit maybe random out there, but that's very us. Is what do you feel is the connection with food and emotions? Because you know, we're on a bit of a mind-body soul approach over here, right? So, I mean, we know that when we eat, it affects also like the microbiome, microbiome and the gut, the gut we call it now as the second brain. It has all the dopamine and serotonin as well, so that helps your brain feel happy. But then there was also the kind of comfort food side of things when we eat things that are not necessarily good for us, but it also makes us feel happy for five minutes. And maybe that's also not necessarily bad things for long as we don't make a habit out of it, right? Hi, I really strongly believe in an 80/20 principle when it comes to diet. And I really hate the term diet even if it's because what we eat changes throughout our lives, right? It changes throughout, like depending on where you live or what your preference studies are, what your cultural background is. There's this huge amount of diversity in there. So I would say like the 80/20 principle is really what I live by, which is 80% of the time we should do and 20% of the time we just enjoy ourselves. I love that. I think that part of this journey is learning how to walk the line between not being so hard on ourselves, but still consistently being consistent. Yes, babe. I love that. Yeah, being consistent on the goal setting, right? What are we goals toward? And you and I talk a lot about how food relates to happiness. Now some foods we know trigger dopamine response, but is there a telling response? We want to limit those ones. Those are your highly processed foods for your highly processed sugars and highly processed carbohydrates. And so, intentionally trigger a response in the brain that causes us to get addicted to them. And so, really minimizing that and then using your 80/20 principle on a general basis where enjoy that once in a while. Like once a week, have a meal that is just what every you feel like doing. You know, for me, when I was raising my girls, we had Friday nights. We were very diligent about what I had and didn't have in the house. I mean, as you know, Sharp, I made everything from scratch in our house. We hope that it didn't have anything processed. Nothing came in a package here. Now, that is an insane level of reassurance and like work. It was taught by research protocols, what I wanted to really understand for me, right? And I'm not like that. So, on Friday nights though, I let my kids have at it. We had popcorn, it took at 20 and everyone's movies and that was our 20% principle. I'm very much like that here with Celeste as well. We eat very well during the week and on the weekends, I'm like, you want your popcorn with the movie or you want a little bit of fancy or we get a little French d'atto from the petisserie and it's like, you know what, we have our own this little treat and it's all good. So, never beat ourselves up about it. I mean, and I think again, you know, I think the food world can become a bit extreme and there's a lot of diet culture now that I think we're kind of coming through that. We're starting to be a lot more positive. You know, the whole body positivity movement I think was great, but then that also went a little bit extreme. So, I think now we're finally coming to a bit of a place of balance where it's like, we still want to be healthy and eat well, but also we're not going to beat ourselves up for the odd treat and speak to our bodies kindly, right? And the other thing that it took me while to get as well, but when I kind of flip that in my subconscious mind, it's like, do things with your body because you love your body, not because you're punishing it, right? So, if you love running, go for run, but if you hate it, listen, you don't have to run, go for a walk or go and do yoga or whatever. And with food, it's the same. It's like, you know what, you know that if you eat 10,000 fabulous chocolate cakes from a French patisserie, you're probably not going to feel great. But if you have one slice of that and you feel absolutely like treated and pampered and decadent and amazing and you know that the rest of the week you've done really, really well with healthy eating, then come on. You know, like life is about the balance and Mike is also, especially for us women about pleasure. I'm sorry, there we go. I said it. It's true. Like, us girls, we need the pleasure, babe. We permission, you know, permission to pamper, permission to have some pleasure. So, all about that, I think. I agree, too, because I think society at large is much fresher on women than it is on men as far as to exit patients and information overload for children shouldn't be doing with our bodies and our minds. And I think it's important to sort of figure out where your line is for yourself, right? We're talking a lot about healthy balance, that bringing a system back into whole neocasis here, right? Find your truth, what is your truth, what's your cap, what makes you happy. And that has to be a part of your fertility journey, too. I think you and I have talked before also about how this is a very strange journey as much as it is a physical and social journey. And the aspect of finding ourselves, what is good for us apart from what other people's opinions are, as well meaning as they may be and as well research as they may be, it's about the individuals trying to find themselves. Absolutely. Like tuning out, tuning out all the judgment and tuning out all the what is should occur is, you know, like let's give ourselves a bit of a pause in a break. I think that's as important, equally as important as eating right. Like definitely, you know, work on your diet, do well on that, eat clean, eat healthy as much as possible, but also for sure, you know, just give yourself a break, keep that balance. Like, yeah, I love this chat, my love. I will let you get on. I know you have a few things you need to do, but I want to have you back on here again soon. I would love to back you on. Thank you, my darling. Speak to you soon. So there we are. Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you enjoyed that little interview with the gorgeous Jen Wright, my fabulous friend and nutritionist and amazing chef extraordinaire. I hope you got some great food for fertility information out of it. And just a few little updates in the Miracombe on the world. My fertility book club for the summer season is now closed for now, but it will be open again in the autumn and you can even catch up if you sign up for the autumn session. I will put details about that on my socials. I'm at Miracombe on the method on Instagram. There's a Facebook page. I'm all over the socials. You can find me, I'm sure. I will also pop a couple of links in the show notes for my social media and the book club. I have one or two open spots for one-on-one calls, for fertility calls. If you want to know where you are on your journey and discuss that with me, there's also a link in the show notes for that. And I will hop on again and do another little episode soon. I promise also I will finally commit to a regular schedule. I am thinking about doing every Thursday for now. I have not actually committed to that just yet, but I will. I will settle down on day so that you know that you can tune in once a week and get your Miracombe on that information. And I'm sorry I haven't done that yet. This is all very new. We're still building, but we will get there. Anyway, thank you so much again for listening. Lots of love. Stay fabulous. AF. Stay fertile. AF. Lots of love. Bye. Free audio post production. By Alphonic.com.