The Greater Side Of Emotional Eating

In times of sadness and difficulties, most people turn to food to put their negative emotions in check. Emotional eating may bring temporary comfort during our lowest points. But of course, it is not a healthy choice if not kept in check. Karie Cassell, author of The Domino Diet, is here to discuss how to address this unhealthy habit by targeting its root cause: our very own thoughts. Tune in as she presents practical tips on calibrating your emotional system, building courage to face your fears, and harnessing the power of PAUSE. Karie also discusses the benefits of doing positive activity bites every single day instead of relying on huge lifestyle shifts that are sometimes too overwhelming to execute.

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The Greater Side Of Emotional Eating

With Karie Cassell, The Author Of The Domino Diet

Welcome to the show. This training is a little bit different because every entrepreneur needs good nutrition to keep themselves going. Especially in really stressful times, you need to be getting your butt out there, getting some exercise, and eating right. I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t eat right. I wanted to remind you about our new tours before we jump into this.

We have very reasonably priced podcast, radio, and print tours out there for people who are either building their platform or their book is coming out or already out. We have guys who read the book. If you look at most of these booking places, they don’t read your book. They put you with their friends. These guys cultivate podcasts and radio shows that are in alignment with your book, your business, and what you do, so it’s much more effective. Reach out to me at ChatWithJuliet.com if you want to discuss and see if it’s right for you.

Our guest is Karie Cassell. Karie brings Nourish to Flourish message to us as a sought-after speaker and number one best-selling author of The Domino Diet: How to Heal You from the Inside Out. Combining her Life Coach certification and alternative and non-alternative medicine as a dietician for 30 years, Karie’s unique formula unlocks patterns of self-sabotage while putting the HEAL back in HEALTH. Look for her soon-to-be-released courses, The Domino Diet Formula and Cracking the Craving Code for Your Full Spectrum Well-being.

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Welcome, Karie. I’m so excited to have you. You know I’m a sugar whore. That’s probably a horrible thing to say, but when Karie and I were working on her book, I quit sugar altogether for four months. It was amazing. I know they say it’s like heroin. I went through withdrawals. I needed Betty Ford for sugar addiction. I’m really excited to hear what you have to share with these guys about how to avoid being me. What do you have to share with us?

All About Karie

I’m going to take you to the root. I did a TED Talk and the topic cultivated a lot of curiosity. I’m going to show you a smattering of what it’s like to be a dietician and a life coach. I’m a different kind of thinker. I’ve been a dietician for 30 years and have been in alternative medicine for 10 years prior to that, so altogether 40 years in wellness. The number keeps on growing. I keep saying that number. It must have grown by this point, but I’m going to keep saying it.

Nonetheless, the topic I’ve been spinning around is that there’s a greater side to emotional eating. That’s piquing some curiosity because it’s usually a negative connotation. My hope is to talk about this idea that we are creating our results by how we think. If we have negative connotations around our food, or we have negative belief systems in our thought process, then we’re probably going to create sabotage at the end of the day. How to extract some of that out?

Sometimes, there are these little common thoughts that we all have as human society walks on this planet, or at least we’ve been privy to. I hope to extract some of that so that we can feel it also resonating within us. You’ve been around maybe for a little bit. Maybe you’ve seen the planet for a little while. I have a couple of resources I’ll mention on how to get in touch with me and all that.

It is really a passionate place for me to have people see the message around food not as your friend necessarily, but more as fuel and healing first and then for celebration as well. That’s a passion for me. Whether or not, we’re all trying to make a living too. I have been to a place in my life before where it felt like the writing of a book or some of these endeavors were on behalf of wealth. I’ve also learned that it takes away from my true passion, which is completely helping people heal from the inside out. That’s the subtitle of my book, The Domino Diet.

I mentioned that I’ve been a dietician for a long time, it feels like. I have been really fortunate. I’ve sat in some pretty cool places in my career. I was in the Board of Director of the Canadian Diabetes Association. I’m the Media Network Chairperson for Dieticians of Canada. That sounds good, or maybe it doesn’t too, but the point for me to say that is there might be some credibility coming from that academic side even though I’m not strong academically.

What really began to catapult my learning was through the personal trials and tribulations to the point where I began to see that there was more of a battle going on between the macronutrients and the nutrients that I had been studying. Here I was at thirteen years of age reading the Nutritional Almanac book. I thought it was normal, to be honest with you. I was reading it instead of Vogue Magazine. I would look around and think that that was the way everybody was.

I hit a Biology 30 class, and I was able to answer these questions. Believe me. I was not strong academically, but here I was answering these questions about vitamin A and vitamin C. My girlfriend behind me who knew I was not strong academically said, “How do you know all this?” I seriously looked at her and went, “How do you not know this?” What I’m saying to you is that I had this draw to want to understand food. I am passionate about it.

Carbohydrates And Diet

I began in the ‘80s when carbohydrates were the best. We’re talking about seeing carb-up powders. Protein powders were sold in these packages like brown sugars in their little plastic bags. There was nothing fancy about them at the time. Carbohydrates were the best in the ‘80s, and then came the ‘90s, and it was fat.

Fat was the best. Halfway through that decade, they weren’t good anymore. It started off with cold-pressed oils and Omega-3s. People were drinking olive oil. I do remember that. Halfway through, fats were bad, and we then had low-fat diet products that littered the grocery stores and changed the way we shelf and the way we see marketing going on in our grocery stores. It has never looked the same again. Then came, “Where’s the beef?” After that, proteins took their turn.

I watched the battle of these macronutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats duking it out for the spotlight. You had to hate one to love the other. I was so perplexed because I had been studying these. I knew that they contained the micronutrients and the vitamins. If you take out one, you’re taking out a plethora of vitamins.

It’s still going on. It is driving me nuts because no diet that I’ve come across so far in the 40 years has helped obesity, diabetes, heart disease, mental health, and digestive disorders, which, on the contrary, seem to be on the rise. I want to propose that maybe the battle of the macronutrients and us having a negative food relationship is causing its own stress. It’s causing its own dis-ease. I know there’s a plethora of other reasons, but it’s not helping.

The true meaning of the word diet comes from the Greek word dieta. It means a way of life. I don’t think that our diets feel like a way of life, so I want us to knock it off, get rid of this battle of the macronutrients, and maybe even adopt a flexitarian way of eating. I’m not against vegetarianism. I’m not against somebody’s path. I want them to embrace it and not have resentment of one food to the other, if that makes any sense. That’s really important to me.

In my own journey in this, I learned also in a mental way that we will have these lessons in life that have nothing to do with our diet. It started the beginnings of my understanding of emotional eating or emotional relationships with other areas of our lives where we end up replacing it with food, alcohol, scrolling, and shopping. At the end of the day, I learned through my own trials and tribulations that there was something missing by just focusing on the diet. It seems like, “Duh,” but I was so entrenched in this world that I thought it was as simple as saying, “Eat this and not that, and you’ll be fine.”

I ended up with my own health journey. I ended up with a lump on my pituitary gland and my thyroid gland. I’ve had my thyroid taken out. If anybody knows about those, they’re the mothership of hormones. I was experiencing a hormonal imbalance like crazy where my body thought it was in pregnancy and menopause at the same time, and that is no word of a lie. Here I am as a dietician trying to promote this message of impact, and it’s not working because I’m feeling like a fraud. I don’t even have the energy to do it. All I know is something’s missing.

Meeting Her Husband

Then came my husband. He’s in a scooter. We’re in Vegas. He is not a happy guy. He is on a scooter because he has gout badly at this point. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a painful disease in the joints. He’s not able to walk. Have you ever done Vegas with somebody who cannot get around mobility-wise? I am somebody who loves to walk. He also has high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure badly at this point. He is eight years younger than me, and I’m feeling like, “The writing’s on the wall. I’m going to be a widow.” I think to myself, “I’m not impacting him. I have my own health concerns going on. Something is missing.”

To the best of my knowledge, I thought about retiring. I even tossed in the towel, so to speak. If you can’t beat them, you join them, so I began to whine with wine in the hot tub thinking, “I did all the right ways at this part of half of my life, so on this half of my life, I’ll have fun,” but it was starting to catch up to me as well. I was starting to see my own troubles, trials, and diagnoses.

I ended up in a conversation with someone. I’ll quicken that part of the story. I ended up becoming a life coach. It was becoming a life coach that I discovered that there was something that was at the root of what was going on here. Often, underneath it all, it has a lot to do with fear, hence, why I’m starting off in the very beginning talking about how we want to spin the connotations around food and not have battles, negative relationships, and fear undertones in our eating and many other aspects of our life.

I’m going to niche into our food because most that are here are entrepreneurs and most that are here are writing books. I’m going to weave that in as well, but for a moment besides that, everyone walking on this planet, whether that’s their endeavor or not, needs to eat. We all need to hydrate. There are no exemptions no matter who you are because you might have families. You might have spouses like I do. It’s important that we see it as one message, I feel.

Emotional Eating

There was a study done on cats. They were eating while being X-rayed. The X-rays were showing very normal digestive systems. Their organs, hearts, and diaphragms were doing what they were supposed to be doing until they brought a dog into the room. It was upon that that they began to react more emotionally. Everything was on alert. They were on alert. Under the X-ray there, you could see their diaphragms were starting to collapse. Everything was fluttering. You can imagine. Their hearts were heart racing and so forth. It got to the point where some of them were vomiting.

While watching this study, it occurred to me that it’s not rocket science. You could probably put the pieces together like I am. If we’re eating while in distress, what is our system doing? While watching the news while somebody else is in distress, what is our system doing? What about when we’re skating across the floor, eating a fork full or two, putting the plate in the dishwasher, or driving in traffic while eating and frustrated? The list goes on. What about eating at the computer? How is our system reacting if it’s not also in at least some distress? That’s unless your mind is very attuned to keeping everything calm and happy on the way of how we will properly digest. I’ll elaborate on that.

What I learned more about this fear and the sabotage is that first off, fear is not something that’s going to go away. You might be thinking about deadlines for writing your book. You might be thinking about the things that you could talk to somebody else about that they don’t have that particular endeavor, but for you, it feels like the mammoth is coming after you, and that’s how your body’s operating. Yet, when you put things in perspective, it isn’t. We created our own thinking, this world of stress.

At the end of the day, fear is right in the show. You don’t chase away fear, so to speak. It’s like darkness. You cannot chase it away. You turn on a light. This is like turning on a light, taking fear, and saying, “You’re no longer the driver. You’re beside me, or you’re behind me.” Why I’m saying this to you is because we will otherwise distract.

There are three things in how we deal with fear in and of itself. We usually end up distracting. We end up in dissuasion and what we call def con. Defcon is like the cat that went crazy. Defcon is a Military term that says your whole system is under alert because you’re under fear. That’s a whole chemistry that’s going to pump through your body. I’ll talk more about that.

At the end of the day, probably what we’re mostly experiencing in our day-to-day is dissuasion or delay. It will end up becoming emotional eating, emotional scrolling, emotional drinking, and emotional whatever. It’s a distraction from the fear because we haven’t learned how to deal with it. We want to get past this fear and understand that we’re like an AM and an FM dial on our radio in terms of how we breathe.

I’m going to take a deep breath through my nose and then out through the mouth as though I’m blowing through a straw. Never in history were we breathing that way and running from a mammoth. The brain is trained to read how you breathe to know whether to switch on AM or FM, AM being, in this case, the fight-flight response and FM being rest, digest, and create a response. It is the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system simply by how you breathe. It is such a simple thing.

This is where I like to say small hinges really move big doors. I don’t know why we’re not talking more about this because we can calibrate our emotional system and our nervous system to be eating one way or the other. Like the AM and FM on the radio, you cannot be on both at the same time. By multitasking, eating at the computer, not going for a walk, so to speak, because things are starting to get pent-up, you’re probably on the fight-flight response. You’re in shallow breathing, which is the fight-flight response.

Calm breathing will flip it over to the parasympathetic to rest, digest, and create. The word digest is in there. It is superior for digestion because that’s where hormones like serotonin are. Serotonin and oxytocin help you absorb your food better, as well as the nutrients and those micronutrients I was talking about. This is what we should be talking about and not the battle against the macronutrients.

I believe that if you eat under the influence of the rest, digest, and create, you’ll be able to eat almost anything because you’ll also stop eating faster. We feel fuller faster. We feel that our cravings aren’t just for food and sugar. It’s probably a stress response going on, looking for dopamine. The whole system is on the fight-flight response where there’s no rationale for portions and no rationale for what you’re supposed to eat. If you’re in the fight-flight response, good luck grabbing an apple. You’re probably not going to be thinking that way.

Normally, I would spend a lot of time on this particular area because there’s so much to say about the hormones that are involved, but I will leave you with this part. In the fight-flight response, we’re producing cortisol. Cortisol is a fat-storing hormone correlated with heart disease and mental disorders. It’s one or the other.

It’s happening even in little amounts or large amounts throughout our entire day on a chronic level while eating. I’m drawing our attention to it so that we can begin a whole new way of how we approach our food. As a dietician, I’ve talked for years about what not to eat, but we have not talked about the how. I’m talking about what I call a prescription before eating and taking in that breath.

Power Of PAUSE

I use this acronym, the Power of the PAUSE, or PAUSE in and of itself as a way to prime the mind to begin eating. P stands for Pause. Pause and breathe before eating. Don’t dive in right away. A is to become Aware of your emotions and your surroundings. If the news is on or there is negativity around you, in all likelihood, you’re going to be in shallow breathing. You want to calibrate your nervous system with that breath and be aware of your emotions. What are you really craving? What’s going on?

Unitask. Focus on food. Some of us are afraid to do that because we don’t trust ourselves. We think we’re going to overdo it, or we’re going to have a binge episode. I was born human first, so all this I relate to. I have learned tools to navigate. Try unitasking. Try not to type your last deadline page for your book while eating. It’s important. It will help with heartburn and digestive disorders too.

The S is to Slow down. If you’re slowing down, you’re going to be able to hear the signals of fullness and if you’re full or not. You’ll be able to hear if you really want that particular item or not. Our brains are helping us if we stop and listen. The one that I’m most wanting to promote is that we enjoy food again, and we don’t think about it as, “So-and-so is eating that,” or, “I can’t have that.” When you’re doing this, the inner physician in all of us will know how much and when to stop. All of it will be customized for you by coming into the Power of the PAUSE.

I have a little bookmark or a little printout that you can QR code scan, and you can have this reminder of the power of the PAUSE. In other words, I use tools that you would use where you’re eating, for instance, or at your desk to remind you so that we can re-pattern the subconscious mind to create new habits. It’s very important to knock off the things we’ve been trained to do.

In other words, who’s heard this before? It’s, “Eat everything on your plate because there are starving kids in the world.” Yet, how on earth did that help? You wouldn’t believe how many people I am working with where that is a major pattern that they’re running called a paradigm simply because they’ve been wiring and firing for so long.

Diet

In this whole endeavor, please join me. The whole idea of the true meaning of the word diet, I’m thinking this is an opportunity. We’re a new generation that has abundance around us. That could be argued because there are people talking about food prices, which is a whole nother topic, but not our ancestors. My dad grew up rationing a can of beans for three days. There’s rationing going on that they had that I will never have experienced. They taught us to eat a certain way because that’s what they knew. They came from lack and scarcity. They did not have abundance to teach us how to navigate with abundance. We are new to this, I feel.

A little bit of poetic license that we’re a little bit clumsy at it. We’re a bit portion-distortion thinking because we come from black and scarcity, but we do have an opportunity with this awareness, being aware of the fact that, “My grieving and my DNA are creating a lot of this disease on the planet.” It is, so how about we install new patterns of the true meaning of the word diet and begin this experiment? That is what I’m hoping for.

That’s what I wrote in my book called The Domino Diet. If you anchor your thoughts to more positive thinking and awareness of your thoughts, the rest will domino into place. This whole business about how you breathe won’t have to matter because, in positive thinking, you tend to be breathing more calmly. It’s your breathing that ignites your hormones, and your hormones will have an influence on your feelings. People think their feelings are what cause their cravings, but it is not. It is first your thoughts, then how you breathe, and then your hormones and feelings. The feelings will then influence your actions, and then everything will influence your results.

Both sides of my medical curriculum were focused on the results, the symptoms, the pill, and the diet. We weren’t going to the root. Rarely are we going to the root causes. I am hoping that this is a message that can start to catch fire, and we will start to think more positively about our food again. Niche this to your own whether it’s finances or your relationships. The point being is it starts with your thoughts.

I create different titles as Juliet knows, like Breathe, Pray, Love. I’m creating courses that go to the root is what I’m getting at. I bring in the idea of this whole of what happened as a paradigm in the background from your growing up, your teenage years, or the relationship. I talk about the emotional part of emotional eating because that’s where it is.

If you have a fight with your spouse or your teenager, or you are worried about your finances, that’s what you’re eating. If I don’t talk about that with you, or you don’t extract that for yourselves, we’re only putting fear in the driver’s seat while eating as opposed to understanding it, going to the depth of it, and parking it beside us. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to be placed in a different spot while you deal with the actual.

I always do a little plug for my daughter. She teaches yoga online. We do this with breathing and whatnot that’s going to help. I then help people understand macronutrients and their calories. It’s not like I brush past it. It comes midway through or towards the end. It was a really difficult decision for me with my book to even put the word diet on that title until I realized the true meaning. It was difficult for me not to dive into talking about the diet right away, but it happens towards the end of my book because I want the mind to be rewiring and firing first.

However, I still am very passionate speaking about the macronutrients and the micronutrients. It is something that is unique to each one of us who may have a diagnosis or their sugar craving is coming from maybe not spacing their meals properly, or maybe not having enough carbohydrate intake in the first place. There’s a deeper assessment.

I wanted to make sure that you knew that I really want to look at that with individuals. Their water intake matters. It’s not as simple as saying, “Do this,” and strategizing throughout the day. As entrepreneurs, you still need to hydrate, you probably know this. You’re 70% water, but it’s not a one-time deal. I’m speaking and using carbon dioxide and oxygen, and there’s water involved. You and I are using water as we speak. It’s not a one-time deal. We have to keep replenishing it in order to have it all functioning in a superior manner. We talk about ways to be able to do that. We sometimes put up the pee chart too so that you can distinguish the color of your urine to know if you’re hydrated or not.

Activity Bites And Sleep

We talk about activity. Weeding this in for the audience is really important to me because I’m no different. I sit at a desk 80% of my day, and sometimes into the evening. I’ve made it a rule for myself to have what I call activity bites after eating to go for a small 10-minute walk, move about the house, or do something that’s 10 minutes worth of activity after eating. At least by that point, because I eat three times a day, and I’m hoping most do, that’s 30 minutes right there.

Studies show that if you are walking intermittently throughout the day versus a 30 minutes, so if it’s 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, it’s as effective as 30 minutes all at once. Is 30 minutes enough? Probably for disease management. The studies show that 8,000 steps a day is better than it used to be. It used to be 10,000 steps, we would say, for disease management and prevention. Studies are starting to say 8,000 is starting to show us some good effects.

For weight release, it is often increased. When I work with individuals including whoever it is, whether it’s for healing, weight release, or otherwise, I have them get a sense of what they are calculating in a day, and then we challenge it to go up by 2,000 steps. 2,000 steps is about 100 calories burnt. There are 3500 calories to 1 pound. If I suggest 10 minutes of activity a day even, and you’re doing 100 calories burning, which is what would happen through that, by the time 30 days have lapsed, that’s 3000 calories.

I can take these little activity bites and see some effects versus the dauntingness that happens in the diet world which makes us feel like we have to be in the gyms, or we have to be on treadmills for 30 minutes or 1 hour. We didn’t have treadmills. We didn’t use to have diabetes and obesity as we do now. We’re underestimating some of the little wins that we can intertwine throughout the day. Call it wins or activity bites, but these are little things or small hinges that move big doors.

Also, I love talking about cravings. I like talking about how our human body speaks to us. When we’re craving salt, sometimes it’s because we’re dehydrated, or we’re looking for potassium. When we’re craving chocolate, we’re maybe looking for serotonin. We’re looking for hormonal balance because that can happen with some of our good chocolates. It may also be caffeine that we’re looking for. If we’re looking for sugar, it could be that we’re not getting enough carbohydrates, or we’re spacing our meals too far apart. Rather than berate them like, “I’m craving this,” I want you to lean in and understand what’s behind that. What are the emotions? Did you eat enough? We go further into it.

If there is not enough serotonin and there is a lot of craving for chocolate, overall for everyone, I start with sleep and hydration, writing books or not. If you were like me when I was writing my book, I would be waking up early. I would have ideas and epiphanies. Sleep was a different kettle of fish for me at the time. I do have times when I don’t need as much sleep, but there are other times that we begin to understand how much we’re missing melatonin and serotonin, which are all part of sleep.

Sleep is where we rest, digest, and repair. There’s a lot happening with our immune system. We want to understand why we’re not sleeping. We go to the obvious first, which is caffeine. I am not saying no caffeine, but I will look at the volume. Most adults shouldn’t have more than 300 milligrams a day, for instance, in the cutoff time.

The window of time that caffeine is in our system is about 5 to 7 hours. We’re a little unique depending on our hydration period, but I usually suggest somewhere around noon to 2:00 to be watchful of your caffeine intake for that reason. If you’re sitting at a desk, and you’re writing your book, for instance, that caffeine we’re looking for maybe to stay awake to be able to do that is something that we want to replace with some other ideas and repattern the thinking around that too.

Blood Circulation

I wanted to mention that I like working with a 30-day, 90-day, 120-day, or longer program. There is a representation of our circulation that is normal blood flow. In this blood, there is a representation of these white beads being iron, B12, oxygen, but also sugar, fat, and salt, and this is normal circulation. We do see, and I see this an awful lot, especially in diabetes, where it thickens from salt intake, sugar intake, extra fat, not enough hydration, and not enough movement. Often, a diagnosis occurs, and that’s when I end up seeing the individual.

What is not said however is that your red blood cells regenerate every 120 days. You had a new batch born, and there’ll be a new batch born again in 120 days. Your red blood cells are a marker of your health. When you are seeing your physician, naturopath, or otherwise, often, you will have blood work done to then determine your true health. That’s your red blood cells.

No way in heck do I ever interpret looking at red blood cell lab data that it’s one and that’s it. There’s so much that can be done to take the new red blood cells and have them eat a certain way, move a certain way, and think a certain way because of the hormones. By drinking enough fluids, we can return back to our homeostasis or our normality with our red blood cells.

Several Updates

It is working for 120 days knowing that you can influence your entire body from the inside out with most of what I’ve mentioned, pausing before eating, having an awareness of your portions, being active, and drinking your fluids. This is my goal, to be able to do that from the inside out. I don’t know if you’re feeling like I’m loading you up with a fire hose, but I have Calendly for you to be able to get in touch with me. I have the Cracking the Craving Code course.

I love Canva. It’s my only way of being creative throughout the day because I’m not really an artsy person. I create recipe books and blogs. I have a recipe book that is for this time of year. We are in June 2024. It’s spring. I’m finally seeing the barbecue season happening, so I thought, “I’m going to create some healthy recipes around that.” It was prompted by Juliet as well.

I wanted to share with you that Mr. Scooter Man is no longer in the scooter. He is free of gout and has normal blood pressure. He is the healthiest I’ve ever seen. It’s simply because he began to, with me, adopt a different way around food. He started to put forward in front of him, rather than focusing on the food, the emotional scrolling, the emotional drinking, and the emotional eating that was happening because he had a fear of giving himself permission to really do what he wanted to do in life, which was to sing in a band. He’s still a corporate guy. He wanted to sing in a band, but he was scared so he would distract himself with the food and the drinking versus getting his butt up on the stage and singing.

Within two weeks of him adopting a different way of thinking and this new approach, which was what I was learning at the time as a life coach, he started to come to me and say, “What could I do to be able to sing better on the stage and look better on the stage?” I looked at him like, “The same thing I’ve been saying to you for twenty years, to eat better and move better.” That would never work and never had the same impact. It didn’t have the stamina or the lasting power. It would only last for maybe two weeks, but when he was doing it on behalf of his dream or his endeavor, it was like he heard a whole new pitch. It took off.

He lost 40 pounds and on and on, the story goes. Finally, I don’t mind being with him again because he’s a happier guy. He was getting angry. Fear was running the show otherwise. Fear is no longer running the show, and he’s living a happier life. We’re living a happier life because of it. The emotional eating part has been cured by the PAUSE.

I say all that to say there is more to it than the roots and understanding. All of this, believe it or not, is woven through the book. His story is woven through my book because he was a handful. I do otherwise welcome your questions. I still have other things to talk about, but I’m going to leave it at that because I want to get to your questions. We’re good timing for that, anyway.

Is there a URL where we can grab that download of the barbecue book?

Yeah. I have it in my emails. I’m just, for one moment, going to look for it.

I have a question for you while you’re doing that. I don’t know if this is a thing, but when you move from processed foods to raw good-for-you food, do you go through withdrawals like drugs, alcohol, and caffeine? If you’re getting off sugar, and you’re feeling those withdrawal symptoms, how do you alleviate them and get through them?

1. A) The awareness because not everyone knows that that’s what’s going on. They’re thinking, “What’s wrong with me?” If they know first and foremost that they’re going to experience something, there might be things that you can do that are proactive around it though to make sure that you’re walking a bit to get the serotonin up to drinking your fluids.

There is a bit of a remedy that’s in place prior to going through all the withdrawal. There can be things that we do in between that are in the healthy way of eating and so forth. Probably more rest is going to be needed, honestly. Where maybe 6 hours of sleep was adequate once upon a time, I would give it more like an 8 to 9-hour window because there’s a lot of repair and rejuvenation going on, allowing for more rest, for sure.

I believe in weaning. I’m not saying that cold turkey doesn’t work for some, but they’re the rare ones. I would be on a weaning-off plan that would take place. Not an all-or-nothing. All or nothing creates old diet patterns in the first place. Number one, sugar is not that evil. Sugar cane is natural. It is normal on our planet. We overdid it. We went from it being used for some manufacturing to some small degree. There’s a show on Netflix called Frosted. Do you know what I’m talking about?

I watched it. If you guys haven’t watched it, it has a bunch of great comedians.

Q&A Segment

There’s messaging underneath it. It has a lot to do with the fact that once upon a time, we didn’t need mass production of sugar. All of a sudden, these breakfast cereals hit the market. I’m not pointing a bunch of fingers. I’m saying to be aware of the fact that that wasn’t part of our planet before, and then all of a sudden, mass amounts of sugars were required to be able to produce these cereals and these foods that never existed for our body to adapt to.

Our brain does need 120 grams of carbohydrates in a day on average. Some brains here probably need more because they’re firing more. Nonetheless, to cut cold turkey I don’t think is a wise way to do it. There are some things like maybe yogurt-covered raisins for a little bit. There’s a bit of a health component versus sugar candy, which has nothing in terms of nutrition. There are some strategies to be put in place in the meantime.

Linda, did you have a question?

I wanted to say this was brilliant. What you’re doing is inspiring. Thank you for all of this information. My simple question is with dark chocolate, which is my non-guilty pleasure, I get 80% cocoa. I don’t seem to be bothered to sleep at night even if I have it at 6:00. I have maybe three medium-sized pieces maybe twice a day, some days not at all. Doesn’t it have resveratrol or something like that in it that makes it easier to digest? My question is that the caffeine in it doesn’t bother me. Does that make sense?

Yeah, for sure. First off, the higher the percentage usually the more cacao in it. Cacao is very healthy. It’s a very natural ingredient. It’s high in potassium, copper, and fiber. The list can go on. It’s a healthy ingredient not to be eaten as a supersized chocolate bar, but as you are doing, that’s great. The amount of caffeine that’s in three squares is roughly probably 25 to 30 milligrams. To compare that to my cappuccino, that has probably about 100 or maybe 80. A normal cup of coffee is about 70 milligrams. A Red Bull is about 100. A Monster is about 300. There is such a varying amount of caffeine. You probably are used to it.

I noticed when I hit menopause that I, all of a sudden, had a lesser tolerance to caffeine. I still have 2 cups, but it’s done by 2:00 for me. For other people, it’s noon. You at least know. You sleep well. You’re probably getting a bit of serotonin out of that. Potassium is the other ingredient that’s great in there. I mix it into trail mixes. It’s a perfect ingredient not to take away.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

Christine?

I’d like to address this issue of people taking the GLP-1 injections. It’s very prevalent on TV where you see a man injecting into his abdomen this wonder drug to release weight or a woman in the thigh. You see it in the ad. They promote this in various ways. I read research that said the people who are taking these drugs, let’s for a year, gain the weight back afterward. I was wondering what you think about the use of this. What would you say to somebody who is intending on taking this drug?

I have a specialty in diabetes. That’s where it all originates, the Ozempic that people don’t know the other name for. Over my entire career, I always went to, even in the health food store industry, “What is the risk-benefit ratio?” Some things that are natural can be harmful as well. First of all, I’ll look at the risk-benefit ratio.

If I’m looking at somebody who has risk after risk due to obesity or diabetes, it might be worth exploring. I say that very lightly because I will always want to go to the foundation first. I’d be like, “Did you try eating this and that? Did you try walking? Did you retrain your mind to be ready for the person who is releasing weight?” If you do not train your mind, I have a chapter in my book called What Do Honeymoons, Lidl Winners, and Weight Release Have in Common? Honeymoons end. Do you know what I’m getting at? We have to have a mind that is ready for that or it will not stay. We will self-sabotage it. There’s that.

I have worked with people who require insulin. I’m not going to take away from that because if you’re a Type 1 diabetic, you will die if you do not have insulin. There is no lifestyle replacement for that. I remember many times with our Type 2 diabetic population that insulin might become required. They were not because it required a needle. They’re glorifying the needle idea. It is driving me a bit nuts because it’s going to the diet pill and symptom and then Ozempic and injection. It’s no different. It’s not going to the root.

That’s a long answer for you, but, at the end of the day, it will come back on if you go off of it because you didn’t go to the root cause of why you are seeing the weight gain in the first place or diabetes in the first place. There is a risk in some of these, but there’s a risk in the metformin that some of our diabetic population is taking. On and on that list goes, but their sugars going high is a higher risk. Sometimes, we need a life jacket to help us keep afloat, to get my metaphor, until we can get everything else under management. The risk then comes down, and we can take them off medication. That’s called integrated medicine in that sense.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

Dorothy?

I have a tendency. Whenever I eat, about 1 hour or maybe 2 hours afterward, especially if I’m listening to something like this where I must relax or something, I want to go to sleep. What is that about?

You’re saying that after about an hour or two after eating and listening to something, you feel sleepy but not beforehand. There are a couple of reasons. One of which is I’m assuming you’re going into the rest, digest, and create zone. If that’s the case, this is not terrible because you’re in the rest, digest, and create. On the flip side, sometimes, what’s happening is when we’re eating things, and normally with carbohydrates, and I’m not trying to make carbohydrates bad here, insulin is also required.

Sometimes, it is a little bit too much insulin for some of us. We’re producing a little bit too much insulin that overrides the amount of carbohydrate that’s coming in. It can feel like low sugar. That requires some experimenting, working together, and things like that. I know you, Dorothy. Extracting that would be doing some experiments like, “What happens if I have 1 cup of rice with protein and veggies as opposed to 2 cups? Do I have the same symptoms? What happens when I have half a cup?”

There’s some experimenting that I do to find out if it has to do with the insulin because we cannot measure insulin on a regular daily basis. Unless you’re diabetic and have a glucometer or a sugar meter, it’s hard to know if your sugars are going up. That’s the other thing I would be looking at. I have my feelers always out for that with people because that’s my specialty or one of them.

Episode Wrap-up

Thank you for showing up. I really appreciate it. I hope you got something out of it. You know how to get in touch with Karie. I know a couple of you are already working with her, but her book too. If you want a funny book that’s not all about diet, she has a great sense of humor in there. Her chapter heads will make you chuckle, especially the ones where you’re like, “That’s me.” Check out her book, The Domino Diet. Karie, did you find that URL for the barbecue?

I did not. Sorry about that. I did for the Calendly.

It’s so these guys can grab a copy if they want it. I’ve already seen it. It’s got some good stuff. That’s why I asked you to share it on the call. When you’re looking out there for those things to build your platform, you’re always looking for that great download. This is one of them to build your list with.

I can grab it quickly if there is another question in the meantime while that happens. I’m sorry. I misunderstood.

I had an observation. This is in relation to the PAUSE and what a social factor eating is. For those of us who live alone and eat alone, eating is such a different thing. I also notice when I attend webinars or things that the host invites people to go ahead and eat during that time. I am not hungry. I wouldn’t normally eat during that time, but there is one class I take where everybody, as soon as they get on, starts stuffing their face. All of a sudden, I’m starving. It’s also that whole environment of what you surround yourself with. You’re not hungry when you go to the mall, but you smell the food court and all of a sudden, there’s french fries on your plate.

We have this DNA that is all about survival, socialization, and connection. There’s so much I can go into about wanting to fit in with the herd as part of it. That’s what you’re experiencing. It’s like a yawn. It’s contagious. I cannot do that while watching because it looks messy or something.

I don’t like participating, but I feel the hunger. I’m like, “That’s not my eating time. Why do I think I need to graze?”

On a scale of 1 to 10 with the hunger scale that I use, sometimes, it’s called thirst. Thirst is around 3 or 4 of a hunger level. You’re probably thirsty. That’s one remedy. We need our water intake, so you may as well use that excuse at the time.

Thank you all for coming. Next month is Aly Berthiaume. She’s going to be talking about book development and authenticity. Most of you have written your books. Tell your friends about it who want to write books. She works closely with Kris Johnson. You can reach out to Chris if you want to know more too about book development. Thank you. We’ll see you guys later.

Bye.

Bye for now.

Important Links

• Karie Cassell
• Nutritional Almanac
• The Domino Diet: How to Heal You from the Inside Out
• Calendly – Karie Cassell
• Recipe Book – Nourish to Flourish by Karie
• ChatWithJuliet.com

About Karie Cassell

Karie Cassell brings “Nourish to Flourish” message as a sought-after speaker and #1Bestelling author of The Domino Diet-How to Heal You from The Inside Out. Combining her life coach certification, alternative and non-alternative medicine as a dietitian for 30 years, Karie’s unique formula unlocks patterns of self-sabotage while putting the HEAL back in HEALTH.

Look for her soon to be released courses on The Domino Diet Formula and Cracking the Craving Code for your Full Spectrum Wellbeing.

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