Transcript…

In this episode, you will learn:

How easy and inexpensive it can be to eat healthy
Why its so important, especially for those with chronic conditions, to be mindful of your diet
What autophagy is and how it benefits you
What fast food/bad food really costs you

Episode 18: Diet and Humor with Lynne Bowman

Katie: This is the pain changer Podcast, episode 18. Over the last few episodes Coral Simpson and Dr. Rebecca Morell joined me to discuss the importance of diet, sleep and a sustainable self care routine to help reduce inflammation and other aspects of chronic pain. This week, another awesome guest, Lynne Bowman is joining me to continue the discussion around diet and to share the cookbook she created. So I hope you stay tuned. That is coming right up.

Before we dive into this week’s episode, I want to return to my listener of the week. My apologies for missing it the last two weeks. This week’s listener of the week is Big Ace Nasty, who says:

“A huge thanks to Katie for sharing her knowledge and experience. I found these podcasts relatable and very beneficial as I navigate through my own traumas and have implemented the lessons learned from these episodes into my daily life. Please keep them coming.”

Thank you so much. Big Ace Nasty. I really appreciate your support and feedback. Please send me a DM on Instagram to @coachktdubs and let me know you heard me. I will send you a gift as my thank you for listening and helping to spread the word that we can accept the diagnosis without accepting the prognosis. Now for today’s show.

Joining me today is Lynne Bowman, a best seller on Amazon with a five star rating and rave reviews. Brownies for Breakfast is a cookbook you’ll actually enjoy reading and using. Lynne has been featured at women’s expo throughout the country teaming with actress Deidre Hall to write and publish Diedre Hall’s Kitchen Close-Up in 2010 and Deidre Hall’s, How Does She Do It in 2012. In previous lives, she won national awards as a creative director for Silicon Valley companies, was creative director at E & J Gallo Winery, advertising manager at RedKen laboratories, and freelance for agencies in San Jose, Los Angeles, and New York. She’s also worked as an actress, makeup artist, screenwriter, Illustrator, legal journalist, and television weather person. Lynne has three grown children to absolutely perfect grandchildren. And as President of the Pescadero Foundation. She and her husband have a small heart farm on the coast of Northern California. Welcome so much to the pain changer, podcast. Lynne, I am so excited to have you join me today. Thank you so much.

Lynne: Well, I’m super pumped up especially after hearing that note to Mr. Nasty your listener of the week. That actually, that’s so great to hear, isn’t it because why we do what we do is to reach out to people and have them actually take away bits that help with whatever’s going on. And that’s why I’m here. I’m so happy to be with you.

Katie: So thank you. So I want to dive in. And you know, I loved your profile when I found it. And you know, and I love your mindset. We had a little chat before we started recording and I think you guys are gonna absolutely love Lynne as well. So you are 76 and you are still going. And there’s anything in the world you can be doing. So why did you choose to do this?

Lynne: Well, I’m still going, I’m still walking around making trouble. Even better than just still going. Yes, that’s what I want for everybody if you know, there’s this tremendous kind of ageist feeling out there that being over 65 or over 70 or over 75 is just kind of a you know, you better slow down, girl you better you know, it’s more fun, more freeing, there’s so much out there that we can do and enjoy and I have kids in their 40s now and as we were talking about before, my youngest 43 just had her first baby. So yes, it’s all swell, but do I have moments where I think well, thank goodness it’s her up all night with the baby not me. I’m all “I don’t have to do that anymore” particularly and I loved doing it when I did it. But there is a time for all these things in your life and being senior is wonderful and I loved what you said about the prognosis, not necessarily being a direct result of what it is that they figure out is “wrong” with you. And I’m a good example of that, because I was told in my 40s, early 40s, that I was diabetic and Type 2 diabetic and that it was a progressive disease, capital P, capital D. And that meant that it was just going to get worse, it was not ever gonna get any better. And there was just something about me because I was a single mom, I had three little kids. And I was determined that that was not going to slow me down or keep me from taking care of my little family. And I was also very influenced, Katie, by the fact that my mom died when I was 18. And she had a chronic disease. So I grew up, especially in my teenage years with this really close up, look at what that does to a family, how that affects lives. And it breaks families. And by the time she was gone, when I was 18, everything had to go: the house, my dog, who was my best friend, my dad, you know, the money was gone. And he had to start a new life and so on. So my elder siblings were gone. So at the age of 18, I had a real big dose of well, girl, what are you gonna do now? And it was because of disease. So my whole adult life, I’ve understood that not only my situation, but the situation of so many other people emotionally, financially, professionally, was completely dependent on their understanding of health.

Katie: Yes, completely.

Lynne: And that may sound a little bit extreme to some people, but I’ve got data to back it up, you know, something like 85% of the bankruptcies in the United States are because of health expenditures. And that may seem like a weird way to start a discussion about pain. But I don’t think you can talk about pain without talking about financial pain, because, in fact, doesn’t it make all of us miserable to have money problems? You know, it’s definitely a disease, it’s definitely a type of severe pain. So all that by way of saying I made it my business, I mean, I had to earn a living from it. I was the sole support of these three kids and I managed to do that. I managed to make a living doing all the things that you listed, and some of them really badly, by the way, I was not necessarily the greatest legal journalist. And I’ll tell you, I was a really bad weather person. But I do that in the bio, by way of saying, you know, most of us have bumps in the road, we try stuff, right? We just keep doing things. And eventually, some of it sticks. Hopefully, yes, you’ll be alright. And then, with any luck, you arrive at your “elder” age. And in my case, that was a really happy thing. I’m very happy to be here. And I’m happy that my kids are okay, and that I have grandchildren that are okay. Even though I told you, we’ve got COVID? Everybody seems to. But the good news is, if you’re healthy enough to start with, if your age is within range, if your immune system is in decent shape, you have so much less to fear from all these things, and you have so much less pain when these things do strike you. And another thing we were talking about earlier, I totally agree. This is a decision that you make. It’s not something that happens to you. It’s how you respond to what happens to you.

Katie: Yes, yes. And you hit on so much there that really resonated on a deep level. Like, you know, kind of starting in reverse with it doesn’t happen to us. What if we look at it as it’s happening for us? What does that change? If we say, Okay, I’m in pain because my body has a message versus I’m in pain because my body is being a dick and it wants me to hurt, like those are two completely different mindsets that when you’re going to be resisting your body being a dick to you. But when you start to tap into okay, maybe my body has a message, you may not like the message, chances are you really don’t like the message especially if you’re high up on the pain scale. But when you can start to listen to that, then the message is going to get a lot lower. Or, you know, and you hit on something with financial fear. So that is directly linked to lower back pain. And if you look at the stats around pain, back and neck pain are most frequently what’s experienced with people with chronic pain. Back is directly linked to financial scarcity. And in my first session with Bill McKenna with cognomovement, all he did was focus on my financial scarcity feel, that I wanted to leave the corporate.

Lynne: So interesting, isn’t it?

Katie: And it went away. And then I had a panic attack. Because I didn’t know who I was without my back pain.

Lynne: Because we hang on to that stuff.

Katie: Yes! We do, and we don’t even realize that we’re making these decisions, much to your point. It was a decision. Was it conscious? No, not at all!

Lynne: So who am I without my pain? Yeah, who am I without my disease? Yeah. Yeah, that’s a huge, huge part of what we’re doing when we cure ourselves or help other people cure themselves.

Katie: Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, and then on the flip side, and this always sounds so messed up to my own ears every time I say it, but I have not found it to be false yet. But what is that pain or that disease giving you, it’s not going to be something you want consciously, that you wouldn’t keep it because consciously, most people do not want to be sick, they don’t want to hurt, they may want pieces of it. Like one of the things that pain tends to bring out is people’s compassion. People who want to be cared for. And so that is a way that they wind up asking for help. Is it conscious? No, not at all. But that was true in my own story. I realized, like, Oh, when I was sick, or I was hurt, I got extra attention. And I can tend to be a hermit. So when I got attention, sometimes it was just such a salve for my soul, that I didn’t really think about where it was coming from. And it was a tough day to face that stuff in myself, but I’m so glad that I did. Because it’s easy for me to hold space and ask someone and I get that kind of like, screw you look, when I’m like, Well, what’s pain giving you like? Nothing? Really? Really, not so much. Yeah, like, and one of the things I found that I got from my former pain, I actually felt stronger, because I could keep up with my co-workers. And I had debilitating levels of pain. Right? I was winning awards. And I was about to go out on medical leave. Like I literally won a million dollar deal in my old cybersecurity life off of three calls. Two weeks before I went on five months of disability.

Lynne: Yeah, I’m thinking about my own background, as you talk about this. I think that I came out of my childhood and my experiences of brawler, you know, and I was determined not to be beaten by whatever happened. And I wasn’t, but there’s a price to pay for that kind of thing. And it’s interesting at this point in my life, to look back and try and be honest about “So what was that about? What happened there.” And one of the things, Katie, that I realized was that, because my mother was not well, and because my dad was scrambling to pay for all of it, and so on, and my siblings were older, I was feral, you know, I was not being supervised in any kind of realistic way. I was just doing what I wanted to do. Most of it. I mean, hardly any of it was illegal, which was good. But it was not the sort of thing that now as a grandparent, or even as a parent, I would necessarily be thrilled to know that my kids were off doing with no supervision. I mean, just as one small example. We used to get on horses, grade ponies, you know, we didn’t know what we were doing but we would just get on and go. I would never do that as an adult, you know, or as a parent or as a grandparent. They’re dangerous animals. But there was no one there to say no. And, and so there’s been an advantage in a way to people of my generation, my cohort, we were not supervised closely. We were not necessarily, although then there’s the other thing that as a female, we all had this very constricted idea of what was going to be okay for us as we became adults. Yes, there was like have your fun now girl because you know, at the age of 25, honey, you better be engaged to something. And you better be on your way to having some offspring because that’s it for you. So different worlds now although as politically.

Katie: Yeah, something yeah, definitely some hiccups in women’s rights as of late. And by hiccup I mean massive screeching WTF moment, but it is what it is.

Lynne: I don’t know, we haven’t talked specifically about this, but I think it’s probably a whole other area of pain related to childbirth. Yeah. Before, after, during, and then child rearing has its own set of trauma and pain. Oh, yeah. And it’s all because if you weren’t really into the physical world, before you had a child, having a child really puts you in a physical space in a new way. In your own body or out of your own body in a new way. And of course, now you have these other little bodies that are doing or not doing things. So pain, what an interesting, interesting thing to… what a viewpoint from which to see life. And, you know, and I can think back to my mother’s life, and how much it was dictated by pain.

Katie: Yeah, and we lose so much when we’re in pain. You know, one of the questions I like to ask people is like, if you woke up tomorrow with no pain, what would you be able to do again? And you know, some people like, oh, geez, it would be a giant one a run on sentence. There would be so much I could do if I didn’t hurt. It’s like, well, what are the derivatives of those can you still do? Yeah, and even getting into those activities that raise joy, that raise your energy, that’s going to lower your pain, that’s going to get you out of your body. And some of my clients have got severe, debilitating conditions that they’ve been told are incurable, are never going to improve, and are progressive. And they’re finding a little bit of truth in there. But not necessarily, they’re actually finding that they’re able to get more relief than they thought were possible.

Lynne: Well, and let’s go back to that, because we’ve got so much to talk about. And I know I’ve wandered off in a couple of different directions, but I love it. Even though I was told that I had type two diabetes, it was a progressive disease. So here I am now at the age of 76. I am no longer technically diabetic. Yay. And I know how to fix it, and you know how to fix it. We all know how to fix it. It’s not hard. It just requires a decision. Yep. You starting with the belief that you can do this. And you trust me? You can do it. I’m not the only one. Lots of us have done it. Yeah. And it doesn’t get done with pills and infusions and stuff. It gets done with food. And the answer there is real food to words. Yes. Real food.

Katie: So what is real food versus processed food? Fake Food? Yes, what we call food. So what is the distinction so that we get very clear what is real food that is actually good for us versus stuff? We want to stay away from?

Lynne: Okay, it’s really easy. Does it have a box or a bag? Or label? And what does that label say? Does it say organic fruit from something? You’re good there. Because it’s one thing. Right? Does it say chickpea pasta? And the ingredient is chickpea. That’s all that it says. You’re good. Yep. Does it have more than two or three ingredients? And are some of them difficult to pronounce? You’re not good. Is that so hard? No. Because we can all understand. And actually, I think there’s some people that still may not have got the memo, that most of the food that we’re eating today has been not cooked, not grown. It’s been engineered. It has been engineered by guys in buildings in New Jersey. You know, nothing personal, New Jersey, but that’s actually where the highway is, where the buildings are, where your food companies have their engineers who are making things craveable. And if you’ve never heard that word before, now you know it’s craveable. That’s the thing that raises your shareholder value, because everybody wants to eat more of it. And people are actually addicted to it. Because, yes, sugar is truly more addictive than heroin. And it is quite legal to put it into food and make that food addictive. Yeah. And so you sit in front of Jimmy Kimmel or whatever, at night eating the Doritos or pizza, or whatever it is, and you can’t stop, and your body just keeps screaming for more because it is a junkie, it is addicted to this food. So if you just think in terms of okay, I’m just going to eat real food. Just start right there. I’m going to eat real food. So real food is whole fruits, vegetables. Yes, you can chop them up. Yes, you can put them in your blender. But do they have a label on them that says more than one, Is it one food? Then it’s real food. Is it organically grown or locally grown? Then you get points for that. Because you can be even more convinced that. Hey, it’s from my own apple tree. It’s real. You know, real food, I think when you see it, we do. Like you were saying earlier you listen to yourself. Is that real? Or not? Yes, absolutely. And I encourage people not to eat dairy. Because the dairy that we’re being sold, the cow dairy food that we’re being sold isn’t real. It’s full of antibiotics. These cattle are being abused. And they’re given all kinds of hormones and things to enhance their production and growth hormones are part of it. So no, unless you know that cow, or really know that farmer that’s not real food. It’s not. So frequently we can get goat’s milk products or sheep’s milk products that are real food. Because they don’t mess with the goats and they don’t mess with the sheep. They don’t tend to. Yeah, and so a lot of and plus it’s a different kind of a protein than I mean, cow’s milk is designed to take a 45 pound calf to a 2000 pound bull in a few weeks. And if that’s what you want for yourself or your kids, okay, but I don’t know anybody who wants that for their kids.

Katie: And now sumo wrestling isn’t something that we’re trying to cultivate in America. That would be one of the professions I think where you want to bulk up as fast as possible. That’s cow’s milk.

Lynne: That’s cow’s milk. So stay with the goats. And then what else about real food? What isn’t obvious about real food processing? Again, I don’t count throwing something in a blender as processing because you’ve held that avocado or that pear in your hand or anything that’s real food. Beans. They’re a thing, they’re whole. You can see that they’re real food. It’s not that hard. Is an Oreo real?

Katie: No, all chemical.

Lynne: Right? Is it vegan? Yes. Is it real food? No. difference, right? And people are always asking me if I’m vegan, because I write about being vegan. And I have been, I experimented with that particularly because there are benefits for diabetics for eating more plants and for not eating meat. So I tested myself, and for six months, I did not touch animal food of any kind. And I had been a meat eater and then milk. Okay, let’s be honest cheese fan. Huge.

Katie: I love cheese. It’s a constant battle.

Lynne: Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ll go there in a minute. So I did an experiment with being a vegan, and my hemoglobin agency came down. Happy with the results. I lost weight. But what I found over time is you can even increase those benefits by doing some other things. You don’t have to be strictly vegan, in that if you are buying really good quality eggs from hens, you know, or from a brand where you could actually watch movies of the hens laying the eggs. Some of them do that now. It’s kind of fun. So and they have to be the kind of eggs where the hens ate bugs and grass and stuff. And so the yolks are really solid, that beautiful orange color that they get. That’s real food. Yeah. So eggs, I eat, I do eat goat’s milk cheese and sheep’s milk cheese. And when I cheat, I just might do it with a French or maybe Spanish, a Manchego, cow’s milk cheese. That’s, yeah, you know, but that’s all I ask of you. If you’re going to cheat, make it worthwhile, you know, eat something really marvelous. And then it’s okay. You know?Just don’t make it crap. Don’t waste your, your cheats on crappy food, make it worthwhile. Oh, yeah, you know, good food. So I wrote this book, because nobody wrote it for me. Nobody handed this stuff to me. Nobody explained any of this stuff to me. And furthermore, I understood kind of intuitively that there were, somebody had to cook something here, right? If someone had to go into a kitchen, and actually prep, take their whole real foods and turn them into good things for us to eat, or it wasn’t going to happen. But there isn’t a lot of guidance for how to do that easily, simply, and in delicious ways. So I’ve done that, I did that for you. And awesome. The fabulous thing too Katie is that this connects with pain in a very real way. Because so much of the pain that many of us are in is literally caused by what we’re eating. Yes. And it is extremely painful. And people don’t I mean, GERD, you know, that the acid problems that people have, and all kinds of colitis. And these things, you know, really difficult, painful conditions can be ameliorated or reversed, managed, or reversed, by really changing the way you eat. And the good news is, it doesn’t mean deprivation, it doesn’t mean you never get to eat anything, it means you’ll be eating better than you’ve ever eaten, really, in many ways, more color, more texture, more variety. You know, so many people get stuck and kind of brown and beige and white, groove eating. And that’s not the best food that’s not the most interesting, delightful, fun, tasty, gorgeous food.

Katie: No, not at all. I have been taught you want to eat a rainbow as much as possible. And if you can’t go for the rainbow, then at least go for the leafy greens.

Lynne: Absolutely. And I recommend leafy greens three times a day, or two times a day, if you’re only eating twice a day, which I highly recommend. There’s plenty of evidence out there now that eating fewer meals in a smaller amount of time during the day, leaving more time between your last meal and your sleep is going to do a lot about the pain and it’s going to help you sleep better. So yeah. The greens with every time you eat, let’s put it that way. Every time you eat. You need to be eating greens, if you possibly can figure out a way to do it. So your challenge is every single time you get ready to eat something you go, Okay, here’s a little voice and grandma on my shoulder going where are your greens, Honey, are you eating some greens? And it can be parsley? Yeah, great. Perfect. It can be frozen spinach chop, no worries, it’s fine. You’ll find all kinds of little ways that the greens can just keep piling onto your plate. And you think yeah, that makes it prettier. That makes it good. One of my favorites is pesto people. If people seem to think pesto is a thing made with basil, by the way. It’s not. That’s genuinely easy.

Katie: I did not know that.

Lynne: Yeah ,that’s a kind of pesto. But in my book, I talk about making pesto with what you have. So carrot tops, great. Put it in the pesto. Kale: pesto. Arugula: pesto. All of it makes fabulous pesto. It’s just you combine it with a certain kind of formula, you’re putting other things in that book, some garlic, some lemon. You can now put that blob of gooey green that you’ve made that smells fabulous on your plate. And you’ve had this infusion of fabulous nutrition and it is so good on the chickpea pasta, on the brown rice, whatever, pesto genius.

Katie: Love that! I didn’t even think of that before. Thank you for that idea! I had already liked just from our quick conversation, I’m like I’m buying this book and there’s a couple people who are going to be getting it for gifts too. But that is a slant I didn’t even think about, you know, one of the things that I had started to do, I’m not in the habit this week, but I’m returning to it again. Next week, this holiday sort of threw me off, it’s two days after the Fourth of July just to put a time and space for everybody. But I did a 30 day juice fast this winter. And I did it to support someone I love initially. And I wound up really getting attached to a lot of the benefits for me. And it was a big commitment. I made every batch myself by hand in winter in Maine, during a month where it went above freezing twice. It was a tough commitment. But within 10 days, the impact was so clear that it became really easy to continue for the next 20 I didn’t even realize I had had adult ache in my body. Like I knew I had still had a little bit of pain. And one of my goals for this year is to be pain free without my props. And I’m like 95% there already. So I’m really excited about that. And shifting diet, much to your point was a big part of that. I had already gone so far with the wellness routine I created with cognomovement, and then adding in and really starting to focus on the diet component really sped things up and then that produced more energy to want to move more. And so it’s just created this extra wave of wellness that I’m still riding on and it’s been and I’ve seen this with other people too. Like my boyfriend has incorporated juice. Like he is habitual about it at this point. He always has juices and he mixes it between red juices, green juices, yellow juices, orange juices, but he’s getting in all those phytonutrients around a really stressful schedule right now. But it’s making a difference in his overall health.

Lynne: I would like to see you both move to eating your fruits and vegetables instead of just drinking them.

Katie: I do eat them too and so does he, but it was the addition of juice, not instead of so just to be clear. That was the juice fast. But no, I think before what I had for lunch today, I had a Granny Smith green apple organic with sheep’s cheese. And some non steroid ethically sourced chicken off to the side.

Lynne: Okay, no more. No more chicken. No.

Katie: No? Oh my gosh. Okay. Tell me why, tell us why.

Lynne: You say it’s ethically sourced. And that’s fine. And if you really do know that the only bad day that chicken had was its last and what it ate, but it is so difficult for most all of us to source chicken responsibly. And most chicken is the most tainted meat on the market. Chicken

Katie: Wow. Okay

Lynne: It’s puffed up with salt. It’s, you know, they’re fed very badly. And what they’re fed also has a big reverberation in terms of the grain, the soy, the whatever, not being responsibly raised, but just in terms of what you ultimately are putting in your body. If it’s a chicken, it’s probably not a good idea. Unless you knew that chicken’s name.

Katie: I did not.

Lynne: Yeah, or the farmer’s name.

Katie: Nope. Don’t know that either. But thank you because as much as I know, I still want to learn more.

Lynne: And we were told all the time. Well, chicken is your…you know, it’s your lean alternative. There’s nothing wrong with fat. By the way, fat is something we all need to consume in fairly substantial amounts actually. But what you want are the healthier fats and anything that is farmed for profit animal wise, is sketchy. And chicken, nobody ate chicken by the way until 30-40 years ago. And chicken then was discovered to be this thing that was highly profitable, because the chickens didn’t complain and they didn’t hurt anybody. The story goes on and we don’t need to take a lot of time on it. But I would prefer to see you eating grass fed beef or any kind of wild goose for meat, and fish is getting problematic too, you know you can’t eat really farmed fish. That’s not good for the environment either, where I’m on the coast of California, so I do eat some locally sourced salmon. But even then I’m thinking, Oh, God, it’s probably not a good idea anymore for the salmon because they’re, they’re being wiped out. It’s a wonderful food, it’s very healthy, but they’re being wiped out. So chicken, not so much. But let’s go back to the idea of what we know about the greens. Yep, eating greens often. And, you know, eating your fruit instead of drinking your fruit if you possibly can manage to do it, and eating your vegetables as much as you can. But, yeah, the time and a word, are my new favorite words, you’re ready for it. Autophagy.

Katie: Autophagy. What does that mean?

Lynne: It is such a wonderful thing and wonderful word. And I only learned this a couple of years ago, and I’m starting to see it out there more now. It means eating yourself, literally, but what it means is that every cell in your body has the ability to groom itself and the cells around it. But it cannot do so until you have not been ingesting food for something like, I think it begins at 15-16 hours. So you have to empty yourself out, you have to leave time. After the last time that you ate for your body’s cells to clean themselves. They’re in there going, you know, and they’re eating the crud, it’s a miraculous process. When you think about it, all these cells are sorting themselves out or recycling themselves and doing all this stuff for you to get rid of your pain. And in fact, a lot of your pain can be a result of residual crud that has built up around your cells, because they have not been able to groom and clean themselves. And this is obviously not scientific language. And if you want to look it up, look it up. Autophagy. Look it up. This is what your body wants to do for you. But it can only do it if you stop shoveling pizza in. And so that’s the idea behind intermittent fasting, for example. So if you quit eating at two or three in the afternoon, and leave a number of hours and you don’t eat again until 10 the next morning, your body has been able to do this autophagy on your cells. And you may very well notice a substantial decrease in pain of whatever kind you’re experiencing as a result. Because your body knows how to do this. You just have to let it do this.

Katie: I hope you are hearing Lynne right now. One of the keys that she is really pressing upon i:s intermittent fasting could relieve your pain. Give it a shot, like Dr. Morrell was saying the other day that anything is an experiment, you know, and she likes to use the word experiment instead of cheat. So it’s more of a positive, I’m just going to experiment and do something that’s not in my diet, just make it a little less heavy, you know, but I love that idea. You know, and it’s whatever you’re called to intermittent fasting. There’s so much support for that right now because so many people are trying it and seeing the benefits with weight, with pain with everything. But I really want to focus on what you just said there that this can help alleviate a lot of inflammation, a lot of pain, because you’re allowing your body to flush out all the gunk that is supposed to leave your body as waste instead of staying in there where it can continue to harm you. And so the rules, if there are rules, are simple: real food, real food? Not all the time. Not all the time.

Lynne: Yeah, when you think about it all the talk about Paleo and keto and everything. We were not meant to be eating all the time. No. We were not built to do that. Whoever did that, nobody did that until the last 70 years, maybe 50 years. You know, since Cocoa Puffs. Yeah. Since food became shareholder value, mostly Um, but, you know, 1000 years ago or 500 years ago, the grandmas were out gathering stuff and the foraging and getting the mushrooms and purslane and the stuff. And if you had some, you ate it, and if a critter had been drugged and killed, you ate it, but then there were days, right, or certainly meals where there was nothing. And that was okay. Because everything about us physically is designed to withstand want.

Katie: And we are trained not to withstand it, we get trained by things outside of us to go after what you want to get the solution outside of yourself, you know, and I don’t know what you’ve seen with this personally, you know, with this, and I want to I want to dive more into your cookbook, I got a lot more questions about that. But one of the things that I can help with as a cognomovement practitioner I’ve seen both personally and in other people, is we’ll have these subconscious patterns that lead us to the food that we don’t want. And some of the most common things that we see people have a high level of anxiety, over-eating actually calms down the stomach and lowers the anxiety. And another reason we tend to eat too much is we don’t feel fulfilled, we’re looking outside of ourselves for something that we need instead of saying, Okay, what, what can I give myself how can I feel fulfilled? And so we go to try to fill it up in our cupboard and our refrigerator and whatever we’re trying to do, we’re trying to fill that feeling of not being fulfilled with food, which is never going to be the solution. You cannot eat enough to feel fulfilled, if you have a lack of fulfillment in your life that is going to come from something that lights you up inside, gives you energy, brings you joy, makes every fiber of your being sing out with Yes. That’s what’s going to make you fulfilled. Eating your Doritos is not going to fulfill you, and neither will a Snickers bar, or anything else. So that’s good. I’m really glad to know that information. So I have a condition called hemochromatosis. So I stay away from red meat. Because that’s a very fancy word for saying I don’t metabolize iron, right, which means that I’ve got to have my iron drained, if I don’t want my blood drained if it gets too high. Since changing the diet between the juice fast I did and these natural supplements that actually activate my body’s DNA that someone had introduced me to, I haven’t had to get blood at all this year. And I was on an every three months, I having to dump blood so much and it’s also reflected in my goal to be pain free by the end of the year without my props, because I’ve already considered myself pain free for a while. But I still wanted my body pillow at night and I still wanted my heating pads. And I’ve noticed that it’s more habitual than need. And I’m weaning myself out of that habit now because I don’t actually need them anymore. Eating is habit more than yes. So much.

Lynne: Yeah. Right. To add to your point about fulfillment, and when we feed ourselves, what are we doing? In a way, I like to say to people, you know, you spend more time worrying about what your Labrador Retriever is eating and benefiting from nutritionally than what you yourself are eating. And what that tells me is you think your Labrador Retriever is more worthy of love and attention and parenting and care than you are. So why not just reframe it, and think of yourself as someone who is worthy of good care and attention and parenting and so on? And do what you would do for anything or anyone that you loved.

Katie: Yeah, yeah. You know, and there’s a really well known coach, Matthew Hussey, he’s the How to Get the Guy guy, but he has these retreats that he really instills this message of core confidence. And one of the things he really dives deep in and I’m not going to explore that world because that is his, I cannot do it like he does. But the basic gist of it and this is this seed planted that I still hold on to. We are all our own best friends. Why wouldn’t we want to give ourselves all the love and affection that we give our best friend? We are literally the only person who has been there for us for every single step of our lives. Even the most important person to us, they are not with us 24/7. Not unless you’re a conjoined twin, then that may be different. But for most of us who are not conjoined twins… We are our own best friend. We are the only person who has been there for every step of our lives. So why wouldn’t we rely on ourselves more than anybody else? Yes, we also know every screw up, every mistake, every shitty thing we’ve ever done to everybody. Learn and find forgiveness for yourself because you are your own best friend, or your own worst enemy. And that is another decision that you have.

Lynne: I think I just take it that further step Katie. And for me, there’s a sort of unbreakable bond between feeding and parenthood. We feed our infants, we feed our children, we feed our older, we feed our elders. And yet, we don’t seem to understand that we need to feed ourselves. Yes, in the same careful, nutritious way that we feed other ones that we love. And so I just think of it as parenting yourself. You know, and obviously, that goes back to my having lost my mom and not had her really for a lot of my upbringing. And I’ve another book I haven’t written yet, but it’s called Mother Hunger. Because there is something that happens to those of us who lose our mothers early and, or who have a crummy mother, or a lot of women out there who have deep wounds from having been under mothered or badly mothered, so to me, and yet I’m so I’ve always been so rich with friends. To me, the hurt, the pain point is this parenting thing, the motherhood thing. So I just, I think of it just in different kinds of semantically different, but it’s the same idea. You need to learn to be your own mother, to be your own parent, to be your own loving adult who takes care of you. And stop being such a baby.

Katie: Right and stop waiting for someone else to do it for you. The way out is through it. And you are the one that can do that for yourself.

Lynne: Yes, yes. So yeah, we’re agreeing on different language around it and different framing, but it’s the same idea. Exactly. Yeah. And it works. And you’ve done it, and I’ve done it. And I’ve seen many other people do it. And I hope everybody gets the message. Because you can absolutely do this.

Katie: Yeah. And for you listening right now, I don’t care what you’ve done in your life, you are worthy of love and belonging. I don’t care what you have done, you are worthy of being loved. You’re worthy of belonging, you are worthy of taking care of yourself.

And I hope you hear me.

Lynne: Yes

Katie: So I want to go back to your cookbook again. So it has a really interesting title Brownies for Breakfast, the cookbook for diabetics and people who love them. So tell me a little bit about what what is behind that title for you.

Lynne: The brownies for breakfast idea. I don’t know where that originated, it was just it came out of the blue, came out of nowhere. Because truly, I think a brownie if you make it my way is the perfect breakfast is a great little form factor. Who doesn’t love a brownie, everybody loves a brownie. I mean I’ll just give you a little taste here. I’ll leak this from the book. You make it with pumpkin puree, and nut butter and cocoa and you sweetened with monk fruit or your favorite sweetener. And I have a whole discussion in the book about the new sweeteners. And so it’s not butter, which you know, nuts, great food and great healthy fat and protein. And then the pumpkin is a vegetable for Pete’s sake and is full of good nutrition. And there’s something about the combination of the nut butter and the pumpkin that just totally eliminates the need for flour for oil. And there’s no dairy needed in this recipe. So it’s vegan. It’s sugar free. And it’s yummy. It’s a gooey, fabulous brownie. And I tell you how to frost it up. Who wouldn’t love that for breakfast? I would. Also, who isn’t going to see that title and go wait what? So that was the idea. And the book also has recipes for donuts that you can bake. Yes and that are the same idea. They’re vegan, they’re whole food, They’re nutritious. They’re great. And believe me, I have never met anyone who wouldn’t take one look at a donut with pink frosting and sprinkles on it and go, Yeah, give me one of those, I have two. And it’s good food. And for those of us diabetics, and having been one for so long, I mean, the idea that I can eat a doughnut and I can eat two doughnuts, and it’s just nothing but a great meal. So you’re welcome. But you have to get the book so you know how to do it. And that it’s all the recipes have the same idea that things that are familiar to you, and that you’ll go Oh, you mean I can make that this way? Yes, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, your pancakes, all these really familiar ordinary foods that you may not have thought of as health foods. They are now because you’ll have the recipes to know how to do it. And it’s all easy. It’s like five ingredients or three ingredients. Really simple. And soup is a thing that Americans don’t eat much of soup a lot. Yes, it’s just the most wonderful way to eat vegetables and nourish yourself. And then stick it back in and free some of it, put it back in the fridge. Use it as sauce, my red pepper soup mix the most wonderful sauce for lots of different things. My mushroom soup is like I don’t know how many ingredients, onions,

and mushrooms and broth. Salt and pepper it, but then the secret ingredient when it’s all cooked, and it’s sat on the stove for about an hour and it’s all mushy. And you get to put it in a blender. And then you add a little dash of whiskey. And I guarantee you that no one will eat your mushroom soup that doesn’t go oh my gosh. Why did you do this? You know? It’s just an old French recipe, you know? So easy. And mushrooms are fabulous food. Yes, that’s good food. Onions are fabulous. And onions are cheap, mushrooms not as much but they’re still pretty cheap. So and also people are so fond of saying well, it’s so expensive to buy that healthy food and you know always be eating. It’s just so expensive. No, it’s not. It is not. Little example, and I I have this in a mailer ready by the way to send out to you, if you sign up on my list. I’ll send you the rest of you for this. The other night. I had a couple people over because COVID we hadn’t been doing this but there were five people at the table. And I did a three course dinner. And everyone was just like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is so wonderful. It was salad, which the recipe is in the book. And then it was a phony beef stroganoff made with no meat. Really good. Yeah. Recipes in the mailer. And then it was a modest but perfectly drinkable little Pinot Noir, one bottle. The whole thing cost me 30 bucks.

Katie:Wow.

Lynne: And I said five people in a very nice way. Now where can you go and do that? Where can you get takeout food? Where can you eat? And this was all really nutritious, wonderful, healthy, fresh food with no preservatives and no sugar. And no gluten. Nothing at all. Fabulous. And it was so what’s the math on? Is it six bucks a person?

Katie: Yeah, yeah, you can’t you could you can’t get that unprocessed, that you could go to McDonald’s 99 cent menu, fill yourself full of crap.

Lynne: But there’s no 99 cent menu anymore.

Katie: See, that tells you how often I go to McDonald’s. I don’t even know that. Oh, forget about it.

Lynnee: This was with wine.

Katie: Wow. Yeah, that’s, I don’t drink anymore. That was a personal preference for myself. But I love that that includes wine!

Lynne: Where can you go out and get a glass of decent wine for $6? So do not tell

me, no whining about how expensive this is. It’s not, it’s a way to actually save money on your food if you eat this way. And yes, it’s true. I am cheap. I know I am, it’s called frugal. I’ve been accused of that many times. It’s saved my butt many times because I know how to make an eagle scream. But I think it’s actually because you know what makes French cuisine so amazing. It’s because they understand starvation, and they know how to make food out of anything. You ask any French grandma worth their salt? How to do something a kitchen? She knows how to do it at nothing. And that’s what is a healthy way to eat. It’s a more healthy way

to eat.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And some of the best chefs I know that’s what they’re like. Oh, what do you got? Oh, you got an onion? You got some garlic. Oh, you got some chives over there. You got some of this. You got okay. And they’ll toss it together a little.

Lynne: I have used it up, eaten it up. I eat right down to the plastic shelves. Nice. Yeah. And you can too, if you have just a few tricks, grand tricks.

Katie: Awesome. I could talk to you all day Lynne.. This has been such a great conversation. I want to leave it though, as we’re wrapping up. Where can people find you? And where can they find your book. And I will put this in the show notes as well. But if you could tell us where they can find you so that they can. I cannot wait to go buy your cookbook. I didn’t know that there were donuts in there. For example, the other day when we passed this donut place. And we’re like, oh, that’s not healthy. There’s no such thing as a healthy donut. You told me about a healthy donot

Lynne: You’re gonna love unicorns, too. Yeah, yeah. So okay, it’s easy to find me because the simplest way is my website, which is Lynnebowman.com. But just remember that the first name is Lynne. And you can Google me with that and find out. So I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook. I’m on YouTube. But the way to talk to me directly, and I hope you will. I love it when people send me a note. And you can do that on my website. There’s a contact form, I answer all questions and inquiries. And I’m happy to hear from you. So please write me a note if you are inclined to. And I will if you sign up on my mailing list, which you can do on the first page of my website, then I won’t annoy you with anything. But I, every 2-3, weeks I get inspired. And I’ll send out a new recipe or a new way to do an old recipe. It’s all the same easy, good, delicious, healthy stuff. So I encourage you to sign up. And I love it when people send me pictures of what they’ve made. And especially if I can post it on social media. That’s really fun. So do that. And you can buy the book anywhere, literally anywhere that books are sold. So your independent bookstore, great, go in and ask for it. They can order it for you from their wholesaler. But you can also get it on online, you can get it on Amazon. It comes in a paperback form. It comes in a hardbound form which I really encourage you to buy because I want that puppy open on your countertop all the time. I don’t want it stuck up on the shelf. I want it being used. I want handprints and drips all over it please, you can get another one if you want to clean one. So it comes in Paperback or hardback, you can download it. But that’s not what you want in a cookbook. Right? You know, it’s people do it. And I love it when people actually read the book, it was intended actually to be read, as well as cooked from. So I hope you will take the time to do that. And then let me hear from you. I’d love that. Lynnebowman.com

Katie: Awesome. Thank you so much, Lynne, I’m definitely going to be signing up for your mailing list when we wrap today. And on buying a few copies of that book for myself and for people I love because I want the people in my life to be healthy, to be pain free. And to be living their best lives and putting real food, real fuel in the body is a great way to do that. What is a parting thought or idea you want to leave people with and more specifically for someone who may be new to this idea that you can have delicious food easily? Where would be a good place to start as a first step for someone who’s new to any kind of diet changes?

Lynne: I ask people to get off sugar right now. Yeah, and what I say is, if I said to you, yeah, I’m totally hooked on heroin, but I’m thinking I’ll cut back. What would you say to me? You’re gonna do that, honey, drop that crap, like a hot rock? Yep, quit now. It will take you about two to three weeks before your saliva reinvents itself and chemically changes in your body. And you will never be healthier. I mean, you will immediately feel the benefits of changing the way you eat if you stop eating sugar in any form. And that sounds tough, but that’s what I wrote the book about. No, it’s not tough. That’s how you do it. You can do it and the benefits are huge, huge. So that’s what I want for you. And then just one thought after that is

eat joyfully, heat joyfully.

Katie: Oh, I love that. I love that.

Lynne: Because there is a lot of joy. I mean food can be pleasurable, you know, we have a lot of social outings around food and ultimate pleasure. Yeah, if you eat with no guilt, if you eat wonderful food, you can eat joyfully, really joyfully.

Katie: I love that, that is a great note for us to wrap on. Thank you so much for joining me here today when and sharing your wisdom with the audience. Thank you. I learned a lot and I’m going to be staying away from birds from now on. So I appreciate the heads up on that I wasn’t even aware and I pride myself on being pretty aware. But it goes to show there’s always something new to learn. Always something new, always something new.

Lynne: Thank you so much.

Katie: Thank you. So this is concluding this episode of the pain changer. I hope you guys are still with me. Next week. I’m going to be doing another solo episode I’m going to tie together these last few episodes and attach it to some of the patterns that I see within my practice as a cognitive movement practitioner. So I hope you’ll join me again next week. And remember until then, chronic does not have to mean permanent