Cheryl A Major – Nourishing Mind and Body

Hi and welcome to the You World Order Showcase podcast we have.

With us today, Cheryl A Major who is a health coach here to share with us how healthy eating can change your mind and body. And she's also the host of a podcast.

Major health tips in digestible bites. Welcome to the show, Cheryl. It's nice.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and have this conversation.

Conversation with you Jill

So we're going to talk about all things eating and health and mind and body, but we are also going to talk about sheep because they're so cute and yours are adorable.

I'm glad you like them. I love them. They're little woolly bundles of joy for me.

They are. It's like spring is the.

The most magical time of the year, I had a lot of goats. Mostly we did goats, but it was just like.

About now, they'd start being born and we'd have they. And they're just so darn cute. They'd bounce all over the place and.

Yeah, yeah, mine are all rescues. I've had sheep for 20 years and I have six now. And they were rescued from the slaughterhouse.

And so they got the they have the life of Riley here. My neighbor used to call it the sheep Sheraton over here. So they live better than I do. But no sheep are amazing. They just they don't get enough credit. They all have different personalities and different voices. And they.

Recognize people and they learn commands and they know. I mean when I go out I say Maggie, take the boys around and the leader takes the boys around so I can take the two who need a little extra food in by themselves. It. It's amazing. It's amazing. They know their names. I have one who goes for car rides.

I have one who gets walked in the back, then one of my neighbors said to me, you know, Cheryl the other day I was working at my desk. I looked up and there was a sheep walking by, so.

Animals are so amazing and we just don't. And you know, we most people stop with dogs or cats.

And they're. They're cool. I, you know, I have dogs and cats and but other animals, they're just like.

They they're all unique, they just, they have their own personalities, they.

Maybe sheep, but they're like sheep with a certain name and they have like, characteristics that are unique to them and they're just.

Even chickens are like that. I mean, it's just like.

I've heard that I've never had chickens. I I've wanted chickens. We have a bumper crop of Hawks around here, so I have decided to err on the side of caution.

And not get them, but I've seen where they're so affectionate and they recognize people and it's just we don't give animals nearly enough credit.

No. Yeah, I totally believe that and that.

So yeah.

Thank you for appreciating them.

I well, I was telling you before I lived on a homestead, and it was.

It was at a time in my life that I manifested it and it.

It was such an amazing experience. It was everything I had hoped it would be. I learned so many things and got to practice.

Doing things in a way that was much slower than you know, not life normally is for people. It was. It was a really special part of my life.

I can understand that.

And it kind of coincides with healthy eating because when you live in a homestead and you're living closer to the land.

Food takes on a different.

Different experience for you rather than, you know, going to the grocery store and.

Picking whatever is offered as a food source, which often isn't.

Don't get me started.

I do want to get you.

Started. Let's get you.

OK.

Started tell us all about it.

How did you get started?

How did I get started? Well, it goes back more years than I will admit to. When I was 12 and I got depressed.

And I started crying all the time and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me. And it went on and on and on. And eventually I learned to hide it. And I dragged it around. And.

I hid it.

Memory loss and brain fog, and he was borderline diabetic. He had neuropathy, he had muscle weakness. I mean, it was a whole. It was a just a plethora of bad stuff.

Going on and he had a really bad event out there. He'd get waves of really dark periods where he just have to go to bed and it happened out there and he said, what is going on? Well, the only thing he was on was a statin.

So we decided to Google the side effects of statin and he turned out to be the poster child for side effects. I mean, if there were 49 side effects, he had 40.

OK.

So when we came back, we said, OK, we've gotta back you off.

And we had to normalize his cholesterol because his family has a history of heart disease and diabetes, which is why he.

Was on the statin.

So we read Mark Heymann's book the Blood sugar solution. We just happened to see him on a PBS session.

And it rang true. And we ripped the Band-Aid off and we went through the pantry and the fridge and the freezer and the covers. And we got rid of sugar, flour, dairy, anything with preservatives, anything in the box, anything that you would put in micro. We've got rid of the micro.

Microwave gone the hood in so that we could cook even more. And the interesting thing was that and I had been on and off to depressive antidepressants throughout this whole period of my, you know, my adulthood for many years and in about.

Thank you.

Six months, he started to normalize with his sugar and his cholesterol. But what was really a miracle for me was I wasn't depressed anymore.

I wasn't depressed and the reason I knew it was that next fall when I was driving, I looked out over a reservoir at the foliage. I live in New England and there was this beautiful foliage and I had terrible, terrible seasonal affective disorder.

And I would just want to crawl in a hole and throw the dirt over me when fall came because I it just did a number on me and I looked out over the water.

And I said, oh.

My gosh, those trees are so beautiful and it caught me up short because.

I said ohh.

I'm not depressed. I knew this by now, and I'm appreciating fall and I actually can look forward to fall now. And that's what happened. And I said, you know, this is just too good. And each of us lost 20 lbs. When we got rid of all the junk, we weren't trying to diet.

We just lost 20 lbs.

And I said this is too good. I just, I can't. I can't keep this to myself.

And I had been thinking about starting an online business and thinking about writing a.

So I did both and I've been teaching and training and creating courses. I've written two books I'm writing 1/3 and I'm on a mission to share with people. That doesn't matter what their issues are, everything can be helped by changing what you put in your body, because if your body is saying.

You know, stop it. Stop it. It manifests as inflammation.

And the beautiful thing about this is called epigenetics. Actually, I mean your gene pool is your gene pool, but you don't have to be another person in your family who gets cancer, another person who's overweight, another person who struggles with depression, mental illness, whatever. It's what you eat. It's your environment.

That turns those genes on or off, so you have tremendous power, tremendous power. And it's so important that people understand this because I think that the process food companies have stolen our power.

And as have the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies and the allopathic doctors, allopathic meaning traditional and not based in nutrition or functional or you know populistic stuff.

And we get caught up in that and you take a ticket and you're on the ride, baby. And it's very hard to get off. So I'm on a mission to help as.

Many people as I can.

That is awesome. Our stories are like so similar. We ditched the microwave. My husband was a truck driver for a lot of years, and you would think that, you know, truck.

My story.

Drivers they tend.

To have a life expectancy of about 55 years.

And he's.

I did not know well.

Yeah, it's a really unhealthy occupation. Most of them are way overweight. They live on junk food and.

We did. We did, I.

Have always cooked, you know? Sauna. Homestead. I know how to can and preserve food and.

It was just like.

When he came home, came off the road, we threw out the microwave and he was even complaining a couple weeks ago that he wanted me to go back to making tortillas from scratch again.

Like I make our own bread. No, really good Baker.

I guess you are guess you.

I can make artisan bread better than you can buy in a store anywhere except France.

I want some now.

Some beans.

It's so easy to make. I mean, it took me many, many years, maybe decades, to learn how to do it, and now it's just like it's consistent.

They amazing and it's so easy, but.

That's a show different show.

Anyway, it's it really does make a difference about what you're putting into your body. He got off the blood pressure medicine because he was his blood pressure was like, up and down, up and down, up and down. And you have to meet this.

Artificial standard and it is an artificial standard. When they take your blood pressure and they never take it correctly.

There's there is a way to take it, but they never do it that way. And in order to pass the physical to be a truck driver, he had to reach this certain standard and then he's got this white Coat syndrome going on because.

His job depends on him being able to pass his physical, so you know it's through the roof. So he he's.

Off all blood pressure, medicine and the blood pressure medication was making him.

Like dizzy and tired and cough.

Yes, yes.

And it was just.

Like all of these things that come along with it that you don't think about and every time you take a pharmaceutical drug, there is.

There's a side effect and.

Drugs and food are so tightly related.

That they're under the same umbrella in the government, the Food and Drug Administration, it's not one or the other. It's both of them combined. And they used to be the department of.

History. That was the original title.

I did not know that interesting, awesome. Interesting. It should be that because Frankenfood is.

It's just chemicals, food, the food that you buy, processed food that you buy in the grocery store. And I'm talking like stuff that's covered in other stuff. Chips that, you know, those flavored chips, it's a toxic chemical that they put on there that's designed.

Uh, yes.

To keep you.

Heating and to bypass your satiation mechanism.

And it has a side effect to your body. It does something to you, just like taking a pharmaceutical drug. It, it's just like taking anything into your body. It's going to have a side effect. And whether it's a good side effect or a bad side effect really depends on how your body is designed to.

Process it.

So you cut out wheat and gluten and.

You want to talk about that? What? What that does to the body.

Well, it's interesting because I mean, if you have celiac disease, it will kill you if you are non celiac gluten sensitive.

Then it will give you heart palpitations or make you stuffy or.

Or, you know, cause depression. It will amp up your inflammation and manifest in, in, in some particular way. I do occasionally eat gluten, eat, eat bread because I absolutely love it. It doesn't love me back, but I do love it. And if it, if it's people think that when they when.

That that they can never have anything again, they can never have a cookie again. They can never have an ice cream cone again. They can never have a piece of pizza again. And that's not what I teach. It used to be what I teach. And then I had somebody say, Charlotte, this is what I have to do. I won't do it. It's just too hard.

And that was, you know, light bulb goes off. And if I really wanted to help people, I have to have them understand that it's most of the time you do it this way and then once in a while, you can do it this way. And that seems to make it more of.

A safe place for people to wrap their heads around it and think maybe it can make a difference in their lives. So occasionally I do eat gluten.

I do really try to eat sour dough because sour dough, if you're sensitive to gluten, gluten.

Sourdough is easier to digest.

But and gluten also, I saw something just the other day and it was just a tile on my laptop and I didn't look at it, but amyloid plaques in the brain.

Are believed to be to be causally causes of.

Alzheimer's, dementia, that kind of thing. And I saw something the other day saying.

No, no, it's not. It's not amyloid plaque. I didn't look at it. So I don't know if they're starting to massage that a little bit, but I figure I need all my brain cells that I can and as and as intact as I can. So I do avoid gluten as much as possible as much as and it's not it's not all that hard. I mean I have found I don't bake.

My own bread, although I used to make.

My own gluten free bread.

I've been buying share which is SCHA with a new loud over at R it's a German company and you can get that in a lot of stores and it's gluten free and it actually doesn't taste like dirt. It tastes like bread and it behaves like bread. So like I remember, do you ever try to eat the rice bread, the rice?

That ohh yuck. It's just. Yeah, it's not edible. It really isn't. But the share is quite good and I know a lot of people like the Ezekiel bread, but I found that getting off gluten really helped and getting off dairy and so.

OK.

I mean, I love sugar again. It doesn't love me back, so it's a choice. It's a choice. But people have to understand what the choices are.

And how to move the stuff that's going to?

Make them sick and old before their time off their plate one bit by one bit and replace it with something good. If they're really into, you know, the McDonald's drive through.

Then that's a bit of that's a bit of a challenge.

And I have found I have one client I'm working with and she agrees with me and then I see her eating a bag of potato chips while we're talking. That has the sour cream and onion sprayed on it.

It's hard.

It I find it challenging to.

Help people without telling them they're wrong because I want to say you're wrong. You're killing yourself. Stop it. But that doesn't work. It's just human nature. You know, there's resistance to that. So it's a little bit of finessing that has to be done. And I'm. I'm getting better at it. It also depends upon.

Where the person is, some people come to me and they got it. I mean, they got it going on and they just want to be more plant based and they want help with that. They want recipes and how do I do this? And I do that. And then you have other people who weigh more than £300. They're not mobile and they need to save their lives. And so that's a whole different thing.

So it it's very interesting I found that.

Working with somebody for less than 90 days really doesn't work.

Because it takes 90 days for people to see results and for people to kind of get with the flow in the program. I had one woman I worked with a few months ago and her goal was to lose 20 lbs in 90 days and she lost 18. I call that a win.

I call that a win.

OK.

So it's a, it's a very interesting process. It's a very challenging process because of.

The different angles you have to you have to kind of get a sense of somebody and what they're up for handling and what is going to put them off.

And how stark you can be.

Kind of what their addictions are because we they get addicted to foods like soda pop is a huge one that people start that addiction really early on and it's no wonder.

Exactly. Thank you. Yeah.

Teens are overweight. There's just, even if they're drinking diet soda, which is worse in my opinion.

I know.

It's worse. It is worse. It is.

Because it causes you to want to eat more food.

Exactly because your body perceives it as being even sweeter than sugar.

And if you tend toward depression, one or two servings of an artificial sweetener can send you into a depressive mood.

So it's just and it does. It does mess with your hunger hormones, so you don't. Your brain doesn't get the message from the leptin saying, hey, we're hungry. We're full down here. It's time to stop eating and people overeat and they don't get cured by their body as they should. Hey, we're full. So. And that's another thing that I like to teach.

It's a blue zones thing from Okinawa.

It's hard hoochie Boo.

Dan Buettner, the blue zones and pushing away from the table when you're 80% full, not eating until you're full and certainly not eating until you're stuffed and just pushing away and waiting 15 minutes because people, especially if their hormones are messed up because of how they've been eating, it's going to take.

15 or 20 minutes anyway for your brain to get the message that, hey, we're OK. We're good down here. We're not hungry anymore.

So I try to work with them to have them try it and just see and then if they're hungry, they can go back, they can go back. There's nothing that says you can't go.

Back for more.

And what I suggest is if you go back for more, take it and then look at what you've got on your plate for a second, Sir helping and.

Put half of it back.

Because we always almost always overestimate what we should.

Or eat mindlessly. That's another huge thing. I mean, don't you find that? And I do it too? You're.

I'm stuffing my face and I'm checking emails or looking at my phone or.

You know and so. So that's something mindful eating mindful being is really.

And changing the size of your plates and dishes like I'm big on when we have to.

There we have several plates.

Yeah, on the table.

There's a plate for the main thing, and it's small and there's a big thing for the salad.

And they're selling with every meal because that's how I was raised. You just eat salad and.

Yes it.

And then there's.

There's a plate for bread because I hate it when my husband puts the bread on the tablecloth.

And I do make my own bread. As we said before. So it's, it's sourdough and it's I buy high quality flour. I'm kind of a snob about flour.

Yeah, I know.

And what do you get? What kind of flower do you get and where do you?

Source it. I'm curious. I get king.

Arthur Flour and it's local.

It's available nationwide, but it's I I'm pretty sure it's grown here in or in Utah. At least there's a mill down there.

And they have really high quality flour and so I'll use that. And I've had my yeast going for years and years and years and it's my pet.

His name is Fred. I had a ginger bug going for a while, so I had Fred and Ginger.

That's great.

That's great. That's super.

It was fun, but yeah, just little tricks.

That you can play with your mind. You know, you don't have to have everything on your plate and if you, you know, eat more vegetables.

If you put.

More vegetables on your plate and less of the maybe if you're having pasta or rice or whatever. Your other thing is then.

You're. You're not going to be tempted to eat so much of that, whereas you can have a lot more of the.

Right. And don't you find that the experience of eating is so visual that if you're putting smaller?

Servings on a big plate you look at it, you say, man, I'm not gonna. This is not going to fill me up. But if you put those same servings on a smaller plate and visually you say ohh, that's an abundant plate that looks really good. It's a whole other trickier mind kind of thing I find.

Yeah, and that's that. That's a it's a big, it's a big deal what your mind thinks about something. And then if you eat with really skinny people like my.

Daughter who's like?

She's just going to turn 20 here soon and she's.

She has a way of eating that.

She always leaves 1/3.

Of them. Give her really.

There's an old Japanese tradition that you should never clean. You should never clean your plate. You should always sleep a little bit left over for.

The gods or something?

Forgot who it was for.

But yeah, somebody, somebody else this.

It's an offering. Maybe it was taboo or something. I forget that. It was basically, you know, you don't have to stuff yourself. It's OK to leave a little bit.

And my dog's appreciate it.

Or my chickens?

3 chickens. Yes, I'm sure the dogs really appreciate it.

And no, eat vegetables. It's really weird.

Well, that's good. You have two dogs.

I have two dogs. Yeah, an old dog whose name was Pudge and he grew into his name. We thought it was funny when he was little cause he was Guinea, but now he's old and fat and they call him the square dog. My grandkids too.

I can't believe you're a grandmother. You don't look old enough to be a grandmother, Joe.

I definitely AM.

Well, congratulations, lucky you.

Thank you. So how do people work with you? Do you work in groups? Do you do one on?

One coaching. How does that look?

I do both. I do one-on-one coaching and I've recently started a group coaching. I had people who were asking me if I would do a group coaching situation. So I am two weeks into the first iteration of the Healthy Eating Club 90 day program.

And I will be starting that up again. Is my intention in April. So I'm putting together kind of a wait list situation and I'd be happy to send you that information once I've got it set up.

And it's three classes a month.

And four open office hours a month.

So people can just drop in with if they need some coaching and they did or they didn't want to talk about something at, you know, the group meeting 24 hour access to me and I share recipes. I'm always developing recipes. And I mean, for me, a recipe in a book isn't just a place to.

Always change it. It's like, oh man, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to add this or I don't want to do cilantro, parsley or something like that. So. So I'd be happy to, to send that off to you when it when? When. It's when it's ready to rock'n'roll for the wait list but and then I do create courses and I have people come in to.

In my community that way, and I have I have two blogs. I have thinstronghealthy.com and I have majorupbeatknee.com.

And you have another course.

Yes, I have another course. I have a course embrace optimism and. Yeah. And you know, I mean, isn't it something that we need to do these days for so many reasons?

And some days it's.

For our mental health, for one thing.

Your mental health? Yeah, absolutely. And some days it's really hard to be optimistic when things just.

Nothing seems to be going right, and you're just feeling really low. And so I put this together and it's there's a webinar and there's a report and I have a, a food and journal that I share. And there are also some images and some quotes as well. There's also a checklist that people can go through and just kind of check off to see.

How optimistic they really are, because some of us think we're, you know, we're really down in the dumps, maybe not so much. Maybe just, you know, we're having a problem, an issue with that or that person or something like that. So I put that together and I would love to share that with your comment.

If that's something that you think they might be interested, it's very simple to visit its embraceoptimism.com.

And of course I have a coupon for your peeps.

And the coupon is Jill 29.

Capital J.

Capital J Capital I, capital L 29.

OK.

Jill, 29, and the that that brings the price of the entire course down to $20.

Awesome. Well, I'll make sure that I put the links in the show notes, but also the coupon code in the show notes so people could take advantage of that. That's awesome. And yeah, optimism is one of those things that.

OK, wonderful.

If you're looking for it, the world to be better, you'll find evidence you're looking for the world to be a terrible place.

You'll find evidence for that too.

I know and isn't it a constant? I don't say constant battle, but it we're a work. Yeah, it's a choice. And we're a work in progress in every way our health our mental health our attitude.

The choice.

And it's so interesting to change how you think and see what happens, and also to watch how you fall back into your old patterns.

That I find really fascinating. And it's tantalizing, too, because as soon as you start to change, you get uncomfortable because it's the unfamiliar, different stuff for you.

And that romances people into going back to the easy stuff. That probably isn't in their best interest to visit so.

You can't. You can't stop. I mean people. People say to me, are you ever going to retire? And no, I mean.

Why would you want to sit and do crossword puzzles and nothing else? I mean it. There's so much to do and learn and see and be and create and share.

And it's just a wonderful adventure and I certainly have no intention ever of just.

You know, falling in that hole that I did feel like doing years ago, it's a whole new life. People need to understand that if they're craving change, if they're craving a new life, whether it's weight, health, diabetes, arthritis.

Depression. What? Whatever you can, you can affect tremendous change. You can't.

Even your financial disposition.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

And changing the way.

You eat actually does affect your finances. If you learn how to use leftovers.

Efficiently, you can save gobs of money on your food bill.

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's another thing that I do teach people. I teach them to make a lot of I have a rice and lentil and bean mixture that I have in the fridge all the time, and I don't view it as leftovers. I view it as something that I'm going to use. I use it for breakfast. I can have a few spoonfuls for a snack.

And use them on a salad. I put some in a soup that was getting a little thin, and so I'm going to put some of this in there because you've got your beans and your grains, so you have a complete protein. If you're looking to do more of a vegetarian plant based diet.

So and I'm happy to ship that recipe off to you too, Jill. If you'd like to share that with people, I mean, I I'm. I'm open to sharing whatever. I'm just trying to spread the word and make a difference because there's so much that people can do, and I just want them to know I want to empower people to make change and to be the best that they can be because it's a.

It's a it's a gas. It's just a it's a wonderful adventure when you realize how you can change your life and your health and your mental health.

It's just so inspiring and fun.

It is really fun. It's like.

Why stay the same when you could have an adventure and you don't even?

Exactly, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You do it right. You start right.

Have to leave home.

It all starts in your head. Yeah. I embrace sobriety. A while back, it's been almost five months now.

We haven't missed it at all. Other people around me drink and it's just like I don't.

I don't want it. Not anymore.

Not anymore that that time has passed, and it's not even.

Like I can't drink. I wasn't like I had to stop drinking.

It's just.

That choice.

It's just something that I chose to do and I continue to make that choice because I like the benefits of it. I mean, I.

As you start seeing benefits from the decisions that you make, it makes making that decision a lot easier.

Yeah. What are the benefits that you personally are seeing?

From that change.

Well, I lost 15 lbs just right off the bat because you know, I don't drink soda pop.

So you know, it was like wine was the thing that was doing it to me. I can't drink beer because it gives me gout.

And I don't really like hard liquor. So it was just wine and.

And I have rosacea really bad. And it's almost totally cleared up. It's like.

I can't even. I would never believe that.

Looking at them.

I'm 63. Ohh, you look fabulous. Yeah, zoom is amazing.

I love you.

You look good. I know I do too, but.

You look great.

Well, thank you. I'm a lot of it has to do with, you know, just making good decisions about what I eat and how I exercise and.

You know those?

And what I think about your mental health, what you think about?

Really impacts how your life is going and you always have the choice to choose a different thought. You don't have to just like, take the take the one that your brain serves up.

I know because it's.

The problem?

Probably the same one you were thinking yesterday that wasn't serving you then either.

Right, right.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

Next week, I.

Want to choose a different thought today? Different thing to focus.

And you're free.

To do that, but you can make up your past if you don't like the past that.

You had that you.

That's a good point, you know.

Ruminate on and you can just make up a new one.

I had not thought of that. I love that.

I absolutely love that Joe.

That's it's my aha. We're our time together today. That's wonderful. You can create your own panelist.

Just rewrite it.

You know that.

Yeah, they say that 50% of what you remember is not accurate anyway.

It's more than that because no two people experience the event the same way and so.

That's true.

It doesn't matter how you how you phrase it in your head, how you remember it, you can change how you remember it. It could. One thing could have been like.

So important to you at the time.

That you've carried it with you all these years, but if you just like.

Tell yourself a better life, as Marissa Pierce says. Dad, I'm just going to decide that I'm going to remember it this way, and I'm going to pick something really positive about the experience, and that's what I'm going to hang.

On to and eventually your brain will just be like, yeah, that. Well, that's how it was and.

I like that a lot.

It not only changes how you feel about the situation, but anybody else that was involved in this situation, who remembers it differently.

As you're relating it to them, it make helps them change.

How they perceive the event so you can take something that was really not that great and make it.

Make it a wonderful event.

I like that a lot. Thank you for that, Jill.

You are so welcome. No charge. Thank you.

I like that even better.

So you know.

This has been a gas do you want to leave the audience with your final thoughts? Well, one thing they really hope they take away from our conversation.

I hope they really take away from this conversation what you just said and that they can. They can rewrite their past. I think that is so powerful and if I can just add on to that that they can rewrite their present and their future.

By changing what they eat and changing what's in their environment and changing their plants.

Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for this time with me.

I hope we talk again. This was wonderful.