Breaking the Weight Loss Code: Lori Balue’s Holistic Approach to Lasting Health

Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Hi and welcome to the You World order showcase. Podcast I'm your host, Jill Hart. And with us today is Lori, Ballou Lori is a certified functional, diagnostic nutrition practitioner and low carb weight, loss, lifestyle expert. She uses an untold and overlooked process to help women over 50 lose weight for good

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: using low carb nutrition, functional diagnostic labs, targeted supplementation, personalized nutrition, and one-on-one customized holistic lifestyle management. She is also the author of the holistic low carb methods, recipes for aging beautifully for longevity. Welcome to the show, Lori. I am so excited to chat with you about all things.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Nutrition, holistic nutrition.

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lori balue: Yeah, it's so exciting. Thank you for that introduction. I mean, it makes really makes me feel special. I've been working really hard and getting that recipe book out, and I didn't even know I would do that. And then, all of a sudden, I'm just like, you know, people need to know that there is a bridge to actually eating healthier and having nutrition in your body. At the same time you get to enjoy treats. And so I put that recipe book together with some of my favorite recipes that I've been using for the last

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lori balue: few years. You know that made it easier for me to lose a hundred pounds. And so that information is available to people, and the more you hang out with me, the more I actually inspire and motivate you to do the same thing, because it's not as complicated as it could be. I can make it easy.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I I love all of this, and we were talking about your pumpkin pie recipe, and we are going to get Circle back to that. But I want people to hear your story because you have a really powerful story. So can you share that with that? Everybody.

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lori balue: And it started back when I was a child, because I had so sorry to plug in my computer. I had major depression as a child to the point where I couldn't barely talk. I know my mom was driving me in a car to see a psychologist, and

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lori balue: I wouldn't talk to them, and I wouldn't talk in the car back. And you know I don't. You know my mom never really talked about this, but she just she was studying Adele Davis. She was trying to figure out everything. The processed food had hit our house, and it was causing malfunction in my brothers Adhd and all these other problems, and it caused depression in me.

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lori balue: and she put me on the Atkins diet.

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lori balue: And so that saved my life back then. And it's I'm a reader. She taught me to be a reader, and even though I ended up not doing the Atkins diet as a lifestyle at that point because we didn't realize it could be a lifestyle. We looked at it as a diet intervention, but it did correct my depression, and I lost 50 pounds, and so I reset my metabolism and did. That's what exactly it needed to do. And so that saved my life at that time, and I actually

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lori balue: stayed 150 pounds approximately during high school, never really lost any more weight, but didn't really gain too much either.

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lori balue: But soon as the high School, you know it was it was the skinny narrative.

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lori balue: you know, starving yourself, going to nutrisystem or weight watchers, and doing all the diets and trying to figure out how to maintain slenderness

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lori balue: while not eating, which is impossible, because, you know, hunger always wins, and you can't diet. You can't diet and actually starve your body over long term, and so any weight you lose is always going to just come right on back. And so that's what happened. I got hit with that Boomerang and I ended up being 225 pounds in my mid thirties, and the depression, all weight came back. But this time I had

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lori balue: a lowered, immune response wasn't absorbing my nutrients or getting enough nutrition in my body, and I was unbeknown to me. I had food sensitivities that were developing leaky gut. I had Pcos. I had asthma allergies, sinusitis, bronchitis.

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lori balue: I was hacking up phlegm all the time, and so, of course, I go to Kaiser. They give me a breathing machine, you know I ended up just living at the Allergist.

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lori balue: Well, once a year from my seasonal allergies. Once it got down to once a year after immune therapy.

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lori balue: and that's where it stayed for like 20 years. And I was just on that, you know, merry-go-round of weight, gain, weight loss, and never could really get a handle on it until I studied functional nutrition.

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lori balue: started experimenting more with a paleo diet and functional nutrition, and even on a paleo diet, you know. It's a great diet. It's a great place to be. If you're not pre diabetic. If you're pre diabetic, you have to take all the sugars out until you get your written blood sugar under control, and you actually reset your metabolism. And so I didn't know that at the time, and I kept struggling, trying to figure out how to lose the weight. What was my weight loss solution? I you know, at the time I'm just like, let's just get rid of this asthma. See what happens.

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lori balue: But that asthma didn't go away until I took the sugar and the wheat out of my diet, because it was inflammation

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lori balue: that I didn't know, and the allergist doesn't tell you about, because he just told me I'd always be on an inhaler. Well, he was wrong.

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lori balue: when my brain came back, it was like an open window, and so much more clarity, brain energy, and excitement

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lori balue: to really dive into this and figure out what was going on, how it was working. I never stepped backwards. I never cheated on sugar wheat again.

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lori balue: but I'd been struggling my whole life, and I didn't want to. Once I got that brain clarity and that brain energy back.

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lori balue: I you know, I certified as a function as 2 functional health coach programs and became a practitioner.

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lori balue: And now it was just like I got to spread this message. I need people to know that this is out there, and I was still working on losing the weight. I still needed to get healthy at the time, because I still needed to fix my gut. I still needed to manage digestion, and I was still using

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lori balue: a food to keep from

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lori balue: to be to be satisfied to for balancing my neurotransmitters.

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lori balue: we need to be able to absorb our food, absorb our protein to get to the point where we actually have good digestion. And then we actually need to correct our gut. So I had been battling food sensitivities, and I didn't know I was red sensitive to dairy, so I took the dairy out and finally started healing more in my body, and once that happened I was able to get better health and drop more weight and every

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lori balue: layer of of lifestyle, because it's not just diet. You got to get your body to actually function

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lori balue: with the food that you're eating and get it to be absorbed. And so

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lori balue: circadian rhythm, light balance, you know, grounding those were immensely necessary

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lori balue: for women, because we have to settle our nervous system, and we have to actually get healthy when our nervous system is in a state of parasympathetic activity. So if you're always in a fight and flight response, and your cortisol levels are elevated, you're not going to heal and get the weight loss you're looking for you actually have to kind of calm it all down and just relax the body. And so I do use supplements for that. Last night I actually took l-theanine before bed, and I'm like my double. My deep sleep

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lori balue: was the highest it's ever been, and I'm like Whoa! That was crazy a little bit exercise, and a little bit of l-theanine does wonders.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm making a note of that.

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lori balue: Well, I'm gonna try it again tonight. And that's you know. That was the one thing that's like, Okay, I haven't been going to the gym. But this made a big difference to my body

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lori balue: to really get my heart rate better, because when we get our heart rate better, then we have a better Hrv, and we could be in a better healing state. And when we're sleeping we're losing weight. That's your growth hormone process so that all needs to be tuned into.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And and finding ways to sleep better.

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lori balue: Hmm.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I would.

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lori balue: Huge. Yeah, it's

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lori balue: turning off the inflammation. From what I'm noticing. When I run, I run diagnostic labs with my clients, and they all have sleep problems, and soon as I dial in the diet for them, and they dial it in. And we work together on that concept and actually find what's going on in their body find those hidden healing opportunities. And I call those the weight loss blocks as well. All of a sudden the inflammation starts to go away, and that sleep gets better.

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lori balue: and there's less waking up at night to pee, because that's not normal. If you have to wake up at night to pee. There's a problem

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lori balue: and you need, and it's usually inflammation.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, I I have.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I've made a lot of adjustments to my own diet over the last couple years, and

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: where I used to wake up a lot at night. I don't wake up anymore.

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lori balue: Okay, so.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Fall asleep. I stay asleep, and I do know it is. It's definitely a process that you can implement. Doesn't

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: all of these things that you talk about a they're driven by diagnostic tests. You're not just guessing you're looking at what's going on in somebody's body and saying, Hey.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: these these are the markers that you need to be paying attention to. And and these are the ways that we can address these issues so that you can be in balance, and your body can can function the way it's designed to.

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lori balue: Yeah. And we have to take. We have to lower the insulin response in the body. Insulin is a necessary hormone that keeps diabetic ones, they have to actually put it in their body to live. We have to have insulin, but you need to have it lower. So if you have insulin levels that are too high because carbohydrates too high. Sugar load on the body is too high. Then you're going to have a fatty liver. That's part of the problem, then your body's blocked. Now you have a blockage, and then you also

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lori balue: have a pancreas. That's not functioning. So pancreatic insufficiency. I'm seeing that on the labs all the time as deficient.

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lori balue: And one of the things that I'm noticing or hearing about is, that's that's fatty pancreas, too. And so, if it goes too far down, like the medical system. They say that that cannot be corrected when you have pancreatic insufficiency. Well, they are not actually addressing your blood sugar. When you correct your blood sugar, and correct your diet with nutrition.

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lori balue: I'm noticing on retests that that does get better, and so that you know you can't actually get healthier at the medical system, because they're only going to track your progress of your disease and then continue to give you medications. It is not a health system that has to take. You know you have to do that at home.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I have a a real problem with just giving people

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: permission in the form of a pill to continue doing things that are destroying their lives.

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lori balue: Right? Right? And it's a sad situation, because it doesn't get any better. And

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lori balue: until you actually look at the nutrition and lower your blood sugar response, and you can get a Cgm and check it and see which foods are actually causing that. But it's so much easier to just

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lori balue: do a low carb diet, Atkins diets out there because it worked. Now it's the Keto diet, low Carb diet. You don't have to be super extreme. You just need to take out the ultra processed foods to get started, you know. Sometimes it's easier. Just get under 100 carbs. Just go to carb manager, track your carbs, see what's happening, and get them under 100. Go down to whole foods. If you need the sweet keep in the fruit.

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lori balue: the fruit is still sugar. It's fructose. You will store that as fat in your liver. So a lot of the times in the beginning most people are pre-diabetic. Almost everybody is insulin resistant. Over 90% of people are insulin resistant.

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lori balue: And so your liver may not be functioning. And so you could have a fatty liver. And that's why, with insulin resistance and prediabetes, you have to take out the sugars, the carbs, and get that lower so your body can heal and burn all the fat in the body, and when you do that, and then over time, when you've you've gotten to your to a point where you're stabilized and your metabolisms reset, and that usually happens in the 1st 20 to 25 pounds.

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lori balue: and that's almost always across the board is what my clients will lose is 20 to 25 pounds, unless you're just a slender woman just looking for, you know, for preventative work, and you're not going to lose that much. You might lose 5 to 10 pounds, but you reset your metabolism. It's so cool to watch this process, and then you, you know, then you you

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lori balue: kind of. Look at where you are in your life. Create the Carb code that you want to live with. But you're already beating that diabetes naturally, because you took the sugars out. It's so critical to not have disease in our body, because 9 out of the 10 diseases in our lifestyle are because of lifestyle dysfunction because of what we're doing to our body. All the toxins.

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lori balue: how we're living alcohol that we're drinking, and the sugar load in the body is the carbohydrates all break down to sugar. So you you know you have to monitor that with a Cgm. Or just put it in carb manager, and if you're losing weight. Then you're doing okay.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And all these drinks that people drink the.

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lori balue: Yeah, they're the one.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Soda, pop.

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lori balue: Yeah. It's killing everybody.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's killing people, it really.

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lori balue: Well, you know, if you look into the South, that's the biggest problem in the South. They've got the sweet tea. They've got the soda. They're losing their teeth. They've got a huge obesity epidemic, and there's a couple of doctors working over there. Dr. Westman, I think, is one of them over in that area, Dr. Mark Cuzakello.

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lori balue: but can't really say his name. Well, but he's out that way. Huge, huge obesity epidemic because of soda. Pop.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's worse than beer. I I see people give it to their kids. I mean.

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lori balue: Soda they think is they just drink it all the time, and no beer. You might just drink it at night, you know, rather than all day long. Where soda I mean. I.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Even if you were.

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lori balue: Down the street with 32 ounces of of soda pop in his hand.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Like.

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lori balue: It's like that was what he had.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Heart attack waiting to happen. It bends your ethelial cells. That's what sugar does.

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lori balue: Glycation. Sugar glycates the vessels and makes them scratchy and rigid, plus that in combination with vegetable oil. So if you're eating fast food all the time. You're getting vegetable seed oils in your diet, and that's all. Causing oxidation and glycation and inflammation in the cardiovascular system has nothing to do with fat

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lori balue: from animal fat or from protein, it has to do with sugar and glycation.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I remember God, it must have been 20 years ago. I was having a discussion online. You know how.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: back in the day I used to argue with people. Now, it's just like, okay, we'll see how that works out for you.

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lori balue: Model. Just be a model of good health sometimes, and just educate people, and hopefully their window. All of a sudden they get that light bulb like my sister. Her light bulb has gone off, and she's like, Oh, my God, we're feeding our kids poison. And I'm like, Yeah.

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lori balue: Now she sees it, now she sees it.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Hard to tell people that. But

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: even things that you think aren't that bad like they have like arsenic in them, and

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the levels of arsenic in some of the foods is is off the charts

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: right? Right? And and that's the thing to think about. You know, if grains and cereal grains are supposed to be good for us.

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lori balue: Why do people who are

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lori balue: eating them? Getting, you know, getting sick.

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lori balue: you know. And there we people are eating more grains and cereal grains and wheat products and vegetable oils more now than the 19 fifties.

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lori balue: and that's been recommended. But there's a huge obesity epidemic because of it, which has gone up, you know the same. So you know they have charts and calculations that show this arrow going up at the same time. The food changed. So

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lori balue: it's all about our food system. We need to go back to nature back to a paleo style diet, or even just back to our great grandmother's era when people ate 3 meals a day, and they ate

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lori balue: everything at their meal, but it didn't have vegetable seed oil. It was cooked at home.

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lori balue: and it was healthier.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Even if you cook at home, you have to be really careful about the ingredients that you're using, because they're just not

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the same as they were back in the sixties and seventies, when we were growing up and learning to.

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lori balue: Right. Well, that's the thing. I you know I'm working on a starting guide, too. I've already started it, and I might work on it in December. But I have a list of you know, ingredients to keep, and and either I do, or I need to create a list of ingredients to purge. I believe I have one to purge from your kitchen, and my neighbor just did it. She had a she found out that she had some fatty liver, and, you know, purged the kitchen and brought in all the stuff that

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lori balue: so she could bake low carb so she could reduce her risk for fatty liver and finally lose the weight. So I'm so grateful that that is, you know. I rubbed off on her a little bit because she's like 1st thing she could think of is, I got to do what Lori's doing, and so

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lori balue: she's on

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lori balue: it. So I'm so grateful that you know that this information is getting out there one person at a time. If we could save one person's life at a time. And I look at this not just weight loss. I it's my journey's been weight loss. The whole idea was to lose the weight. But overall it's to save your life and build 10 to 20 more years of active living for longevity, because we can, and if we can stay out of a nursing home and stay out of the medical system and use the money to invest in yourself. Don't give that money to the medical system. Invest in your own health

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lori balue: would be the best thing to do, so.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Everything.

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lori balue: That you're not investing in your health when you spend money on yourself. And so if you wanted to join a program and get healthy. That's an investment in your health for your longevity. So you could even work longer at your job. If you need that, so you can get your brain energy back and dial back that fatigue and just be excited to live again.

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lori balue: This is more than just.

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lori balue: That's a huge difference.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Cognitive function.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know. You can go along for a while kind of.

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lori balue: It sneaks up on you, and you're not aware of it. I have got a client that that happened to, and she's like my knee, disappeared in her superpower of being able to multitask and do things and and work at her job. She's like something's wrong, and that was one of I always ran a metabolic analysis.

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lori balue: and that's 1 of the things that showed higher as her neurological issue rather than endocrine dysfunction. And so definitely you could see it in her symptomology.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, it's it's a real, it's a real thing. And when you, when you get it.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: when you're aware that wow, there's a night and day difference it. It's huge.

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lori balue: Yeah, most people who've had depression and even bipolarism. They're noticing it with schizophrenia. If you follow and track Dr. Georgia Eid, if you want to get her book and then get Chris Palmer's book. Those 2 books are amazing. They are psychiatrists working in the field of metabolic psychiatry, and they are using the keto diet for themselves as well as their patients, and they've noticed that schizophrenia which has been intractable with medications. Medications do not work for these things.

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lori balue: Keto diet works for these things, and people are losing weight and getting healthy, and you know what once they start this. They never go back to the standard American food because they feel so much better and got their life back. That's how I feel, too, because I did have that depression. I wasn't living.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah. And then you've got all of the the external forces that

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I don't think they're as bad as they used to be. But I know in the seventies and eighties there was always the big push that you had to be.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Little boys and women's body is the the only thing that

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: comes to my mind when I was thinking about. You know the twiggies of the world.

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lori balue: Yeah.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: That is not healthy.

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lori balue: No.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: There's there's a difference between maintaining a healthy weight

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: because of your lifestyle and eating nutritious foods and having your body be what it's gonna be

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: versus just trying to lose weight for the sake of losing weight.

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lori balue: Yeah. And the thing to look at this, too, is because a lot of the times just losing weight's not the power to actually get you into action. What's going on in your body? What's your vision? What's your goals? If you've got prediabetes? And you might not even know you've got prediabetes you have, Pcos. That's prediabetes.

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lori balue: But anything that's going on in your body. If your body's not working the way you want it to, and you feel like you've got something happening, or you're noticing people around you just dropping dead.

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lori balue: you know. You might want to take a look at your diet, because this is all preventable.

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lori balue: and we could live longer. And so we want to actually think about what do we want for our vision? You know, if you're snacking all the time. If you're snacking at night before bed, and you can't turn off your appetite, and things taste so good, and they keep you taste, you know if you want to eat them more like someone was telling me. I had just baked some brownies the other day, and I put it on Instagram and into Facebook. And she goes, oh, that wouldn't last very long in my house. And I said, Well, these ones don't actually create cravings in your body. It actually

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lori balue: satiates you. So you feel like you had a nice chocolate snack, and you don't feel like overwhelmingly need to eat the whole plate. And that's what my sisters noticed, too, the more she gets into a low carb diet and dial in her carb because she goes. I'm not hungry

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lori balue: when I eat good food. I don't feel like I have any cravings, but all of a sudden she'll just like I'm going to try and eat this, you know. Mentally, she's like, well, you know, I could eat that if I want to, and so she'll eat it, and then she can't stop eating. It just turns that sugar switch off. And she's just like, Wow, you know what a difference. But she's developing a mindset. She's like, you know, that food doesn't taste good anymore. Why do I even want to eat it? And so now, if you use the food bridge concept

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lori balue: and start making everything you want to eat low Carb, now you've got a solution that's going to help guide you in your lifestyle factors, in your lifestyle changes that are going to give you the health that you're looking for, so you can stay out of a nursing home. So you don't have to spend your money at the Medical Center.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And this brings us back back to our pumpkin pie discussion.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yes, I love how you did that. So you're you're using out outlook.

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lori balue: Allulose.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Allulose instead of sugar.

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lori balue: Right.

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lori balue: Allulose is a pretty cool thing at first, st I was like, no, I'm not so sure about that, you know, and I was kind of waiting for the information to come out. I've been using erythritol and monk fruit for the most part, and you know that, you know, and I don't eat it like all day long to the point where some people will get gastric upset. But if you're just having a dessert and a snack, you don't notice it too much. You might get a little bit of gas, but with the allulose there's not as much.

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lori balue: Each person is going to be different from what I understand, there's not as much gas and bloating with allulose. But the thing about allulose, you know. Everybody wants to think you could just take a pill like ozempic or a shot, and then you would have weight loss. But the thing with allulose that they're noticing, and Dr. Ben Bickman, he's a Phd. Specialist on insulin resistance, and he's been talking more about allulose.

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lori balue: And it actually creates the glp-one activation in your body to actually reduce your appetite so you could eat something like this that's still nutrient dense. It's got pumpkin and coconut milk and eggs in it, just like any other pumpkin pie. I just changed out the sweetener, and I make mine dairy free with the coconut milk.

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lori balue: and it's not going to set off my cravings because it's going to actually cause you or help. You have less cravings, and you feel full longer, and you don't just overeat. That's the cool thing about this, and that's how a low carb diet works, too. When you start getting the right foods for your body and bringing in more fat and protein and using food more strategically and absorbing it. You actually create the glp, one activation in your body through diet and protein.

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lori balue: And there's no reason to even have ozempic or or a drug, because you're actually doing it through diet, which is permanent weight loss.

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lori balue: because you could do this process and live this as a lifestyle and never gain the weight back like I have. I'm not gaining the weight back. And so you can do this all the time.

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lori balue: And but if you do like ozempic, the problem is, it's a starvation diet. It's a very low calorie diet, and you don't have enough protein, you lose your muscle mass and your bone mass.

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lori balue: And then once you stop doing it, because people only do it for a year, maybe 2 years, that they're uncomfortable. They have nausea, they don't feel good in their body, and so they stop, and once you stop. The only access of a low calorie. Starvation diet is your body's ready to gain weight. You've already lowered your metabolism because you lost your muscle. All the fat comes back, but not the muscle. And so, if you were to just transition into a keto or low carb, and do that naturally, like one of my clients did.

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lori balue: That's just

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lori balue: so much easier. You actually get to live life, eat pumpkin pie, make a brownie, you know some keto cookies and still enjoy the holidays. I even make a Keto carrot cake, and that's in my cookbook, too, because, yeah, I like to celebrate.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I will have all these things. It's not about denying yourself stuff. It's about making better choices, right?

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: The things that you want to consume.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I don't know if it's because I'm old or

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: or what. But I've I've reached a point where there's some things

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: just don't taste good to me anymore, and.

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lori balue: Right? Well, you're

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lori balue: bacteria change. And when we, our bacteria change, we actually can lose the urge to have a lot of sugar, because there's 2 types of bacteria commensal bacteria, they call it bacterias, which I call the skinny bacteria, and your firmicutes, which are your fat bacteria. So the more firmicutes you have, and you're eating more carbohydrates. You're feeding that bacteria. You could have candida and fungus overgrowth. You're feeding that.

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lori balue: And so they want a lot of sugar. So if you've got a huge sugar addiction, there could be, you know, pathogenic problems in your body that are craving sugar. But once you stop eating that and eating more whole foods and cutting back on your carbs. Then those

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lori balue: vermiculties bacteria die out more, and you're now nourishing your skinny bacteria, and they don't like as much sugar. They want more fatty acids. They need the short chain, fatty acids, they they want to be fed fat and fiber, and so you can change your your health by changing your gut by changing the food you eat.

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lori balue: And that's part of the process. It's you know. I try to keep it simple. But you know it's a whole body process, and it starts with food, and the thing with food is

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lori balue: you might need to use more of the food bridges initially to get off of ultra processed foods.

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lori balue: Use the flavors you like, but just make it low, carb. That's the one thing that, I would say is going to be the biggest thing that you can do. And then, as you change and evolve, I've been doing this for 8 years. I'm more keto carnivore now on on some days I forget about vegetables, but I eat mostly eggs, beef, protein, fish, sardines, salmon. That's what I eat on a daily basis.

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lori balue: I mean, I only, you know, nibble on my my brownies or cookies during the holidays. Normally, it's not something I do regularly.

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lori balue: but they're there for people who need them. It's a bridge.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, it's a bridge. And you get into patterns where you eat different kinds of foods at different points in your life.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And you know everybody has.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you can get to the point where you can listen to your body. And and I think that's why

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: a coach like you, who actually has

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: some data around what you're telling people to do. And it's it's tailored to the individual, to it gives them a glimpse at what's going on rather than just going to their doctor and saying, Hey, can you give me something so I can lose weight and.

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lori balue: Yeah.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: The doctor doesn't know you, and he's not gonna do the the diagnostic work because they don't really know how to do the diagnostic work, and they don't have the time or and they're not interested. But if.

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lori balue: Married together. Functional diagnostic nutrition with my lived experience and the diagnostic labs. And you know we discover what your weight loss blocks are, so you can collapse the time it takes to get healthy within 6 months.

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lori balue: It's pretty fast.

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lori balue: It doesn't have to take a really long time, and it's not just about losing weight. Weight is a symptom

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lori balue: of being unhealthy.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Symptom of being unhealthy. The the more weight you're carrying.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the more unhealthy you are, and you can get healthy

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: diabetes. Another case, you know they used to say, you can never cure diabetes. Well.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you know, that may be the medical profession's opinion, but I've seen.

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lori balue: Because they can't cure it. They don't try to. They don't have the ability.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We need it, too.

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lori balue: No, they're not. Their hands are tied. They're not. That's not their model. Their model is, they've got 6 min with you. You've got a problem. They're going to analyze what's going on in your body, you know, from whatever labs they're working on, and then say, Oh, you are either pre-diabetic or diabetic. Here's your medication. Okay, have a good life. I mean, they can't do anything.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, but you need to take personal responsibility for your own well-being.

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lori balue: Yeah, don't go to the doctor. They can't help you. Dr. William Davis. He has a podcast. Out called Defiant health. So listen to him. He's a cardiologist, and he has a book out called Undoctored, also has one out on gut health, and he says, Take care of yourself at home. Don't go to the medical system.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah. I'm all about that.

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lori balue: Yeah, I love him. He's just so cool.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you if you're in a car accident, or you know.

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lori balue: Get fixed up. I.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We'll get fixed.

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lori balue: Hope I have the hospital to get to. Yes, great emergency.

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lori balue: Everybody, you know. They're beautiful, wonderful, hardworking people, but they cannot take care of chronic

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lori balue: help because of blood sugar, regulation.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Right because our food supply has been so contaminated. And we've told things are food that are not food. Chips are not food.

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lori balue: No, I know I had somebody come over when the kids were little. She goes after school, and she was like, Where's the chips? I'm like we don't do chips after school.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Tossed toxins. And they're just like, yeah.

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lori balue: You know there are some healthier alternatives out there for people who aren't ready. I wasn't ready to give up chips right out the bat right out the gate. And so the lifestyle changes can be things that are stepping stones like there is a the brand called Siete, and you could get their chips that are made of cassava, and just have them occasionally, and a little at a time, just to enjoy the flavors of guacamole or salsa, but not as a main dish. And then the other things are like bread, you know, people I needed to have bread, but I made my own.

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lori balue: and so that was when I went low. Carb Keto, I'm a baker. My grandmother was a baker, so I just started making everything myself of what I wanted to eat, and you know there's there's a couple of companies out there called unbun and base culture. Now, those are the only 2 that I would recommend. That don't have any wheat in them that are relatively

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lori balue: good quality bread that won't ruin your lifestyle choices. But anytime you get those cheap breads that say keto at the store that have wheat gluten. You're still damaging your gut. Just don't eat those. And Sourdough. It's not going to work either. Dr. William Davis says, I'm sorry, but Sourdough is still wheat.

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lori balue: You will have leaky gut, and there's so many doctors out there saying that as long as you're eating wheat in your diet, you will have an autoimmune disease period.

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lori balue: It's just gonna happen.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Interesting. Even if you're making your own bread, I do make my own bread. I'm at.

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lori balue: Correct.

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lori balue: It's still wheat. Yeah, we're not designed to digest the wheat protein.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Interesting.

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lori balue: Yeah, you need to listen to Dr. William Davis. Get his gut book.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's.

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lori balue: I actually put that in my

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Jumps, down.

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lori balue: I've got some tips and hacks and pages of recommendations in my recipe book, and that was one of them was to get his book and get his yogurt maker and listen to his podcast because his mother died of a heart disease, and she was doing everything right. And he's like, well, she did everything right. What's going on now? What do I do with myself? And how do I help my clients

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lori balue: or his patients? And he says this is all wrong, it's all wrong.

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lori balue: And so when you get a cardiologist, flip it 360 degrees, you know something's wrong, and that you might want to follow the cardiologists who are making these lifestyle changes. There's a lot out there actually.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, it's dairy is another thing that I live in in dairy country, and we can get actual raw.

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lori balue: That's nice. If you can get it wrong.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You should only have it raw if you're gonna get something pasteurized.

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lori balue: Right.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You're it's been taken apart and put back together. You're not getting any of the nutrition.

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lori balue: Exactly.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's causing you to have lactose intolerance because you're not getting the new. The enzymes

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: are in raw milk that helped you to digest it, and we were never designed to actually drink cow's milk.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you're gonna drink milk, goat's milk is better for you, it's smaller fat molecules.

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lori balue: Yes, definitely.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Globules that you can actually.

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lori balue: And you know that's 1 of the things I do with every new client is I run a food sensitivity test, too, to see what your body's reacting to, and then remove those foods until you, you know, for 3 to 6 months. Let your body heal, and it's a huge inflammatory

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lori balue: correction that you can make to jumpstart weight loss. And it's 1 of my foundation 1st steps. And you know, right now I'm actually having a $300 off of that program. It's a 6 week jumpstart program, and I'm just my one of my Black Friday specials. I'm super excited to be able to offer that, because oh, my gosh! It's just!

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lori balue: I could not heal my body until I took out the foods I was reacting to to all my food sensitivities, and even losing the 1st 20 pounds. I could not lose any more weight till I completely took out the foods I was reacting to. So it's huge people. Poo! Poo it, thinking, you know, why do I need a food sensitivity test? Well, you could see what you're reacting to this very day and

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lori balue: correct it so that you can, you know, lose your pain in 9 days, like one of my clients 9 days into the program. Not, you know. Her foot. Pain was gone, and then another client just this past summer, after working with me 6 months, 95% less pain lost a foot an inch and a half in her foot. Size.

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lori balue: inflammation, and swelling gone, and 26 pounds of weight loss. That was just her reset in 6 months.

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lori balue: So.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah. Thanks.

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lori balue: We can do with with the right food dialed in for our body and not eating our food sensitivities. It's so powerful.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And it's not about like giving everything up all at once, like I've been on this journey for a long time, and I've given up

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: different things along the way. I quit drinking alcohol a year and a half ago. I haven't had a soda.

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lori balue: Water's, for I love my sparkling water. It makes me happy.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Even that you. It's not an all the time thing, because if it's got carbonation in it, it's going to destroy your bones.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But I mean, I love water. We we spend a lot to filter our water.

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lori balue: There you go!

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I've I've quit drinking coffee on a regular basis. I drink tea, and I have Earl Grey tea, and I mix it with

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: coconut milk.

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lori balue: The coconut. Milk's a good one. See? Now, if I had my food sensitivities I wouldn't have known that I read sensitive to the black tea, and I'm okay with coffee. And so that would if someone would say, You know, people caution us about coffee for for me. I didn't need to give up coffee

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lori balue: because it's not a food sensitivity, but black tea was. And so I actually do it the reverse way. I don't do black tea, because that didn't make me wasn't good for my body.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I don't do black tea, black tea. I can do Earl Grey tea.

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lori balue: Well, Earl, great tea is coming from black tea.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I realize that.

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lori balue: Oh, yeah.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Only kind of black tea that I drink. I don't drink the really hard black tea and the other teas that I drink are all herbal. Yeah, like rubiose or

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: chamomile. And I have different teas for different times of the day. But.

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lori balue: My teas during winter more so when it's hot out or cold cold, I always drink more tea.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, it it it feels good. And I was I

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I was drinking a lot of cream with my coffee, which

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I was like, I'm I'm not really enjoying this, and I think that I do have a re an allergy to milk products, even raw milk products, because

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: my nose generally runs a lot.

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lori balue: That's right.

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lori balue: When I and things congestion from dairy, right.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, so it just cutting way back on it and and adding more coconut milk into my diet. It

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: it helps with brain clarity because it's got the

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the right kinds of fatty acids.

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lori balue: Yeah, that's the other side of it. When you look at the nutrition of food and you actually get more Mct oil, coconut oil, you're you're getting the good fat to the brain to actually reduce your risk for Alzheimer's and dementia. And

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lori balue: that's really important. And and when we cut our sugars back, our body is able to use those ketones more regularly to help create higher mitochondria health.

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lori balue: And there's less risk for for diabetes. And Alzheimer's so it's just a super win-win. When we look at our diet.

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lori balue: Those purposes like, what do you want to not have.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's probably gonna be the next thing that has to go. But.

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lori balue: There's so many things you could do, though, and like in my recipe book, I just was doing a recommendation because it's not my recipe. But there's a little sipper she goes. Her name is Bethany Ugart, and she's got a book out called Digest this

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lori balue: and Super easy Recipe books. Some of my favorite recipes are in that book, and one of them is just, you know, like 8 ounces of tahini with 4 eggs. You get a tablespoon of apple, cider, vinegar, and a teaspoon of baking soda. You whip all that up together.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And you just put it in a little bread pan and it pops up and you just slice it, and you've got bread

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: as long as is really just a vehicle for delivering other stuff on.

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lori balue: Like almond butter, you know. That's what I like it for. So you know, I always like to have a little bit of almond butter on a piece of bread, and it feels comfortable with a cup of coffee. I don't do it all the time. I actually have to make myself not do it because I'll overeat it.

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lori balue: But that is available. And so basically, it's the habit and the desire to do that. Once you take wheat out of your diet, then you no longer have the addiction to it, because it is a food that gives us that dopamine hit, and it goes through the same pathways as cocaine does, and dairy does the same thing. So to give you, it's like morphine hit.

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lori balue: And so those casein and gluteomorphines are going to drive. The reason why we want to eat those foods and why we don't want to give them up. And so when we find those food bridges and create substitutes for what we want to eat, but we're able to then do away without the addictive foods that cause us to have inflammation. Then we're able to get to the next level of healing in our body

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lori balue: so that we can prevent the disease from coming up and lower our blood sugar response. It's so powerful what we could do with food, and not being so restrictive. You don't have to be.

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lori balue: you know, full on keto carnivore at the beginning, unless you have an autoimmune disease, and you need to. Those are just choices.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah. And and just I, I was

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: really restrictive, keto for a while.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and then I I veered off of it

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: because I hadn't really come up with a sustainable way of of living like that.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I had kids at home

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: which always makes life exponentially more difficult when it comes to die.

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lori balue: Multiplies.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yes, so I might look at going back into that.

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lori balue: And don't look at it as restrictive. So here's what I want to say, for everybody, too, is

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lori balue: what you want to do specifically right now is, if you want to bake and have something for the holiday, just use allulose or the erythitol and monk fruit.

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lori balue: Change the sugar, use almond flour for the wheat, create something that you're going to have. Pick up my my book because that'll help guide you and give you that inspiration and motivation. It has a keto recipe. It has carrot cake. It has that pumpkin pie. Brownies. Fudge

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lori balue: those things. You know they're in there because those are things that I needed when I 1st crossed over to low Carb, and I never completely went without those until more recently, where I just

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lori balue: eating more meat and protein, because that's where I'm at with myself. I need to build more muscle. I need as a woman 61 to maintain my weight loss. I need to improve my basal metabolic rate and create more muscle to lose that last 10 pounds. And you know right now that's where my health is that I need for myself.

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lori balue: and so I eat more protein. But I still keep those foods in my diet, and I've never felt restrictive. I just like, how can I make this the way I want to have it so I could eat something I want to eat. Even a keto lasagna is awesome possible. They even do it, carnivore, but you can make a Lasagna.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Okay.

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lori balue: Is pretty cool.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Cheese, though right.

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lori balue: Yeah, you do still do cheese. And so if you're dairy sensitive. I use Manchego more so than Mozzarella, specifically, because I can control the quality of my cheese.

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lori balue: But basically you do. If you're dairy sensitive, you're going to take a hit on cheese when you make a Lasagna. So when you're doing more desserts, and you're doing a lot more dairy. Then you're going to probably notice more inflammation. But when you're living your standard diet, you want to keep cheese to a minimum in the beginning. Keep it in.

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lori balue: Get yourself off of the processed food

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lori balue: dairy has its purpose. It gives you that morphine hit, I mean, people have a hard time saying No to dairy for that reason, and so, if you need it, keep it in, make everything else low carb. Find out what your food sensitivities are. Start reducing your dairy and bringing in coconut milk. It's going to make huge difference in your inflammatory load and support your brain health. There's always going to be a solution. That's why, when you hang out with me, I'm going to guide you exactly into that process.

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lori balue: And with all my lived experience I've got the certainty, the conviction. I know how you guys can do it. I know everybody can do it. I did it. I lost 100 pounds. There is no reason why anybody can't do this. I'm not special. I just hurt, and I had my pain, and I didn't want to live like that, and so I made the change I just got. I got the information I needed. I followed somebody who'd been there and done that.

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lori balue: who was empowered on his own journey.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And you have a book called or Not, a book, a workbook called 8 Essential Hacks to Losing stubborn body, fat as a woman over 50. So you want to talk about that for a little.

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lori balue: Yeah. So that one is actually I. You know, I keep thinking about. You know, I've updated the name on it more so because it's for stubborn fat overall, not just belly fat.

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lori balue: and it's really cool, because it's got the 8 steps of things that you want to do to get started. It's going to help you with digestion. It's going to help you with hydration. It's going to give you some, you know, some workbook where you can write down your visions and your goals. But it's really going to show you what I specifically did in the beginning that really helped me jump, start my weight loss, and I have every single one of my clients start this. So that is a good place to start. And then there is also the

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lori balue: fat hacks, Mini course, which comes with the workshop and the workbook, and the cheat sheet of all the steps you can do. So you don't have to do them all in one day. Put it on your refrigerator, print it out, put it on your refrigerator, and start looking at all the things that you can do to fine tune your body so you can thrive

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lori balue: and create the Ferrari you really are, or the Mercedes, and stop living in that pinto and start, you know, making yourself a Tesla, just got to recreate your body, and that's what it is you get to reclaim your health.

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lori balue: to thrive, not just survive.

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lori balue: We can survive.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Much.

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lori balue: But you're never going to thrive, and people are dying. I've had friends die before 60,

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lori balue: and my brother is 60. He's a couple years older than me. I'm going to be 62 this year. He reversed his diabetes.

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lori balue: and his friends are dropping like flies.

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lori balue: you know, if you don't do something and correct your.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Start early.

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lori balue: Don't know what's what's around for you. So that's you know, I've been studying the studies.

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lori balue: You can get 10 to 20 more quality years of living with an anti-inflammatory diet which takes the sugar and the wheat out of your diet.

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lori balue: because that's what they're seeing.

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lori balue: That's when you, if you want to get to your nineties, and hundreds upright walking, dancing at weddings.

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lori balue: You can, but you have to take the sugar load down.

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lori balue: you know, or you know what.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Literally.

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lori balue: I just had a pint of berries the other this past weekend. I do it so infrequently, but I'm like, Oh, every now and then blackberries, you know. I'm going to have some, but I'm metabolically flexible, and I can do that and not react with my blood sugar. If I wanted to have a wine at a celebration I could. But the only thing is, if it's not organic, I'm not going to drink it. So I into, you know quality.

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lori balue: health and living and the lifestyle, which is important. Like, if you're putting toxins into your body, you're going to create body fat.

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lori balue: You're gonna you know your toxins go to your brain.

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lori balue: A lot of people get

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lori balue: more brain dysfunction, too, because the toxins go there. Your metals go to your brain, you know if you're creating more mercury in your body, you're going to get it in your brain. We want to just get it out.

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lori balue: Stop putting it in there.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Foods that you can eat, that actually help with that to little things like Cilantro.

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lori balue: Cilantros are really good getting some Spirulina and Corella on a regular basis. They sell that stuff all the time. And basically, what's missing in most people, and I run a hair tissue mineral analysis to find out what minerals your major minerals are looking like and and

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lori balue: what they're doing. And one of the things that's usually missing is selenium. And so we need selenium in our diet. Most people are not getting it. Part of the reason there is a hashimoto's and a hypothyroid issue is, people are not getting their nutrients are not absorbing their food, and selenium is deficient. So if you're you know if you're always out doing raw sushi, you need to make sure you're taking that selenium to balance that mercury that you're getting into your body.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: For sure.

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lori balue: Yeah.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I don't eat much fish for that very reason.

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lori balue: Well, all of my fish is cooked. I focus mostly on salmon because I don't do. I don't feel full eating white fish, and so when I want to have shrimp, I always combine it with salmon or with eggs, so that I can enjoy the shrimp. But I'm still feeling satiated because white fish is not satiating, there's not enough protein in it overall to satiate the body, and it's low fat. We want protein and fat to satiate the body, and and if you do that you'll win. So if you

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lori balue: eat before you go somewhere to a party and then make your own dessert low. Carb.

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lori balue: Then you win because you eat what you bring. When you go to a party you don't have to feel left out.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Enjoy the celebration.

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lori balue: Yes, exactly.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So, Lori, this has been an amazing conversation. How do people get in touch with you?

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lori balue: Yeah, I am@loribaloo.com, and you could download my book. You can get my new book there as well, and I'm also on Instagram. Just about daily you could see my pictures of the pumpkin pie. I just had Lori Ballou weight loss at Instagram. I'm the only Lori Ballou out there. I'm on Facebook as well, and I'm on my Youtube station for a holistic low carb weight loss for women over 50. So check me out there.

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lori balue: and I'm always going to be out there educating you, and I'm ready for you to make your lifestyle changes if you need the education. I'm here to help you implement that.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Awesome.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So what's the one thing you hope the audience takes away from our conversation today, covered.

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lori balue: You know what. Just make everything low. Carb, follow that food bridge. If you want to have a pizza, make a mezza pizza, you can make so many different crust. I have a recipe for that, too. Just make it out of chicken or ground beef. There's so many things we can do we just want the flavor? But the problem is.

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lori balue: if you're going to keep the wheat in your diet, it's going to sabotage you. What wheat does is, it causes your Ghrelin hormone, your hunger hormone to be elevated. So the more we eat wheat, the more hunger you're going to have, and so the best way to turn off that hunger is to stop eating the wheat and go gluten free and make everything low. Carb, that's the best thing you could do for yourself.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today.

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lori balue: You're welcome.