Episode Overview
Episode Topic
In this episode, we get into the world of holistic nutrition and wellness with Christian Elliot, CEO of TRUE Whole Human. The discussion centers around the transformative power of a Personalized Health Approach. Christian shares his journey from struggling with his health to becoming a leader in holistic nutrition, emphasizing the integration of body, mind, and spirit in achieving optimal wellness. Listeners will gain insights into the benefits of addressing underlying causes of health issues rather than merely managing symptoms, highlighting the importance of nutrition, mental well-being, and personalized strategies in healing and maintaining health.
Lessons You’ll Learn
Listeners will learn invaluable lessons from Christian Elliot’s extensive experience in holistic health. He emphasizes the necessity of viewing health through a comprehensive lens, considering factors such as nutrition, mental and emotional well-being, and lifestyle context. Christian’s Personalized Health Approach reveals the importance of addressing both the biological and emotional aspects of health. By understanding the impact of nutrition and toxins on the body, and learning how to mitigate these factors, listeners can take actionable steps towards improving their health. Additionally, Christian’s insights into the power of proper hydration, real food consumption, and the significance of supportive social environments offer practical, achievable methods to enhance overall well-being.
About Our Guest
Christian Elliot is the CEO of TRUE Whole Human, a company dedicated to holistic nutrition and wellness. With over 20 years of experience in the health field, Christian’s journey began with his own struggles with frequent illness and joint degeneration. His turning point came when he met a chiropractor who introduced him to the healing power of nutrition and a holistic approach to health. This profound personal transformation inspired Christian to help others achieve similar results. At TRUE Whole Human, Christian and his team offer high-touch personal coaching, focusing on the unique needs of each individual by integrating various disciplines, including chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, and naturopathy, to promote healing and wellness.
Topics Covered
The episode covers a wide range of topics essential for understanding and implementing a holistic health lifestyle. Christian Elliot discusses the fundamentals of a Personalized Health Approach, highlighting the importance of nutrition, mental and emotional wellness, and personalized health strategies. The conversation also explores the impact of toxins and the environment on health, and how to effectively address these issues through detoxification and proper nutrition. Listeners will gain practical tips on improving their hydration, choosing real foods, and the benefits of learning to cook from scratch. Additionally, Christian shares inspiring success stories, including the transformative journey of a client who overcame severe health challenges through holistic practices.
Our Guest: Christian Elliot – Has the Proven Personalized Health Approach for Optimal Wellness
Christian Elliot, the CEO and founder of TRUE Whole Human, has an extensive background in health and wellness that spans over two decades. His journey into holistic health began in 2003 when he was struggling with frequent illness and joint degeneration. This personal health crisis led him to explore various alternative healing modalities, eventually becoming a full-time health coach in 2005. Christian has logged over 15,000 hours of one-on-one coaching, utilizing more than three dozen different alternative healing methods. His approach emphasizes the integration of body, mind, and spirit, offering a comprehensive path to wellness that moves beyond traditional symptom management.
Christian holds a master’s degree in divinity and certifications in personal training, nutritional coaching, and life coaching. Alongside his wife, Nina, he built a highly successful brick-and-mortar wellness business that included services like chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, and naturopathy. In 2017, they transitioned to TRUE Whole Human, focusing on personalized, high-touch coaching programs that address the holistic needs of their clients. Their philosophy is rooted in the belief that health cannot be compartmentalized; it requires addressing mental, emotional, physical, and relational aspects to achieve true well-being.
Christian’s work is driven by a passion for helping individuals reclaim their health and live their best lives. TRUE Whole Human’s programs are designed to meet clients where they are, incorporating elements of behavioral science and transformative psychology to create lasting change. The Elliots’ commitment to holistic health is evident in their personalized coaching approach, which aims to clear excuses, develop new mindsets, and sustainably rebuild health. Their work has made a significant impact, helping clients navigate complex health challenges and achieve remarkable transformations.
Episode Transcript
Surani Fernando: Welcome to another episode of Holistic Health Habits, the podcast, where we explore the latest trends and insights in holistic nutrition and health. I’m your host, Surani Fernando, and today we have a very special guest with us, Christian Elliot, the CEO of TRUE Whole Human. TRUE Whole Human is a leading company dedicated to holistic nutrition and wellness, offering a comprehensive approach to health that integrates body, mind, and spirit. You can learn more about them at truewholehuman.com. Welcome to the show, Christian. It’s great to have you here.
Christian Elliot: Well, thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.
Surani Fernando: Great. So just to start us off, just to introduce yourself to our listeners, can you share with us a little bit about yourself and your background, what led you to enter the holistic nutrition field, and how TRUE Whole Human came about?
Christian Elliot: Sure. Well, I suppose like a lot of people who get into the health space or holistic health or alternative, even I got into it trying to get my own health back. So, in 2003, you wouldn’t look at me and think, boy, that guy doesn’t look well. But I didn’t feel well. I was sick frequently and I had some joint degeneration. I’m 27 at this time thinking, geez, what is this going to be like when I’m 50? It was it was not a pretty picture. So I just had the good fortune to find a doctor, a chiropractor of all people who turned my paradigm of health upside down. He helped me heal and among other things, introduced me to the healing power of food, of nutrition, of using nature’s pharmacy, of using nutrition as a world-class healer rather than just something you manage for weight or some sort of math puzzle that we have to think about. So that about a two-year journey of learning at a kind of a breakneck pace about what was creating so much of my symptoms and that led to kind of started as a hobby, and then it turned into a business and people would pay me for it. We eventually grew to adding fitness. We had pretty much every discipline you could think of chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, naturopathy, and we and all sorts of different groups, fitness. We integrated that into a business at Brick and Mortar for about nine years. Then 2017, we transitioned into the business that you just referenced TRUE Whole Human, which is a high-touch personal coaching business. So we do look at the person as holistically as possible. But knowing that nutrition is just one of the pillars that has to be in place if you’re going to have the ability to help someone heal. So that’s the very quick version of almost 20 years or I guess over 20 years of how I got here.
Surani Fernando: Was that a long journey into studying all the disciplines, or how was that for you? Did you go straight into that when you got diagnosed?
Christian Elliot: Well, no. It was as much I was trying to get my health back and in hindsight, it was so clear why I was not well. My nutrition was not great and that I had so many sinkholes or gaps in it. I was eating foods that were poisoning me rather than helping me heal. So, buttoning that up I was always into fitness, but my nutrition held me back, from excelling at that. So as my nutrition got better, I was able to get into fitness. But the experience with the chiropractor led to that moment where I said, how in the world is this not normal? Why do we not all practice health this way and that leads you to study like, what are the systems we live under and why is it all symptom management? So what that expanded my view of was there are so many other disciplines out there that have healing as their background. That’s not treatment. They’re working to help the body function better, which is not Western medicine’s strength. It’s their only good at trauma and emergency care for the most part. So I just expanded my horizons on a number of different disciplines. I’ve probably done close to four dozen different healing modalities and types of practitioners over the years to just experiment with what else is out there. So that awareness that there was so much more to health led me to interview and eventually hire and kind of curate a team of people who brought different strengths to the puzzle of trying to help someone get well or maintain a lifestyle of wellness.
Christian Elliot: So that I didn’t have to go study chiropractic and acupuncture and naturopathy and all those. I was able to aggregate and learn from them, but also we all had the same mindset of like, we’re in this to help people heal holistically. That was a fun chapter, didn’t matter which way somebody, what discipline they needed. We were able to nimbly say, well, is this what serves them? And we’d made money no matter what they did. So it helped us become unattached to this the tool that we have for a lot of the things in the wellness world is the hammer and nail problem. It’s the only skill I have is this. So every problem looks like it can be fixed by that. We’re able to kind of let go of that. unfortunately, fortunately, nutrition never lost its role as a centerpiece in healing. Then we were just able to come around to that solid nutritional philosophy and package wellness in a way that has been pretty unique. We’re still doing that work today.
Surani Fernando: Great. You mentioned already, having that multidisciplinary approach, but at TRUE Whole Human, what are some of the unique approaches that set you apart from maybe some of the other practitioners out there and maybe technologies that you’ve implemented to enhance holistic health for your clients?
Christian Elliot: Yeah. Well, I guess our sweet spot has been over the years, as you remove the idea that There’s a truism in business that riches are found in niches. While that can be true to make a living, what’s also true is that health is not found in niches. So by broadening our perspective on where what it takes to build health, we step back and look at what are the fundamentals that everyone has to do well. So for a while, we were in the lane of curating the biological laws of physics. We call it the nutrition and the sleep and all of the things that no one’s going to disagree with hydration, things that we know we need to do, manage our stress. That eventually led us to realize we are really, good at the tactics of health. But what we were lacking was a well-curated experience to help deal with the human condition. The fact that sometimes I don’t feel like doing the thing I know I need to do. Sometimes there are emotional blocks, sometimes there are open story loops, and there are past traumas that have become relevant or they are the biggest impediment to someone’s healing journey. We’ve got their nutrition dialed in. They’re reasonably consistent with exercise. We’ve got them sleeping better, but there are other things that hold them back. So where we have grown over the years, our business is called TRUE Whole Human for a reason because we’re focusing on the whole human. We’re focusing on everything that makes that person unique. So the mental, emotional, and even spiritual aspects of I come from a Christian perspective for context on that.
Christian Elliot: But those different aspects of being human and then the third lane is the context of an individual person’s life, and that takes more of a life coaching aspect, that takes more of an even a project management lens to say, well, especially people in the busy middle third of life where they’ve got young kids and aging parents and a lot of complexity. It takes a strategic mind to say, whew, that’s a lot. How would we move the fulcrum to get leverage over this health situation you’re in? How do we personalize a journey through healing that isn’t just, here’s a suitcase full of supplements, and here’s a chiropractic appointment, or there needed to be enough frequency of touch points where there needed to be a strategic level? Think about where is this person stuck. And once we kind of step back and said, okay, there’s a mental, emotional, spiritual aspect to this person, but there’s also a contextual lens where what scenario they’re in, what things can make claims on their time is different. It’s not the same for everyone. So we’ve just become nimble over the years at dealing with the biological laws of physics, but also dealing with the mental emotional puzzle and the contextual puzzle. So that made for hyper-personalized coaching. That’s what we’ve been about since about 2017. Now, we’re expanding that through our network of doctors and practitioners across the spectrum and bringing to bear more minds on similar problems. But we haven’t lost that whole human perspective on trying to help someone heal.
Surani Fernando: Okay. What would you say? Is there a commonality or do you have a type of client that is the most common that would come to you that needs more of a holistic approach where Western medicine is failing?
Christian Elliot: Yes, it surprised me. I had a blog post go viral on it. I got a lot of attention after that, and what I found was our target market was older than I thought. That was. The people who were most attracted to what we do were typically 5060s and 70s, and I think our largest demographic is still 60-something-year-old females. There’s something about that when you turn 60, oh, I’m not going to live forever. I don’t want to do this wrong anymore. I can’t afford I don’t have the luxury of experimenting with or trying to biohack my way to wellness, wellness, or medicate myself into some sort of like, poison myself. Back to health doesn’t make sense to me. So how do I adjust my lifestyle? And typically it’s that introspective retrospective or even legacy phase of life people are entering that makes them want to do this well. So we don’t exclusively have 50, 60, or 70-year-olds, but we have the majority of them in that older age range. We do have our 30s and 40s. But they’re more the rare gems who are who realize if you’re sick enough and you’ve been through the medical merry-go-round and then you went through the alternative merry-go-round Sometimes even the coaching merry-go-round with too many specialists, which we’ve come to call partial lists.
Christian Elliot: Now they zoom in on a tiny part of the problem as if there’s a special solution to a complex problem when it’s more lifestyle and. Sometimes it is going in for the older demographic. Digging up the bully from the playground, the mom wound, the story, the self-image, the inner critic in their head who has been a mean bully for a long time and has made them feel inadequate or not worth it, or there isn’t a point to all this effort. Those are the sticky points. Those are the harder things to get to take those weeds out of someone’s thinking. But man, it has been hard to light to grow in our ability to influence that. So that has, I guess, shaped the demographic that has found what we do to be precisely the solution they were looking for. Nutrition is part of that. But yeah, it’s it’s a fun line of work.
Surani Fernando: And would it be common because I think as you get older and, just living a lifestyle in a modern lifestyle, there are certain common kinds of diseases or names that come up like diabetes or, cholesterol issues or inflammatory disorders that are often connected to nutrition? Is that do you see a lot of that, or is it like, are there other things that surprise you with certain conditions where they’ve gone into Western medicine and it’s not helping?
Christian Elliot: Well, guess what’s fun about our work and what we’ve honed in on, is we go after causes of where those things are coming from. What Western medicine does is, it looks for downstream symptoms of what’s going on. It looks for pathologies that result from different problems. So we’ve identified there are basically only 2 or 3 things that make you sick. There’s malnutrition. You don’t, your body doesn’t have the nutrients it needs to run its engine. But the other big one that Western medicine overlooks, and that our regulatory agencies intentionally turn a blind eye and tell us it’s not this. But the biggest thing after malnutrition or even preceding malnutrition is toxicity. It’s the poisons that we live with every day in our environment. When you recognize that’s the source of the downstream problems, there have been over 80,000 chemicals invented in the last 100-plus years. The human body didn’t grow up with those. We were bombarded with them from birth to grave. Some of the sticky widgets that we deal with, whether it’s diabetes, cancer, autoimmunity, heart disease, you name it, are coming from a toxicity problem. It’s the interaction between the average and 2006, average person, you could test them. They had a body burden of 700 chemicals, pharmaceuticals being one of those 700 from plastics in our environment to, the majority of nursing mothers having rocket fuel in their breast milk like it’s we’re so gunked up on the inside. Then the thing where Western medicine or reductionist thinking falls flat is that it doesn’t account for those chemicals getting in the body and interacting with each other, and they’re creating entirely new chemicals that we have no idea how to get our head around.
Christian Elliot: So what’s been simplified for us is that we have a malnutrition problem and we have a toxicity problem. So how does the body purge itself of toxins? How does it get rid of poisons? How do we get the exits open so the body can flush that? how do we bring in the nutrition so that the body can rebuild after it has been purged of all the things that are causing the damage? So that is a much simpler path to healing. There’s more complexity because there are lifestyle factors that converge to create that problem. But once you identify that as the target, the other thing that can poison us is our toxic thoughts, which is kind of what we referenced earlier. So there’s chemical poisons and there’s mental emotional poisons. They influence your biology. Your Bruce Lipton would say that your genes load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger of your thoughts. His book, The Biology of Belief for about 98% of your results like, well, shoot, if that’s where we’re stuck if that’s the actual upstream influence, then we don’t have to be as focused on do they have cancer. Do they have diabetes? They have eczema. Do they have whatever we go after? Where is this problem coming from? Rather than playing biochemical whack a mole downstream, trying to hit whatever the latest symptom is, we say, how does the body heal? What does it need to do that? How does it get things out of the body? And how do we build a lifestyle over time that prevents this from ever happening again? So that’s the work that we’re about on the day-to-day. It’s it’s helped simplify what we do for people.
Surani Fernando: You’ve been in this industry for a while. You’ve seen a lot of like how we’re evolving in our lifestyles, but also how the field is evolving. What are some of the most significant advancements that you’ve witnessed and, emerging trends and innovations in the field that maybe you’re excited about and maybe things that we should be concerned about as well?
Christian Elliot: That’s great. I guess I’ll give you two answers. There are areas where we’ve made progress and areas where I think we’ve regressed. So I think we’ve come a ways from, the days of Zone and Atkins and, and that world and we and or South Beach diet, and then we paleo and keto have kind of been going at it for a while. Now we’re in this phase where there’s even more extreme. We’ve got on one end, we’ve got frugivores people only eat fruit or strict carnivores where it’s beef and salt and So while we have jettisoned some things that are not great we’ve also added confusion to the landscape, some other things that have fallen away that I think deservedly so would be kind of food mass approaches to nutrition, where it’s just about managing macros or it’s how many grams of this, that or the other, how much fiber are you eating? Or even, the caloric angle of eat less, move more, which is kind of another way of saying, overworked and undernourished, which doesn’t work. Well, I think the trend of very low-calorie dieting, VLCD. I think that as it’s become evident how metabolically damaging that is. So I think there’s less of that and it’s fading appropriately because the food is so much more complex than a math equation.
Christian Elliot: You can’t boil a person down to a math equation or a lab test, and you certainly can’t do that with the complexity of nutrition. So There’s a growing recognition that nutrients need each other in order to work. It’s not one missing nutrient that’s the key to unlocking health. There’s a breadth of nutrition that heals. So I think we’ve matured in that way. But I think where we’re where we are now, the confusing landscape is, is reinforced on some level by propaganda. I don’t use that word lightly. There is a concerted effort by some of the people and with levers of power or influence to nudge people in a particular way. So, for example, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates’s Medicaid, Medicare even Google, they all favor search results or they all favor and promote a plant-based diet or a way of eating that removes animal foods from the equation. If we look at that list of those influences, we can say that maybe there’s some truth in doing the opposite of what they have suggested. So that amount of marketing, if you will, has muddied the waters a lot and confused, I think a lot of people and even he goes back to the Framingham Heart Study or Ancel Keys, or even the vilification of saturated fat or salt that we’re still trying to break up with, but they’re working their darndest to keep that spell over people.
Christian Elliot: So being able to zoom out and help people see nutrition from a historical lens, some of the best advances we’ve made in the nutrition field, I think, have been more on the farming, the regenerative agriculture, because we have access to more nutrition now than we’ve ever had, and the ability to use food as medicine. But there are industries that want to take that away, and they want us to eat bugs. They want us to eat baked meat, lab-grown meat, which, if you understand how they make that, that’s with cancer cells and bacteria and aborted fetus fetal cells like those are cells that proliferate quickly and they’re trying to make food out of that. So those are that’s the landscape that the more of us see through that and we can say, what is ancestral nutrition? How have humans fed themselves and realized there isn’t one diet everyone needs to eat? But there is a large amount of propaganda and marketing that we have to sift through, and there may be no more confusing landscape than nutrition. The more of us who can point that out, I think the more we nudge humanity forward and the more we help people heal with nutrition as world-class healers.
Surani Fernando: Yes. I can attest to that in terms of it being quite confusing to the average person, just trying to navigate how they should be nourishing their body. Also, with the health and wellness world that’s more on the capitalist side of things, making a lot of products with, as you said, a lot of ingredients. We’re supposed to navigate that as well with understanding what ingredients are what and all the processing, that goes into it. So would you say, you mentioned, just looking ancestrally it seems like all the different diets out there, the common theme that they might have is, go back to eating whole foods, not ultra-processed foods.
Christian Elliot: The challenge we have as consumers is that the Chemical companies are free to make whatever they want for the most part, and they don’t have to prove their concoction safe. But we the people have to figure out how to fund a study to prove that they are unsafe. Some of the simplest wisdom you can get when it comes to nutrition is to eat real food. That means food that doesn’t have or require a label, or if it’s got a paragraph worth of ingredients, don’t bother. There’s way too much in there that is a chemical manipulation or what we could call a food-like substance rather than real food. The body burden you take on is one of the reasons we’ve deteriorated in our health statistics so badly. Six out of ten people now have a chronic condition in the United States because our food is poisoning us. So we’ve got so many preservatives, and we’ve got pesticides and growth hormones and other things that have found their way into our food. So part of it, like I said, regenerative agriculture stuff that doesn’t have a label, knowing your farmer, figuring out what humans have eaten for a long time and not just what they ate, but how they prepared it because there are some things you eat in their raw form and it just it’s not healthy.
Christian Elliot: It doesn’t help you and your body rejects it. But if you know how to prepare it well, you can unlock the nutrition that’s in there., we think we’re more advanced these days in our so-called primitive ancestors. Often they had a lot more figured out than we did. They realized, oh, I eat that. I don’t feel great. So they found a different way to prepare it, or they just stopped eating it. We have found a way to use industrial digestion if you want to think of it that way, to disassemble things in nature and repackage them in ways nature never would have, and it’s been to our detriment. We didn’t get better living through chemistry. We got chronic disease through chemistry. So yeah, to your point, return to how people ate before the grocery store existed. How did they preserve things? How did you how do you ferment and salt and all that? There’s so much wisdom in that. We’ve just lost it. Yeah,
Surani Fernando: So interesting. When someone comes to you, is it more like a personalized plan that you would give them? Like what kind of analysis would you do to understand what the best nutritional plan, or holistic health plan for them?
Christian Elliot: Yes, we do what we call kind of a 360 audit of everything about them. Obviously, nutrition is one of them. So we zoom in on nutrition by getting a sense of the breadth of it. So we kind of we created our own kind of model of what are the factors we have to account for when we are doing an intake. So sometimes it’s just helping people understand planning Sourcing, like where do I get food? Other times it’s how do you prepare them, how do you cook them? How do you make food more nutritious? And then there’s the quantity, balance, and timing issues with those of how much. So those are kind of the food factors on the more personal. It’s the social and emotional stuff. Sometimes it’s the I’m trying to eat well, but there’s this party I’m going to or I get to the end of the day and all I want is a glass of wine and what do I do? So there’s, there’s especially if you have like eating disorders in your past, there can be any number of food hangups. So that’s become a big one. There’s learning to use food more targeted for you as medicine because not everybody can eat the same thing. Oftentimes it’s a matter of their digestion not working as well. Like anybody who has a dairy intolerance, if they’re averse to dairy, it’s often that their gut isn’t working as well. That’s our first food, right? It’s silly that we would be unable to digest dairy.
Christian Elliot: So if you get on real raw, good quality dairy and you still have a hard time, well then we look deeper and say, maybe there’s something going on in your gut. Then there’s finally the sixth one just how much does all this cost? Like there’s a real budget involved here, and there’s sometimes there’s sticker shock transitioning to real food and making the, the principled decision that, okay, like, my wife and I did this, I’m ten years ago when we said, okay, food costs what it costs. We’re not going to cheat that that is our health insurance or assurance, if you want to think of it that way, that is a reality. We’re not going to fight that. We’re not going to be mad that the food we want to eat is more expensive. We’re just going to accept that and we will cut something else in order to find real food. There’s plenty when it comes to budgets, there are so many ways to buy in bulk and make your own food from scratch and get the cost down. But it does take an adjustment, and that’s where the coaching comes in. So wherever somebody’s stuck, what kind of inventory? Those six categories figure out where they have the most potential to change or to heal. With that background, then we can start mapping out the personalized plan.
Christian Elliot: Sometimes that’s the mom that needs to learn to cook or has picky eaters in her house. Or sometimes that’s the dishes in the sink. I don’t like that. I had to figure that out, or I don’t know where to get this kind of food or whatever it is that there’s I probably heard every excuse you could throw at me. So we’ve over time, figured out the breadth of those excuses and how to. So we have so many cooking classes, for example, in our program because people needed to learn how to make real nutritious food and lectures to give them the intellectual underpinnings to say, that’s why I’m doing this. So whatever somebody is on the journey, our job is just to be kind, and manage the potential for overwhelm. Keep that at bay as much as we can and say you, you don’t have to climb all the stairs today. Like, let’s just take the next step and the next step. like we’re 20 years into this and we’re still optimizing how we eat and finding a new kitchen gadget or a simpler way to do this, or make sourdough bread, or finally figure out how to ferment that. So you don’t necessarily finish, you just get better and better at it. When that’s accepted, oh gosh, it’s so much easier to heal and use nutrition as the healer that it can be.
Surani Fernando: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s important to enforce. It’s a journey and it’s like being realistic about your goals and also living life because we all also need joy in our lives sometimes. Like focusing and just going down a rabbit hole of getting a bit obsessed can be. Yeah, taking away the joy. But we often talk about technology and how that’s impacting the holistic health field evolving. Like how do you see that role in the field and how do you use it? would you say it’s impacted how your business is run?
Christian Elliot: Yes, I think the technology is best used. It’s in the farming realm where farmers have figured out better ways to essentially grow grass so that the herbivores have better grass the chickens can follow that and the pigs can do their job., So technology has been as much in the way we’ve produced food and been able to scale. I think it was Joel Salatin who said that regenerative farming didn’t have the Manhattan Project like chemical farming did. Over time, the biodynamic farmers have figured out how to produce really, good food and scale it. Then when it comes to the individual, technology can be helpful, but it can also get in the way and it can make people data neurotic, where they’re just focused on numbers and they need everything to be quantified. Whatever I’m looking at tells me my self-worth or whether something’s working or not. So if technology can be used without falling into that trap, I think it can be helpful. So one of the most helpful things I think, out there in the tech world related to health is probably something like an aura ring where you can something simple you can wear, but it’s shocking the amount of information that’s actionable or insightful about how your health is doing.
Christian Elliot: And one of the things you could point to that says this is influencing my heart rate, my sleep, my drive or libido, whatever. It’s your food and seeing how what you ate or that several people, that glass of wine they had. Sure enough, every time they do that, their aura ring gives them not-so-glowing reviews about how their body responded to that. You see that with enough frequency and you’re like, I guess there is something to my adrenal glands. Like my sleep is disrupted. I don’t have as much energy the next day. When you’re willing to soberly take that in rather than like, I can never have wine again. No, you just say it’s learning how to get healthy, and weight loss and healing become the side effect of practicing better habits. So, an aura ring is one good example, there are other apps or tracking things you can do, but that’s probably the best one we’ve found so far. That helps people see what’s going on on a much clearer level.
Surani Fernando: Yeah, I’ve heard about the aura ring. There’s this other thing that I’ve been quite curious about. It’s where you blow into it and it will tell you what you’re burning as fuel. People will use it like before they do a workout or something. I don’t know, I’ve seen it advertised, but I can’t remember what it was called, but what is that sort of a similar thing?
Christian Elliot: Well, it could be. So then you even what you’re kind of stumbling into, maybe there’s even just the idea of testing. It’s it’s a lab test from any doctor has typically most of them have the same problem. The problem is that there are moment-in-time windows that don’t necessarily capture the whole picture, or they don’t capture the breadth of causal factors. They have this one data point of how much, ketones may be in your breath or something, but they don’t tell you why. It’s like getting your blood pressure taken. Well, that’s what it was then. But were you nervous because you were in the presence of a doctor, or were your heart rate high because you’re anxious about something? There are so many variables. What something like an aura ring does is give you real-time data over a whole day or over as long. The longer you wear it, the more insightful it becomes. So some of those tests can be helpful, but they’re often red herrings. Or there’s a way disproportionate amount of emotional weight put on what they’re telling you and those types of things.
Christian Elliot: I go back to my word partial list. They tend to be more slivers of windows, like a little flash bang that went off that might have been actionable of what happened at that moment, but it doesn’t necessarily paint much of a full picture. Yet they are promoted as if they are the secret, the most important data point. rather than this is one little metric that might be insightful if you can measure it over time and compare it with other things. So even getting on the scale can be the same way. Like, oh my gosh, I lost it. I only lost a pound. Flatliner, I gained weight. Like the real journey of change is up and down. It does fluctuate and it’s not as straight up to the right. As we accept that and know that the body is adapting its systems and healing, it’s so much easier. When you have data over time, it’s going to serve you more than punctuated random, data points that aren’t necessarily indicative of a whole in any meaningful way.
Surani Fernando: Yes. So with some of those, apps and devices you would use, if the client has them, you would work with what they have to, of course, them as little.
Christian Elliot: Any data can be helpful. It’s it’s giving it its appropriate context that becomes the chat okay. This we have our little visual we call our synergy symbol. If you can picture an atomic symbol it has seven different aspects of wellness. You can think of it like seven tires on a car, which is kind of a funny-looking car. But if 1 or 2 of them are flat, the whole thing is dragged down. Often we’re so fixated on. But I have this metric and I slept for this long, or I breathed into this thing, or I took my whatever lab test and it showed me that, yeah, I’m doing great. But there’s this one thing and it’s as if another, I’ll correlate it and I’ll come back to my point when when we get negative feedback on something, we get bad news. It takes about ten positive, instances to outweigh the one negative thing, to get us back to emotionally neutral. A lot of the testing stuff we have is similar. It’s like, oh, it’s the one thing that’s not going where I want. So this guy must be falling and this isn’t working or oh, maybe, but once you can zoom out and say you have hydration and nutrition, you have exercise and movement, you have mind and emotions, you have stress management, you have sleep and rest and play and you have restorative health care.
Christian Elliot: You have a meaningful connection to people and to God and to nature and yourself for that matter. Those are other metrics that very infrequently get brought to the measurement of how you’re doing. Do you are you sleeping better? Is your pain diminished? Is your digestion better? What’s your mood like? What’s your heart rate variability, your heart rate over time? Can it go up and down quickly? There are so many other things to measure, and as long as people, I think appropriately appreciate that this is a limited data point of endless numbers of ones that could be out there, then it can become emotionally neutral where they come. It’s just feedback rather than identity. It doesn’t mean There’s no point in tracking that. There are so many wonderful things to track, but just to have it in its context keeps people from the emotional friction that says, oh, I knew it. This wasn’t going to be it, or all of my dreams were about to come true because this number got better today. So to be able to approach data with, huh. Or maybe it’s there’s so much more to center you when interpreting it.
Surani Fernando: Yes, definitely. I guess moving on to some maybe practical tips, and advice for our listeners who are newer to the field and keen to improve their holistic health, what would your three practical tips be where you can offer them to start implementing today? It’s free and it’s easy and it’s simple.
Christian Elliot: In the nutrition realm in particular?
Surani Fernando: Yes.
Christian Elliot: I don’t underestimate the importance of hydration. Can you get wetter water? Can you get better quality water that nothing exits your body without the medium of water you’re going to get toxins out of you. You need to have good-quality water. So to me, a good structuring unit kind of is kind of like the finishing of it. You get a great filter and a structuring unit and man, your body can show off some healing capabilities, and start to shed some weight. The other one would be just go back to ancestral nutrition, and try to get as much food as you can from a source without the requirement to have a label on it and a long list of ingredients. It’s so much more fun to enjoy flavor and breadth of nutrition, the way nature packaged it, than to try to get it in supplement form. So we are we’re more supplement minimalists. There’s bee pollen, for example. I think of that as bee pollen granules in particular from a local farmer. That’s kind of nature’s multivitamin. There’s so much breadth of nutrition, and we miss that nutrients need each other in order to work. So you don’t. Sometimes you can make yourself worse by supplementing vitamin D or too much of any one nutrient. When you let nature package it for you, you can get so much more nutrition out of it. Then I guess I’d say the third thing would be learning to cook from scratch. That takes the time to do that because it’s a skill that will pay you back every day for the rest of your life like there is. It’s there’s something emotionally satisfying about something that tastes good and that you made it, especially if you know where it came from. So your hydration, your ability to cook your own food, and then just find food that doesn’t have a label. From a farmer you trust, that’d be a top three, maybe.
Surani Fernando: And maybe like some other tips for physical and mental well-being, maybe one of each. What do they do?
Christian Elliot: One, taken away.
Surani Fernando: Okay, you could you could choose whatever. But, like just things that you think that people don’t do to take care of their mental well-being, physical well-being. It’s like just, such an obvious thing that people don’t do.
Christian Elliot: Well, probably the biggest thing maybe would depend on the person, but being able to inventory your inputs. By that I mean who speaks to you. What voices are you listening to and are they edifying or do they make you feel less than? Do they speak life and hope to you, or do they speak scarcity and fear to you? If you are in an environment where you’re constantly having inputs and this is most media falls into this category, be afraid. There’s something that, the danger that’s lurking or there some reason you shouldn’t feel secure that media, you cannot help but be influenced by that. So often that means a fairly ruthless elimination of toxic inputs. Sometimes that’s toxic relationships that need to be dealt with. It’s if you want to heal and you rule out that your inputs are probably, I would say, even more, influential than your food, if your inputs are negative or your or toxic, or you have an awful inner critic in your head that is reinforced by the media or the people that you surround yourself with, that may be the first thing to change. COVID did a number on us, sifting and shifting friend circles and created a lot of tension between people. That has kind of left people unmoored or lonely and any number of ways. So finding your people, if I can add a second one here, yes. This is as much centering and hopeful and life-giving and it just makes life feel worth it. So those two things would be probably the biggest ones, I’d say, because we’re social by nature, we can’t. The solitary humans are a contradiction in terms. We need each other and we can’t meet all our needs by our own efforts. So cutting off the inputs and finding your people would probably be my summary of your question.
Surani Fernando: Yes. I think it’s stark like the pre-COVID, post-Covid, the things that we lost during that time just even, like personally for me, just the movement that I would do not just like going to the gym and that like that dedicated time for physical activity and exercise. It’s just like walking around, going to get a coffee, going for a walk with a colleague or it’s, now that we’re doing a lot more online and at home, we have to remind ourselves to to move more. I feel like that connects with physical and mental. Well, it does absolutely.
Christian Elliot: I’ve spent a dozen years as a trainer, and I probably, as much as anyone, understand how medicinal movement can be and how healing that is. You want to get any system of your body in shape. Start with your cardiovascular and muscular system, like get those in shape, and watch how every other system your brain fog, your digestion, and your metabolism all get better because you did that. So yes, movement and exercise are two different things. They are super important. Maybe that’s your waypoint. Maybe you need the mood reset of exercise that gives you the ability to stand against the toxic inputs that you can’t quite cut off yet. So there are so many ways into the wellness cloud if you want to think of it that way. Just get moving, just get started. Find your people.
Surani Fernando: I’ve got a couple of minutes just to finish off, I’m curious to know if you can share a success story from TRUE Whole Human that highlights how effective your program is.
Christian Elliot: Yes. I guess I’ll give you my whopper. My biggest one. I have a client who used to be £500, and when I met him, he was on 13 medications. He was diabetic. He had a black toe, and they were about ready to cut his toe off. He had oozing sores all over his body. He was in chronic, constant, debilitating pain. The kind that keeps you from sleeping now, not able to get comfortable. he was planning his own suicide. He was trying to figure out where he could do that so his family wouldn’t have to clean up the mess. That’s about as low as you can get. This is the height of COVID-19 as well, where his family’s cutting him off because they don’t want to kill Grandpa. So life just felt cruel and not worth living. he had been to a number of doctors. This guy goes to its off his digestion was a mess. His eyesight was not great. We have reversed all of that. He has gotten 90% of his medications are gone. His anemia is gone. His. We saved his toe. His. He no longer has oozing sores all over his body. He’s lost a lot of weight. He’s in his 40s now and he owned it. He took extreme ownership. He wrote me one of the most brutally honest emails about a situation I’ve ever received. But his secret was that he was. Is willing to put in the work and he realized it’s not someone else’s job to manage my health. Nobody can make you practice your health habits. You have to do it.
Christian Elliot: Once that clicked for him, he was in a bad enough spot that he just needed relief. So we got him sleeping. We got him out. He has episodes of pain, but he doesn’t live with chronic pain. His diabetes is very much under control. His digestion is better on so many levels. He now has a purpose everywhere he looks. He has a grandchild he never would have met had he not started. There’s a testimony video of him after his first year with us. It’s on our website. If somebody wants to go see it. His name is John, but that’s evidence of what can happen when somebody takes ownership of it and when they approach it holistically. We went through a as you can imagine, you don’t get to be over £500 without a lot of mental, emotional head trash, without a lot of stories and a lot of food hang-ups So on. So we had to work through that. It wasn’t just the tactical eat This, not that, and do these exercises. There was that. However, the biggest wins came from shifting his mindset and shifting the dynamic in his marriage and those types of things that made life feel worth it. To his credit, he just consistency became his superpower. He just wouldn’t quit on himself and just did the next hard thing. If somebody has that mindset, my goodness, let the body show off what it’s capable of doing and he’s living proof that this works. We just sometimes need to have the courage to take the first step, and then find the reserves to not quit on ourselves.
Surani Fernando: Yes, very powerful and inspirational story there. Good one to end with. Well, thank you so much, Christian, for joining us today and sharing your valuable insights on holistic nutrition and the future of this holistic health field. There are our listeners, make sure to check out TRUE Whole Human at truewholehuman.com for more information Some of those testimonials and more information on their services and holistic health programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Stay tuned for more episodes of Holistic Health Habits, where we continue to explore ways to enhance your nutrition and well-being. Until next time, take care and stay healthy.