Shownotes
The quality of your leadership and mental capability depends upon the foods you eat. That may sound like a far-fetched statement, but it is a reality. You are what you eat.
In this episode we are joined by Jayne Reynolds, a Brain Nutritionist Health Coach, to delve into the topic of how foods actually affect your brain, your leadership, and what you can do about it.
It all began with Jaynes’ own health issues of anxiety and depression being removed within a week of removing certain things from her diet.
That started her on a journey to find out more about how food impacts the body, the brain, and our entire life.
Jayne comes at things holistically and you will find that not one size fits all.
We are all different. We have different likes and dislikes, personalities, leadership styles, ways of learning, and biological needs for the health of our body.
If you want a simple and practical explanation of how to best care for your brain and your body, listen today.
In this episode:
Social Proof: Meet Dan who turned from an irritable and cranky boss to a happy, easy to get along with boss just by changing his diet. Nothing else. It was such a pronounced change his employees asked him what happened.
Simple Steps to Start
- Eat protein throughout the day
- Avoid high sugar foods
- Don’t replace it out, do without
Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:
How can we honor God in our business?
Stewardship of health. Your health affects the way you do everything else, and it will affect your testimony for Jesus as well. Don’t let people say, “I like your Jesus, but I don’t like you” because of how you eat, and consequently, how you act.
One challenge from today:
Take your health seriously so you can leave a legacy for others.
More About Jayne Reynolds
https://bit.ly/thementalhealthnutritioncoach
More About David Schmidt
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Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcripts
David:
[0:00] We've all felt the effects of stress and a lack of sleep on our leadership skills.
David:
[0:05] And great becomes good, good shifts to bad, and bad becomes worse. And so we are not machines, and we need to take care of ourselves. However, one aspect of our well-being you may not have thought about affects you as much as stress or sleep is the things you eat. And yes, that donut and fufu caramelized caramel coffee drink you have had in the morning that makes your morning great may just be your biggest mistake in your leadership journey for the day. What you eat has profound impact not just on your body but also on your mental health and your leadership and so today i'm excited to have with me jane reynolds who's a certified amen clinic mental health nutritionist so big big um to talk about the impact of nutrition on your leadership and what you can do about it so jane thank you so much for coming on board and talking to us about nutrition you're
Jayne:
[0:55] So very welcome i'm excited to be here and talk about all of this.
David:
[0:58] Yeah, so I'd like to challenge my listeners What is one way that you have found that we could honor God in our business That other people may not know about?
Jayne:
[1:11] Um, for me, it's stewardship of my health. And I think that's probably one of the key things. I mean, it's pretty trite because that's what we're here to talk about. Right. Um, but as I've looked around and, um, observed leadership and leaders around me, it's quite easy to see those who are taking care of themselves, those who are not. And when we are stepping into ministry in our work, because our workplace often is more of a ministry than even a church setting might be. Um, we have a profound responsibility in our faith. You know, this is the temple of the Holy Spirit to show up taking care of that in order to be in the best position possible to serve in the way that we've been called to. I have been challenged on that. I've had people say, well, I'm chronically ill and my biggest ministry is prayer. And so, you know, I do what I can do and I'm not specifically speaking to those people. I am talking to the people that you talked about just as we were getting the intro started there, who are making poor choices and then allowing that to impact the way they're showing up to lead. Because we've got this profound responsibility, I think.
Jayne:
[2:20] As leaders, as Christian leaders, to not only just show up with good leadership skills, but also good faith skills that point other people to Jesus. And when we're cranky and irritable, it's really hard. it starts you know producing comments like i like your jesus but not you know i like your christ but not your christians right so um yeah to just steward our bodies the way we've been called to.
David:
[2:45] Okay and i think that's hard because we just grow up eating whatever and i know i'm jumping ahead but like especially as kids you can your body is so resilient you can eat whatever and doesn't seem to affect you but as you age you get 20s 30s 40s 50s what you eat starts to affect you can see the effects more because your body's not healing as quick as from as well. Yes. But, uh,
David:
[3:11] Very good. So give us a brief overview, your journey. How did you get to be a nutritional health coach and why, why did you go down that route?
Jayne:
[3:20] Yeah. Um, I, I was very, very sick. And I think that a lot of us, um, for a lot of us, our journeys into our sort of missional calling comes out of the hardship that we've been through. And I don't think I'm any different than anyone else who's been through that. Um, I struggled with severe anxiety and depression, And that was triggered by a health event that I had when my first daughter was born. I had an E. Coli infection. I was in the hospital. They gave me three bags of antibiotics over the course, sorry, seven bags of antibiotics over the course of three days, decimated my gut bacteria, had no idea back then about reseeding and the role that your gut bacteria plays in your mental health and started this slow demise into this path of chronic anxiety and depression that lasted for seven years. So I made lots of changes. I tried to do talk therapy. I tried to do medication. They didn't fix it. The thing that fixed it was changing my diet. And so I started thinking about what I'd been through and what I was being called to do and how I could help other people with this knowledge and information because not many people know how to do this. So I went back to school, got board certified in holistic nutrition i went through the academy for addiction and mental health nutrition and then became an aiming clinics brain a certified brain health professional last year so yeah and now i get to just talk to people about how the things that they put in their body affect their mental health their well-being and how they show up that's.
David:
[4:49] That's good and i i've seen that many times and that because that's your experience and or people have a need and they fix for themselves. And they're like, oh, you like it too? And they start handing it out to other
David:
[5:01] people. It's essentially what you've done. Very good. So a mental health nutritionist, the name probably does it, but describe it. What do you do as a mental health nutritionist?
Jayne:
[5:14] Yeah, I'm helping people who come into my office to figure out the root cause of why their brains are functioning the way that they are. I am one piece of a puzzle. We are working together as a team in the mental health community to help you figure those things out. So you might need a brain scan at Amen Clinics to figure out where the blood flow is in the brain, or you might want to do neurofeedback. But the thing that I work on with my folks is figuring out if there are any nutritional deficiencies that are, or allergies that are causing problems inside the body that might be affecting the way the brain's functioning. So gut health is major. If your gut is not functioning properly, then your brain won't be either, but that's the same for thyroid health or blood sugar regulation. And so we can look at these different things through laboratory work and symptomatic checkers and assessment tools. And then we can create a custom plan for the person in my office to figure out what foods support them. And I do that not only from a conventional medicine side of things, I've studied that obviously through aiming clinics and the academy.
Jayne:
[6:20] But also from a traditional Chinese medicine. So we were looking at this from more of a holistic perspective. What are the nutrients I can put in and the nutrients might be like the air that I breathe or the love that I'm surrounded by or the community that I'm involved in. So these are all things that help to nourish our bodies, but it might literally be a zinc deficiency or a vitamin B6 deficiency, or you might be allergic to gluten and it might be impacting the way that your body's functioning. So we take a good look at all of that and then create a customized plan for you nutritionally to support your body.
David:
[6:55] Hmm. It sounds easy, but it probably isn't easy. It probably is not, oh, I'm going to come in and ask me 20 questions and oh, here's your plan. It's probably not that easy, is it?
Jayne:
[7:06] In the first month we spend, the first month is my fact finding month with my client. So we do a delayed food sensitivity test. We do organic acid testing, which is a pee in a cup. One's a blood spot test. One's pee in a cup. It takes a while. Like we order that from the lab. It gets shipped to your house and then we have to fill it all out and send it all back. So we're waiting. That takes about a month. In the meantime, we're filling out those assessments. That nutritional assessment questionnaire, we're asking about 350 questions. And then we have an amino one that is looking at the neurotransmitter balance inside the body. And there's probably another good 20 questions on there. And then I have a pyroluria questionnaire. So yeah, there's an awful lot that we're pulling together. Yeah. And then we get you to get your regular labs done too. Like one of the things that I talk about often is that we don't have a baseline. We have no idea whether our thyroid function is normal today compared to how it was six months ago or a year ago or five years ago. So if you get your annual labs done, then we can look at that through a functional health report. Then I'm pulling all that information together through the lens of traditional Chinese medicine to figure out how to best support you. So yeah, it sounds easy, but it's complex in the pulling together, but we try and put it together in a way that you can easily do it step-by-step, in order to improve your health and well-being.
David:
[8:33] Yeah, and that's why we work with people like you. You've done it for a while. Very good, very good. So I usually don't think about foods as affecting my mood very much. Can you give us a simple reason why your foods affect or give us an example of that?
Jayne:
[8:50] Yeah, let's just start with gluten sensitivity. We know we've got clinical studies showing that gluten sensitivity can cause symptoms everywhere from bipolar-type symptoms to schizophrenic-type symptoms, anxiety disorders, depressive disorders. So when we take gluten out of the diet, we can sometimes resolve things like underlying anxiety, um, or depression just simply by removing that one food group.
Jayne:
[9:21] So it doesn't, it sounds like, you know, it's just, uh, very, like a very quick and simple thing, but this was the thing that was so cataclysmically changing for me. Um, I had been, I mean, I ate a normal diet. My grandfather, his brother are both celiac. My mom has gluten sensitivity. I didn't even think about having gluten sensitivity. So there's some history there, right? In the family. um but a chiropractor suggested i take it out for my gut health it had nothing to do with my brain i was just having gut issues and i took two weeks to decide to do it because it's very complicated you know there's just a lot it's in everything so i took it out and one week later the anxiety attacks that i had had sometimes three and four times a day for an hour at a time were completely gone wow right so it can be that dramatic when we start looking at it and if you've got kids struggling with ADHD or, you know, and we're talking about food dyes or food intolerances or sugar load or any of those, I think we can start cleaning the diet up to make massive changes to how the brain is functioning.
David:
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