[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to remind my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled Highly Sensitive People. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world isn’t exactly made for us and I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as a unique gift and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course, please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com. So we are in the month of May and May is the springboard to summer with the official kickoff in the United States. It’s usually Memorial Day weekend, the last weekend in May. So getting ready for summer can also mean preparing your body for summer and especially gut nutrition. Today my guest is going to talk to us specifically on the topic of gut healing, which will come in handy for highly sensitive people who usually feel a sense of over stimulation or overwhelm, which can affect our digestive track. The guest today is Lily Lopez. She is the founder and CEO of Gut Garden, a supplement company based on functional medicines, 5R approach to gut healing. She founded the company in 2016 in response to her own experience with chronic digestive symptoms and her long road to gaining her health. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two-year-old and three year old sons. Welcome to the show Lily. [LILY LOPEZ] Hi Lisa. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. [LISA] You’re welcome. I’m so glad to have you here. I’m so interested in this topic and I can’t wait to hear about what you’re going to say about it. As I like to ask all my guests who come on the show do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person? If so, or if not, would you mind sharing a little story about that? [LILY] Sure. I don’t know much about highly sensitive people. I am highly sensitive physically, but maybe not so much emotionally and mentally. I’m very much prone to food sensitivities, breaking out in hives, any kind of any physical trigger. If there’s a medication that has a side effect, I will have all of them. Maybe as I get older that has continued to be the case, maybe even more, so I think as I get older. [LISA] What is it about getting older that we become, I guess, more sensitive to either foods or to smells or other things? [LILY] I don’t know. I don’t know what that is. Maybe we just build up a load over time and it just, you accumulate. But I don’t know. I’m not, I couldn’t guess why that’s the case. [LISA] I can research that and see what I can find and let our listeners know. So I want to go back to your bio and what’s the 5R approach to gut health gut healing. [LILY] Yes, so the 5Rs are based on the functional medicine approach to healing the gut. The 5Rs are remove, replace, repopulate, repair, rebalance and at Gut Garden, we use a garden theme. So we’ve just renamed the 5Rs to fit in with our garden theme. We’ve renamed them clean, prepare, plant, feed, and protect. Like we said, they’re based on the 5Rs. So the Gut Garden protocol is five supplements that is a 30-day supply and it comes with instructions and a suggested schedule for one to take each product. But the theory behind the Gut Garden protocol is you’re going to start with activated charcoal and charcoal’s a detox agent. It’s highly absorbent. It helps to mop up any toxins or unwanted materials, bad bacteria in the digestive tract and carry it out of the body to set the stage for healing. [LILY] Then you are going to add in digestive enzymes with meals to help absorb nutrients, especially if you’ve felt unwell for a long time, you need that little bit of extra help from the natural bile and digestive enzymes to help absorb, excuse me, digest your food and move things along. The digestive enzymes are really great for that. Plant, you think about planting a garden. You want to add in your seeds or you’re healthy, your good bacteria, your probiotics, and the fertilizer for that is actually what we call resistant starch, probiotic fiber. That’s the preferred food source for a probiotic. That’s what a prebiotic is. So the probiotics, your good bacteria feed on prebiotics to help them survive and multiply and get really strong. Then lastly, we use collagen peptides. Collagen peptides are phenomenal for strengthening the lining of your gut and your intestinal wall, which becomes like weakened and broken down over time, especially if you’ve been having gut problems for any length of time. [LISA] Oh, wow. That sounds so interesting. I’m wondering why so many people are walking around are not feeling well. [LILY] Oh boy, it’s really, it’s so common. There’s a number of reasons. Our modern food supply, just starting from the way that our food is grown with the GMOs and highly processed ingredients that are unpronounceable, stress, especially for those of us that would consider ourselves highly sensitive is definitely a trigger for any digestive distress. Overuse of antibiotics, alcohol, mold, there’s really any number of things in our modern lives that are just really taking a toll and hitting our digestive system really hard. [LISA] Do you think people with gut issues usually have sensitive stomachs? [LILY] That can be part of it. I think that, if you want to bring it back to talking about people that are highly sensitive, I think that the main thing that ties that in with gut health is maybe like higher stress levels. Maybe like more of a tendency towards overwhelm can really take a toll on your digestive system. A little bit of stress is good, but I think highly sensitive people probably experience a little bit more stress and anxiety than your average person walking around. Maybe I think fight or flight mode is activated and just triggered maybe even more so by everyday events or new situations, which really does take a toll on your digestive system. Fight or flight mode is activated and just triggered maybe even more so by everyday events or new situations, which really does take a toll on your digestive system. [LISA] So tell us more about stress in the gut. [LILY] What happens when you get stressed out actually is that your body produces cortisol. Cortisol is highly inflammatory. It produces cortisol actually in your gut. It’s a hormone cortisol. A little bit of inflammation is good. Inflammation helps to heal wounds or fight infections but chronic high levels of inflammation is dangerous and it can be triggered by chronic stress. It damages your gut lining. The other thing that happens with chronic inflammation is that it’s a trigger for autoimmune diseases and it exaggerates immune response. So what happens is your body is actually very, very smart and before high levels of inflammation will trigger that, exaggerated immune response, your immune system says, “Hey, let’s not have that happen.” So it actually suppresses your immune system at first. So high levels of stress lead to high levels of inflammatory cortisol lead to actually a suppressed immune system, over time, what you have is a perfect storm. The high cortisol is damaging your gut lining. It’s also causing inflammation, which suppresses your immune system, and that makes it much more hospitable to the pathogens and bad bacteria that are very harmful for your gut. Then lastly, the other thing that stress does is that it actually restricts blood flow to your gut. Because again, if you’re running from a predator, you need that blood flow in your limbs and your legs to run away and your body says okay, well, that’s our priority and digesting your lunch can wait till later. But the problem is that when, if this is a chronic feeling your body’s just saying we will digest your lunch later every day, which leads to these chronic constipation and bloating and diarrhea and these things that happen and really create a perfect storm for things like IBS and leaky gut, parasites, bad bacteria, yeast overgrowth and those triggers for digestive ill health. [LISA] What are some of the things that you can do before it leads to those chronic issues or diseases? I know you said there’s diarrhea, constipation. What would be like a warning sign to say, oh, maybe I need to do something here? Is there like a time limit or? [LILY] I can speak for my own experience here. I actually founded Gut Garden because I was one of these people that was walking around with chronic constipation and bloating for years, maybe 10 years before I was really actually able to figure out what was going on in my body and get help. The main problem is that apart from just being really uncomfortable all the time, walking around feeling like you’re blowing up like a balloon, just feeling heavy and uncomfortable in your body, what I always say is what happens in the gut does not stay in the gut. At least not for long. When I was about in my early thirties, my whole body started to fall apart. I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I was told I had prediabetes. I had a ton of nutrient deficiencies. It was just a horrible brain fog, anxiety, you know I was coming home from work at 6:00 PM and going straight to bed. I was just exhausted and it occurred to me, it didn’t occur to me then, but I know now that that chronic digestive problems symptoms, excuse me, the chronic digestive symptoms actually had a cascading effect on the rest of my body. Because your gut is really the powerhouse for your entire body. It’s the body’s second brain, as you say. It is responsible for your immune system and regulating your hormones and helping you sleep and digesting the nutrients that you’re eating from food. Really when it goes out of whack, it can definitely have this, you can see this domino effect throughout the rest of your body, which is really scary. [LISA] That does sound scary. What is your daily routine now? What was the turning point for you to do something different? [LILY] I ultimately found a functional medicine doctor after years of going through the big teaching hospitals and modern medicine and their solution, really, for me, they slept the label of IBS on me, and just wanted to give me a pharmaceutical pill, which covered up the symptoms, but wasn’t really treating the root cause. So a functional medicine doctor is really what introduced me to this 5R protocol. They also helped me discover what the root cause was. In my case, I think, as I mentioned earlier, I had a host of food sensitivities. So I really had to go on a really strict elimination diet and write down what I was eating, what was triggering my symptoms. I learned that gluten, dairy, sugar were all really exasperating my symptoms to the point where now actually, if I eat gluten or dairy, I can actually feel the inflammation in my joints the next day. It’s like an immediate trigger. So I knew that I had to cut those foods out and then just start on the process of rebuilding. So that was, as I mentioned earlier, the 5R approach, it was adding those enzymes back in and the bio salts and rebuilding my bacteria and rebuilding my microbiome with healthy bacteria and strengthening my gut lining. [LISA] Oh, wow. How did you go about doing that? [LILY] It was hard. I mean, the elimination diet, I think is probably one of the hardest things to do when healing your gut. Food is so social. It’s something that you do three times a day, at least, and you need it for survival. So going a month without eating major food groups like dairy or gluten is really difficult. It’s hard to go to parties and it’s hard to, you’ve got your family that say oh, just try a little bit of bread and people don’t really understand it. So that that’s really difficult and really hard to do but so worthwhile to figure out what your food triggers are. And then just like, yes, adding a, learning how a new way of eating and then adding in the supplements has just been so helpful in addition to a stress, because some stress relief program. [LILY] As I mentioned before, about how stress is such a trigger, I think stress relief is, for all of us is a daily, weekly something that you’re always constantly having to work toward. For me, I mean, I have tried and I have tried, and I have tried to love meditation and I just cannot get there. It’s not for me meditation but for me, my stress relief is going out in nature and taking a walk, going to Pilates, maybe trying to find a sauna. It looks different for everyone. Journaling a little bit. But stress relief is certainly something that requires maintenance just as much as watching your diet and your making sure you sleep at least eight hours a night and exercise. That’s one of the things that are probably most commonly overlooked is that stress piece of it. [LISA] I don’t think stress is something that we can get away from. Like you said, I think in the beginning that some stress is good in our lives, but when it’s in a state that keeps us in the fight, flight, freeze mode, that’s not good. As you said, it leads to all different kinds of issues in the body, especially related to the gut. [LILY] Certainly. Then the other thing that happens too, is once your gut has gotten into this place where it’s your immunity is down and maybe you’ve got an overgrowth of bad bacteria, maybe you’ve been diagnosed with IBS or parasites have gotten in then you get into a thing where it almost becomes like a chicken and egg thing because your gut is also speaking to your brain and vice versa. So your gut communicates back to your brain. About 90% of your serotonin is actually produced in your gut. So if your gut is not working optimally those processes are not working optimally. Then you see people with anxiety and depression, and like, it’s just like a never-ending cycle [LISA] In my intake forms just being a mental health professional, I always ask about food, even though that’s not my scope of practice, but it helps me have some insight into it and if I need to refer to a specialist for that person to get some help with that aspect of healing, [LILY] It’s so important. It’s really like such an overlooked, food can be a trigger for disease, but it can also be medicine. It’s so overlooked but so important. [LISA] What do you think about just the different types of, I don’t know if they’re called diets or just the type of eating, like there’s vegan, there’s gluten-free, dairy-free, there’s such a range out there now. What do you think about all of that? [LILY] Well, I mean, I think that it’s more important just to make sure that you’re getting your nutrients. I mean, you can be a vegan and eat only Oreos. Oreos are vegan. You can be a vegan and not eat any fruits or vegetables. You can just eat crackers and pasta. You can be paleo and not eat any fruits or vegetables. I try to stay away from fad diets. I would say that for us, when we are working with customers that need a little bit of extra help with the elimination diet piece of healing their gut, we do actually sometimes use the word paleo just as like a catch-all. Because paleo actually really eliminates grains and dairy and sugar and really all processed foods. So if you’re doing an elimination diet, we do like to veer people towards a specific diet, because then they can find more resources for the diet. They can find cookbooks, they can find blogs with recipes, but with anything, like I said, I mean, it’s so easy to just not still not eat a nutritious diet, even though you’re eating within the parameters of something like vegan or paleo or keto. So it’s important to keep an eye on all of your nutrients. [LISA] Okay. Is it possible because what I’ve heard is that some of these diets, whether it’s paleo or, they can be expensive, like bioorganic and not everyone has that option. Does it have to be expensive? Is there a way to do it so it is affordable for everybody? [LILY] Yes. I would just say that there are gurus out there. There are people that are really, like JJ Virgin is actually a great example of somebody who, I think she has entire courses around how to do this affordably and just to make it as easy as possible for people. [LISA] Oh, great. We’ll have that in the show notes too. What are things that you don’t like but everybody else is doing? [LILY] I don’t love veganism. I think that because most animal products maybe are not the most nutritious or grown or cultivated in the healthiest most organic, sustainable way. I think that that doesn’t mean that we should avoid all animal products. I think that we should, we can do better towards educating people about how to do so, how to enjoy animal products responsibly in a way that’s really healthy to stick with pasted wild, fresh organic animal products so that becomes more the norm. [LISA] Okay. Wow. That’s really interesting about that. Is there any particular animal that you recommend over other ones? [LILY] I mean wild salmon is just a phenomenal food that the DHA and Omega-3s that you get from eating wild salmon, I mean, you’re not going to get that from any animal product. It’s just phenomenal for brain health, for gut health, for mood. It’s phenomenal. And grass-fed beef, pasted grass-fed beef is also really high in Omega-3s. Eggs are really high in colin, which is great for eyesight and also brain health. Then liver products, any organ meats are really high in vitamin A and the vitamin A that’s in animal products is actually much more bio-available and easier for your body to absorb than the vitamin a that’s found in carrots or sweet potatoes. It’s not the same. So you really have to eat a lot more of these plant foods in order to get the amount of nutrients and absorb the amount of nutrients that are found in animal foods. Calcium is another one. Yes, you can get calcium from kale and spinach, but I mean, you’re really going to have to eat a lot of kale and spinach to get the same amount of calcium that you would find in animal products. [LISA] Okay. Wow, I didn’t know that. What do you think about like smoothies? I know, you can go to, there’s whole foods and they sell all the different types of smoothies, the vegetable smoothies, fruit smoothies. [LILY] So I think that, I love a smoothie. We have two products, our resistance starch in our collagen that are both powders and a great way to take both of those products is in a smoothie. I think that one thing you have to be aware of with smoothies is you just have to watch the sugar content. So watch the fruits. You don’t want to blood sugar spike. So anything too sweet is something to pay attention to. Green juices is the same thing, like if I make a green juice, I always will blend it instead of juicing it because it keeps the fiber intact whereas when you juice it, you just keep the sugars right without the fiber. So it’s just an immediate blood sugar spike to your bloodstream. [LISA] My question is about protein, so I know the different diets have different ways of getting protein. What do you think about, and it can get from pea powder, you can get it from beans, legumes? There’s animal protein. [LILY] Yes. I mean, I think that protein is, I think it’s just important to have diversity in your diet. So protein is absolutely important. It’s important for your bones and your brain and your gut and your energy, your muscles and trying to, I wouldn’t eat in an all-chicken diet any more than I would eat an all-bean diet. I think that both of those things can be healthy and high in protein and just to keep an eye on having a diverse array of different foods. [LISA] I hear people talk about, oh limit your intake of a red meat, have it once a week or once a month. Too much is not advisable or it’s not good for you. What do you feel about that? [LILY] I actually don’t agree with that. I think that red meat can be very healthy if you are eating, like I said, like organic red meat can be really high in Omega-3s and essential nutrients for your body. But there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s not so healthy. Cows are meant to eat grass. Then you see grass-fed beef, like they have evolved to eat grass. What happens is that people feed cattle grains, GMO grains, to fatten them up for the big, the quarter pounder and the T-bones, to get really good fat on there. Their digestive systems are not built to digest grains. So then they get infections and then you give them antibiotics and everything that they eat, you eat. So that’s why sticking with grass-fed red meat is so important because they’re eating what they’re meant to be eating and the sustainable farming and it everything, the carbon footprint is less and all of that. [LISA] Are there any other things that you recommend that people stay away from, or just be cautious of, be aware of? [LILY] Yes. I mean, I think that everybody is really unique and that’s why it’s really important to do your own elimination diet to determine what your food triggers are. We actually sell a food journal at Gut Garden just to help make it a little bit easier for people. But once you remove trigger foods for, I think we do 21 days, we do gluten dairy, corn, soy, and eggs, and we suggest that people remove all of those foods for 21 days and then you add each one in one at a time over three days, and you write down your symptoms as you add each one back in. What happens when you do that is you will start to notice immediately. It might take a couple days to show up, that’s why we add each one over three days, but you’ll notice, like I mentioned earlier, if I eat dairy the next day my joints are totally inflamed. Or you might notice that you’re constipated, or you might notice that your heart might be beating a little bit faster or you’ll have a little bit of anxiety. Your reaction to trigger foods is really different for each person and the trigger food for each person might be different. Those are the most common ones. Gluten is definitely the most common but eggs and soy for people, if that’s your trigger food you should avoid it. [LISA] Okay, what are you finding out when you do the elimination diet and you bring the foods back in? What usually happens? [LILY] It’s different for everyone but say you take out gluten, say you take out everything for 21 days. You add gluten back in. You might notice that you’re constipated. You might have diarrhea, you might have gas, you might have aching joints. You might have a migraine and really taking those things out of your diet to put them back in really just makes that so much more noticeable. Before I healed myself and found my trigger foods, I was walking around with so much inflammation in my body that I didn’t even know it. So once I was able to remove all of that and add it back in those symptoms come on like a beast every single time because you get so used to taming the inflammation that when it comes back, you would notice it immediately [LISA] And it’s something as a highly sensitive person would probably automatically just pick up really quickly, just being sensitive to smell, taste, touch, hearing? [LILY] Yes, I think a highly sensitive person, and for me too, like I said earlier about being highly sensitive physically is that, I think a lot of people are walking around with this widespread inflammation. Some of us can feel it, some of us have the physical symptoms of that whereas there are others that don’t know that that’s going on in their body until they have all of these other health problems. [LISA] So what’s the most important thing you want listeners to know or take away from our conversation today, Lily. [LILY] It’s just important for people to know that they, to watch your gut, listen to your gut. Your gut is the powerhouse for the whole rest of your body. It really, like I said, it regulates your hormones. It controls your immune system. It helps you sleep and the symptoms from your gut show up everywhere from your joints to your skin, to your mood, to everything. So always listen to your gut, look at your gut and know that that’s really the powerhouse for the whole rest of your body. [LISA] I love that. That’s something I use with clients, for mental health, listen to your gut. People will be like, I don’t know. I’ve never listened to my gut or I’m not sure what that even feels like or looks like. I was just thinking, as you’re explaining this, like, well, maybe there’s this inflammation there, that’s getting in the way of us really clearly listening and noticing what is happening in our gut and how that really like links to what’s happening in our brain too. [LILY] It’s absolutely all connected. [LISA] Do you have a for our listeners that you’d like share with our audience today? [LILY] Yes, I sure do. So we have a free download. It’s an ultimate gut healing guide. You can find that on our website, which is www.mygutgarden.com. Then we have a 15% off coupon code for the listeners of the Am I Ok? Podcast. That is a coupon code at checkout, AMIOK for 15% off. [LISA] Great, thank you so much. That was very generous. Where can listeners get in touch with you? I know you just mentioned your website. And do you work with people one on one? [LILY] We don’t. We do have a number of wholesale practitioner customers that work with our products with their patients, but with gut, excuse me, with mygutgarden.com you can buy the products directly from us. Then our Good Gut Program, which is all five products comes with instructions and a schedule, like a roadmap to walk you through it. You can DIY the gut protocol. Actually, right now the Good Gut Program comes with the food journal for free [LISA] That sounds wonderful. I love food journals. I highly recommend them. [LILY] Definitely. They’re so important. [LISA] Well, thank you so much, Lily for coming on the show today. [LILY] Thank you for having me. This has been great. [LISA] Thank you, my listeners for tuning in. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review, wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about highly sensitive persons, please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each one of you that you are okay. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.