Unlocking Holistic Nutrition Secrets with Ellie Kempton

Episode Overview

Episode Topic

In this episode, we delve into the intricacies of optimizing gut health with Ellie Kempton from Simply Nourished Nutrition. Ellie shares valuable insights into the role of nutrition in gut health, discussing practical tips and strategies for improving digestion and overall well-being. From understanding the gut microbiome to navigating dietary choices that support gut flora, this conversation offers listeners a comprehensive guide to achieving and maintaining optimal gut health.

Lessons You’ll Learn

One of the key lessons from this episode is the profound impact of nutrition on gut health. Ellie Kempton emphasizes the importance of mindful eating and making informed dietary choices to support a healthy gut microbiome. By understanding how different foods affect digestion and overall well-being, listeners can empower themselves to proactively improve their gut health through practical, sustainable dietary changes.

About Our Guest

Ellie Kempton is the founder of Simply Nourished Nutrition, renowned for her expertise in functional and integrative nutrition. Her journey began with a Crohn’s disease diagnosis during her time as a collegiate swimmer at the University of Virginia, sparking her interest in holistic health approaches. With a master’s degree from Bastyr University, Ellie specializes in metabolic mastery, gut health, and hormonal balance. She employs tools such as continuous glucose monitors and comprehensive stool panels to tailor individualized protocols for her clients, advocating for informed supplement choices and promoting simplicity in achieving holistic well-being.

Topics Covered

The episode outlines Ellie Kempton’s evolution from collegiate swimming at the University of Virginia to her current prominence in integrative and functional nutrition. It chronicles her personal health challenges with Crohn’s disease, catalyzing her dedication to nutritional science. Emphasizing her academic credentials from Bastyr University, it underscores her specialization in metabolic mastery, gut health optimization, and hormonal balance. The narrative underscores Ellie’s use of advanced diagnostics such as continuous glucose monitors and comprehensive stool panels to formulate personalized nutrition regimens. Additionally, it highlights her advocacy for evidence-based supplement choices and holistic wellness strategies aimed at simplifying nutrition for clients.

Our Guest:  Reveals Secrets to Metabolic Balance Mastery

Episode Transcript

Surani Fernando: Welcome to another episode of Holistic Health Habits, where we speak with leading wellness experts with unique perspectives on holistic nutrition. I’m your host, Sorani Fernando, and today we have a very special guest joining us. We’re thrilled to have with us Ellie Kempton, the owner of Simply Nourished Nutrition. Ellie is a leader in the field of holistic nutrition and a lifestyle architect dedicated to guiding women back to alignment within their bodies. A qualified biochemist, her transformative approach is rooted in cutting-edge science, and Ellie’s mission is to install agency into her audience to to sustain care well beyond intervention. Ellie, thanks for joining the podcast.

Ellie Kempton: Well, thanks for having me. This is such a treat. Yeah.

Surani Fernando: Really excited to get into the discussion. So just firstly, I’m super curious about your background. Can you share a little bit more about yourself, your biochemistry background and why you entered the world of holistic health to start Simply Nourished Nutrition?

Ellie Kempton: Absolutely. And it’s not what you would expect. My journey to where I am today was very circuitous and it actually started in water. I was a swimmer since I was a little girl, and I just learned at a young age to push my body very hard. And I know many of your listeners can relate to feeling like grit is good and if it hurts better. And so I learned that as an athlete and this little fish that I was, I was competing at four years old and I just lived and breathed competition. I loved just the thrill of the chase. And I learned early on to tune out to what my body was telling me in the name of performance. And, you know, life is an extreme sport. We are always performing in some way, shape or form. And so I learned through the lens of swimming to perform every day. And I swam my way into college. I swam at University of Virginia, and it was there that I started to feel the impact of the grit. I started to feel the impact of the grind. It just didn’t feel right. But I kept pushing, and it was two weeks before Olympic trials that I just broke. All the blinking lights on my body’s dashboard were just absolutely going nuts, and I needed to address them. There was no more duct tape, no, no more capacity for me to absolutely cover up what symptoms I was experiencing. And it was time for me to go to the source. So I ran tests with the medical team and really started to dig into what was going on. And it was very clear at the get go that this had been going on for a long time, obviously, but with the diagnosis of Crohn’s, it was time to take action. So I started to just look for options. And honestly, the treatment and the approach to Crohn’s just it wasn’t resonating with me. The traditional approach, the traditional care, it just didn’t feel right. It was that like.

Surani Fernando: Injections, like biologic injections, things like that.

Ellie Kempton: Yes, very much so. Just really modulating the immune response possible. Resectioning it was just this approach that even as the little fledgling biochemist that I was, I just started to ask questions and probably very challenging questions. I’m sure I was uphill, but I really wanted to understand. And that’s really how my brain thinks. I love being an innovator. I love creating problems to creating solutions to complex problems. And so I just asked more and more questions, and my questions led me all the way to a practitioner who who really specialized in functional, integrative holistic medicine. And she just asked me questions that were really good and had never been asked before, like, do you sleep at night? And what are your stress levels? And the most noble question of them all was, what do you eat throughout the day? And that was just that moment of clarity for me. I remember sitting there thinking, gosh, if food is information and information can heal the body, let’s let’s put this to work. Let’s do this. Let me be an n of one experiment. Let me see if I can do something about this from a different innovative approach. And I experienced food as medicine and holistic care early on. I experienced it in college and it was not overnight. This is not a a hero’s journey. That was the next day. I swam at Olympic trials and won. No, right I was in. I was very much it is very gradual and I love that you preach that from the hillsides.

Ellie Kempton: Is that holistic health? Holistic medicine is a journey. But knowing the trailhead, knowing where the first step is, is so healing at that deeper root and that core of our human. Being so. It was a long journey, but really trusting the process and feeling this, this bubbly percolation of life just come to the surface was well worth it. And so I went straight out from UVA and I got my master’s in Functional and Integrative Nutrition at Bastyr University in Seattle, and I decided then and there that I wanted to become a dietitian. I really wanted to really disrupt the industry in an innovative way and bring a more holistic, just, uh, practice and, and compass to the world of dietetics. And that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been in practice now for ten years. And I’m at this place now in my career where I get to see and and work with just the clients that are so beautifully equipped to do incredible things, but just feel confused. They feel like I did sitting across from that doctor, being so inundated with information and feeling like I just needed a compass and a first step. So predominantly now work with women in private practice in Denver, Colorado, and build out programs for industries that are looking to infuse holistic medicine into their care. And I just love seeing women heal through the lens of what I experienced as a 20 year old.

Surani Fernando: Yeah, that’s an amazing story, amazing journey. And I think that, you know, I think I can resonate with that as well. Like just you have a science background and you understand the importance of science, but at the same time, there can be a little bit of a disconnect when you’re looking at trying to treat a disease. And, you know, we often talk about putting Band-Aids on the symptoms versus like going to the root and looking at what’s actually causing that and, and solving the issue from, from the root of the problem. And so bringing those things together is, is really important because I sometimes, you know, sometimes we have MDS on this and, and they sort of say, you know, doctors and MDS traditionally, like they’re not really taught about nutrition. Like they talk, they talk, you know, it’s Western medicine and it’s like the medicinal approach to treating some of these diseases. So yeah, we like to talk on this podcast about there’s, there’s a there’s a place for both. But at the end of the day, especially with Crohn’s, because I do know some other people with Crohn’s and they have issues with taking a lot of these very harsh medications that that don’t work. It’s about looking like holistically on how to how to solve that issue. So, um, so yeah, well, I.

Ellie Kempton: Think you just described it so beautifully in that holistic health is not binary, it’s not polarizing, it’s not this or that is truly treating the whole human and taking this, this community knowledge that’s woven into the tapestry of our intuition and pairing it with cutting edge medicine and diagnostic tools is the essence of holistic health. And I love building just this tribe of mentors around my clients and working with professionals of different backgrounds and different disciplines, and we work together for the whole human being. And my favorite way to witness transformation is cutting edge science paired with human centered grace. And that is holistic health to me.

Surani Fernando: Yeah, that’s really a nice way of putting it. And how long have you had Simply Nourished Nutrition for I guess. So you graduated and then like launched it straight away?

Ellie Kempton: No, there were a few iterations. I was looking for just the the right fit for this perhaps experience that I had going into practice. And I didn’t necessarily want to go into private practice right away because I’d been given warnings from my mentors saying, you know, private practice is perhaps more business knowledge at first than it is clinical knowledge. And they were all right. So I took my time making my way into private practice, and I worked in clinical settings for a bit until I really understood what it was that I wanted to do. And then, yes, I took the plunge. And I’m actually coming up on my ten year anniversary and owning this practice next month. So it’s really fun to see the evolution. And ultimately what I’ve seen is that human beings do not need more information on what to do. We are living in an infodemic and at the beginning of my practice, I started to feel it back in 2013. But now I feel like. My gosh, it’s only gotten worse. What we need most is we need filters, we need simplicity, and we need a reinstallation of agency. We need really a a perhaps a a catalyst and a springboard back into our own, knowing around what we need to do for our bodies instead of basically handing the reins over to Instagram and TikTok and podcasts and books. Really, with this complete resignation is what I see is a resignation to information.

Ellie Kempton: And when there’s a resignation to information, all you feel is defeat. So my job now, I’d say I take more seriously than any role or background that I have in biochemistry or dietetics, is to be that catalyst of agency and help the women who are sitting across from me understand not only what to do, but how to weave it into the tapestry of their life in a way that works with the architecture of our brain. We have to know that we’re human and we’re not robots. So when we get these protocols that are spit out for us from name the platform, it’s no wonder we can’t just install it overnight because we have to work with old patterns, old exposures, current environments. If there’s if there are habits that are as big as oak trees growing in our our soil of habit formation, we have to acknowledge those before we plant new seeds. So that’s something that I have really started to make a pivot toward is the the perhaps laser focus on the the behavior architecture, the habit formation piece. I’ve become so entrenched and excited about this, this world of research that I’m actually back in school studying it as I pursue my degree in in Applied Psychophysiology, because I want to understand what it is that I can do to serve the audience I serve, helping them understand how to take this plethora of information and synthesize it into tangible, sustainable action steps.

Surani Fernando: Yeah, definitely. And that was something I was going to ask you a little bit later on. But you know that that’s something I think that a lot of people struggle with is the abundance of information out there. I mean, it’s a great thing we have access to a lot more information than we did, you know, a few decades ago. And we can be learning at our own pace and depending on what we need to be knowing. But at the same time, you know, you mentioned all those social media platforms, and I’m definitely a consumer of some of this stuff where you you hear a lot of conflicting opinions on what is the best diet. You know, it’s is it vegan? Is it paleo, keto, carnivore. And I mean, it’s it’s a lot to take in. But I think, you know, my take home is that all every sort of holistic nutritionist or, you know, person talking about diets, it seems like the common denominator is cutting out or drastically reducing ultra processed foods and refined sugars. That seems to be in none of the diets. So it’s like, you know, taking some of these key things and then also figuring out, obviously with, with professionals, what your body type is, what your body reacts the best to what you know, gives you the most energy. So, you know, in my, my own, you know, self practice, you know, I try and listen to my body as well with the concept of moderation and and knowing what nutrients my body needs. But how do you sort of what would be your advice to people just just so confused about what’s out there and just need someone to tell them what to do?

Ellie Kempton: Absolutely. A lot of that confusion comes predominantly from a disconnection from our body. Think about my story. Not that I’m the archetype for everyone, but a lot of the confusion, even at the young age of 20, stemmed from being completely out of touch with what my body was telling me it needed, and we practiced that. Right? So just like a muscle, when you practice not being aware, that muscle becomes stronger, so you become less and less aware. So I think a lot of the confusion will dissipate when we have a very powerful awareness practice, when we can tune into the tapestry of our energy, of our gut, of our skin, just these simple things. It doesn’t have to be a fully fledged hour long inventory every day of how we’re feeling, but just having a practice where you tune in when you first wake up, you tune in throughout the day so that as you eat food, as you exercise, as you perhaps do something that’s maybe not as wellness oriented, drink alcohol or sugar. You understand what impact it’s having so that when you do make a positive shift, you can reward that shift and really celebrate it because you’re feeling what impact it makes an emotional. With new things is what builds the the, the, the encoding of that habit. Not repetition, just repeating a habit, just doing it for doing it sake is not what’s going to encode that habit into your life. It’s the emotional experience with the habit. If you feel the sense of life giving support and you feel the impact positively, chances are so much stronger that you’ll do it again tomorrow.

Ellie Kempton: So that awareness piece is definitely going to cut through the infodemic. But I also think that there’s this culturally driven pressure and urgency to figure out a plan. And we feel it a lot around January 1st. But I definitely feel the pressure that my clients bring in saying, give me the plan that works, help me get to this outcome. And we’re so focused on optimization and outcomes, we forget how to start. We forget where the trailhead is. We forget to do the first step in our aspiration to hit step one. So another way to slice through some of this overwhelm is to create a scenario where you filter through, maybe you you have a note on your phone where all this good advice, you put it somewhere so that it’s there for safe keeping. But you choose the one, maybe two things that feel really aligned with who you are and what you believe in. And you do the simplest version of that because if you get success, momentum begets momentum. So it’s almost like riding a bike. If you do that first pedal stroke, the next one and the next one and the next one become easier and you become less confused because things become automated for you. Before you know it, you don’t even realize you’re riding the bike. You don’t even realize the pedal strokes are coming around because you were so successful with the first pedal stroke. That is something that I see so predominantly perhaps defeating to my clientele. Is this pressure to do it all in a vacuum where they don’t feel their body? Yeah.

Surani Fernando: Really interesting. And, you know, you mentioned some of the some of the clients that you have, um, you know, some of the focuses of your practice. What would you say are the key focuses or key teachings of your practice that set you apart from from the rest? Um.

Ellie Kempton: Well, the global umbrella to everything I do is installing agency in the woman I serve. Helping the woman I serve do what she already wants to do, but with a sense of confidence and self-efficacy. So the woman that I serve typically comes into the practice having done all the things. Maybe they used to work in the past, but they don’t work now, and that’s very frustrating. They feel like, oh, I used to just go on this diet and do this run and I’d lose weight, or I used to just take this supplement and get energy and they go back to doing that. It doesn’t work. So they go they they start to bring in more and more and more. And because I get to work with such resourceful, incredible women, the the audience listening to this podcast, I, I, I take my job very seriously and being a filter to them and helping them understand how to really screen how much information and how much pressure they’re being exposed to to do everything. And then really, the perhaps biggest pain point that I feel like I get to serve is a disconnection from our hormonal landscape. Because when you take confusion and you pair it with hormone imbalance, it’s a recipe for insanity. You literally feel like you’re going insane.

Ellie Kempton: And so I love being an interpreter. I love helping women understand what hormones are, how they’re your superpowers, and how they play a big role in the the architecture of how you how you live your life and, and how you even perceive life. Because if your estrogen is high one day and it’s dropping the next, you might actually see your your world through two different lenses. And that’s if you know how to work with it. It is a superpower, to be honest. So I’d say the predominant concern is overwhelm. It is confusion. And it’s certainly not for lack of effort. My clients tend to come in full of grit, ready to work harder, ready to go on the diet, and we gracefully make our way back over to a road with the label ease, simplicity, and really, I, I think flow. That’s a big piece of how I teach, is I help women understand how to implement something and then how to iterate off of it throughout the decades so that as your body changes and as it tells you what it needs, more of you fluidly flow into the next, the next iteration. Or I like to call it a software upgrade. And it’s a it’s a process. It’s not an outcome. Yeah.

Surani Fernando: And can you explain like what the principles are of something that, you know, you teach which is metabolic mastery. What what does that mean.

Ellie Kempton: Well, when you think about The human body and you think about what the song of the cell is for the human body, the word metabolism comes straight up because metabolic health is such a big term. But ultimately it’s how you as a human being, take information in and make energy, make meaning out of it. And so I love teaching courses. I teach tons of classes on this concept of metabolic mastery because it touches on many pain points. If you’re feeling fatigued, your metabolism is impacted. If you’re gaining weight, your metabolism is impacted. If you’ve got brain fog, if you’ve got gut issues, all of it comes back to this bigger umbrella called metabolic mastery. So I love teaching how to reclaim this song of the cell, how to helping take information you’re exposed to. So food that your body understands. And um, you know, environments that your body understands and give your body access to them so that so that the cells, every cell in your body can make meaning out of that input. Now there’s different facets, there’s different trailheads to metabolic mastery. We’ve got gut health, microbiome diversity. We’ve got hormone balance. We just discussed how how much hormones play a role in vitality. We’ve got an and in that case I was speaking about, you know, your sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone and cortisol. But we’ve also got cortisol. So, you know the sex hormones are estrogen progesterone and testosterone. But cortisol is another hormone that plays a big role in metabolic mastery.

Ellie Kempton: When women come in and they’ve been under high pressure, high stress for decades, they don’t realize that that may be a subtle infringement. Their high or low or dysregulated cortisol may be at the helm of why they feel metabolic dysfunction. And they’ve handed over their agency. They’ve handed over their their responsibility to a protocol to try to fix them. But ultimately, we need to get down to the heart of their cortisol and, and fine tune our protocol to their metabolic dysfunction. So there’s a few different trailheads, but the predominant ones tend to be gut, uh, cortisol, sex hormones. And really, I think a big one is, is detox making sure that your body, your your organs of elimination, your skin, your liver, your kidneys, your lymph, your lungs, they’re all releasing waste as quickly as you’re taking in new information. And in this day and age, we both know, I’m sure you’ve had many guests talking about these, this metabolic waste focal point. We live in a day and age where we live in, in things that mimic estrogen, chemicals that mimic estrogen, and we live in air and we drink water that just has a bit more for our body to detox. So not to resort to pessimism, but we certainly need to pay even more attention now to the release than we do the input. Making the input perfect, I think, is less of a concern, at least for the clients I serve.

Surani Fernando: Yeah, so it would be a client comes in like you look at their individual symptoms, the individual sort of history. And then it will be a combination of, you know, nutrition protocol, physical activity protocol, mental health. Is that would that be a very, you know, brief summary?

Ellie Kempton: Absolutely. You nailed it. It’s really taking that awareness piece. So serving almost like that aerial perspective. We talked about how important it is for someone to actually even understand what’s going on. Because I find so often that people want to treat something that they haven’t defined. So really understanding the landscape, getting a survey of where there there are issues and tuning in very, very consistently so that once you make the intervention, you know what’s changing because you can’t change what you don’t track. Yeah. And then identifying the trailhead that requires our first attention. And for some people that’s a trailhead that they’ve never even felt. Oftentimes I’m working with clients on blood sugar regulation. That is something that they may have never had exposure to. And I love introducing them to this facet of their body. That really is the underpinning to vitality. When your blood sugar is dysregulated, it it fuels the flame of inflammation. And so I think this, this evolution of holistic health and this evolution of holistic medicine has enabled us to pair what we feel and what we don’t feel with current technology. So I would say one of my favorite, favorite pieces of technology that’s more accessible than ever is a continuous glucose monitor, because that tends to be one of the stickiest, deepest roots of metabolic dysfunction for my clients. I can’t tell you how many continuous glucose. Monitors I’ve helped my clients put on. And when we look at the data, they feel this deep empowerment because we’ve found the root, right?

Surani Fernando: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Um, because, you know, we often talk about technology as well, advancements, you know, helping the field. You know, you mentioned the glucose monitor. Are there any other sort of applications or technological advancements that you think have really helped the field? And on the contrary, what should we be looking at, you know, with a little bit more caution because I think there’s, you know, we live in a consumerist capitalist world where people just want to make a quick buck and prey on the people that really just want to get healthy. So what should we also be just a bit cautious of and not jumping into the hype?

Ellie Kempton: Yeah. You know i think my two favorite Advancements that I use very, uh, very liberally in my practice is the the access to blood sugar, helping clients reclaim that, that confidence over looking at their blood sugar through a CGM. And the second is looking at the gut. I tend to pride myself. I jokingly tell my clients that I’m going to be their plumber because ultimately, there are many places along the GI tract where issues can occur. But without a stool panel, which I believe are stool panel technology and the the metrics and the the precision in testing is just being refined so beautifully. Without that stool panel, I have to guess quite a bit at some of the issues I have trouble understanding without a stool panel, if there’s an infection or what the immune system is doing. And if we think about it, our gut is the central cog. It’s like the cauldron of wellness. So if I can understand what’s brewing in that cauldron with more accuracy, I can be so much more precise. I can come in with fine tooth comb or tweezers and come at the issue without as much testing and guessing and testing and guessing. So those two advancements are huge. I I’m leery at this point, and I know that I reserve the right to change my mind because I changed my mind all the time. I pride myself on definitely going, uh, changing things and changing the script as as science changes, but really putting a lot of stock or creating a protocol out of DNA, I believe, has yet to have too much clout.

Ellie Kempton: I think there there needs to be more advancements in order to make a definitive protocol, because there’s so much you can do to change your genetics or change your genetic transcription, not change the genetics, but really turn on and turn off genetic transcriptions based on your environment and your food. So I’m excited about what’s happening in that realm, and I’m very curious. And it’s got my interest piqued. But I don’t yet use that technology in my practice. And honestly, I think that some of the biggest, uh, sinkholes and sticky points are, are happening in the supplement industry. I think there’s a lot of money. And don’t get me wrong, I use supplements very strategically with clients. Yeah, but I can’t tell you how many of my clients come into their initial session with just shopping bags of all the supplements that they have put themselves on, and many of them are poor quality or don’t have what they say they have in them. And obviously, you know, I don’t fault my client for that whatsoever. I really I really am cautious around what supplements are on the shelves, how they’re being tested, their purity, their potency and their efficacy. So those are that’s one of the stickier points that I run into, especially with the advent of oral peptides becoming more accessible. I think we got to be careful.

Surani Fernando: Yeah. Yeah, I think I find that one to be a bit of a minefield. Just, um, you know, with the quality and then also different things that might have a lot of different ingredients on in them to make them more appealing to a consumer. Right. So is another thing of trying to to sort of grab the attention of people that have good intentions of being healthy, but then, you know, they don’t they may not have the awareness or the education to to, you know, sift through the good, the bad and the ugly of some of these supplements. So and it’s hard because even if you do know have a little bit of awareness, it’s just like, oh, what’s that? Why are there so many ingredients in this supplement that should just be like a few, you know. Exactly.

Ellie Kempton: And which one was it? And then to amplify or exaggerate the issue, if you don’t know what you were feeling before you took the supplement, then you might fall prey to taking it for too long and, um, not creating damage per se, but perhaps wasting money and and sometimes in some cases, compromising other issues. I know I’ve had clients come in who were put on antimicrobials years ago, and they didn’t know what they were looking for, and they didn’t know how to use it. And so they’re still taking these high potency antimicrobials that are starting to kill off some of their good bacteria in their gut. And so it’s a point of just gentle education. But also, again, I sound like a broken record player, but I just keep going back to this installation of agency when you can help the woman sitting across from you, the human being sitting across from you, reclaim their capacity to make these decisions. You empower them to do that in many areas of their life. So for me, it’s about slowing down and really coming back to why are we doing this again? And then taking it so many layers deeper and saying, how are we going to do it? How are we going to weave this into your environment, into your community? Because ultimately this isn’t just about you. It’s about the people around you as well, how you live and how you eat and how you how you love impacts the people around you. Yeah. And you, you mentioned.

Surani Fernando: You, you help a lot of your clients, you know, with their blood sugar. You know, I assume maybe people with diabetes and things like that. How do you collaborate with the advice that they’re also getting from, you know, their MD that is maybe prescribing, you know, the drugs, the newest drugs that are on the market or the generics or whatever it may be like. How do you work in conjunction with that advice?

Ellie Kempton: Do I look at it as an opportunity to solve a problem for the client and to build that tribe of mentors? So I see myself as though I’m on the the deck of the wellness ship and the the medical team, the doctor, the MD, the D.O. they’re the captain. And I know for the most part that my clients not seeing the captain every day, at least they’re probably seeing them once a year. So they’re checking in with the captain, and the captain is giving us access to insights far ahead, looking for icebergs, looking for big trouble, and helping us understand if we need to make some more drastic shifts on what we’re doing every day on deck. But I love being the support team to the captain and being the crewman on deck and helping with the day to day activities, the mopping of the deck, the the repairs, the daily just rituals that need to be accomplished to keep the ship happy and healthy. So I find collaboration to be very life giving, even if there’s something that I don’t quite understand. What I try to do is support it so that it. For instance, if a medication is being prescribed at high doses, my job in the client’s life is to make sure that their body’s metabolizing it correctly, because sometimes I think the medication can be given and the client doesn’t know how to actualize or or actually efficaciously use. Their body doesn’t know because there’s so many different bottlenecks in the system. So if I can make the treatment even more impactful and possibly decrease the need for so much, my job is done. Yeah.

Surani Fernando: I really that’s a really good analogy to like, you know, put that you know, get that image of the captain and, and would you be able to share with us like a success story of one of your clients, someone that came in and just, you know, really turned it around with just some simple steps?

Ellie Kempton: Absolutely. You know, there’s a pivotal case, and we use her as actually an archetype in the, in the practice. And for just, um, privacy sake, I’ll, I’ll call her Betty. But my sweet Betty came in and just I, I don’t know if in our first session, she actually heard what I was asking because she was so frazzled and so just really she felt like her body had mistakenly tagged herself as the threat. She had a pretty severe form of autoimmunity that was really taking over with RA, and she just she just felt like her body was betraying her. And she had she was a very high profile, very successful attorney. So she needed she could not tap out. She she made it very clear to me that whatever we were going to do, she had to keep her her career going and her home life going. She had a few younger kids, um, and she just was the she was the person in the household that everyone relied upon. So keeping that in mind, I just asked really good questions. Questions that nobody seemingly had asked about her past and her patterns and what brought her peace, what brought her joy, what made her feel the most overwhelmed so that we kind of we got a lay of the land because she had been to enough practitioners who had told her what to do right off the bat, that it just added to her workload.

Ellie Kempton: It was almost like she was carrying into our session this red wagon just filled with advice, and the last thing I wanted to do was put one more stone of advice on there, right? So we spent a good chunk of time unraveling some of the things that were automating her habits the triggers, the the cues, the anchors to these automations that weren’t serving her so that we could. Some land for new habits that do serve her, and the goal was not to completely take her off of her Ras medication. It was not to just turn her into this DIY home chef. The goal was to create an environment where she could experience ease. She could experience grace even in this this environment at work that was very pressurized, we started to give her a sense of emotional literacy, helping her understand what she was actually feeling, which was a very abstract concept at the beginning. But she became very emotionally literate towards the end of our time together and really to create habits that automated themselves because of that emotional experience, because they felt so good. Even if the lunches that we were preparing and the exercises that we were doing throughout the day weren’t perhaps Instagram friendly, it wasn’t like we were again, chefing this whole experience, it was simple and it was good and it was just information her body needed, and she knew so well how to check in that what happened over time is she started to feel a sense of trust, like her body wasn’t betraying her and tagging her as the enemy.

Ellie Kempton: Her body was starting to build the sense of safety so that everything that she started to eat, even if it was a simple, simple, stitchable meal or any time she went for a walk, or any time that she would really relax, even for a millisecond, her body could receive it, her body could metabolize it and use it for something good, which is metabolic mastery. Yeah, so it wasn’t overnight. But what I love and I call my clients my mentees is as I mentored her through this journey, this healing trailhead, she started to build a toolbox that she could use in many areas of her life. Before I knew it, she was asking her kids the questions I was asking her around. Just creative solutions to tricky problems. And you start to put on this mindset of success. Instead of fixing problems, you create solutions, you don’t fix problems. And when you go through life creating solutions and not fixing problems, you you have a different perspective completely.

Surani Fernando: Yeah, that’s really nice. I really like the focus on simplicity, because I think that a lot of people can just get so overwhelmed. Yeah, with all the problems and just, you know, dialing it back and going like step by step. Building blocks with solutions is a nice, much nicer way to to see things. And yeah, just it just sort of makes it much more attainable I think. So just finally, my last question to you, because, you know, in in this day and age, everyone is a little bit, you know, focus obsessed, whatever you want to call it. On on aging and longevity, what would you say is the number one secret to aging powerfully through the decades to come?

Ellie Kempton: To become curious, to become self-aware, and to consistently check back in with the information your body is giving you? If you can do that, you will not dig a hole that’s too deep for you to climb out of, because you will be able to refine your approach in the subtleties and not even have to resort to an overhaul. January 1st won’t even register to you as an opportunity to do things completely different tomorrow, because you’ve been iterating every single day, moment to moment, day by day. You’re just slightly tweaking things so that you get to this place where you experience peace, because peace is the home address of healing. So if you can create a sense of awareness and truly just just perceive what it is that you’re you’re feeling before you take action, to be self-aware is just to tune in to how you think and how you feel. It’s noticing how you notice, and it’s not in an effort to define this perfect protocol, that’s the next step. But it’s in an effort to expand. And that is the most powerful way to age is in a space of expansion and not constriction. We don’t heal when we go into a space of scarcity. We heal when we understand our limitless nature.

Surani Fernando: Really nice way to end off this discussion, will. Ellie, thanks for this insightful conversation and for sharing your expertise with us today. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and I learnt a lot and have a lot of food for thought moving forward. So to our listeners who want to learn more, be sure to check out Simply Nourish Nutrition at their website, which is the same name, I believe. Ellie.

Ellie Kempton: It is. Yes.

Surani Fernando: And that will also be linked in the show notes. So also thanks to everyone for tuning in to another episode of Holistic Health Habits. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and follow us on social media. But for now, stay healthy and nourished. I’m Sereni Fernando and we’ll see you next time on Holistic health Habits.