Are You Sabotaging Your Metabolic Health? Common Mistakes, Blood Sugar Spikes, and Jana Danielson’s Daily Rituals Tips
with Jana Danielson
Dr. Wendy Myers
Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metals, chemical toxicity, and the health issues caused by these toxins. We talk about anti-aging, we talk about bioenergetics, and advanced topics in health. Today, my guest is Jana Danielson, and we’re going to be talking about the vitality code, cracking mindset, movement, and metabolism wellness because it’s really shocking that 93 percent of people have issues with their metabolism. I don’t want to say metabolically broken, but they have issues. They have challenges with their metabolism, with their blood sugar and with their weight, et cetera. So, it’s really important to try to use every tool that you can to work on your metabolism.
We’ll talk about a lot of strategies on the show today, using mindset, and some tools that you can use to set little goals like maybe choosing three things that you need to do the lowest hanging fruit. We’ll talk about going on walks for 10 minutes after lunch and dinner after almost every meal. I’ll talk about using a continuous glucose monitor and how, for me, that’s helped change my behavior in my eating patterns. When I eat so much, it really gives me a lot of insights and clues into my metabolism as well and to help to fix that
Jana Danielson is an award-winning wellness entrepreneur who transformed her personal struggle with physical pain into a mission to elevate women through self-love and empowerment. As founder and CEO of Bloom Better, she helps women discover their sacred cells by integrating physical wellness with mental and emotional health, focusing on mastering mindset, movement, and metabolism. Jana is a Pilates master instructor and Amazon international bestselling author. Jana created the Cooch Ball, the world’s first pelvic floor fitness tool for women. She also founded Lead Pilates and Lead Integrated Health Therapies. Jana is also a member of the Holistic Leadership Council and recipient of the 2023 MindShare Leadership Summit Future of Health Award. Having coached hundreds of thousands of women globally, Jana continues to inspire and guide them towards enhanced quality of life, confidence, and impact. Her work proves that when women invest in their health, they invest in the power to change. You can learn more about Jana and her amazing line of supplements at bloombetter.life. Jana, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Jana Danielson
Oh, Dr. Wendy, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited for our conversation.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. So, tell us a little bit about yourself, your history and how you got into the health industry.
Jana Danielson
Well, I was on the corporate track as a young woman in the mid-nineties, finishing my business degree and then my master’s in business. I was going to bust through the glass ceiling in the fill-in-the-blank corporation and blaze a trail for other women in executive leadership development and the corporate world and there was another plan for me. By the age of 21 years old, I was actually on 11 different medications a day. What started out as what I thought was just a stomach ache in my late teens, by 21 years old, literally, the pain succumbed to me. I went to bed looking at the 11 prescription med bottles on my nightstand, and I woke up to those same 11. What I didn’t realize then was how that simple act of going to bed and waking up and that being the first thing that I was seeing was completely shifting my body’s ability to remember that it could be healthy, that it could heal.
I was told by my doctor that the pain was in my head and I was seeking attention. Six months later, I went to my first Pilates mat class and four months after that first Pilates class, I was off all 11 medications. I had no idea. I just thought I would throw salt over my shoulder and I would make sure not to walk under a ladder because I thought it was just a fluke. I didn’t understand how, what four years of medical tests and protocols did not do, my body actually healed on its own in 16 weeks. It made no sense, but I had this huge curiosity as to what was going on in my body and shifted from the corporate world to wellness entrepreneurship. That was almost 30 years ago.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the company that you founded, Bloom Better?
Jana Danielson
You know what, Bloom Better is the latest evolution of myself. What started off as getting certified to teach Pilates, and at that point, it was kind of like Jana, you have an MBA. Why are you getting a Pilates certification? A lot of people around me were questioning why I was leaving this career that was very ego-driven to something in health and teaching Pilates. Anybody can teach Pilates, right? But you know what, Wendy, that really spurred this passion in me because of what I found through teaching Pilates out of my home. Opening up my first commercial Pilates studio, then expanding into an integrated health therapies clinic, grew that to a team of 60 clinicians, administrators, and instructors, I fell in love with pelvic floor health, created the cooch ball for women to help them understand that our bodies are meant to have babies and have emotion and be able to heal from that and move forward.
Bloom Better is where I landed because I realized that three specific pillars of health mindset, movement, and metabolism or metabolic health, really, when you bring them together, and you understand how they leapfrog off each other when you change your frame of reference, and your set of lenses around this body. When I was 21 years old, I actually hated my body. I use that word, and I don’t like that word, but I hate everything about it
Dr. Wendy Myers
I spent my whole teens and 20s hating my body. It was such an unbelievable, sad waste of time and energy. And it’s unbelievable how you look back and I’m like, I had a supermodel body. Like what? Why did I hate my body so much? I wanted to cut it up and do plastic surgery and it’s really sad. It’s so important to teach mindset skills to young women at younger ages.
Jana Danielson
Well, and that’s what it is. It’s understanding that, if we live in these silos, like yes, I do my meditation. Oh yeah, now I go and I do my yoga class or my spin class and oh yeah, now I’m making sure I get my vitamin C and making sure that I’m taking my collagen, when we do these things in isolation, they do have the ability to move your health forward I think it was in 2022 when the latest research said that in North America, 93 percent of us are metabolically unhealthy. So, we can be doing these pieces to move us forward and get out of that 93%. What Bloom Better is all about is when you bring these beautiful pillars together, like the three strands of a braid in your hair, the body will respond in a beautifully magical way. That’s really the heart and soul. I feel like my purpose is to elevate women by showing them the path to self-love and empowerment and it’s through mindset, movement, and metabolic health that I’m doing that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about, when you say mindset, what are your strategies? Because I know for me, it’s become more and more important to not say or think or write negative things, especially when it comes to my health and to my body, because I think it’s so easy for women to fall into this, Oh, God, I’m so fat, nothing I’m doing is working. The scale isn’t moving. I’m too fat. I’m too heavy and it’s a repeat of that over and over and your body is listening to that. Your body is listening to you. I think you have to flip that and say, I’m so thankful that I’m improving in my health and I’m getting thinner and thinner or I’m getting more healthy or whatever that the positive messages are is to be thankful and grateful for what you’re trying to accomplish and move towards. It’s such a practice. It really is challenging, even if you’re mindful of that.
Jana Danielson
Well, you know what, I root into some of the work by Dr. Joe Dispenza. He says we would rather live in our familiar past than the unfamiliar future. So, of the 60 to 70, 000 thoughts we have in a day, 80 to 90 percent of them are the same as they were yesterday, last week, last month, last year. We as women crave this change. We might think, Oh, it’s my birthday. Now I’m going to shift things. I’m going to clean out my fridge. I’m going to get myself a new pair of runners or, Oh, it’s January 1st. It’s time to get my resolutions out there and become a different person. But yet our thoughts are the same as they were 80 percent of them, like for the last decade or more. So, how can we anticipate a change or expect a change when we’re still living as that past version of us? And so, what I started doing is looking at, well, what is mindset and how does it work with emotional intelligence and how do we get in touch with our emotions?
A friend of mine, Kristi Holt, who owns a company in Utah called Vibeonix was doing this crazy research using voice recognition. You take a 15 second voice sampling and they created this AI algorithm. Kristi used to be in the world of solar energy. That’s what she used to do. She questioned that if we can take energy from the sun and harness it and power our homes and if emotion is truly energy and motion, if we could learn more about that, what would that do for us? How would it power our body differently? How would our posture show up? How would our metabolism show up? How would our lymphatic system show up? If we were of a mindset that was dialed into those expansive emotions, because it’s one thing, and I think Wendy, you would agree. It’s one thing to do your affirmations and your mantras, like, I am abundantly healthy. I’m abundantly healthy. But if the voices in your head are your jeans aren’t zipping up anymore. We have to make sure we buy a bigger tuner. If those two don’t match, the head is always going to kind of trump what’s going on in the rest of the body. You might go to the grocery store line and the clerk says, how’s your day? And you might go like, I’m having a great day and inside your cortisol is pumping. Your stomach is hurting. You’re in this protection posture and there’s nothing that your body’s like, you’re lying. You’re not okay. For all of these reasons, you’re not okay.
What I started learning and training with Kristi is how can we become aware of our emotions? That then led me to the work of Dr. David R. Hawkins, the scale of consciousness, knowing that shame. It’s the lowest frequency emotion on this planet. Then I brought in my pelvic floor world. The pudendal nerve is the main nerve that runs from our brain to our pelvic floor in a man’s body and a woman’s body. It’s a motor nerve. It sends messages and it is a sensory nerve. It would send sensations, and this is how all this has come together. The Latin root of the word pudendal, if you were to Google it means an area of shame. So, we are born into this body onto this planet with the frequency and energy of shame in through the pelvic floor, which is the sacral chakra, which is our creativity, our sensuality. Now we know from David R. Hawkins, that that is the lowest frequency emotion that we have on this planet. It should be no surprise that we have an almost 20 billion incontinence product industry because women don’t want to talk about this. We would rather mask it, but then we have research that says that 90 percent of pelvic floor dysfunction is proper breathing, proper posture, and simple blood flow.
Mindset is not just journaling. It’s not just affirming. It’s not just meditating, but it’s believing in that future version of yourself like these things have already happened. I am living my most healthy, abundant, beautifully energetic life. And if I say that, and if I do things like make sure that I’m drinking my water and every hour get up for two minutes, the 50 percent decrease in blood flow to my legs is negated. I am really loving that future version of myself. So, that’s where I love to take my community on this journey is to go beyond the words right now, because if you’re not embodying those words, that’s all they simply are, words.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I think it’s really important. I have like a little cheat sheet that I have if I start to go into negative Nancy mode or whatever. You just have a bad night of sleep or you just can’t switch. I have a little cheat sheet where I have a huge list of health personal business goals, but I’m thankful like they’ve already happened. Every night before going to bed I say, thank you so much for that. I’ve had two hours of REM sleep and two hours of deep sleep. I’m thankful as it has already happened or like it already happened. And for me, that has been so instrumental in switching and retraining my brain. Creating a practice or it’s not just around positivity, it literally will switch my mood and it’s almost like I’m essentially going into prayer and thanking my creator for having already created what it is that I want to do in my life or create my life. So, that’s been incredibly powerful for me.
Ads 00:15:15
For anyone listening that really wants to detox their body, go to heavymetalsquiz.com. I created a quiz for you. It only takes a couple of seconds based on some lifestyle questions. You can get your toxicity score and get a free video series that answers all of your frequently asked questions about how to detox your body. Check it out at heavymetalsquiz.com.
Jana Danielson
When I get on an airplane, that little prayer, like, thank you Lord for a smooth flight, thank you for the feeling of my feet back on the ground, I’m already at my destination point. You bring up a really good point that it’s that future pacing. I read once that the brain doesn’t discern between success and gratitude. So, having that gratitude, that prayerfulness, that thankfulness really is a super basic hack for starting to shift your state, because as you know, there are so many opportunities to be ungrateful. Sometimes I compare people’s energy to the characters in Winnie the Pooh, and it’s so easy to be Eeyore. To be like, well, it’s sunny now, but there’s two clouds in the sky so it might rain later. It is so easy to fall into that trap. And like you said, the body listens right down to the mitochondria in our cells that power our body. They are listening. So, it’s important to understand how reframes and that future pacing of your gratitude and your prayer, what an impact that it can have on your life.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, because I think it’s so counterproductive if you’re doing all this stuff to improve your health, to improve your metabolic health, lose weight and do all these different things we do for our health, but yet for the most part you’re sabotaging yourself with your mindset. You’ve got to work on the mindset too and not beat yourself up when you make a mistake or you eat a bad meal or your impulses get the better of you and it’s just so easy to just beat yourself up all day.
Jana Danielson
There’s a research study and it’s quite interesting, that proves exactly what you’re saying. There were 84 women that were working at seven different hotels as part of the housekeeping staff. They took half of those women and they did training with them. They basically told them that the movement and the activity that they were doing through the day, and they were cleaning on average, about 15 rooms a day. Half of the women got told that what they did in a day constituted exercise. They showed 15 minutes of vacuuming, 15 minutes of changing sheets, all these kinds of things were listed out for them. The other half did not get that information at all and nothing else changed. I think it was maybe two, like eight to 12 weeks after when they went back and they looked at some of the metabolic markers that they measured pre-research, that the group that were the informed group that were told that what they were actually doing constituted exercise, they had lost on average two pounds in the two or three months. Their blood pressure had dropped drastically. Their body fat percentage had dropped. Their engagement in their work being better, they were more grateful for their job.
That goes to show that a simple reframe of what we might already be doing, we believed for so long that we had to get 45 to 60 minutes in for exercise to count that we had to have so many cardio sessions a week, so many. And now we’re seeing that simply little bits of nutritious movement throughout our day can give the same amount of benefit as that concentrated time to work out where if you’re working out for 45 minutes, but the other hours in the day we’re sitting slumped over eating at our desk, it kind of negates the check box of, oh, I worked out today.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, exactly. And that’s so interesting those women thinking, oh, I’m working out now, but it totally makes sense. Let’s talk about movement, about optimizing daily movement because I have read a lot of different research just exercising 10 minutes after each meal or going for a walk for just 10 minutes is much better metabolically than doing a 30-minute workout by itself, even though it’s the same amount of time, what you thought was super interesting.
Jana Danielson
Well, and you’re right, and you point to a really important point that, after a meal, even it’s the research shows that even after like 90 minutes after a meal, if you can get that 10 minutes in, because what’s happening when we eat, our blood glucose will spike because we’re taking in this food, we’re converting food energy into cellular energy. Depending on the order you eat your food, like, for example, if you want to optimize that, if you were to eat a cup of vegetables or a starter salad that is high in fiber, and then you might have your chicken fettuccine alfredo versus eating the alfredo without a vegetable. It is drastically different in the blood glucose spike because of that fiber being front loaded. What we know is that a walk, a 10-minute walk within 90 minutes of eating, your muscles are actually able to absorb.
Think of your muscles like a moving company that comes in with the boxes to pack your house before you move. Well, those muscles are there with boxes to pack up that glucose so that it doesn’t get turned into fat. It gets used as energy and that’s really metabolic health is the ability of your body because we have two fuel systems. We have sugar as fuel and we have fat as fuel.
For many of us that get these spikes like, oh my gosh, I’m shaking. I’m so hungry. We are kind of stuck in that sugar as fuel cycle, and we never get bumped over to using our fat as fuel. When we start incorporating these simple things like a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in water 20 minutes before we eat, going for that 10-minute walk after we eat, we are managing that blood glucose spike in a way that is very optimal for our health and manages that glucose in the body. So that’s a big one. The other thing people don’t realize is that the mitochondria, the little powerhouses of our cells, are like our cell phones. One of the things we all make sure our phones are plugged in at night. So, when we get up in the morning, we’re fully charged, right? Well, our mitochondria are like that. When we get into a cycle where we are fatigued and we choose maybe the couch over that 10-minute walk, we are missing an opportunity.
When we move, it’s like we are sending our mitochondria a text message to be like, hey gang, it’s time to boost the energy. It’s time to give this cell a boost and it’s time to give the cell that’s a part of this organ or this system a boost.
Movement and mitochondria have a direct relationship. The more consistent you can be with those 10-minute walks, or like I said earlier, once we’ve been sitting for an hour, 50 percent of the blood flow to our legs has decreased. This means that we might feel like the Tin Man after a heavy rain. It takes a few steps to get going. Simply getting up for two minutes every hour will negate that 50 percent decrease in blood flow. That’s what I mean. Sharing this and connecting these dots, Wendy, are important for people because I think for some of us, we’ve been conditioned to think like you said, it’s all or nothing. If I can’t get in my hour long, what’s the point? And then of course it starts playing with our mindset. Oh, I’m so lazy. Why can’t I make myself a priority or I’m off the wagon again? So that’s how those two movements and metabolic health are related and why the 10-minute walk is so important.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and especially given the statistic that you notated earlier that 93 percent of people are metabolically unhealthy, that is just a shocking statistic. I think it’s really important for people to consider getting a continuous glucose monitor and looking at your blood sugar levels, looking and experimenting with the foods that you’re eating. I was absolutely shocked when I started doing this and seeing what foods really negatively impact my blood sugar. I was looking at getting on this roller coaster ride and then my blood sugar spiking again while I’m sleeping and hen that correlating with me waking up and a bad night’s sleep, which screws you for the next day, and then your blood sugar stays high for 12 hours after a refined carb meal, or even a meal with a little bit of carbs, what you might think is just not that much. I think it’s really helpful to change behavior when you have a little bit of data, like with a continuous glucose monitor, and they’re more affordable now.
Jana Danielson
They are. One thing to understand too is that, and I alluded it to it earlier, but I just want to make sure that your audience understands that sometimes just simply changing the order that you eat, like when you eat your fiber first, and then you eat your proteins and your fats followed up by your carbs, so followed up by your pasta or that piece of pizza that you, when you do your fiber. your protein and fat and then your carb your blood glucose profile is going to be very different, even up to 30 percent lower simply because of the order that you ate your food in. We’re not told that. We’re told here’s the standard American diet, or I’m from Canada. Here’s Canada’s food guide. Well, there’s actually research that shows that there was a group of people on the standard American diet, and I think it was six weeks after following it to a T, people were less healthy. They had actually gained weight following the standard American diet. Become an advocate and a champion for your body through what you’re putting in your mouth.
Our food travels on average 1500 miles before it gets on our plate. That in itself is like, I remember buying some avocado this summer when we were back in Canada and I kid you not, it was three weeks of that bag on. I took them out of the mesh bag, but three weeks later, I still had green avocado and I was like, what have they sprayed on this to stop the natural ripening process. So, starting to question these practices, I think is the first step in waking up to how I can do things differently for my body in a way that is simple and that makes good sense.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think if anyone’s listening and you’re probably listening, if you saw metabolism in the title, and you’re trying to work on your metabolism, you gotta track your blood sugar. You have to because that can pinpoint a lot of issues for you, food sensitivities and change your behavior because you have data. Let’s talk about some practical strategies that you have for say, putting all of these things into action, your thoughts, your actions and your bodily processes.
Jana Danielson
For sure. I have a system that I call my in rituals and an in ritual is like a superhero’s way of thinking about your habits or your patterns. What are those choices that you’re making every single day that are going to be little bulbs on a Christmas tree so that at the end of the day, your Christmas tree is all lit up and it is Eckhart Tolle said, awareness is the first piece or the biggest agent for change. So, bring these pieces of the puzzle to your awareness. Simple things like going to bed with a glass of water that has some Himalayan sea salt in it. When you can start your hydration process, first thing in the morning, your thirst mechanism is going to be woken up. Water is used in our body, but people don’t realize this in a priority way. If you think of it like a pyramid, our brain is at the top of the pyramid. Our vital organs are the center swipe and the bottom are like the tissues of our muscles, bones, joints.
If we walk around a couple times a week with that low grade headache at the brow line or at the hairline, that actually is dehydration. That’s what your body is dealing with. So, your brain, instead of being like this juicy grape is actually like a raisin, if that’s the top of the pyramid, and if your brain isn’t hydrated, there’s no way your vital organs are going to be hydrated. There’s no way that if you’re healing from a little bit of maybe a tennis elbow, a little bit of inflammation or bursitis, there’s no way the body can impactfully heal because those cells are at the bottom of the hydration pyramid.
Understanding that solid hydration, even simple things like room temperature, water versus cold water, your cell will absorb water at room temperature more optimally. Then freezing cold water when you take that Himalayan sea salt. There are over 84 trace minerals. You’re also getting through the cell wall, dipping versus chugging. That’s totally different from a hydration perspective. When you can sip one or two ounces every couple of minutes, it’s way more impactful than downing a whole bottle of water because most of that is just going to go right through to the bladder and you’re going to pee it out. So, something as simple as starting your day with water is really important and about half your body weight in ounces is just a great rule of thumb for knowing like, how much water should I be drinking? So that’s a great one. Getting out within half an hour of waking up, if you can get into the sunshine, outside is best, but in front of a big window if you live somewhere where there’s seasons and getting outside is challenging to just boost your circadian rhythm.
If you do live somewhere where you can get your feet on the ground within those first 30 minutes or your hands on a tree or a plant that Schumann resident resonance from the earth, Mother Nature’s frequency becomes part of who you are. It’s almost like those old school Etch A Sketches where these little things just shake the photo or the image on the Etch A Sketch and just neutralize it. You get to start your day feeling new. The brain doesn’t discern between success and gratitude. So, when you can get up and be thankful and verbalize that, let your body hear, I’m so thankful for this body for waking up. I am so thankful for this man laying beside me that snored all night. I’m glad that he is alive
Dr. Wendy Myers
That he slept so much better than me. Yeah, I’m so happy for him
Jana Danielson
But when you talk about practical tips, I also think that some of these practical tips as in rituals that I mentioned people also tend to discount because they think, how can sunshine really impact us like that? And we’re returning to more of this beautiful, simple way of being healthy. Yes, we have all the tech, right? Like you said, we can measure our blood glucose levels at home. We have aura rings and we have whoops and we can tell how long we’ve been in REM sleep. We have all these things which are great. We also need to remember that we have this internal antennae that maybe we’ve just become disconnected from, but there’s a remembering. Our body knows how to be healthy. Our body knows how to be vital. Our body knows how to have longevity. We just want to nurture it and give it the opportunity to show us because when it’s disappointed us in the past, and many of us have had the gift of pain given to us, it’s sometimes hard to trust it again that it can be this vital, beautiful machine that serves us until our last breath on this earth.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think it’s so important to get back to the basic foundational practices. I think so many people think it’s got to be my genetics or do some protocol or I need a continuous glucose monitor or whatever it is, all this tech that we have and that people think it’s going to be something complex when they’re not doing the basics to address the root cause of their health issue. Certainly, for me, my daily practice, I wake up, I have to drink a liter of water with salt in it before I have my coffee. So that’s just like my little barrier to entry for my little treat and I have water again. I’m going on my walk in the morning sun, not wearing sunglasses, getting that sun in my eyes to set my circadian rhythms. So, I’m using my entire day to set myself up for a successful sleep at night, which is going to set the tone for my entire next day. You make these little investments in yourself but the hydration with salt is so important. I can’t emphasize the importance of that enough and you don’t taste it after a while. If you taste the salt in it, usually you’re mineral deficient, but after you do that for a little while, you don’t taste the salt in it. You’re not really putting enough in it to taste super salty.
Jana Danielson
I love how you set that up because what it made me think is you are setting up your days to win your nights, and then when you win your nights, you set up your day. So it’s this beautiful, almost like infinity sign cycle that you just so beautifully explained.
Ads 00:34:04
I want to give thanks to one of our sponsors IonizeMe Maxx Ionic Foot Baths. These are the foot baths that I personally use and recommend to all of my patients. If you’re looking for an effective way to detox the body, that’s easy to do, it doesn’t take any time out of your day and you pull all of these toxins in your body into the water. You want to be doing a foot bath. These are fantastic to pull ions into your body through the feet and neutralize toxins. They can help with pain, with fatigue, with brain fog, with weight loss, and even with swelling. They’re great at reducing lymphatics flowing and giving you liver support by pulling out toxins through the feet and into the water. They dramatically increase mobilization and flow of toxins into your urine and stool for two to three days after you do the foot bath, so they’re not just coming out in the water. Get yours today at healthandmed.com.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and it’s out of desperation to sleep and to be healthy. Sometimes when you fall off the wagon, because you say you have stress, which I want to talk about, we all go through periods of stress. We have projects and it can really throw us off, throw off our sleep, throw off our blood sugar, stress eating and stuff like that. When you have a period like that, you’ve got to kind of tighten the reins to get back to your baseline or your baseline weight or whatever that is. That’s where I’m at right now. really getting a lot of data and, and really fine tuning what it is that I’m doing, based on data with my R ring and continuous glucose monitor and really getting more strict about things, strict about sleep, discipline, going to bed early so that I can get back to baseline, which is my goal right now.
So, let’s talk about stress and how that impacts our metabolism, because I think people don’t realize how much stress they’re under. I have a lot of people I talk to that are friends and they’re like, oh, I’m not stressed. Oh, I don’t feel stressed at all. I’m like, I’m happy. I think people don’t realize they don’t have to feel stressed to be stressed and I think that there’s a lot of EMF stress, emotional trauma, that’s largely unconscious, nutritional stress and other stuff going on. I think people don’t realize how much it impacts them and how they need to shield themselves from certain types of stress and people and things like that to achieve their health goals.
Jana Danielson
Yeah, and you bring up a really good point that a lot of this is going to be unconscious or subconscious. What happens is we are going along, going along, going along. It’s like we’re wearing this backpack and then all of a sudden, something happens with one of our parents’ health and it’s like you’ve just put another backpack or another brick into your backpack and you’re like, oh, that’s a bit heavier, but then a couple days later, you’re like, oh, okay, this feels normal. Then something else happens and it’s like putting another brick. And so, we become very conditioned to just continue to put bricks into our backpack until there’s a point and I should say that putting bricks into the backpack will always start the body in what’s called the stress response. It’s like Atlas holding the globe over his head. We’re like, I got this. We are pushing through it. I just push through till next week. Even the language we start using is, once this month is over, I’m golden. We say things like that to ourselves. That is a classic stress response where we are rallying the troops.
I got this inside our body. Our noradrenaline and our cortisol. Our stress hormones are supporting that rallying of the troops, but while that’s happening, the body is so smart. The body is like, all right, there is a threat here. She or he is working through this, but while there is a threat, we better start to protect and that’s where we’ll start seeing an inflammatory response. You might come to the end of the month and think, oh my gosh, like why is my tummy so bloaty? Or, why all of a sudden does it look like I’m carrying five or seven extra pounds? But we’re not connecting the dots to those four extra bricks you just put in your backpack over the past 10 days. We don’t do that.
There reaches a point where we are unable to remind the body or tell the body that the threat has been removed. When that doesn’t happen, the needle eventually goes from stress response to trauma response. All right. So now we have this beautiful vagus nerve. It’s the 10th cranial nerve. It’s the only nerve in the body that goes from the brain. It innervates all of our organs. It’s like a master switch, and when things are going good, things are going good. It’s like going down the freeway. But when things are going sideways, it’s like being on an old dirt road after a heavy rainstorm. It is muddy. When you flip from the stress to the trauma response, something really important happens in the body. You start to withdraw and retreat because the backpack is just too heavy. You start to disconnect yourself from friends. You start to feel different than you. Your behavior changes. You’re waving the white flag. At that point, the body is like, holy moly, we need way more, call in the help. We need way more army support here. Inflammation goes way up. Our circadian rhythm gets off
Dr. Wendy Myers
Bring in the carbs.
Jana Danielson
Exactly, yes, bring in the carbs or you lay in bed at night and your mind spins and spins and then you get mad because you should be sleeping. And so, again, the simplicity of knowing that this is what’s happening in your body, connecting these dots, you don’t have to have years and years and years of training in this. It’s just recognizing it in your body and so something as simple as humming, when you hum, it actually improves the tone of the vagal nerve. For the vagus nerve, singing, humming, those are two really important ways to just start to do a little bit of a reset. It’s like doing a cold plunge to do a full nervous system reset when there’s dysregulation. Recognizing it first, and then doing some of these basic things, because you better believe, the carbs are the infantry is going to be there, and it’s going to make you feel so good in the moment. Then, your blood glucose spikes. You are in this euphoric state and then the rug gets pulled out from under you. and there is the crash and therein goes the cycle. So that’s really kind of a simple way of understanding how even unbeknownst to you, this is what’s happening in the body from that metabolic perspective.
Again, simply adding that 10-minute walk, getting outside and doing some diaphragmatic breaths. Did you know that when you breathe with your diaphragm completely into your nose and out your mouth with your belly moving like a newborn baby in those moments, you’re taking in 600 percent more oxygen into yourselves by simply breathing with your diaphragm, which is that main muscle of respiration. So again, we’ve been dropping these little nuggets throughout this whole conversation that become those in rituals. It’s not like life is never going to have its stressors. That’s not reality. But, do you know what reality is? The ability of you to be confident in what you know about what you’re doing every single day to be ready so you can respond to those moments, recognize them, because for a lot of us, we don’t recognize them until we’re way down the path of that sympathetic fight, flight, freeze, and it takes us longer to return to that parasympathetic.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I think a lot of people can go into burnout mode, and essentially, they crash or they go into overwhelm, withdrawing, and depression. I think depression is a very useful, albeit annoying response to stress and feeling overwhelmed. It’s a protective mechanism that makes you shut down and just stop what’s going on. It’s one aspect of it. I think what a lot of women do is sabotage themselves. They put their body under tremendous amounts of stress. See if they’re working up super early and foregoing sleep and then doing a high intensity cardio workout before they go to work because they’re trying to lose weight. I’ve had so many clients that do that. They don’t understand that if you get a really good night’s sleep that is more important than a high cardio workout for weight loss. I think people don’t understand that if you want to lose weight or you want to have a healthy metabolism, you’ve got to focus on mastering sleep. I almost want to do a course on sleep because I’m so obsessed with sleep and different tools to improve sleep. If you want metabolic health, you have to learn to sleep because if you sleep four or five hours one night, you have the blood sugar levels of a diabetic the next day.
Jana Danielson
Yes.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And on this blood sugar rollercoaster, stress eating as a result of that
Jana Danielson
Yeah, you’re exactly right.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, let’s talk about some of the key indicators that you’re on the right track, that you’ve got your mindset, your metabolism, and your exercise in sync.
Jana Danielson
When these pillars are in sync, they will start to serve you very quickly. And how you’ll know is because I talked about it earlier, it’s this conscious choice. So, I could sit here all day long and this water bottle could stay full and at the end of the day I’d be like, oh shoot, I only had like half of a 500 milliliter water bottle all day long. I can feel that very quickly in my body because the more dialed in you are or you get, the quicker you’ll notice when you’ve kind of gone the opposite way. You’re going to feel it and then you’re going to see it. I think that women are looking for the see. I want to see the change in my waistline. I want to see this chicken wing stuff disappear. But, the seeing is actually an outcome of the feeling.
When we start feeling different, when our skin starts to get brighter because we’ve been hydrating, because we’ve been getting out in the sunshine, because we’ve been breathing, because maybe you did a swap for that high intensity interval workout for a long walk or a yoga or a Pilates class, which in your ego mind might be like, we didn’t burn many calories. That was a waste of time, but in the heart and soul mind, it is like this beautiful way of encouraging the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest. That’s the communication system we need to bring on track so that it can tell those troops like, hey, fall back. We’re good. Like look at, there’s not as much cortisol. There’s not as much noradrenaline. We’ve got more oxytocin. There’s more love. She’s right. A 12-second hug will give us a dose of oxytocin, the love hormone.
It’s switching the set of lenses that we have from, I need to see a number on a scale. I need to see a number on the waistband of my pants. Those outcomes will happen, I promise you, when you focus on the process and the small little wins. Last week I had a woman and what I had her do was create three rituals every day. So, she picked her hydration. Prayer and meditation every day were one of her rituals. And then her 10-minute walk after she went after lunch and after dinner. That’s what she did. When we checked in later in the week, she’s like, I’m up to like 14 in rituals in a day because they just become a part of your lifestyle. She added salt into her water. She started getting her feet on the ground. The beautiful reality of this is that when this starts to become a part of your lifestyle and you stack it into what you’re doing, it doesn’t take any more time.
We all have 1, 440 minutes in a day. There is nobody on this planet that has extra hours because of gender or race or how fit they are or how many degrees they have. We all have 1, 440 minutes. How we choose to spend those is up to us. I think there’s lots of those 1, 440 minutes that get spent doing lots of things. I do it too, so I’m not like, I’m not on a soapbox, but sometimes I’ll catch myself and I’ll be like in those three minutes, I could have gone and sat on my cooch ball, or I could have just laid on the ground and done some deep breathing. Or I could have used my technology to connect with a friend that I haven’t talked to in a long time. So, it really is becoming mindful. I think sometimes the word mindful is a bit of an oxymoron. We actually want mind emptiness or we want the space between the thoughts. That’s what we want. So, I feel like being mindful is starting to understand, do I have space between my thoughts and what’s happening in that space? And can it help me to almost come out of my body and see myself as this fast forward.
Even the language we use, I’m busy, I’m crazy busy. I’m ridiculously busy. We start using different adjectives in front of the action word. My breath reconstructor taught me this. He said, you know what, Jana, bees and beavers are the only two species on the planet that are busy. Busy bee, busy beaver. Humans, you can be highly scheduled. You can be from. 8 a.m. to 5 p. m. highly scheduled meetings, picking up kids, all these kinds of things. The difference is the mindset of that. When I’m highly scheduled, I can still be present for every single person that’s in front of me versus letting my brain think about, okay, as soon as I get off this with Wendy that I have to go do that, that I have to make sure I have enough time to go and pay that bill and then be back for my two o’clock. That is actually a recipe for disaster. That is that trauma response in the making. Understanding the simplicity is important. I’m not saying it’s easy. Okay, I’m saying simplicity, and those are two different things. But it starts with choice.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, and there are so many healthy choices you can make and so many unhealthy choices. But yeah, it’s I think when you start small and start with those small changes, like you said, choose three per day and you start having those small wins, you start having more self-respect as you’re like sticking to something that you committed to and that’s where it’s building on itself when you’re staying committed to something on a healthy path and just keep adding more and more things like that. That’s what I do. I try to have a morning routine and just stick to that and have not having things scheduled in the morning and just hold that space for myself because I think a lot of women completely give themselves away to all these various things that they’re doing in their family and their husbands and their work and all they’re being pulled in so many different directions, but you have to take space for yourself or your point. You can at some point become ill. So think that you need to invest in yourself now so that you have more of yourself to give. Why don’t you tell us about your website? I know you have an amazing line of supplements. You have metabolism supplements. Can you talk a little about those?
Jana Danielson
Yeah, for sure. I actually do, and so I am really proud of this line of supplementation and even 24 months ago, I never thought that this would be a part of my brand, but I started to learn something that made me draw a line in the sand. I was researching the supplement industry because I’m sure like most people, my supplement cupboard, and I’ve got two and it’s there. It’s packed. I remember opening up my cupboard one day and thinking, how did this happen? Like, is my body really benefiting from all these bottles? If that’s the case, which ones are there, and how did this all happen? And so when I started researching, I started learning some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the supplement industry. First of all, I saw that up to 80 percent of supplements that we purchase do not meet label claims. We buy these supplements with the best of intentions. We trust the people that are selling them, and a lot of people think that the FDA actually is the watchdog that makes sure that these companies, what they say is on the label is what’s in the capsule. That’s actually the only thing now that I’m in the world of supplementation, the only process the FDA is really the watchdog on is in my fulfillment center, like how I’m actually filling my capsules. There are very specific processes we have to go through in accreditation. They don’t do anything with what is in that capsule.
The saying that God puts people in your place for a reason and a season is true. About three years ago, I met a gentleman named Sean Wells. Sean is known as one of the world’s foremost supplement formulators. We met at an event in Turks and Caicos and I reached out to Sean about 18 months ago and said, listen, my community is asking me for solutions for what they feel is unexplained weight gain, energy that is like a roller coaster, and inflammation. How do we really start to heal what is causing inflammation so that we can have longevity and energy and live our very best life? I said, if I do this, I want these to be ingredients from Mother Earth. I don’t want any fillers that are made in a lab and I want the body to feel different because of this. And so, what we did is we created a custom formulation for women. We use the acronym SKNY. S stands for supports healthy blood glucose levels. K is ketogenic friendly and has natural clean ingredients. Y is youth boosting daily formula. The acronym SKNY is what we’ve created.
Sean took some of his Mother Nature’s best and then really worked to create these ingredients to be metabolically available in the body. So, we have something called dihydroberberine, which is the more metabolic or the more metabolically available form of berberine, which helps with, like I said, manage those blood glucose spikes. We put something called tetrahydrocurcumin, again, the very bioavailable version of curcumin to help with inflammation and bloating.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I was going to say before that I take berberine. If I eat some meal that has some carbohydrates in it, I’ll take berberine because it blunts that blood sugar response. It’s unbelievable. It totally does.
Jana Danielson
Yeah, and the difference here, and I obviously want to get some of this in your hands, but for a third of the population, berberine is actually a GI, creates GI distress, either constipation or diarrhea because of the biochemical change that has to happen from berberine to the gut and it absorbs it as dihydroberberine and then it goes into our bloodstream as berberine. So, what Sean did was he removed one of those biochemical reactions and having it hit the gut as dihydroberberine for those 33 percent of the population makes it available for them without the diarrhea or the constipation. The other piece we added was ergothionine, which goes right to our mitochondria. So, it’s not cellular support, but it goes deeper. That’s one of the things that my women will notice first. A stable energy level, which gives them confidence and then they start to see the changes. Once we start to manage inflammation, like I had one woman who is a retired nurse. She had major vascular disease. She sent me photos, Wendy, and honestly, she had no ankles, like her knee to her foot was all the same. It was the same circumference all the way down. She would wear sandals and you would see the imprint of the straps. Four days into doing one capsule before her two biggest meals, she sent me the photo of her ankles. She was able to start walking again. She’s completely changed her body. And so that’s what the bloom better is like.
When I drew my line in the sand and threw my hat in the ring in this industry that is very crowded and very noisy, what I’m doing now is working to navigate and find the beating hearts, the women in this community, in this world that are looking for something that is natural, that can support them. We hear the horror stories of what’s happening with these semi glutide drugs and women so desperately just wanting a body, they’re just craving this body and they’re willing to put these different versions of reptile venom into their body to freeze their digestive tract. When we have something from Mother Nature and berberine as an example, it’s been used in Ayurvedic medicine for 2000 years, right?
Dr. Wendy Myers
It has the same mechanism as metformin. It works on the same mechanism.
Jana Danielson
Yes, exactly.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So that controls blood sugar for anyone who doesn’t know
Jana Danielson
It’s sugar. We’ve been told for so long, salt, salt, salt, bad, bad, bad. But salt is what creates the electricity in our cells. We need salt. It’s actually the sugar that has been leading us down this windy road. I saw a real on Instagram that showed colic in a baby, sugar, ADHD in a toddler, sugar, even dementia and Alzheimer’s in an older adult, sugar. There’s this culprit that’s kind of been masked and off to the side where when we start to understand that, yes, of course, we’re going to have changes in our hormones as we get into perimenopause and menopause, and yes, there’s all these other things, but I’ve really become like I am on a mission to help women and men understand that these are choices. Metabolism isn’t something that we think we have a high metabolism or fast metabolism when we’re young and as we age, it gets slow. Metabolism simply is the body’s ability to take energy from food and create it to cellular energy. So, it shouldn’t matter what age you are, if you’re sleeping well, and doing all these things we’ve just talked about, that’s what contributes to metabolism and we should not be just sitting back and accepting the fact that, well, there was another candle on my birthday cake. So I should expect these aches, these pains, this extra weight, this, you know, lack of sleep. It’s just not the case.
Ads 00:59:13
I just want to take a minute to give a shout-out to one of our sponsors, Tru Energy Skincare. I absolutely love Tru Energy Skincare. I’ve been using it for a couple of years and I’ve noticed a dramatic improvement in my skin texture and it’s so soft and supple. It’s super healthy. This is one of my secret weapons because not only are you getting lots of healthy, natural ingredients, moisturizing, and hydration in the Tru Energy Skincare, but the inventor of this, Cathy Goldstein also infuses thousands of frequencies into the skincare to dramatically improve collagen production and so many other benefits in regards to all these different frequencies that are infused into the skincare.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think a big part of controlling your blood sugar also is avoiding industrial seed oils, the soy, corn, canola and the very volatile seed oils like sunflower and things like that, they’re using in processed fast food. Those create a barrier to cellular metabolism and therefore insulin sensitivity as well. I think that that really needs to be factored in because I think a lot of people don’t always have to eat less carbohydrates. They should for a while until the metabolism is fixed, but at the industrial seed oils really throw a big wrench into that insulin sensitivity as well.
Jana Danielson
Well, I think how many times do you hear like, when I travel, I go to Italy and I eat bread and the pasta and I am totally fine and I have a gluten sensitivity, but here in North America, it’s totally different. You’re right. It’s because of all these hidden processes that have seed oils and what else has been added to that grocery list of ingredients. So, it’s shifting the conversation. It’s cheering each other on. It’s having these quick wins that might seem like nothing in the moment, but a moment, plus a moment, plus a moment, that’s how momentum starts and it becomes positively infectious because people will start to notice the energy and the frequency that you’re letting off you’re radiating. That’s pretty inspiring.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think because so many people have problems with their metabolism, you need to be taking certain supplements and like berberine. I take berberine, I do the apple cider vinegar before I have a high carbohydrate meal. There are lots of other supplements like the ingredients you mentioned can be a big game changer to improving your metabolism and removing certain foods. So thank you so much for coming on the show and kind of just laying that groundwork for these foundational things that we have to have in place to improve our metabolism because you have to start thinking about this no matter what age you are, you’re in your 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s 60s, it doesn’t matter what age you are. The stat is that 93 percent of people have an issue with your metabolism. So you need to have a game plan in place to prevent metabolic issues and to fix them and identify them. So thanks for giving us some really good tools. Why don’t you tell us what your website is
Jana Danielson
You can find me at bloombetter.life or on any of the socials, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, @jana.danielson. Our wellness shouldn’t be a dream, right? It is very simple to take that one first step that creates this spark, and I hope there’s something in our conversation today that has resonated with you because when information resonates, it means that there’s something in your soul that’s been like, ooh, can we start doing that? Or can we start living that? Because once we start living it, it becomes our body’s wisdom. What this is all about is getting reconnected to that innate divine wisdom that we have within us. We just got to clean away a little bit of the cobwebs and some of the dust, but it’s there.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Jana, thank you so much for coming on the Myers Detox Podcast and everyone, thanks so much for joining me today. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. I do this show because I want to help you give you those little pieces of the puzzle that will help you elevate your health and maybe that one little thing that you’re missing that you need to be doing that you can discover on the show. So thanks for tuning in every week, where I bring experts around the world, talking about heavy metal and chemical detoxification and health issues caused by different toxins and chemicals. We also talk about anti-aging, bioenergetics, and more advanced topics in health. So, thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
