Christina Tidwell 10/19/20 Christina Tidwell 10/19/20

Creating Habits That Stick

In this post, I dive deeper into habits: creating new habits and how to actually make them stick. I hear from so many people that they generally know what they should do, it’s just that they’re not doing it. This is not because you’re a failure but rather because behavior change is a skill that needs to be developed. If you’re feeling stuck putting things into practice and taking action, I’ll share more about how to uncover your personal blocks and how you can learn the skills and tools you need to successfully change and transform.

CREATING HABITS THAT STICK

“I know roughly what to do, I’m just not doing it!”

Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself saying this….? (Hand raised here!) I’ve heard this phrase from multiple people recently, so I wanted to talk about it. Have you had the experience of going through a course or working with a practitioner where you were given TONS of information and protocols, only to find that you didn’t follow through with it? Or maybe you felt good for a month or so while you were really motivated to make healthy choices, but then it didn’t feel sustainable so you weren’t able to stick to it long term?

This is not because you are a failure or due to a pure lack of motivation (although that’s often the messaging we receive). It’s because behavior change is a skill that needs to be developed!

When we don’t treat behavior change like a skill that needs to be developed and help people cultivate that skill, sometimes we’ll resort to using fear or even shaming in attempts to instill change. When I worked at a cardiac clinic patients would often get the message, “Lose weight or you’ll get another heart attack!” with the hope that the fear and information would be enough for that person to make the change. But the reality was that that person then went back home, to the same environment, the same cooking, the same relationships, and didn’t have any new skills to make these changes a reality. So they ended up feeling more shame and guilt without any of the positive changes.

Again you can see how it wasn’t that person’s fault. They simply needed a different kind of support to help and learn the skills of creating lasting behavior change.

These tactics of fear and shaming can sometimes come about because well-meaning practitioners aren’t trained in supporting people through the skills needed for successful behavior change. And we aren’t always aware of these things ourselves!

That’s why coaching is so critically important, and it’s why when people say to me, “I know what to do I’m just not doing it,” I know exactly how to help guide them. If you are feeling stuck in your health journey, you might need some information, but chances are you’ve done a TON of research and are having a hard time getting things to stick in a sustainable way.

I teach these skills in my 1:1 coaching, and they are tools you will gather for LIFE. I don’t just offer a list of foods to eat and not eat because that doesn’t work. Instead, we work week by week to uncover your personal blocks and learn the tools you need to successfully change. If you're looking for support, guidance and a clear plan of action to get you on track to achieving your goals, I encourage you to book a Discovery Call to learn more about how you can benefit from 1:1 coaching and learn more about my coaching programs. In this call I can help you identify what's been holding you back, and create a plan of action to move forward with clarity and confidence.

Tune into the video for more info about how to get started, and let me know in the comments what helps you create long-lasting habits.

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In today's episode, we talk about habits: creating new habits and how to actually make them stick. I hear from so many people that they generally know what they should do, it's just that they're not doing it. This is not because you are a failure or due to a pure lack of motivation (although that's often the messaging we receive).

If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell and I'm so excited that you're here! I am a RN & Functional Nutrition Practitioner that helps those with autoimmune disease, hormone imbalance and gut issues heal without overwhelm so you can feel better in your body in a way that honors your unique needs and feels sustainable for the rest of your life.

If you suffer from:

Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm

...and aren't getting the support you need, I’m here to help guide you! My job is to clear the overwhelm, help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and co-create a sustainable path forward to help you reach your goals and feel better in your amazing body. When we work together you can’t fail.

In my health & nutrition coaching programs I support you in the quest to get back into balance by listening to your story, understanding your needs, getting to the roots of imbalance in the body and co-creating a sustainable path to healing together. These sessions weave together functional nutrition and science, lived experience, mindset shifts, and intuitive guidance for a unique and full-spectrum approach to nutrition counseling and holistic health.

I always offer free 20-minute discovery sessions to get clear on your major health concerns and identify what’s standing in your way. Click the button below to set up your free consultation and we can create a plan of action specifically for you.

Book your free Discovery Session here

Christina Tidwell 9/24/20 Christina Tidwell 9/24/20

The Dangers of Proton Pump Inhibitors

Have you or someone you know taken acid-blocking drugs, particularly Proton Pump Inhibitors? If you are, you’re certainly not alone. In this post, I discuss the dangers of PPIs and everything you need to know about these acid-reducing drugs including the effects they can have on our bodies.

THE DANGERS OF PROTON PUMP INHIBITORS

Have you or someone you know taken acid-blocking drugs, particularly Proton Pump Inhibitors? If you are, you’re certainly not alone. Americans spent $13 billion of acid-reducing drugs in 2006 to give you an idea of the magnitude of use. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the dangers of PPIs and everything you need to know about these acid-reducing drugs including the effects they can have on our bodies.

What are Proton Pump Inhibitors?

Proton Pump Inhibitors - or PPIs - are a class of acid-reducing drugs. They’re medications like Prilosec, Prevacid, and Nexium to name a few, and they are designed to turn off acid production in the gut. They’re often used for stomach and small intestine ulcers, for severe GERD, esophageal reflux, and sometimes to protect people from getting ulcers that can develop as the result of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory use. They're also available over the counter to treat heartburn. PPIs are approved by the FDA for a 14-day course of treatment, however many people end up taking these well past the indicated timeline. I took proton pump inhibitor drugs when I was dealing with acid reflux and heartburn and ended up taking them for around a year without any follow-up, and oftentimes my clients come to me in similar situations.

Things to consider when taking PPIs

These antacids might seem really harmless because they're available over the counter and anyone can just walk into a store and buy them, but they can have a number of side-effects and really serious downstream consequences when used long-term that we really need to be aware of when we're thinking functionally.

The first issue is that they don't get to the root of the problem. PPIs are band-aids used to mask symptoms of heartburn. Typically heartburn is a signal that there is digestive impairment that's causing acidic stomach contents to leak up into the esophagus. So in order to treat the problem, you need to support overall digestion, not just mask the symptoms. When I started learning about this, my mind was blown! Instead of just saying, we need to turn off the acid, we want to think, why is the food not being broken down in the gut in the first place? And how can we support top to bottom digestion?
There is also an increased risk of infection when taking PPIs. The FDA has issued a series of reports cautioning against the prolonged use of PPIs, citing increased risk of infection, bone fractures, nutrient deficiencies and life-threatening infections (clostridium difficile) but they are still over prescribed and widely used long-term. Stomach acid secretions act as a defense mechanism against enteric bacteria and so less acid during PPI use allows for colonization of opportunistic microbes. That means you could end up with an overgrowth of microbes that might lead to more dysbiosis.
Chronic PPI use also leads to malabsorption of key minerals in the body, namely a loss of calcium and magnesium. A loss of these minerals has been shown to lead to bone fractures and cardiac abnormalities among other downstream issues. I also see this in terms of not being able to absorb things like iron, B12 or different vitamins. A lot of times, having low stomach acid or just impaired digestion is correlated with low iron or nutrient deficiencies overall. And we know that nutrient deficiencies are a big driver of autoimmune issues or any health issues because our immune system needs those nutrients and those building blocks to do what it needs to do.

Listen in below to learn more about the dangers of taking PPIs. And if you're on a PPI for any reason, know that that's okay. I've taken them too. When you know more about them, you can begin to understand how they might be affecting your body, and then you can take steps to get to the roots of what's going on.

PREFER TO LISTEN? TUNE INTO THE LIVE WELL PODCAST BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)

Click here to listen in iTunes

Click here to listen in Stitcher

Have you or someone you know taken acid-blocking drugs, particularly Proton Pump Inhibitors? In this episode, I talk about the dangers of PPIs and everything you need to know about these acid-reducing drugs including the effects they can have on our bodies.

If you suffer from:

Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm

Book your free Discovery Session here

Christina Tidwell 8/17/20 Christina Tidwell 8/17/20

Connecting to Your Why

Having a hard time making behavior changes that stick? The first step is connecting to your big WHY. So often when we start going down the path of changing our diet, our behaviors, or bringing in lifestyle interventions, we get caught up in the "doing" part. But really, one of the most important pieces in creating lasting habits and behavior changes is understanding why you're even doing these things in the first place.

In this post, we’ll go deeper into connecting to your why and how this allows you to look beyond just the external factors to make sustainable and aligned changes.

CONNECTING TO YOUR WHY

Having a hard time making behavior changes that stick? The first step is connecting to your big WHY.

So often when we start going down the path of changing our diet, our behaviors, or bringing in lifestyle interventions like meditation, we get caught up in the "doing" part. But really, one of the most important pieces in creating lasting habits and behavior changes is understanding why the heck you're doing these things in the first place! And that means connecting to your big why.

This shift to connecting to your why brings the focus away from the outward and the external. When you begin to investigate you might have whys like... “because someone told me to” or “because this is what my life should look like” or “because this is what I'm supposed to do”…

Sometimes we attach ourselves to these external whys, and then we're not truly connected to our own individual reasons for why we're doing something. This makes it much more difficult to stay connected to healthy habits because we're not connected to why we want to do them in the first place.

Asking yourself some simple questions and seeing what comes up for you can really help understand your unique why.

Ask yourself: Why do I want to get healthy?
Is it because you want to lose weight? Is it because you want to have more energy?

Take your answers and go further:
Why do you want to have more energy? What could you do with more energy?

You can go even deeper on these answers:
Why do you want to have energy when you come home from work at night? Is it because then you can create a better connection with your family? Is it because you have time to actually be creative and do what your soul wants you to do?

I like to think of these answers like little golden threads, leading us up to our big why. Keep digging a little deeper, and when you really land on your why you'll know it, you'll feel it. I encourage you to write your whys down so you can see them, and connect to when you need to.

This is truly one of the biggest keys to supporting sustainable change for ourselves as we move through any healing journey. I have worked with so many clients to help support their bodies through healing journeys, and really understand how to make healthy choices feel sustainable and easy in their lives. If things don't feel sustainable or easy, we run the risk of feeling like we're always either totally on or off the wagon. Or we feel like we can't stick to anything or feel better, and I truly know that’s not the case for anyone reading this today.

All of us absolutely have the power to make really aligned choices and to have sustainable health practices that feel really good for our bodies. I would love to support you and hear your BIG whys so please feel free to share them in the comments below so we can support each other!

PREFER TO LISTEN? TUNE INTO THE LIVE WELL PODCAST BELOW (AND DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE SO YOU'LL NEVER MISS OUT!)

Click here to listen in iTunes

Click here to listen in Stitcher

One of the most important pieces in making any behavior change stick for the long-term is knowing your why. In this episode of The Live Well podcast, I share the importance of understanding YOUR why and how this allows you to look beyond just the external factors when it comes to making lasting changes in your health choices.

If you suffer from:

Fatigue and energy crashes
Brain fog
Poor digestion
Painful periods and PMS
Symptoms of autoimmunity
Stress and overwhelm

Book your free Discovery Session here

Christina Tidwell 6/23/20 Christina Tidwell 6/23/20

Your Functional Timeline and the ATMs of Health

When dealing with chronic illness, it’s important to investigate the “root cause” of what’s going on in the body. Often times treatments for autoimmune disease involve medications or interventions to manage or suppress symptoms, but they don’t always dig down to the root to see what’s going on at a deeper level. When we’re working in functional medicine and looking at things through a functional nutrition or functional medicine lens, it really is all about identifying the root cause of disease and understanding how your personal history influences disease expression. The most important tool in the functional medicine toolkit is the functional timeline. This tool allows us to put our presenting illness or symptoms in context with our entire life, and helps to identify the roots of illness to move towards resolution. In this post, we’ll look at the functional timeline and the ATMs, or the antecedents, triggers, and mediators of health!

Your Functional Timeline

and the “ATMs” of Health

When dealing with chronic illness, it’s important to investigate the “root cause” of what’s going on in the body. Often times treatments for autoimmune disease involve medications or interventions to manage or suppress symptoms, but they don’t always dig down to the root to see what’s going on at a deeper level. When we’re working in functional medicine and looking at things through a functional nutrition or functional medicine lens, it really is all about identifying the root cause of disease and understanding how your personal history influences disease expression. The most important tool in the functional medicine toolkit, in my opinion, is the functional timeline. It’s something I take all of my clients through when I work in one-on-one programs with people, and it’s almost always how we start out because we can't move forward unless we really understand where we've been in our history. This tool allows us to put our presenting illness or symptoms in context with our entire life, and helps to identify the roots of illness to move towards resolution.

Why we use the Functional Timeline

Even if we have the exact same diagnosis as someone else, or even if we don't have a diagnosis, just the same symptoms, what led us to that place is going to be very different. In order to move forward and work to support the body in a way that makes sense for you, it’s important to understand the whole tapestry of you, and what led you to where we are now so that we can move the needle forward and actually make a difference in your health.

The “ATMs” of Health

Antecedents
First, we look at antecedents. This is where we'll try to identify what factors in your life, genetic or acquired, may have contributed to the illness or condition. This can be your family history and what's going on on either branch of your family tree.

Antecedents are things like:

Prenatal exposures
Being born prematurely
If you’re a twin
Vaginal birth or C-section

Understanding what happened during our infancy and early childhood:

Early nutrition
Formula-fed or breastfed
Allergies
Dietary insufficiencies

What we want to understand with antecedents is that they’re things that have to do with our genes and our very early history, and they're not necessarily things we can control. We kind of accept that they are there, and they might give us greater insight into what's true for us. We also have to understand that our genes are not our destiny.

The study of epigenetics allows us to understand how the expression of our genes can be influenced by our environment. As we go deeper into these next steps - triggers and mediators - we begin to understand how our genes are influenced.

Triggers
Triggers can really be seen as the final tipping point leading to the expression of illness. Here’s how you can create your timeline and identify your triggers:

Grab a piece of paper.
On the left-hand side, you have your antecedents and birth that you just uncovered.
Then draw a line that goes over to the right side of the paper. Think of this as a timeline of your progression through the years. I do a really in-depth timeline for my one-on-one clients where we leave no stone unturned.
I typically section it out into childhood, teens, twenties, thirties, and so on.
As you work across this progression start to ask yourself: What was going on around that time? Going all the way back and starting in childhood, maybe you had a lot of infections and you took antibiotics a number of times for strep throat or ear infections? That can influence what's going on in the gut. Did you have Epstein Barr or Lyme or other infections for example?
Trauma and adverse childhood experiences can play a factor here too. This is something I've been thinking and talking a lot more about recently in light of everything going on in our world right now - understanding racism and systemic racism, and understanding how racism affects our bodies. And we know this is not a new issue, right? I've been learning and understanding even more recently, how things like inherited and ancestral trauma and daily microaggressions can directly affect our health.
As you move across your timeline, triggers can even be things like a big move, a job where you didn’t feel like you're really you're seen, heard, or treated well. It can be a toxic relationship or difficult family dynamics.

Sometimes these events just add up over time, and sometimes we might actually see there was a big period of stress or an event, and then we start to see the manifestation of illness or symptoms right after that. As you detail your life events you begin to understand how they contributes to this tapestry of you.

Mediators
Mediators are the factors that are ongoing and prevent the resolution of the problem that you are seeking help with in the first place. Essentially, they're what make you feel better or worse. Broadly, they can be things like diet, nutrition, food, sensitivities, and stress. I'll tell you right now the main one I’ve seen working with hundreds of people over the years is stress. To be more specific, how different stressors on our bodies and how our bodies deal with this load of stress and how that influences how we feel.

Understanding our mediators is really the heart of the work that I do with clients, and some of the questions we want to answer are:

What makes you feel better or worse?
And then how can we leverage that?

It sounds very simple, but as many of you who have gone through this process will know, it involves deeply understanding your body. That’s why the functional timeline is so useful. We can really understand your antecedents and your triggers and your unique physiology to help us know which mediators are actually going to make a difference versus which are not for you.

This is also why a standard protocol doesn’t always work because you haven't actually pinpointed which mediators are actually going to make a big difference for YOU. That's why we use tools like food and symptom journaling and different coaching techniques to understanding this and to figure out what works for you. We want to understand the roots - understanding stress, understanding your life history, understanding how you relate to the world, understanding how you relate to work. We use these pieces to figure out what's true for you, and we want to ensure that you learn how to take care of yourself for the rest of your life.

Through these processes and through functional nutrition coaching, we're able to bring a lot of this to light so you can start to feel really confident about what works for you and what doesn't. It doesn't have to feel like a mystery where you just keep second-guessing yourself and questioning what you're doing, jumping from one intervention to the next.

This helps you to get rid of all the overwhelm and noise so you can feel calm and connected to what works for you. And then you can use these tools for the rest of your life, so that no matter what season you are in, and no matter what comes at you, you know what your mediators are. You know what you need to move you forward into more vibrant health. That is the power of using functional nutrition timelining and working through a functional lens.

I really love it when we start to put these pieces of the puzzle together and clients begin to have “aha” moments! I've coached so many women and men through this process and moving from that place of feeling stuck and confused to breaking through a lot of these blocks and truly understanding how to care for your body for the rest of your life.

Check out the audio below for more information on functional timelining and the ATMs of health. If you’re giving this functional timeline practice a try leave me a note in the comments below, I’d love to support you!

In today's episode, we explore the functional timeline which helps identify the root cause of a disease and how your history influences this. This is a very important tool, in my opinion, which is why I take all my clients through this at the very onset of our work together.