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Casey's blog

Essential oil ingestion: Just DON'T Do It

6/10/2019

23 Comments

 
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Got gut health issues? Down some OnGuard Softgels to sort out what-must-be candida.
Everyday detoxification? A few drops of lemon essential oil in your water everyday will have your liver squeaky clean in no time... all without having to eat an actual lemon!
Want to feel the spiritual benefits of frankincense oil extra swiftly? Chuck a few drops of that stuff down the hatch and feel your consciousness expand...


No, no, and dear God, NO.

In short, essential oil ingestion can incredibly be dangerous unless prescribed by a qualified herbalist, naturopath or aromatherapist. Not a distributor for an MLM essential oil giant who has no health qualifications or expertise besides what their team leader has passed on to them.
​

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The call for wise, old women

31/7/2019

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"A village without elders is like a tree without roots."
- African proverb

Winter, 2018

I'm frustrated.

​I crave the presence of old, wise women. The sage, the elder, the crone. The wise old woman, or man.

​Like an open wound craves soothing balm and mending and tenderness, I crave the smell, the words, the energy of the mature feminine archetype. And of actual old, wise women. 

Where are they?

We have an ageing population, but - as Michael Meade, host of Living Myth podcast so eloquently states - instead of getting older and wiser, it seems people are just getting older.
​


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The Wellness Diet Cycle

17/7/2019

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The typical person I see in my clinic is female, in her 20s, 30s or 40s.

She goes to yoga and only shops at organic markets. She makes her own bone broth, vegetable juices, and paleo "treats" (because gut healing is good, and dairy and sugar are "bad").

​She spends a small fortune on vitamins, probiotics and herbal supplements.

She is very health conscious, sometimes bordering on being obsessively so. 

She has seen numerous health practitioners prior to seeing me.

And despite her utmost efforts to be healthy, she has long list of seemingly obscure health conditions. The list of signs and symptoms I see in these women goes something like this:

Headaches, migraines, intense cravings, cold hands and feet, sleep problems, rough dry skin, brittle hair, 
hair loss, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), dizziness, brain fog, low energy levels, low body temperature, constipation, low libido, bloating, indigestion, frequent need to urinate, anxiety, panic attacks, loss of muscle mass, heart palpitations, frequent colds and flu / thrush / UTIs / herpes outbreaks, unpredictable emotional swings, severe PMS, irregular periods, missing periods, infertility.

The woman in question usually doesn't have every single one of these (although some do), but she will have a significant number (around 80% or more) of them.

By the time they've come to see me, many of these women have attributed this long and baffling list of symptoms to candida. Or a food intolerance. Or simply "being too fat".

And they've come to the conclusion (via Google or some health guru) that the obvious solution is to embark upon yet another restrictive diet. Anti-candida, low-carb, paleo, keto, GAPS, SCD, vegan, intermittent fasting, and raw are the usual go-to's right now.

And herein lies the root of the problem.


The Big Thing most health-conscious people are missing (that's ruining their health)

Most of the women I see in clinic do NOT have a food intolerance, candida, or an allergy to grains. I should add that I have been trained to recognise and treat food sensitivity and intolerance so am well aware of what that looks like. Although it is a valid and very real issue, about ninety percent of the time, food intolerance is NOT the causative factor.

The root of these women's problems is this: They are trying too hard to be healthy and as a result, they are eating too restrictively.
The biggest mistake I see women making today is trying too hard to be healthy.

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periods, fertility & eating disorders

21/5/2019

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"I have my period. So I mustn't have an eating disorder."

For years I thought that if a woman was menstruating regularly, she was displaying one of the ultimate signs of health.

​I thought that if a woman had a regular period she must be well nourished. That the moment her caloric intake dipped below her requirements, her body would stop ovulating and periods would disappear.
​
That Mother Nature never lets our bodies grow babies -  a highly energy intensive endeavour that demands massive amounts of resources - in a perceived famine.

For years, I was wrong.

​In my time as an eating disorder dietitian, student naturopath, and having lived through an (undiagnosed but still very harmful) eating disorder, I have learnt a thing or two about periods and under eating. Here I'll attempt to bust some common myths around periods, fertility and disordered eating.


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Body peace and permaculture: the parallels

4/3/2019

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For some years I've been interested in organic gardening, particularly permaculture. Recently I've taken a deeper dive into this method of 'natural' farming within which is embedded a deep reverence for, and trust of nature. And I've realised that permaculture has some uncanny parallels to the non-diet approach and Health at Every Size movement I am so passionate about in my clinical practice. For the last 7 or so years I've been working with people with weight, food and body image concerns, from wanting to lose a couple of kilograms to life threatening eating disorders.

One of the greatest teachers of this method of farming is Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One-Straw Revolution. In this book Fukuoka describes his discovery of "do nothing" farming, where he creates situations where nature will do the work with the minimum of interference on his part.

So instead of spending hours ploughing the soil or spending money on adding chemical fertilisers to his crops, he simply chucks the rice straw back on the ground after harvesting it and scatters chook poo over it. Occasionally he sows clover to use as a green manure.

​And that's pretty much it.

And rather than seeing everything turn into a wilderness and watching helplessly as the prickles take over, Fukuoka actually equals the yield of farms that have had these modern high intervention inputs applied to them, with a fraction of the investment of labour and resources.
​
What 'natural' farming can teach us about maintaining a "healthy" weight, ​naturally
Of course by "healthy weight" I don't mean what the BMI deems healthy. I adopt Dr. Rick Kausman's description of your healthiest weight being the most comfortable, natural weight for you - the weight your body naturally arrives at and maintains when we provide the right "soil" (see number 2). So here's what I gathered together in my current understanding of permaculture principles and my more deeply rooted understanding of HAES and the non-diet approach. The biggest parallels between permaculture, and the non-diet approach and HAES as roads to body peace, are:


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5 Flavours to Eat for Health

23/1/2019

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​In Chinese medicine and in Ayurveda, the hallmark of a balanced meal is the inclusion of all of the flavours. ​​By including all of the flavours in a meal, you’re going to feel very satisfied. And satisfaction is a crucial element of enjoyable, intuitive eating. One of these flavours is bitter, a very important taste that many of us are missing on our plates.

Throughout Spring and Summer in 
my Southeast Queensland neighbourhood, edible weeds pop up everywhere including in my own my backyard.

​Under the kids’ trampoline out of the lawnmower’s reach, I find dandelion greens, sow thistle, billy goat weed, sheep sorrel, and wild carrot, among other largely unknown yet freely available sources of nutrition*. At the farmer’s market I uncover a similar array: mustard greens, endive, chicory, kale, parsley, rocket.​
​

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The Mother and The Warrior

2/1/2019

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Pic courtesy of https://www.writeups.org
James Cameron has directed and produced some of the best movies of all time IMO. The run of action movies he directed in the 80's was pivotal in forming the fertile ground of my childhood imagination - The Terminator series, Alien trilogy and in the early 90's, Point Break (which is so bad, it's good, y'know?)

I have spoken of my love for Aliens in this blog on intuitive eating (Aliens and intuitive eating? YES!)

Sigourney Weaver plays the central character Ellen Ripley, a leader and a warrior. To get a taste of Ripley, watch the clip below where she is about to enter the alien hive in order to find and rescue her adoptive daughter, just as the colony is minutes away from exploding. It's pure badass.

Aliens is one of the rare movies where a female is the le
ad role heroine AND she is not hyper-sexualised.

I mean, Wonder Woman and Tomb Raider are OK and maybe make small inroads in the eternal quest for equal gender representation in action movies, but who seriously fights villians in high heeled boots whilst maintaining deep cleavage, and a full face of make up? Practicality and believability factor: zero.

Ripley is also a mother.
​


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Purity vs. hybridisation

19/12/2018

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When it comes to the work I do, I've never been 100% sure about what to call it, or if it even has (needs?) a name. Try as I might (and I have, numerous times), the stuff I "do" can't be put into a single box.

And it's not for lack of direction; I know what I am good at and what I love to do. It's just that there are so many directions I feel I am being pulled in.

Perhaps a nicer, less divisive way to say that, is that I have many colourful threads that form my web of being! :)

​I often feel this pressing need to categorise "it", to pack it down nice and neatly into a label, to be able to explain to people what I do in a concise sentence without feeling like I've left large chunks of who I am stranded by the side of the road, all for the sake of simplicity.

And so here I am, eating disorders dietitian by day; (newly) Zenthai shiatsu practitioner by candlelight.
​
In one studio a yoga teacher emphasising the importance of play; in the next a nutritionist distilling hours of reading textbooks and research papers into digestible information that my clients can understand.

​Studying naturopathy and Chinese Medicine on one hand; investigating the clinical applications of CBT and DBT for eating disorder clients on the other.


Sometimes I feel like a bit of a jill of all trades. Master of none. A case of shiny object syndrome. A fraud. Not really good at any one of those things.

Hello, voice of my inner critic, I hear you loud and clear.


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Spring energetics - moving from darkness into light

12/10/2018

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Wild edibles have been popping up everywhere in our hood - check out these bitter dandelion greens. Perfect with some sour lemon juice, olive oil and salt for a simple spring salad.
​
​
Spring is here, and although I LOVE it, the transition has been rough...

Winter just isn't my thing (as nice as all those warm cups of chai tea are!) Spring is my favourite season of the year - and not just because it's my birthday season. As the weather started warming up, our little family enjoyed daily expeditions to a local mulberry tree. It seemed our hands and faces were perpetually stained purple, and life was sweet.

Then we had a car crash. 

And it was as if our whole world was turned upside down. 

​
Someone rear ended us on the highway. Miraculously no one was hurt, but it shook us all up. Since then, my family and I have encountered battle after battle. Physical, emotional, mental, you name it.

It started with that car crash involving all of us (such a scary experience with babies in the back). Between us we've been through a bout of hospitalisation for appendicitis, some heavy repressed memories resurfacing, a shitload of emotional processing (with anger, shame and vulnerability at the forefront), the extreme physical fatigue that accompanies such emotional processing, a teething baby (aren't they just always teething?!) and learning about the "tantrum explosion" stage of a certain ginger haired three-nager.


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3 things you MUST know about Postpartum nutrition

29/3/2018

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"Eat ENOUGH food. This is where you need to put your big girl pants on, ignore the ridiculous cultural push to lose the "baby weight" as fast as possible... and eat like a grown-ass woman."
What you eat during the month after you give birth has the power to radically improve your strength and recovery.

And, it is said in Chinese medicine, what you eat and how well you take care of yourself during this crucial time has the power to impact your health 20, 30 or more YEARS down the track.

There are other important things to think about in your Golden Month, which I mention here - but of course, being a nutritionist, I believe the food you eat after having a baby is crucial.

Nutritional requirements during recovery and breastfeeding unsurprisingly increase, and in the case of some specific nutrients, quite significantly so.

If you're breastfeeding your requirements for protein, zinc, iodine and vitamin A literally double.

And to produce milk, you need to be getting more overall calories than even during your third trimester of pregnancy; around 500-600 calories more for the first six months postpartum if breastfeeding exclusively (as recommended by the World Health Organisation), which is an extra meal or 2-3 extra snacks a day.

Of course I don't recommend calorie counting and nothing is set in stone - listen to your hunger and fullness cues and you will be fine. Note: If you have a history of or current disordered eating you may find it difficult to follow your body's hunger and fullness cues, in which case seeing a HAES or non-diet health professional would be super helpful for you.

Even if you cannot or choose not to breastfeed, extra nutrition is required to heal from childbirth and replenish your body after nine months of pregnancy.

And if your kids are more school age than newborn, you need some serious fuel to keep up with all the crazy demands asked of you, mama. You have important shit to do and you need energy and nutrients to do it.


So without going into a huge amount of detail on exact postpartum nutrition requirements, here are the three big nutritional principles from TCM you can aim to follow in your Golden Month. 

And by the way,
 nourishing yourself well is as crucial in healing immediately after childbirth, as it is 10 years postpartum. These three tips apply just as much years after your last child is born, as they do as soon as the baby is born.


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All content copyright Casey Conroy - Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing. For more information please click here to see my disclaimer.
Natural health for EVERY body. Copyright © 2022
0432 618 279 | info@funkyforest.com.au