Guiding the aging process is a long term project and I’m celebrating 11 years since I started to reverse engineer my biological age. In this episode, I break down my Functional Nutrition framework and tracking tool that will help you understand your baseline and get really clear on how you can improve your longevity strategy.
Guiding the aging process is a long-term project and I’m celebrating 11 years since I started to reverse engineer my biological age. In this episode, I break down my Functional Nutrition framework and tracking tool that will help you understand your baseline and get really clear on how you can improve your longevity strategy.
In order to feel younger while growing older, you need to know what's happening inside your body and be aware of how external exposures make an impact internally. One of the simplest ways to do that in the comfort of your own home is by tracking your food, mood, and elimination via urine and bowel movements.
I share tools to help you know what to look out for, like Vivoo and the Bristol Stool Scale. I also encourage all of my clients to examine their sleep quality, stress management, glucose levels, and energy levels after they exercise.
There are so many effective treatments and modalities out there that can support you, but your central nervous system will override all of your efforts on an unconscious level if you don’t do the emotional work first. If you haven’t already, listen to Episode 8 - Making Peace with Your Past and use that as a launching point.
Listen in to learn more about my healing journey and methodologies that have helped guide the way.
If you are enjoying these conversations, please subscribe and spread the love by leaving a review and sharing it with your friends.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or on your favorite podcast platform.
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Dana Frost 00:07
Welcome to Vitally You, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host, Dana frost, a wellness expert, life coach and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect conversations about vitality from the inside out with guest experts in the field of health, culture, and spirituality, and solo episodes along the way from me where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy, medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger, while growing older, this is the place for you.
Dana Frost 00:52
Hi, everyone. I'm Dana frost, your host and wellness Alchemist. Thank you for joining me for another solo episode. I was thinking about the episode last week with Chris mirror belly of novice labs where he talked about the 10 hallmarks of aging. And I thought it would be really interesting to come on and for me to share a framework for you if you haven't started thinking about a longevity strategy, a framework for that. But I want you to stay tuned to the end of the episode to learn how you can be the winner of a very special Thanksgiving week giveaway. Okay, so just to recap, the nine hallmarks of aging come from a study published in 2013 by a group of European researchers. And since that time, the 10 hallmark of aging was added. So Chris went over those you could listen to his episode if you missed it. But why should you care about these hallmarks of aging, I would say they're relevant to the degree that you care about how you age, because they actually provide a context for why we age and how to mitigate the aging process. Now in previous generations, the choices and knowledge about improving the aging process were limited. But today we know better. And when you know better, it's time to do better. To get better longevity outcomes. This is what I believe I believe you really need to know yourself, you need to understand your health history. At a minimum, you need to understand your genetic predispositions. And you really need to understand your triggers. And that, you know, past triggers, current triggers and what you are predisposed to in terms of your triggers. And you know, I'd like to say you don't have to invest expensive diagnostics. But I do believe you need to know what's happening inside your body, you need to understand what are the exposures that originate outside the body, and if they've made an impact internally. So along these lines, I'm thinking about heavy metals, mold exposure, exposure to 5g and the electromagnetic field exposure to contaminated water, beauty products and toxins that are in beauty products. So I've just listed a lot of toxins, because those are the things that are exogenous to us. And if you want to learn more about that I'm going going because this episode really isn't about that. But if you're curious, I'm going to provide a link to an Instagram profile that has excellent information. The practitioner is Lera Adler, she's an environmental toxin educator, and she's got wonderful information for free, where you can start learning some more. Okay, the other thing that I believe you need is a stress management strategy that works for you. We all handle stress, we process stress differently. And so it's really important to know, how do you metabolize stress? How do you process it? Are you easily triggered? And what are the tools that you have to metabolize stress? Okay, so, the hallmarks of aging are important, but they're really important. After you have dialed into the daily information that your body is giving you your body's always talking to, it's always giving you information. So there's a lot you can do. Like before you dial into, well, you can understand the hallmarks of aging. That was last episode, but really, you could just take the next decade. I know that sounds like a long time. But if we're thinking about how we want to feel in 10 years at the end of this decade and 20 years and 30 years, you can just say I'm going to dedicate a decade which is actually what I've just completed. I've I'm 11 years post health crises. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later because I did a review of labs from the past 10 years. So you could just say for the next 10 years, I am going to tune in to what's happening inside my body inside this earth suit on a day by day basis. That's what we're going to do in today's episode, we're going to talk about how can you tune into your body and there's a framework for that. So if we want to feel younger, while growing older, or to use novice labs, the company that Chris founded, their tagline is younger longer. And I can't imagine that anyone doesn't want to feel younger longer. You need to know what is your baseline, you need to know where am I today, it's gotta gather some information about your history, your genetics, as I said, you don't have to take expensive tests. Sometimes genetic testing can also be super confusing. And honestly, before you and invest in that, I would encourage you to at least take a year at a minimum to dial in to doing some of these things that I'm going to recommend on today's episode. But you can note what has happened health wise in the previous generations in your family. So that's one of the things that I did I knew this predisposition for diabetes, I knew that anxiety came with people as they aged, I knew that adult onset obesity was one of the factors, some skin cancer, so you want to tap Oh, heart disease was another one blood pressure issues. That was another one. So you want to note what have previous generations experienced health wise, you want to know, as I said, What's happening for you. Now, you want to understand the stress levels over the past decade and where you are currently with stress. You want to track any labs from the past years, wherever you can get labs from the previous labs that you've taken, and you want to get labs that are up to date. And I will share in the show notes, I will share a list of the lab markers that I like that I would recommend any clients just so you get an overall sense of where you're at from a deeper health perspective. But what I really want to recommend is tracking health markers that you can track from the comfort of your home, this is really amazing. There's so much information that you can actually glean yourself, just you you don't have to pay to get this information. So I would start with my functional nutrition framework and tracking tool. And it's called a food mood and poop tracker. So you're like, Wait, what's that? I know my clients kind of like, take a deep breath. And when I say I want them to track food, mood and poop, but it's exactly what it says it is you track what you eat, you track your mood and any physical symptoms like bloating, fatigue, inflammation, and you track what your poop looks like. And I like to add other tracking items. But first, let's just review this idea of the food mood and poop tracker. By the way, if anybody wants a copy of my tracker, and you want to contact me, you can email me and I'll send it to you. Okay, so when we're talking about pooping, we're talking about elimination, how your body gets rid of what you feed it and how your body gets rid of actually the toxins that enter your system. I add urine to this. It's not on the food and poop tracker. But these are the things that regarding elimination that can be easily tracked, gives you information, as I said about what's happening inside, it's the way that it comes out. So where your poop is concerned, I want you to Google a copy of the Bristol stool chart, the Bristol stool chart so that you can gain insights about the effectiveness of your elimination because the size, the color, how many times you eliminate a day or if you aren't, don't eliminate every day, the texture of your poop. Those characteristics provide information about what's going on inside with digestion, how you are metabolizing and getting rid of the things that you need to eliminate. Then when you're looking at your food, you can track your mood and also the physical things that are happening with you as you're fueling. So, you're going to actually write it out. And you're just going to notice you'll see patterns forming when you look at what is my mood was I fatigued was anxious. Was I depressed? Did I have energy surges or crashes? Was I bloated? You might
Dana Frost 09:36
see inflammation in your joints or weight gain. And when you start to track these patterns will arise and you're gonna make this is why it's so important. You begin to make these connections from a knowledge base and you get your brain to buy into the changes that you want to make because it's not easy to change your lifestyle and And when you're looking at a longevity strategy, you will have to change certain things about your lifestyle, but you actually need evidence that it's important for you to do this so that you get buy in. Okay, so that's the feedback that you get when you're tracking that is what's going to give you the energy to make those changes. Okay, so it's not on my functional nutrition tracker, but I add now urine. So if you missed my episode with the vivo team, where we talked about their at home urine test that tracks nine health markers, go back and have a listen, it's an excellent tool for gathering information about your about your baseline, you're going to know what is going on in my urine, and you can know this from the comfort of your home, it's super easy. You could just do this for a month, gather your information, you could do it once a week for a couple of months. It's not that much of an investment and there is a coupon code Vitaliy you. So the nine markers that vivo tracks hydration, so it's gonna let you know are you really hydrated, it's going to let you know where your pH balance is, it's going to it has a marker an oxidative stress. So how much stress is in the system, it's going to track salinity, magnesium, vitamin C, calcium, ketones and protein. And I will tell you, I started tracking when I was having them on my podcast, I tracked all the way through the summer. And I actually learned that I was over supplementing, and one area I needed to add in, I could see like, oh, when this happens, I actually need to add in vitamin C. So gives you some really good information. And by the way, if you feel like you can't do this alone, you know, you can hire me and I can hold your hand. A lot of times I know for me, I've needed a coach at different times. So you don't have to do this alone, I would be happy to walk this path with you. Okay, so that's the food, mood and poop and I add urine tracker. So the other things that I like to add to tracking, I like to add sleep, stress, glucose and movement. Okay, why do we add sleep? Sleep is an important marker, where longevity is concerned, sleep is an important marker in terms of how your body is able to reset and rejuvenate at night, your nighttime sleep. And I know we've talked about this before, but that's where you detox, that's where your body does. It's like turning your computer on and off, it does a reset your organs reset your digestive system gets a long, ideally 12 hour rest, understanding what's happening while you're sleeping, if you can't go to sleep, or if you go to sleep easily. And you wake up in the middle of the night, when you start tracking that it's going to give you information about what's happening with maybe with glucose, maybe with your hormones. And that's where somebody like me would come in handy just to help you determine exactly what is happening. But you do want to know how you are with your sleep. You do as I mentioned stress, it's really important to understand how you metabolize stress because stress, stress impacts your body's ability to heal. And we know that stress, actually it is one of the things that will expedite the aging process. So if you have a lot of stress, you're not going to feel younger, growing older, I can tell you the 10 years, the decade that I had stress, and you know, it was really the way I was interpreting the things that were happening in my life, I was easily triggered. I gained weight I wasn't sleeping well. I think when I look back at photos that I looked older I looked dragged down. That's what stress does to your system. So it's really important to get a baseline on your stress, glucose levels. That is another key health marker. From my perspective, I am a big fan of at home glucometers I love it when clients are willing to track glucose, glucose, if you have any hormonal issues, if you're Peri menopausal or you're having hormonal issues and your menstruating woman, I start first with your glucose what's happening with your glucose levels, circulating glucose that isn't used for energy, it ends up being stored as fat. And that is done in as short of an amount of time as four to eight hours. Okay, so it's really important to hone in to what is your fasting glucose? Where are your glucose levels 40 minutes after you eat? How does your body respond to carbohydrates, different kinds of carbohydrates when you're tracking glucose on a regular basis. That's the information you gain and it gives you a lot of information about what drags your system down and what fuels your system. Really important marker very easy to do. The next one exercise or movement I actually like to say movement. So when we're looking at movement, and actually this goes back to sleep as well. When we're thinking about longevity, we want to know how do we feel when we wake up, we shouldn't be energized when we wake up. That means that our cortisol level is elevated, it should be elevated in the morning. So we're ready to take on the stress of the day, if we wake up and we're tired. That tells us that cortisol maybe isn't optimal. So when you're exercising, you're doing movement you really want to tap into, do you feel energized after exercising for the rest of the day. That means if you do that you're working in your sweet zone. Now, when I had my health crisis, what I learned through all of this is that I was over exerting myself during exercise, I had adrenal fatigue. And the bootcamp that I was doing, it simply was too demanding of my system. If you feel tired an hour after you work out, you're working out too hard, okay, probably your adrenals are already burned out. And the movement is just too intense. And more often than not, I found that clients were working out too hard if they were having a health crisis. So it's important to know that your system, your mind body system, it reads all stress is the same. It doesn't distinguish between, you know, you get triggered by an interaction with a family member. And so you're triggered, so you have stress, or you're stressed, because you're thinking about a presentation that you need to do. Or you're stressed, because you need to pack and you haven't packed yet, and you have all these other things to do before the evening is over, or you're being chased by a lion, or you're working out, and you're demanding from your body, all of that the
Dana Frost 16:48
body reads a distress. And it doesn't really know it doesn't differentiate. So it's really important to kind of tap into these markers, the food, mood and poop, the sleep, the stress, the glucose, the movement, and exercise movement or exercise to get the baseline of where am I? Where have I been? Where am I today? Where do I want to go? And what are the things that I need to do lifestyle changes I need to make so that I feel younger, while growing older, I feel younger, longer in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. I know for me, I have this vision of myself on the ground, outside on the floor with grandchildren. Well, you know, 20 3040 years from now, I'm able to go on a walk, I'm able to ski. I'm not a very good skier, by the way, but I can do the greens, I can do some blues, but I don't ski often enough to really perfect it. But I want to be able to do these things. I want to be on a bike, I want to be able to do these things with my grandchildren. But I want to point out and I want you to hear me on this. I am 11 years on my healing journey. And that's why I said give yourself a decade it's a marathon. It's not a sprint, guiding the aging process is a long term project. You don't need to be in a hurry. And the good news is that your body starts responding because it craves homeostasis. When you start treating it well it cuddles up and it rewards you. It's amazing, you'll get little surges of energy you'll you'll become encouraged because you start feeling better, that's going to give you more energy to make another lifestyle change. But you've got to give the body time it will reward you in the short term but that long term healing journey and you know changing your stress default, improving the glucose numbers that that's a long term project. So let's just say what I've shared on today's episode is only the tip of the iceberg. It's a starting point so that you gain an understanding of what's happening from the inside out and for your own health perspective. But I want you to know also that there are unlimited treatments and modalities that can support you. And practices that really shouldn't be a part of your longevity plan things like supplements, but don't go randomly taking supplements. Before you take a supplement. Let's get your gut in order so that your gut can absorb the supplements you're giving it so you're not throwing money down you're elimination to things like weight training, cold therapy, light therapy. Honestly, if you go to the Biohacking Conference, you're going to be blown away by the bio hacks but this is what I will tell you nothing can substitute for your own inner knowing and intimacy with yourself. Your intimacy with your emotions, your intimacy with your body and this is why tracking is a non negotiable for me. If you're working with me that is and I would say it's a non negotiable. Maybe not like I don't have to try anymore, just because once you start tracking over time, you're just automatically tracking in your mind. Okay, so the other thing I want you to stress is that you can have all the bio hacks, money can afford. But if you can't manage your stress, it's all for nothing. It's also like throwing supplements down the drain, you're throwing money into the wind, if you're paying for biohackers, but you don't know how to manage your stress. That's how important your central nervous system is, your central nervous system will override all of your good works on an unconscious level, if you haven't dealt with your demons. I'm going to repeat that it's so I've learned this, it's been true for me, I see it with clients, your central nervous system will override all of your good works on an unconscious level if you haven't dealt with your demons. Okay, so let's do the inner emotional work and heal the things that have happened in our past. And I have a couple of really good episodes where I talk about that. And I want us to also look at the alternative, let's not have a strategy for longevity, what happens? Well, this is going to lead you down the path of following conventional recommendations. When you have body breakdown, and you experience any combination of the hallmarks of aging, this is going to put you on the path of the majority of the population and you will excel I promise you you will experience increasing inflammation, you will experience resistant weight gain or an inability to gain weight or keep weight on Well, it's the same thing, right? Which is likewise problematic. You can be you can look skinny on the outside and be completely inflamed on the inside. Brain fog, chronic pain, diminished range of motion, your body's going to get stiff, that's actually the 10th hallmark of aging, it's just the stiffening of everything in your system. I don't remember what they call that. But the stiffening anxiety and depressed mood or just mood dysregulation. And you know what's going to happen when you go to your medical team. They're going to top it off with a cocktail of prescriptions served with a very special side effect for each symptom you present, that those medications are going to have side effects, that's going to be your complement to your main meal, if you will. And you know, this is why they do not have the solutions to slow the hallmarks of aging. They are firmly these conventional practitioners. They are firmly rooted and trained in pharmacology and disease medicine, not prevention, or turning back the clock on chronic pain, inflammation and autoimmunity. I think that you'll remember an episode where I got really fiery, talking about the amount of money that we spend on health care for these diseases that are preventable, and that are reversible. They don't have the answers, you are looking for solutions in the wrong places. You're gonna just like the majority of the population, you'll just go down that route. Your longevity strategy needs to be hit two proven strategies, and they're found outside the conventional model. Okay, so I'm at the end of the episode, and I want to hear from you. This isn't a one way conversation, at least I don't want it to be what are your thoughts about Aging and Longevity? Please let me know if there are topics that you would like me to address on the podcast or guest you'd like to hear from a few weeks ago. This is what I mentioned earlier that I would share at the end of the podcast a few weeks ago, I did a review of my labs over the past decade. And the trend was remarkable. The markers that I was looking for my vitamin D or alpha hydroxy, a one C the glucose, insulin, triglycerides, thyroid marker, magnesium, my liver markers, the markers that indicate liver function all had improved. I have improved my biological age because when you see the steady improvement in labs, and they're not fluctuating, they're stable. You are reverse engineering the aging process in real time. It's amazing. It was just incredible to go back and do that review. So are you with me? Who wants to live younger longer and feel younger growing older? I hope you do. I'm assuming you do or you wouldn't be listening. Okay, so this week, feeling younger while growing older. It feels like a confirmation because I'm living it. So that's what that feels like for me. I will answer that question. This is the information about who is going to win again. Have a way. Happy Thanksgiving week everybody I hope you have a wonderful time with your family and friends. So the first person who creates a post or a story on Instagram and uses the hashtag feeling younger growing older, and you tag me and you make a comment about what that means to you. The first person I see who does that will win a sleeve of eon anti inflammatory patches. These are the lifewave patches and you want to talk about stress relief eon calms stress at the speed of light, it also diminishes inflammation at the speed of light, it helps you sleep better. So I cannot wait to see who wins I will be watching Instagram to see who's the first person to agree to post or a story using the hashtag feeling younger growing older and comments about what that means to them and tags me. Okay. Thank you for joining me on the vital yo podcast. I want to thank Windy City Rach. For this review that she left me on Apple podcast I can't begin to express how much value this podcast is brought to my life. There is a time and a place for Western medicine but it's growing glaringly obvious that integrative health is the path forward for root cause remediation. I recently came up with control and that episode in particular was incredibly useful for me. Thank you for all you do, Dana Well, thank you Windy City Rach for the review and please if you are enjoying this podcast, you would just make my heart smile. You would light up my eyes if you would subscribe, download and leave a review. It really helps this podcast be seen by more people. So please do that for me. I
Dana Frost 26:47
will be forever grateful. And until next podcast episode I am streaming love from my heart to yours