https://www.thenaturalbalance.net/

A Naturopathic, Nutritional Therapy & Wellbeing Clinic ​​ About The Natural Balance Founded by Nutritional Therapist and Health Coach Kelly Mulhall, The Natural Balance is a natural Nutritionist London practice that specialises in Digestive Issues, Women’s Health and Hormonal Imbalance, Fertility, Miscarriage & Pregnancy, Disordered Eating and overall Wellbeing. We offer everything from private nutritional therapy packages, to food diary reviews, personalised meal plans as well as self led, online nutrition programs. Our corporate nutrition workshops and wellness programmes are for businesses looking to optimise the health of their employees, which will translate into improved productivity, increased motivation and reduced absenteeism. Whilst we offer Nutrition Packages, we never take a one size fits all approach – we work with you as an individual, tailoring your support levels to your body’s unique needs.

My Movie kelly

[00:00:00] Best Book Bids podcast brings you nutritionist, gut health specialist, and health coach Kelly Mullhall. Kelly is the founder of the Natural Balancer one-Stop Wellness Shop for private nutritional therapy and corporate wellness. Kelly takes a holistic approach to healthcare and focus on implementing healthy eating, improved physical fitness and positive mental wellbeing with the aim to make each and every client feel the very best version of themselves.

Kelly, thanks for being on the. Thank you very much for having me been traveling in South Africa, but we don’t wanna talk about, now what I do wanna talk about is take us back to, your story and how through your personal struggles with health led you to now leading others in their health journey as well.

Absolutely. So I suppose my story is a bit of a what’s the word? I’m not, I’ve not always been interested in healthy eating and nutrition. I’ve been quite the opposite. I was a can’t cook, won’t cook person, I lived off ready meals, crisps, chocolates, Luca, eggs. That was my sort of staple diet.

So I had no interest in healthy [00:01:00] eating not interested in the kitchen at all. And I think it was, It’s a culmination of things really. Being at university, eating bad food, obviously, craving food all the time, no energy, sick all the time. And then I went traveling to Thailand when I was university and I picked up a travel bug, as I think many people do when they go traveling, when they’re younger.

And I just completely destroyed. To the point where I must have been back at the hospital and the doctors for about 12 years having testing done, blood tests, stool tests, everything done to see what’s going on with your guts? Why have they suddenly, completely changed? And it was awful.

And and I never got anywhere. It was left undiagnosed. They tested for parasites, couldn’t find anything. . And in the end I just thought, okay, this is life I just have to deal with, ibs, as a massive percentage of the population do and. And so I dealt with it. And then it wasn’t until I was working in a, corporate environment when I was in London and I [00:02:00] just, I was chatting to a friend one day and I was thinking, I’m not really enjoying my job.

What can I do? I wanted to sort my health out and I, we just, someone, she mentioned nutrition and I didn’t really know what that was. Obviously I was not interested in nutrition and I just started delving into it a little bit more and I thought, oh, this is all about, healing the body from. , the root cause of the problem.

I said no one so far medically has been able to diagnose what’s wrong with me or find out what’s going on. And so I just started looking into it and I thought, actually, do you know what? There could be something in this. And I went and I saw a student nutrition clinic at the place I actually ended up studying at.

And I went there and I was like, explained all the situation and they were like, look, you need to do a comprehensive stool analysis. Very different to the sort of type thing you’d get at the doctors. And I did. And they diagnosed a parasite, which I was like, oh my gosh, I’ve been living through this for years.

it was a lot more in depth than you might get your doctors. And and then from, yeah, my life just completely changed. I started working with the nutritionist transformed, how I ate, but also healed my gut. Got rid of [00:03:00] the I B s and I was like, wow, this is, really amazing.

And so within about a week I decided to quit my job and enroll to study, to become a nutritionist for a couple, three years I think it was. Which was quite ironic cuz my parents. , you’re not interested in nutrition or healthy eating. And I was like, no, I can see that this is gonna be huge and this is gonna help me and I’m gonna help other people.

And I think when you’ve been on your own journey, with health, it really does then give you that sort of motivation to want to help others because you’re like, look, this has happened and worked for me and I can see how incredible it is. I want to help other people. So yeah. So that’s it in a nutshell.

It was yeah, quite life transformational really. And that’s what you’re do with other people with it. I wanna unpack some of that, so thank you for sharing that story. So Thailand Travel Park, 12 years had a para. That was undiagnosed. That’s like having a firstborn or like being pregnant for 12 years, which is and not sure what’s going on.

What is a stool [00:04:00] analysis? What do they do? It’s obviously, what’s the in depth of a stool analysis? What do they do? So if you go, obviously I’m in I’m based in England. So if you go to the doctors and having NHS test, you’re basically just pulling into a sample pot and then you send it off for analysis.

And what they usually do is they just culture the stool for a few days in a Petri dish and just see what grows, which is what I’ve been doing now, a lot of bacterias or parasites or anything that’s in the stool, anaerobic meaning they don’t like oxygen. So if you try and take a stool and you expose it to oxygen and then you just.

Get the bacteria to grow, you’re not gonna find anything in there because it’s gonna have died cuz it can’t survive with oxygen. But when you do a comprehensive stool analysis, so something like a functional test, which is what we do in our clinic. In England, they probably, they’re gonna be private.

Usually you’re looking at the DNA level of the stool. So using PCR technology, much like done with a, COVID test and use a pcr, you’re looking to see if there’s the genetic material for covid. The covid, the coronavirus in there. So it’s the same sort of thing that you would do with the stool.

You’re looking at much more [00:05:00] DNA genetic. And from that you are assessing in the stool. Is there parasites, is there pathogens, bugs? Looking at bacteria levels. You’re looking at the breakdown of fats and carbohydrates. You’re looking at the levels of digestive enzymes in your stool. And just seeing how the whole.

Gut microbiome is working and functioning. So it’s it’s a lot of digging around in stool. I don’t do that. It’s not something that my clients send me their stool, they send it off to a lab. It’s not something I did have someone ask me the other day if they wanted to. Them to take a picture of their stool and send it to me.

I was like no. . I do not need to see that. No, you can just tell me what it’s like. So yeah, so that’s comprehensive stool analysis. Then what you usually do is you would grow, you would try and similar things. You would grow some of it in a dish and see what grows, because some bacteria are aerobic and will grow in oxygen.

But a lot of it will be done through DNA testing to see what’s in there, which is how I ended up finding out paras that I had clearly didn’t like oxygen. Got it. The reason I ask, I’m a big Matrix fan, and I think number one where Neo gets like this electronic [00:06:00] parasite in his body through a dream, and then they suck it out through his belly button and it’s like a tracker and it’s alive.

And he’s that thing was in me. And that’s what came to my head. But How do you actu Sorry. Just a funny just a funny movie analogy with the para. , they’ve located it. So you’ve got something. How did you heal it? How did you clean your body? How’d you get it out? What’s the next step after that, after the diagnosis?

So this is quite interesting actually, cuz I remember when I told my fa family oh, do you know what I found out the problem? And they’re like, okay, are we gonna go to the doctors and get antibiotics? And I was like, no, actually. Because as been in the news for years now, antibiotics are, we’re becoming more antibiotic resistant.

Antibiotics do kill bacteria but they just kill everything. A lot of people that come to me, a slight tangent, but just so you background, a lot of people that come to me will have had rock repeat bouts of antibiotics and it just destroys the gut lining and it destroys the bacterial diversity in the gut, which obviously if you have a parasite or a bug or an infection, you want the [00:07:00] bacteria to be killed.

But obviously, as I was looking at from like a naturopathic perspective and trying to do it from a more natural approach, I wanted to do it more natural. Now nature gives you everything you need in nature. So to, in order to kill off the parasite that I had quite like a comprehensive antimicrobial protocol.

So n Nature provides us with a natural antibiotics. in the form of a lot of herbs and plants. So some of the ones that, you’ve probably heard of on a daily basis be like orno or a garlic or the active component of it called allin. These are herbal antimicrobials, which will kill off bacteria, but they target the bacteria that is the pathogenic one, so the bad one, as it were, and it won’t destroy everything.

So it depends on the type of parasite that you have or the bug or infection. Depends on how long you’ve had it and how vir it is. How much there is in there will depend on how long it takes for you to kill yourself. [00:08:00] But it could be a couple of weeks, it could be a couple of months. So when we work, when I work with someone, you’re always looking at the actual symptoms because it’s like, how are your symptoms responding to what you’re taking?

So we, we did it through natural antimicrobials, blend of different herbs, Burberine, there’s a aana, there’s black walnut, there’s U ersi there’s a whole range of natural herbal antimicrobials. And it’s not as though if you think you’ve got a parasite, you should caveat this. Don’t just go and, drink some or a gar oil or something.

It’s not quite like, works like that. You’ve got to look at the active constituents in it and have the correct dosages and things. But yeah that’s how I got rid. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, thanks for sharing. And two things I picked up. So number one, you need to know exactly what the problem is. So a lot of people just go to the doctors.

Here’s the story. I got sick a couple months ago and I went to doctors and I was so sick and I just went to the doctors to get medication. I’m like, just gimme antibiotics, but, and the doctor said, I’m not giving you anything. And I was like, wow, this is like a random doctor. I was in the middle of nowhere.

I just had to go get medication and she was like, not giving you anything. [00:09:00] No antibiotics. Suck it up. You’ll be okay. And then she explained a little bit about it’s bad to take too much antibiotics, and I was like, wow. I was like speaking to, a naturopath, but she didn’t, what I’d love her to do was like, look.

don’t think you should take anything. Go see a, a naturopath and get them to sort you out or do a further analysis on what it is as well. How important is it now with the movement of, you studied threes at the College of Naturopathic Medicine, top Europe school, educating, nutritionist, herbalist, and acupuncturists.

What’s the popularity and why is this so important now that we need to find out the root cause of. Our symptoms like ibs and like how important is this trend? Like it’s not a trend, like to go back to nature’s way and not just rely on the pharmacist and the medical institution to take a pill and think it’s gonna solve everything, which it doesn’t.

It just masks it huge, hugely important. And that, a lot of that is down to antibiotic resistance because as soon as antibiotics was discovered, it’s completely transformed the world and saved lives. It’s been probably one of the best medical [00:10:00] inventions ever, but, Bacteria.

Viruses are very clever. They mutate, they change, they grow. They become adaptive to their environment, which is why, you could have bacteria that has been found from millions of years ago, and it could be reactivated now because it protects itself and it will hibernate essentially until it gets activated again.

So when we have bacteria in the body and then. Bombarding it with antibiotics, the bacteria’s gonna be like, oh, I get this. Now I know what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to kill me. I’m gonna change and I’m gonna mutate to something else. So that’s where you get the antibiotic resistance from.

And now we have so much more antibiotic resistance because so many people have been on antibiotics. When you’re younger, now GPS and doctors are much more aware of it. They’re stopping prescribing it as much as you, you’ve seen. , but it just means that they’ve got two one, they’re trying to find more types of antibiotics, but there are certain antibiotics that are like strictly kept under lock and key to give people who are antibiotic resistance to everything else cuz they’re just not responding to [00:11:00] treatment.

So it is really important to one. To try and find out the root cause of what’s going on in, in the body and in the gut. And then you can try and support it naturally because it may be for a lot of things, and this is why stool testing is just so incredible, is that you may have an overgrowth of certain bacteria.

Some, I’m sure you’ve heard of like the good bacteria in the bad bacteria in. Some bad bacteria is pathogenic. It’s, it’s an infection. It’s not the sort of thing you wanna have in there. It’s gonna cause you a lot of gut symptoms. Maybe there’s bloating or diarrhea or constipation, things like that.

But what you don’t want to do is just always kill something. It could be that your levels of good bacteria are really low and if you start to increase them, it will balance them out. You are not gonna have that technical overgrowth of the bad bacteria. So things like changing up what you are eating, putting in prebiotic foods, which feed the back, the good bacteria in your gut will mean that they naturally grow [00:12:00] and populate population of those good bacteria increase.

You don’t always need to. So it’s, that’s why a stool test is so important to look at, especially when you’re looking at what we call the commensal bacteria. So the good bacteria and the bad bacteria together, because it’s not just all as always about killing, it’s about in improving the good guys and increasing their population and everything starts to balance out then.

And then in that case, you don’t need the back, the antibiotics or necessarily the herbal antimicrobials. In that way. Yeah. People treat their body like they’re going to war, but it’s more of a, it’s more diplomacy. So you get ahead through. Through agreements rather than through war.

The big five pillars that you talk about is diet, it’s lifestyle, it’s exercise, it’s sleep, it’s stress management. You go to a doctor’s, they don’t ask you, what you have for breakfast, how’s your stress levels? How’s your lifestyle? What are you exercising? This is the importance of having someone like yourself and those property institutions where you can look at those pillars cuz they’re the daily.

What’s your stress like today? How did [00:13:00] you sleep last night? Like lifestyle changes, diet and exercise. This will change the fundamentals of your body as well. I like that. It’s really cool as well. Just while we’re just a you talked about IBS before. A lot of people suffer from it.

We know it’s irritable bowel syndrome, but how does someone know that they have it and how can they, I’m not saying how can you fix it, but where does it come? How do you improve it? What’s, why is there such an increased risk, like so many people these days? So I’ve got irritable bowel syndrome, like where’s it come from?

Yeah. The gold, the golden ticket question. Isn’t that so irritable bowel syndrome, exactly what it sounds like is irritable bowel. Your bowel is irritable. It’s not functioning probably as it should be. And I think one of this is what a lot of people don’t understand is what should a bowel movement look like?

How should it feel? How do you know if you have irritable bowel? Really, if your stool looks like a sausage, so a stool as in your poo looks like a sausage and you’re going one to two times a day, you are in a good place if your stool is anything out of that range. So if it’s too hard to pass, it’s constipated, it doesn’t come [00:14:00] out, or if it’s on the other side, it’s loose, it’s mushy.

There’s no form that you’d probably say that there’s something going on there. It’s slightly irritable. , anything less than one a day, once a day would be class as constipation. Anything more than three times a day, you would probably say something’s not quite going right there because your, the food is transiting through your bowel too quickly.

You’re not having enough time to digest and absorb the nutrients. So three times a day is probably max that you really wanna be going. The main causes of irritable bowel tend to be something like repeated antibiotic use, like I was saying before, which is just has then has not been recovered from. So usually if you’re on antibiotics, you want support the gut with some sort of probiotics or prebiotics to try and increase the good bacteria again.

A travel bug or food poisoning usually is quite a big trigger for i b s as well. So if someone like me picked up a travel bug, whether it’s dirty water, mine was, I fell in a, I was white water rafting and I fell in the water that wasn’t white. It was more brown and swallowed loads of water and that’s how I’d got sick.

[00:15:00] But, take a dodgy takeaway or something like that can often have it. an impact. So those are the, I would say, the main things. If someone comes to me, I’m usually saying, have you had travel bug food poisoning or antibiotics? They’re probably big triggers for it. But also things like food intolerances or allergies.

If you are intolerant to food is different to an allergic reaction to food. An allergic reaction means would be something who’s, someone allergic to peanuts or, celiac, you’re actually allergic to gluten. You are having an immune response to those foods and that immune response can cause you to have diarrhea or bloating or pain.

and also a poor diet, what you would call the typical western diet is a big cause of gut issues. So a typical Western diet would be high in refined carbohydrates, say like breads, pastures cakes, pastries, anything that’s refined and high in sugar, low in nutrient content. So not a lot of vegetables.

And saturated fats. Like things like long [00:16:00] life products, preservatives, additives, anything that’s not fresh. It would be your typical Western diet and having a typical western diet. Means that the gut, the lining of the G can come, can become a lot more aggravated. It can become a lot more inflammatory because the types of foods that you’re putting in there are causing it to be aggravated and inflamed essentially, which then means.

You’re more likely to suffer from something like leaky gut. I dunno if you’ve heard of leaky gut. When the gut has been constantly bombarded with something, causing it to be irritated, whether it’s a bug or a bad food choices or toxins. The, I will say I was, do this analogy.

So imagine these are the cells of your the lining of your gut that you want them nice and tightly packed. So food comes through the intestine here, and then it will get digested and absorbed and it will go through the vili into the bloodstream. And you. take the nutrients that way. But if the the gut’s constantly being inflamed, then the cells will start to become a little bit leaky like this, and the tight junctions between them will get gappy, and [00:17:00] then bacteria, pathogens, bugs, food starts to seep through the gaps.

Into the bloodstream, and then people will then start to notice maybe, oh, I’ve got brain fog, or I’ve got achy joints, or I’m getting rashes on my face or spots on my skin. Or your mood is changing. All of these things can be another sign that there’s something going on in the gut. And leaky again, can be another sort of The next best stage I suppose, of having irritable bowel syndrome if it’s not being recovered from properly and the gut isn’t functioning.

So those are probably how, the main reasons of why you might get i b s. What can you do about it? is there, I guess the, next part of that question you can absolutely do loads about it and I think that’s what people don’t necessarily understand. And then, and not to poo western medicine, cause obviously it’s incredible.

Your, like you said, we go to the doctor, they’re not asking you about all of the other things that are going on in your life, which can also be impacting your gut health. So for me, the biggest thing is always a [00:18:00] comprehensive stool analysis because there’s no point in guessing what’s causing your ibs, could it be that you’ve picked up a travel bug or that you had a dodgy takeaway and you’ve, you’ve still got a bug in there or something.

Or is it that, just that, over years of stress, your gut microbiome balance has fluctuated in the sort of more negative way, and stress has such a huge impact on our gut. We have a gut-brain access. So if we’re under any sort of mental or physical stress, it can also put stress on the gut. It can make it more leaky.

It can make it more inflammatory, and it can have more of when it has a more pro-inflammatory state, it means that some of the bad bacteria can proliferate, which then gives you the ibs. So what you wanna do is find out what is the cause of the gut symptoms, and you can do that through a stool test.

Yes. Okay. Maybe it’s a pathogen, if it’s not okay, what are your good bacteria like? Are they’re actually really low levels, or the mucus membrane of your gut is really compromised. You haven’t got anything there to try and stop bacteria [00:19:00] going through from that leaky gut. You wanna find out what the cause is and then you can rectify it.

Now, for example, with the stress thing, a lot of people will know. Oh, do you know what? When I’m really stressed, I notice that I get a flare up. Or you can, you have that gut feeling, don’t you? You know when you know when something’s not nice and you think, oh God, I need to go to the toilet right now, or, So stress can play a huge part in it.

And if that’s the case, it could be just simple as if you can manage your stress levels. If you can try to remove the stresses in your life, take steps to, to do something to improve that stress. You might find that your I B S clears up and that’s quite an easy fix. . But if it’s someone who’s got a parasite or you’ve had, lots of antibiotics or you’re eating a really bad diet, you need to find out what that is.

And really the best way to do that is a stool test. They are expensive, I always say, but they are, they’re worth in weighting gold. If someone said to you, you can pay a few hundred pounds or a few hundred dollars and I’ll tell you what’s going on with your cut, I always say that’s a pretty good investment.

I wish I’d done it 12 years before cuz it would’ve saved me a lot of hassle, [00:20:00] but then I probably wouldn’t be a nutritionist now. . So once you know what the cause is, then you can start to heal the gut. And a gut healing protocol is gonna involve, obviously, like looking at your diet, it’s gonna usually have quite a comprehensive supplement protocol.

Now, obviously as a. A nutritional therapist. I don’t wanna be what’s called like a green doctor. I’m not there just to give more natural versions of a Western medicine. I am there to use the body to heal itself. But also supplementation does help with this. So things like, Supporting the lining of the gut, bringing in prebiotic foods or prebiotic supplements along with probiotics, probiotic foods or probiotic supplements, or using natural antimicrobials to kill off the bacteria to then, make sure that those symptoms aren’t happening.

, a bit of a full body approach. We need to look at stress, is that causing it? We need to look at diet, what foods are you putting in or not putting in. We need to maybe look at a [00:21:00] healing protocol, so with supplements or natural supplements. And then just put taking, putting the whole thing together as a package.

And working on it that way. And I would say people would say what people would say, how long does that take? That’s probably easy. Is this a day? Is this a week? I would say rule of thumb, you are looking at three to six months. If you’ve, six months, if you’ve got really bad gut issues, three to six months, you’re probably gonna see pretty much good resolution of your symptom.

Yeah. Thanks for cheering. So many questions you’ve answered before. That’s just this, just great. Back to the IBS thing. What about coffee? I know that in the morning I have my coffee and I go the toilet and just one of those things. I don’t know if it’s just a morning thing, but it’s like the smell of coffee, side of coffee first sip, like it just, I don’t know a lot of people.

Is that irritable bowel syndrome or is that just, what is that as in sends you to the toilet? Yeah. So coffee is a stimulant, so that’s why we get a buzz off it. We become more alert off it. It’s waking us up. Coffee is gonna do the same to your gut. [00:22:00] It’s gonna start that peristalsis action in the gut.

When you think food’s moving along the intestines, it will start that process. So it’s like kickstarting the metabolism almost to, to move things through now, which is, is it good, is it bad? I would say, . Ideally you don’t want coffee on an empty stomach because when you have coffee on, which I know lots of people do, I used to do it, I’d probably used to drink like five, six cups of coffee a day when I was working in, my old job.

And coffee is huge trigger for people with irritable bowel because if, especially if you have diarrhea or loose stools, it’s gonna make you go to the toilet even more. Cause you’ve already got a compromised gut. But having coffee on an empty stomach is gonna impact Your blood sugar as well because it’s almost going to spike your blood sugar because which is gonna then start getting everything moving.

It’s gonna give you more energy, so things are gonna start to move through the guts. So I would say you always wanna try and have coffee with food. It’s better for you. It’s gonna keep your blood [00:23:00] sugar a little bit more balanced. But it’s absolutely. Make things move through in the morning. And I know a lot of people rely on that as well to have their morning coffee to get them going to the toilet.

But I would encourage you to have a water and some food first just so it’s a little bit more gentler on your digestion. Got it. Okay. Thank you for that. , what is the difference between a dietician and a nutritionist as well? What are, what’s the core difference? There’s it’s a bit of a weird one.

There’s dieticians and I suppose I’m speaking from the perspective of, the UK health system dieticians are much more in line with what our nhs, our national health system and how the Western medical. Profession works. I suppose it’s a lot to do. I would say it’s probably more to do with calories in, calories out.

And in line with what like I said, Western doctors would prescribe with people from a nu nutritionist perspective. So you’ve got nutritionists, you’ve got nutritional therapist. There’s what, technically what I am, you’ve got naturopathic nutrit. Nutritionists are, and especially what [00:24:00] I do is we are looking at the body as a whole, so we are always looking at the root cause of the problem, and we’re not just there to mask symptoms.

So it’s always, it’s much more investigative. When you’re a nutritional therapist is you’re trying to understand what’s the reason you have this problem, then we need to peel back all the layers and work from there outwards to try and heal the body. But we’re doing it in a much more holistic perspective, maybe than a dietician, because we are looking much more at stress, sleep, lifestyle exercise, all of those things that play into the body as a whole than maybe a dietician, which in my experience has been a lot more focused on.

Calories and food obviously is a huge part of it, but we focus more on the whole picture as a, in a holistic perspective, I would say. Yeah, makes sense. I think I had this conversation the day with someone. I was like, you can get your diet right, you can exercise right? Get your water all that stuff.

Stress is good, [00:25:00] but don’t sleep for a week. Not gonna work. So it’s like it’s, it all balances together. You can’t just, chop off one arm and say you’ve lost five kilos. You know what I mean? It doesn’t work like that. Like it’s all interconnected. What about fasting? Do you ever tell clients, or do you recommend fasting?

There’s all these hype about water fasting. I’ve read walks into the five and two and all this stuff about fasting. What is your recommendation to clients in regards to, fast? Funny. I get that. I get this, asked all this all the time and I feel like I should have a set response here for this.

Yeah. Cause people are really interested in this. So fasting, there’s lots of different ways of thinking about it, first of, I would say fasting often works better for men than women just because of how women’s hormones are. If we are not eating, it can impact our blood sugar, which can impact our hormone balance.

So generally, as rule of thumb, I found that fasting works better for men because of the hormone we’d have. You [00:26:00] have the same hormone rollercoaster maybe as a woman can. Secondly fasting is, if you were doing it from a weight loss perspective, fasting and fasting can be good to create that calorie deficit if there is a lot of weight to be lost.

Because if you’ve got, spare calories to burn, then the, you want the body to burn that fat. But if you are not necessarily overweight, fasting doesn’t always work because you are then just gonna be a calorie deficit and you haven’t got enough energy coming in the body to do all of your bodily functions.

Now, fasting from the perspective of shortening your eating window is quite good. because digestion takes up a huge amount of energy in the body. It’s massive, which is often why, when you eat, you feel quite lethargic or tired. If you’ve had a big meal after you need to sit down, that’s because all the blood, all the energy’s going to your digestive system to break down the food and get the nutrients out.

So if you can [00:27:00] shorten your eating window so that you are not eating from seven in the morning till 10 at night. You’ve then got a longer period over the evening when you are fasting so that the body can then do everything else it needs to do. Now at nighttime, the immune system is really important to, it’s repairing, it’s healing, it’s fighting infection.

Our limb system is detoxifying. All of the toxins throughout the body. Our brain’s working on solidifying memories and all of these things, and we’re sleeping, we’re recharging our batteries, which is what we want it to do. But if we’ve still got food in the digestive system, then we’re just, the body’s not able to do those other really important points.

And things that it needs to do. So if you can fast. And so by fast I mean having that long period of not eating is good. Yes, absolutely. But fasting to the point where it’s calorie deficit can be detrimental if you are not getting enough food and you’ll know that usually because of your energy levels.

I have a lot of people say, oh, I don’t eat breakfast. I’m not that [00:28:00] hungry. , but then they’re, on lots of coffees a day or three o’clock in the afternoon, they need a snack or some chocolate or some sugar, and it’s that’s not really working for you then is it because your body is giving you those signs that it’s not got enough food and energy in them?

So I would say it can be short term. It can be good in the sense if you are overweight and you’re trying to lose calories and you do a little bit of a deficit. , great long term. It’s probably not advisable because your body, there’s a reason that we need, between, 2000, 2,200 calories a day because our body needs to do all of these things with the energy and our brain uses a lot of energy.

, which is fine, but if you are not eating enough and you’re just fasting and calorie deficit, you’re gonna find that you’re hungry and you’re cranky and your concentration and your memory goes, you might not repair as quickly from me, recover from exercise. You might find you’ve got muscle ache. You find that your body is burning muscle rather than fat, which is what a lot of people I think don’t realize, is if you eat [00:29:00] less, and this is often I find.

Something when people think of a diet is that if you eat less, your body will think there’s a famine. So at first it’ll be like, okay, I’ll burn some fat, and you think, great, I’m losing weight. But then it will plateau because our bodies are really clever. So if your body’s thinking, oh my gosh, there’s not enough food every day I’m getting less and less.

And I’m hungry. I need to preserve my fat stores for danger for famine mode because fat has more colds, more calories on us than muscle does. So what will happen is our body will burn the muscle because there’s less calories, but it will store fat. So people will think, gosh, I’m eating less. I’ve still got weight around the middle, weight on my bone or my arms, what’s happening?

It’s because your body is preserving that because it’s worry. That there’s a famine coming and as soon as you start to eat regularly again, your body’s clever. Ah, food’s coming great. What I can do is I’ll speed up my metabolism and I’ll start to burn the fat because I don’t need the [00:30:00] stores of it because I know that we’re in a safe time, and the body can and metabolizes it needs to, it can burn fat as it needs to.

And I don’t need to worry about storing it. So there’s a roundabout way of explaining fasting, but I hope that helped. No, it definitely did. What went through my head? Just a couple little thoughts. When you talked about the immune system working at night, it’s like a nighttime cleaner at a shopping center.

I’m one of those motorized mops and it’s just going slow. Like cleaning the whole shopping center during the night, and it’s like we have that in, in, in ourselves. What’s a really interesting fact is so many people that diet hate their. To a point where they’re at war. This is back with the diplomacy versus war.

They’re at war with their body. You can’t cheat your body. You can for a short period of time, but in the long run your body wins. Hands down. Okay? We know this cuz we all die and the body shuts off, but. If you just loved yourself a little bit more and said, you know what, we got this. I’ll give you the [00:31:00] right food.

I’ll treat you good. I’ll get enough sleep for you. I won’t stress you out. You take me for some runs. We’ll go to the gym every now and then we’ll get some exercise there and let’s be friends. And if you start up your friend in your body will work for you as well.

Know it sounds stupid, but it’s just that change of thought versus. Love yourself. It’s the only body you live in. It’s the only house you’ve got. Absolutely. You can totally right there. I think it’s easier said than done for a lot of people. There are lots of people that do, go to war with their body and it can be a very mental thing as well.

It is, it’s a psychological pain that can be causing you to have an upset relationship with your body. But it’s so true, you don’t need. Live a strict regime of diet and exercise. To have a healthy body that works for you. You just need to put more of the good stuff in and do more of the good things, which will make you feel better, which will then mean that the body functions better and you will have a better relationship with it.

It’s, you don’t need to be a saint with your body. But you just need to treat it with a little bit of kindness as well, I think is [00:32:00] important. Absolutely. Now, from one coach to another, it’s like health coaching, for example, right? You have the answers. A cu a client comes to you, you diagnose him, you give him the analysis.

You give ’em the plan. Okay. That’s half the job. The other half of the job is the power of behavioral change. It’s to manage their inhibitions, fears, blocks that keeps clients on track, motivated and hit their health goals. How hard is it to change someone’s behavior as well? What’s your experience like with that?

It depends on how much they want to change. So often I find it can be if they’re like at the end of their tether and a lot of people that come to us usually. Been to the doctors or hospital as the last resort. They come to us because they were like nothing else has worked. So a lot of those times people are like, I am really ready to make change, and they are going to do what you asked them to do because they’re like, I’m fed up.

But some people. Have almost, I find, grow to have their symptoms and their diagnosis and their illnesses as a bit of their identity. And it’s oh, I can’t do that because I’m, I’ve got this, or, [00:33:00] and so they use that as a barrier to actually putting the effort into making change. So when I’m working as a health coach with someone, what I’m trying to understand is what are your actual barrier?

to this? Is it that you’re being lazy and you can’t be bothered because you just want the easy way out? Or is it that, it’s, years and years of ingrained sort of indoctrination of yourself that this is who you are now that we need to work on? Or is it just that, people just put silly barriers in the way, it’s oh, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the money.

Oh, I haven’t got the space. Oh, healthy eating’s hard. And if we can start to unpack, Then we can say, look, let’s just focus on this. And I think a lot of times when you are doing it from a health coach perspective is someone will come to me, right? And I’ll ask for a list of all their symptoms and they’re like, oh, do you know what I, I really want to lose weight.

often that’ll be that their main focus is they wanna lose weight. But when I look at their symptoms and I look at their blood tests or the stool tests, I’m be like, do you know what [00:34:00] actually what you really need to do is work on the hormone balance because of the imbalance of the hormones or the blood sugar that’s causing you to be overweight.

Whereas they just think, oh, they need to eat less or exercise more. But actually, no, there’s a more biological reason for that. So it’s trying to marry up what you know is the cause of their symptoms with what they want. What they want to get out of it and what they think is the problem going on with them and trying to find a balance between the two so that you can then help them.

And I think there’s lots of tools that we use. There’s lots of like diagrams and charts and things that we’re trying to unpack each area of your life. So what is it? Is it the stress impacting this? Is it your exercise? Is it job? Is it family? Is it finances? Is it diet? Is it sleep? And then we can say, look, actually, why don’t we focus a little bit on this area?

And as you start to focus on say, . Your sleep and your sleep improves and you’ve got a better bedtime routine, and you’re going to bed earlier and you’re sleeping better. You wake [00:35:00] up with more energy, great. I’ve got more energy. I’m more focused and motivated to eat well today because I’ve had a good sleep.

And when I eat well, I’m gonna feel better. And when I feel better, I’m more likely to go to the gym. Oh no, go to the gym. I’m gonna have more energy, and then I’m gonna have those endorphins and I’m gonna feel good and I wanna keep doing it. So it’s just trying to marry up all of those things. Again, taking that whole holistic approach to it.

Finding out what the blocks and the triggers for that person are and just trying to dig a little bit deeper and find out the reason and then slowly work on that. Yeah, it can hard, a lot of people come, a lot of people come with the. The fake reason, not the real one as well. I, someone was like, I really wanna lose weight.

But what they really wanted to feel better, more energy, sleep better, and obviously the external thing is to lose weight, but the internal things that come with it. Now you touched on something that was my next question, which is hormone balancing as well. Talk to me a little bit about hormone balancing, mood swings, hormonal aches, cramping, digestive issues, and female hormone.

Things. Painful periods. I’ve [00:36:00] got a wife I know what hormones all about . Or what’s hormone balancing? Hormones, men and women have hormones in the body. They’re, like chemical messengers that send off around the body to, to trigger certain reactions within the body.

When our hormones are unbalanced, it can mean that we are then, Unbalanced, in ourself with various different things. Now, for women, obviously hormonal balance is huge because we have such a huge change in our hormones every month when we have a, menstrual cycle and when we have an imbalance of hormones.

it can cause so many symptoms for women whether it is menstrual cycle related, heavy periods, pain, cramping, mood swings, poor sleep, anxiety but it can also have an impact on energy focus, mood concentration, has a huge impact on the reproductive system, with regards to fertility as well.

From a women’s health perspective, the hormones you think of estrogen, progeta, and these ones, which are they fluctuate quite a lot throughout the month. That’s one side of things, but then another side of a sort of hormones that can affect both men [00:37:00] and women. I guess the one I probably see the most with is thyroid hormones.

Now, these, for women, obviously these are connected. The thyroid hormones can impact the, our sort of female health sex hormones as well. I guess from a more general perspective with hormone. Ones that affects men and women is our thyroid health. Now, thyroid is the gland in the neck. It produces thyroid hormone.

It goes into every cell of the body, and it governs our metabolism. So when the thyroid’s not working so well, it means we’ve probably got less energy. We can be more lethargic, maybe more constipated for a lot of people at. We have cold, more cold hands and feet. On the other side of having an overactive thyroid, it could be that you are more nor more jittery, more nervous.

You’re the sort of person that can’t put on weight, you’ve got a lot more energy. So that’s one that see quite a lot in clinic. And especially if you people come to us with energy, it’s let’s check your thyroid. Cuz actually thyroid, if thyroid can be impacted by stress, and lack of iodine too.

So it’s looking at that. So that’s a really big area for hormone balance. But then, like I said, from the women’s perspective, [00:38:00] which is what we deal a lot within our clinic, and even myself was coupled with my, the IBS issues I had hormone balance imbalance was, massive, and I.

As, I dunno what percentage of women around the world are on the contraceptive pill, which is obviously a synthetic hormone. But when I came off the contraceptive pill, I’d probably been on it for 16 years or something. It was the answer to everything. When you go to the doctor, oh, I’ve got heavy periods.

Oh, I’ve got acne. Oh, I’ve got period pain. It’s go on the pill. And people still get prescribed to go on the pill and I don’t think that you realize. Detrimental that can be because we are on it for long periods of time. And even myself, when I came off the pill after 16 years, my skin went crazy.

I, I was in my thirties and it was like a, really bad teenage acne. I didn’t know at the time that was hormonal imbalance and your body’s trying to detoxify all of these hormones and . It’s so important to have good gut health to balance your hormones because our hormones are excreted through the gut.

So I said thing that we tie in a lot with people, and it’s something we [00:39:00] see usually quite a lot together, especially with women, is if there’s gut issues going on, there’s often quite. Commonly hormonal imbalance as well, because the hormones aren’t being excreted through the stool and they get reabsorbed.

And when h hormones as particularly estrogen because it’s quite a powerful hormone when estrogen gets reabsorbed, or we have high levels of estrogen that aren’t being excreted. Women find that maybe skin issues are a big one. Mood swings, painful periods, bloating things like fibroids and cysts can develop.

It’s quite a, it’s quite a big area to cover, but it is very much connected. It’s something that is very important to make sure your gut health is working well if there’s hormonal imbalance, because like I said, nothing in the body is in isolation. , this is another, even, this is tying it all in together.

Everything is absolutely connected. Thank you for ex, thank you for expanding on that. Not many people, understand about hormones and you just educated me a little bit about hormone balance. [00:40:00] The last one, which we touched on, I think we’ve touched on lifestyle, diet, exercise, sleep, stress.

Everyone knows what the stress is, but you talk about how to det. Couple tips before we finish off. How do we de-stress? Like when someone says, just stress less, stop stressing. Relax, that’s great. , thank you. That changed my life. What are some tips that you give people to de-stress and relax?

I think the first thing with trying to say de-stress is, If someone said to you, just chill out or relax, that’s gonna stress you out more. That’s like really passive aggressive way to get someone riled up. I would say it’s very much looking at the reasons that you are stressed and trying to, again, dig into those.

I think I find the biggest things that work with my clients when I’m trying to support stress management is putting in. And I think especially, work is a huge stress for people. And I’ve had clients that have quit their jobs because the stress levels have been so much that they’ve impacted their health.

I see that quite a lot and whilst sometimes I may actually say to [00:41:00] someone, not just straight off the bat, Is this the right job for you? They might turn around and say, no, it’s not, and I’m gonna quit that job. And they remove that stress and their health dramatically changes. Now, obviously that’s more of a drastic drastic example.

I’m not telling everyone to quit their jobs, but I find the biggest thing is. Trying to put boundaries in place to try and minimize that stress because a lot of us are yes people, so we’ll say yes. We take on things we don’t have the capacity to do and then we’re putting more on our plate.

That’s gonna make us more stressed from a another perspective. I say I have a background of being a yoga teacher as well. is knowing that there’s things that you can do to instantly put your body from your sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight response into our parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest nervous system, which is the more de-stressed one is breathing is huge.

If you just two minutes works really. . If you just find a quiet space or go and sit in the [00:42:00] toilet at work or wherever it is, and you close your eyes and you take some deep breaths, it will instantly activate your para parasympathetic nervous system. And anybody, if you’ve ever been to a yoga class or you’ve ever done anything where you’ve just sat there, it will de-stress you and the importance of this.

Is that it brings down your cortisol levels, it will bring down your adrenaline, which are our stress hormones, which will make us more stressed. And it just puts you into perspective more. It’s why, when we are nervous or we’re stressed, our breathing will get more shallower and we’ll be more on edge and everything’s a little bit more tense.

But as soon as you take deep breaths, breathe in for four out for six, or even, if that doesn’t feel comfort. Box, breathe. Breathe in for four, out for four. Hold for four. In for four. Hold for four. It will naturally calm the body down. And I’ve seen clients, especially some big cl clients of mine, have had severe hormonal imbalance.

A lot of stress levels, hair falling out heavy, painful periods, gut issues, and I just got them to go to the toilet in periods of [00:43:00] stress. and do some deep breathing, and they did it a couple of times a day and it was amazing the results. So that’s probably my biggest tip. is do some breathing.

I actually have a funny story of that recently, a couple weeks ago I was out with my wife and we both went to talk and one of my friends is like a master breath work. Anyway, he’s just next level in terms of breath. And he does this one where it’s nostril, where you hold one nostril and you breathe and you alternate nostrils and you breathe.

I come outta the toilet waiting for my wife. There’s a crowd of people there. Now I’m in my own world because I’m just, I’m just in my own world. I’m standing there going.

My wife comes out and goes, what the F are you doing? I’m like, what? People are looking at me thinking I was doing something to talk. I just sit in there breathing for a minute. People thought I was doing like cocaine or something. It was the funniest thing, cuz I was literally getting high off my breath.

Just getting, I scented. I was, it was so funny because I’m like just laughing to [00:44:00] myself going, oh my God, how embarrassing. But it was just funny. That’s a great breathing exercise. A and Nostra breathing please. Yeah, it’s amazing if you are sitting in traffic or whatever, hold your nostril.

Breathe in. Alternate nostrils. Add such a rush. I was doing that today. Better than drugs. Breath is better than drugs. Any drug, alcohol, cigarettes, whatever. So if you are stressed, that, that is number one. The other ones you say take a time away from technology, which is great, nourish the body and make time for yourself as well.

And then identify triggers and seek a resolution. Kelly, we could chat for hours, but I’m gonna let my audience find you. So you’ve got some programs online as well. Where can people find out more about your stuff and your work? Yeah, fabs. You can head to the natural balance.net on website there.

You can still about the sort of private coaching we do online group courses that we’ve got or online self-led courses. You can find us on Instagram as well. It’s the natural balance with an underscore at the end. And yeah you can find everything on there. We’ve got lots on there. Lots. [00:45:00] What about socially as well?

Where do you spend most of your time on. Instagram probably. You’ll see a lot on there. We’ve got a lot of information on there. We’ve got a lot on the website as a lot of blogs, so blogs on gut health, women’s health, hormones, fertility, pregnancy we’ve got a whole range of beacon of pregnancy.

Congratulations and for your next step in Journey in Life as well. Thank you very much. Wanna say thank you for being a guest on the Best Bull Pits podcast, and to my audience, go out there, follow Kelly and check out her website. She’s got some great stuff there. And yeah, if you, any of this stuff resonated with you, definitely seek out some professional advice and let Kelly look after you.

Kelly, once again, thank you very much and we shall speak to you soon. Okay. Thank you very much, Michael. It’s wonderful to speak with you. Thank you. All right, great. Thanks so much. All right, bye bye.