Transcript - Holli Thompson: Hack Into Your Nutritional Style

Holli Thompson: Hack Into Your Nutritional Style – #175

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Dave: Hey everyone, it’s Dave Asprey with Bulletproof Radio.

Today’s cool fact for the day is that we’ve always assumed your height is genetic. It sort of is, but new research shows that it’s only about 80% genetic and the other 20% is nutrition and environmental factors. Better nutrition is something that we think is a reason that average height keeps increasing. You might argue, and I probably would, that it’s improved access to food. Since we eat more now, it’s not necessarily that we’re getting more nutrition.

And as for the genetics, it looks like there’s about 697 gene variants that impact your height. So if you’re short, there’s great hope for your children, but for you, well you’re probably still short. Likewise if you’re tall and you don’t fit in economy section, that would be me, there’s no hope for you either, but hey, there are worse things than being tall.

Today’s guest is Holli Thompson, who’s the creator of Nutritional Style, which is a health and nutrition blog, and consulting company. She’s a certified health coach, health professional, and a Myers Briggs Practitioner, which is really interesting. She’s also a raw food chef, and if you’ve listened well, you know that I’ve been a raw vegan. I’m not a raw vegan today, but that I’ve used a lot of the raw vegan cooking techniques that I worked on in some of the Bulletproof recipes as well.

You can find Holli at HolliThompson.com, and you’ll also see her writing on MindBodyGreen. By the way, shout out for those guys. They’re good friends. TheDailyLove, hey Mastin, love you back. EndlessCancer.org … Awesome Holli, you write for good people.

Most importantly you can check out Discover Your Nutritional Style, which is a new book that Holli released and I just had chance to look at an advanced copy.

So Holli, welcome to the show.

Holli Thompson: Thank you, I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dave: So you’ve been a former big time, New York City corporate type who moved to the country and started a new career. How’s that going so far?

Holli Thompson: (laughs) Well, I’m sitting here staring out at the absolutely most beautiful view in the world … a huge old historic barn against a sunset on the East coast. So I’d say it’s going pretty well. I didn’t really intend to stay this long, maybe. Wasn’t quite sure how it would work out, but that’s kind of the way life took me. I still get into New York pretty often, at least once a month.

Dave: Nice.

Holli Thompson: And more of these days, more of these days with my book.

Dave: Yeah, I was in New York 2 weeks ago for my book and to meet with some other friends out there. No matter where you live, it seems like if you write books, you end up in New York pretty often.

Holli Thompson: Yup, absolutely.

Dave: So I did something similar. I’m looking out at the second most awesome thing or view you could look at. It’s Vancouver Island. So I’m looking out over Salt Spring Island and some water, and building an organic farm where I live, because that’s one of the ways I know to increase my resilience. To live around beautiful stuff.

Holli Thompson: Right.

Dave: So I’m working on it much like you are.

Holli Thompson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dave: What made you make your transition to looking at this nutritional typing sort of thing? What did this?

Holli Thompson: Well what happened was … really right after I left New York and left my big glamour job in the city, I moved here to a farm and got sick and started to get basically all kinds of things that I’d never dealt with in my life. I was on a fast track in New York, flying all over the world, running multimillion dollar business and basically held it all in. I moved to the country and started to get incredibly, horrible migraines. Debilitating migraines, where I was hospitalized actually 3 times in a year. I also started to get allergy symptoms. I had never had allergies in my whole life. Both of those segwayed into chronic sinus, so I ended up with 7 sinus infections in 1 year. I was basically living on … every time one of these things would happen, I would be at the job living on a fist full of pills. Living on antibiotics. Finally that one year, where I had 7 in one year, I felt great on the antibiotic and horrible off of it. So when you get to the point where an antibiotic is your feel good drug, you know you’ve got to do something about it. My immunity was compromised, basically thrown off my healthy gut bacteria. I also started getting sick all the time. Every virus, every cold that came around, I would get sick. It affected my fertility. I wanted to have a baby at that time. I could get pregnant, but not keep the pregnancy. So it was a very … it was a sad time, and then went through several miscarriages, which threw my hormones off. This cycle went on for several years, Dave, where I felt like I was on a roller coaster. I eventually adopted my son. My son is from Russia and that was a wonderful thing. Within months of bringing him home, I broke into this viral rash, which was mononucleosis, with still getting all of the other things … chronic migraines. Here I was with this new baby, but then living in fear that a migraine would strike, or a sinus would strike. Whatever. So went through this lovely period for several years, and finally decided to take my health in my own hands. I’d always been interested in nutrition … a student of nutrition. I had spent all my free time at … not just health spas to lay around … but to hike, work with people, work with holistic practitioners, and get into alternative medicine. I really turned back to that after years of trying Western medicine … really turned back to that and realized that there was something in my diet that wasn’t right. And it wasn’t like I was eating a bunch of junk food or processed food. I really felt that the way through my healing was going to be through my food. When people get sick or when you feel awful when you’re sick, it is very difficult to care about your food. Or it’s difficult to do what you need to do. You know that … or you may have worked with people … we think that people are very sick … that need our empathy and need our help to get them good food because in America … I mean here we are … what we have to grab if you’re not feeling well, is not healthy.

Dave: Yeah.

Holli Thompson: And is not what we should be eating if we don’t feel well. So I had actually gotten to that point, even knowing what I knew. Where I was grabbing what was there, and it was not working.

So I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, recognized that my immunity was compromised and found a holistic nutritionist. Really did the nutrition piece myself. This person was fantastic at compounding supplements, which I did need at the time. I was so weakened by everything, but really did the food piece myself.

After going through that, then coincidentally my son going through a period like that … where he all of a sudden developed asthma and went from being a healthy, robust little boy to being very sickly … worked with him the way I did. The thing that we had in common was that we were both dairy intolerant. We both had an intolerance to dairy that was creating an inflammation, that was at the root cause of all of those things.

Once I figured that out for myself, and then subsequently my child, who’s my adopted child from Russia, it made sense. Right? It made sense for his genetics that he might have an issue with dairy.

It changed everything. It changed everything for me. I realized that I need to share this. It was something that was profound in my life and my child’s life. If I hadn’t done this work … if I hadn’t done the hard work of figuring this piece out, I don’t know where I would be. I would still be back there so many pounds heavier and chronically sick all the time. Basically not living the life I was meant to live. Not feeling I’m meant to feel and my son too.

So that was my big moment. My big ah ha moment was really when it came down to my child. When I saw what he went through with the permission of a medical doctor, saw how changing diet … removing all dairy from a little kids diet, which can be a tough thing for a mom to do, right? It was profound.

I ended up going back to school and my mission became to share good health. How to find good food in America. That came through natural cooking school. It came through going back and getting certifications that I needed and wanted, to work with people and coach people. The rest is history.

I started Nutritional Style about 5 years ago. Then have been working on my book, Discovering Your Nutritional Style, for the past couple of years. So that’s it.

Dave: We have a few things in common there. You’ve had fibromyalgia, chronic migraines, allergies, and I’ve had all of those things. I lost 100 pounds … and chronic sinusitis for 15 years.

Holli Thompson: Wow.

Dave: So making out the antibiotics that make you feel better and all.

Holli Thompson: Yeah, inflammation.

Dave: Yeah, inflammation is underlying everything. For me, one of the surprising things that I’d found … this is top of mine because I had finished shooting a documentary … we just wrapped the final shoot 3 days ago. A documentary on environmental molds, and how a moldy house can actually trigger dairy allergies, can trigger asthma, migraines and all that. I sort of went back … I’m like, wait a minute, when I was a little kid I was inflamed. I had nosebleeds all the time and frequent bruising. I had all these signs. I lived in a water damaged basement. I realized that the environment, even when I was a young … very, young … 2 or 3 year old kind of boy, I didn’t … like my parents didn’t know. I didn’t know. I had all of these things going on … the asthma, the rashes and all that. What did that do to my gut biome? What did that do to my whole life, lifespan, evolution, and the way my body grew? So I think it had an affect. When I was re-exposed, my dairyologist went through the roof … compared to what they used to be. It’s kind of interesting.

Holli Thompson: Very interesting.

Dave: Do you think that there was a trigger when you left New York? Because you handled dairy well in New York? Or were you not healthy in New York either?

Holli Thompson: You know, I was managing chronic sinus, but the level of when … after I moved. I think one of the triggers being here in Virginia … First of all, it’s a different climate. It is moist. It is humid. Everyone says that, everyone who moves to Virginia gets allergies of some kind. Plus we were living on a farm, so you’re exposed to all kinds of things. I actually had a doctor say to me, well some people just shouldn’t retire. Some people shouldn’t jump off the fast track.

Dave: (laughs)

Holli Thompson: When you’re in the hospital and you’ve got a migraine, so that they have you on a morphine drip, you really don’t want someone to tell you that.

Dave: Yeah.

Holli Thompson: I think that’s interesting about the mold. Mold and yeast is powerful stuff. You know? So it’s very interesting.

Dave: How would you develop nutritional style? One question, and I have to admit, I’m just not remembering this from having gone through your book. There’s always a question about candida and do you not use nutritional yeast in food?

Holli Thompson: Yeah.

Dave: Or do you not? Where do you come down from a nutritional style perspective? Help people who are listening understand. How are you thinking about … what is nutritional style? And how you would approach something like nutritional yeast versus canola oil versus some other kind of food?

Holli Thompson: So specifically, nutritional yeast? Or just candida in general?

Dave: Well let’s just walk through what,

Holli Thompson: Talk about?

Dave: Whats your approach to nutritional style?

Holli Thompson: Okay.

Dave: Then let’s just zoom down to a couple foods like that.

Holli Thompson: Okay, so my basic premise for what is your nutritional style, discovering it, is that we’re all different. So what works for me, might not work for even my sister, or my mother, or my best friend. What started to happen in my practice, after working really with hundreds of women in groups and individually, I started to hear over and over, women coming to me saying, oh well, you know what? I mean I know I should eat this way, but my friend just did this diet. She lost all the weight, and I want to try that. So I saw … started to watch women in particular, but guys too, jump from one style of eating to another without tuning into what was working for them and what their body was doing on a very basic level. If you bring up something like candida, if you’re eating one way … let’s say you’re on a vegetarian diet … classic vegetarian diet that has maybe a lot of grains, beans, legumes, whatever and fruits. You’re not feeling great, but you’re doing it because you’re determined to not eat animal protein, that’s not working for you. The same thing for people … a lot of women now come to me … in fact, I just came from a meeting with a client who is white knuckle fighting to be a raw vegan. I think you said, you were a raw vegan for a while. I was a raw vegan for a while. I write about it in my book. I felt absolutely fabulous as a raw vegan, until I no longer did.

Dave: Yeah for about 3 months thereabout?

Holli Thompson: You know what? Longer, longer. I was white knuckling it. I was actually coming into my second winter. Basically stealing food from my kids plate and my husband. I’m making these delicious winter stews for my family and cooking seasonally. Then trying to be a raw vegan in Virginia when there’s 3 feet of snow outside. It wasn’t working.

So what started to drive me crazy were women like that, because I had gone through this, who were determined to try a particular style of eating and white knuckling through it, when it was clearly not working for them.

That’s really my entire premise. That we’re all different. Some things work really well for some people, and some things don’t. By tuning into our own bodies and what works for us, we can discover our unique nutritional style and it can change. It can evolve as we grow older. It can evolve if we move. It can evolve with the seasons, and should evolve with the seasons.

I just thought, really passionate about this, because so many people were trying to do something that wasn’t ultimately right for them. Because somebody else told them to do it. So I started to see 3 different styles of eating emerge from the client’s that I was working with.

One is what I call a healthy omnivore, which is someone who freely eats animal proteins, but yet we try to make them the healthiest omnivore possible. So that might be, being dairy free, gluten free, but needing lots of vegetables with having animal protein in their diet.

Another was what I call a flexible vegetarian. So very much a vegetarian diet where they can tolerate some grains, some legumes, and sort of a traditional vegetarian diet. Yet if they want to have a piece of fish, it’s not the end of the world. I like to say it’s food, not religion.

Dave: Is it true that fish are the vegetables of the sea?

Holli Thompson: (laughs) I don’t think so.

Dave: Oh darn. No, I’m just kidding. But,

Holli Thompson: No, but I do love sea vegetables.

Dave: There’s so many vegetarians who are willing to eat fish. Well, you’re not actually a vegetarian really, but it’s good that you’re eating some fish because you’ll get some omega 3’s. It’s okay. You’re not a bad person.

Holli Thompson: I know. And that was what was driving me crazy. The Earth is not going to stop moving just because you ate a piece of fish or you ate some grass fed meat. Some people who are trying to be vegans and they might have some fermented cheese, or they might have a piece of salmon or whatever. It’s like they’ll say well I’m a vegan, and we’ll go through their meals and there’s animal protein all over the place. I was like, you technically are not a vegan. Let’s just drop that label.

So Discovering Your Nutritional Style came out of that. It came out of working with all these women. What I’m really passionate about is helping people find out and figure out what works for them. Which foods work and don’t work? I think it’s just as important to know what doesn’t work as it is to figure out what does.

Dave: In the Bulletproof diet, I do this road map and a book coming out … I have a list of kryptonite foods.

Holli Thompson: Yeah.

Dave: It shared an awful lot in common with your list of dangerous liaisons, your toxic,

Holli Thompson: Right.

Dave: And potentially dangerous foods. What are the foods that are toxic and dangerous on your program?

Holli Thompson: The serial killers. GMO’s, processed foods, trans fats, processed corn syrup, processed sugar. I mean, processed sugar is the devil. You know? The artificial sweeteners are the devil. I think if anybody, no matter what you’re eating … if you can get those things out of your diet, you’re halfway there really, but for a lot of people incredibly, it’s incredibly difficult. Even with the knowledge and science behind it.

Then I get into what I call the bad boys of nutrition. Those are some of the inflammatory foods that are commonly inflammatory in a lot of people. So that might be … that’s like your dairy, your gluten, your soy, your sugar, processed foods, night shades. I think we all owe it to ourselves to figure this piece out. To find out, do you have a legitimate dairy intolerance? Do you have a gluten intolerance?

You probably have thought and found this too, but so many people don’t want to come face to face with that reality. They are … usually they’re the ones to tell me, I need all this help, I can’t lose weight, and I feel awful. My energy is low. The first thing out of their mouth is, I just can’t give up bread.

Dave: Yeah.

Holli Thompson: Bing, gluten intolerance. But,

Dave: Yeah, can you say addict?

Holli Thompson: Yeah, exactly. These foods are addictive. They’re physiologically addictive to most people. They’re producing different things in their bodies, that their body continues to want. For me, it’s mystifying that people often know, and will come to me and tell me. Then we will work together over time, to really … a lot of the work I do is getting people actually accept that food is as powerful as it is. That it does have as a profound effect on your body, as we saying it does.

Dave: It’s one of those things where we’ve almost been taught over the last 40 years, that exercise is more important than food. You eat whatever you want. As long as you exercise enough, you’re a good person, and you’ll be thin. I’m a 300 pound guy and I work out like 15 minutes a week, and I just wear the electricity stuff, but I look better now than I did when I was 18 or 25. And it’s all food. Really, exercise isn’t that big of a variable. It’s like 5% for me.

Holli Thompson: Right, right. Me too. me too. I mean as long as I move and do something,

Dave: Yeah.

Holli Thompson: I feel great and I feel toned. I think that food has a lot to do with your skin tone. Food has a lot to do with your muscle tone. Because if you’re feeding your body the right fuel, your body’s producing healthier cells. Your body is … You’re going to look younger. You’re going to be more toned. You’re going to look … your skins going to be more clear. It shows. So I totally agree. I have a lot of people come to me who exercise too much,

Dave: Yeah.

Holli Thompson: who are over training, and then trashing their bodies with the wrong foods as you said. They’re the ones … they have like these amazing physiques, but they look probably 10 years older than they need to. You know?

Dave: How do you diagnose over training in someone who comes to you looking for diet help? Like Chloe has, I’ll just say an exercise problem, or a stress problem really, which is how that manifests.

Holli Thompson: It absolutely is. I think I can usually see it on their face. I mean if you … you can see it. You can kind of see that over trained … usually the skin is very dry. Their body is in a constant state of inflammation and repair. So they’re not giving … you can tell if they’re not giving their bodies the correct nutrients to cool all of that inflammation. If you’re not giving your body a break, if you’re not adding some balance in. Yeah. Usually the face. You see it in wrinkles, dry skin, and bumpy skin. They don’t have that glow that they want, but they have great bodies.

Dave: Yeah, it’s easier when you’re young. That’s for sure. I have a good number of people who come to me who are phenomenally successful. They’re around 30. They’ve burned a lot of their, sort of, youthful vigor. They’re running companies, running ironman’s and training. Guess who are professional triathletes? They train and sleep. That’s all they do. They eat, train and sleep. To try and put that on top of running a company, being a young parent, and all that stuff, it does come from somewhere. Maybe it comes from your chi. (laughs)

Holli Thompson: Right. (laughs)

Dave: You can only do it for so long before you start to break.

Holli Thompson: Yeah.

Dave: Then you can see it in their face is what you’re saying?

Holli Thompson: Yeah, and their chi is not unlimited. You know?

Dave: Do you use lab testing for food allergies?

Holli Thompson: You know, I don’t. I know a lot of nutritionists do. I don’t. I think that even if I were to, I think the best way to tell is to do it yourself. Remove the food completely, 2 to 3 weeks, and then add it back in.

Dave: (laughs)

Holli Thompson: When you do that, it’s like, ah ha. Hello.

Dave: Yeah.

Holli Thompson: Guess who has a dairy intolerance or whatever it is? Again the crazy thing with that, is that a lot of people still, and the smartest people in the world, will still get in there and try to figure out how it possibly could have happened, and not have been what they just worked 2 to 3 weeks to prove.

Dave: (laughs)

Holli Thompson: I’m not kidding. The smartest people in the world will say, well do you really think so? I mean, I did have a stomachache when I ate that bread. But gee, I don’t know, because I’ve had a whole lifetime of not having a stomachache. And it’s like, ahh, that’s the whole reason you went without bread for 2 to 3 weeks and then added it in, is so that you can see how you genuinely react to this, but it’s funny.

Dave: I try to overcome that resistance in people using the data. If they don’t use the blood tests, I put out a free app called Food Detective, that looks at your heart rate after a meal. If you eat something you’re sensitive to, your heart rate elevates above 16 beats per minute. So you could get the rationalists, who are like well, it’s something else, but then if they had bread 4 meals in a row and it always elevated, they can’t say, well I had coffee that meal. I ran the next meal. They could run out of excuses after a while. Okay, I guess the data is kind of eh, and they have to face reality, because they have a mirror. The mirror is in the form of data versus the mirror that you can see, and their face looks broken.

Holli Thompson: Right.

Dave: You can see someone who’s drained. It’s like a delicate dance when someone really doesn’t want to give us their drug of choice, which may be gluten. It may be dairy protein, casein. It could be corn, or sugar or whatever it is, right?

Holli Thompson: What’s your app? We all need your app.

Dave: It’s called Food Detective. It’s on the iPhone only. I’m working on the android version.

Holli Thompson: Awesome.

Dave: It’s free. I just want people to not walk around inflamed all the time, so I’m not trying to sell anything here, but it

Holli Thompson: No, no I want to share. I mean I’ll be sharing this with my people.

Dave: Oh, thank you.

Holli Thompson: Yeah. No, no, no, we need to share that. I think it sounds great.

Dave: There’s so much you can do when you get rid of the baggage of all these allergies. Because as you know, because you’ve done it for yourself, it’s like your willpower that you’re holding. That you are using that willpower to push against something. You remove all those inflammation things, and all of a sudden, I don’t have to push that hard.

Holli Thompson: Right.

Dave: I can move more things now.

Holli Thompson: Yeah.

Dave: And for me, as an entrepreneur and a dad, and a guy who didn’t have that when I was younger, to have it now … this is kind of fun. I’m having a party.

Holli Thompson: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yeah, I think that once you do remove those things and you get to that point, as you said, it’s easier to sustain. People say, well how do I do it? Oh, it’s so difficult. Oh, I just don’t have the energy for that. It’s like, no. I mean it’s like anything else. It’s like a muscle. Once you know how to do it, and you make it a part of your life, then it’s easy. You feel so good, and you feel like crap when you don’t.

Dave: (laughs)

Holli Thompson: What’s the option? Why do you want to feel like crap?

Dave: Yeah, once you recognize not feeling crappy,

Holli Thompson: (laughs)

Dave: that really motivates you to feel good.

Holli Thompson: Yeah.

Dave: That was my experience as well. Here’s something else that I love to chat about. You talk a lot about cleansing.

Holli Thompson: Yeah.

Dave: So the way you do cleansing … how do you do cleanse? What is a cleanse, according to a nutritional style approach?

Holli Thompson: So just like in the same way that people have different nutritional styles, different ways of approaching what they eat or their diet … if we do a cleanse together I break my cleanse into different levels.

So if you are coming to me from a processed food, you’re eating fast food, or you’re not eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, you’re coming to me eating animal proteins 3 times a day. So we’re going to do definitely a whole food cleanse. I don’t believe in taking that person … I think taking that person to a juice cleanse is kind of crazy and would make them very sick and then unhappy. Basically they’d come out of the juice cleanse and be ravenous for food and you’ve lost the whole ballgame.

So I generally prefer to do whole food cleanses. If someone is already almost vegan, then we might add in more liquid nutrition than if they’re an omnivore and eating meat 3 times a day. I do like the idea of giving the digestion a rest. I love the idea of removing those inflammatory foods that are commonly inflammatory in those people. The reason I love that is because it’s itself experiment and it’s a way of discovering … starting to discover what your nutrition style is and which foods are a problem for you.

I absolutely remove all of those inflammatory foods if the person can take it. Believe me I’ve worked with people who couldn’t take that. Their systems just wouldn’t tolerate it and again they’d be sick. So you remove the inflammatory foods. You eat good. You know, 3 meals a day. If you can do 1 liquid nutrition meal, great. In the morning terrific. Maybe 2 depending upon where you are in your path.

Then go through that for a good 2 weeks. I like the 2 week method. Then ease out of it and learn. Use the … what we talked about before, about adding back in the inflammatory foods. Use that technique to learn what your problem foods are. Is that, is it actually … is dairy a serial killer for you? Or is gluten a problem for you? The interesting thing is, those inflammatory foods are problematic for so many people that it’s rare to find instances where they’re not. How about that?

Dave: Yeah. When you look at the total bucket of inflammatory foods the odds of someone responding to at least one, are very large.

Holli Thompson: Yeah.

Dave: Why is it invisible? People who have a food inflammation problem and aren’t paying attention to this stuff, are like no, I feel fine. Why do they not see these foods that are causing inflammation?

Holli Thompson: I mean, I think they’ve had a lifetime of it. They’re not putting the connection between maybe their acne and the pizza that they eat 3 times a week. Or dairy is something … I work with a lot of kids and moms with teenagers. Dairy is something that shows on your face often, if you’re a teen. You know, moms want to say, well he eats a lot of candy. Well maybe, but I’d look at the pizza.

Dave: Yeah.

Holli Thompson: I’d take a look at the dairy. So I think it’s again, it’s just people believing that connection. Not quite wanting to face that internal inflammation is going to manifest as acne, wrinkles, dry skin, achy joints, early arthritis, sinus infections, migraines, all of the different … I have a whole list of what I call early warning signs, that tell you that you know what, there’s probably some low level inflammation going on. There very well might be something you can do about it with your food. I think that’s a key thing that I want people to get with this book.

Dave: That’s a really important message. That there’s all these things. If you’re color blind, you’ll not know you’re color blind because you’ve always been that way. Until you do a little test and you’re like oh wait, you can see a difference? I don’t see a difference. That’s the thing that’s kind of the gateway drug to paying attention to yourself. If you just seem to feel really good for a couple of days and go wait, could that be my normal state?

Holli Thompson: (laughs)

Dave: And then start working towards that.

Holli Thompson: Yeah, yeah. I had a woman … I mean I love this story. I’ve had so many … so many people have a similar story, but this one in particular … we did a cleanse a year ago and this woman literally called me and she said, oh my God, I was driving to work and for no reason at all, I just started laughing. I had this feeling like I am just so happy to be here. I am so happy to be alive. And she said … and I started to say to myself, are you losing your mind? Am I going crazy? And she said … and then I realized it’s the cleanse, it’s the cleanse I’m on. I feel so good.

It was after about 4 days on the cleanse when she had removed all inflammatory foods, and discovered what was possible for her. If you go through life … I mean so many people feel bloated and achy after they eat dinner. They think that’s normal. They think that they’re supposed to feel that way. If you’re eating something that’s inflammatory, that’s going to do it.

But then go have … I remember when I first had … started to eat raw vegan … and first had a raw vegan meal. I had eaten so much food, but I felt so amazing. I felt so light and my gut felt so clear. You know, I’ll never forget that. We were … I was with a friend of mine … we’re just saying wow, this is extraordinary. We just ate so much food. This was a long time ago. Yet we feel fantastic. There’s no bloating. There’s no icky feeling. We wouldn’t want to go lay down and take a nap.

When you start putting those … you know, the cause and effect together for food, that’s when stuff starts to happen. You know, when you start believing it.

Dave: Yeah, it’s … at this point if you’re still out there believing food quality or the type of food you’re eating doesn’t effect how you feel, you just have to say you’re not paying any attention at all because it’s just … there’s just too much data and if you pay attention you can usually feel it.

Holli Thompson: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Dave: Well Holli, there’s a question that I ask everyone who comes on the show, and the question is, given all the things you’re learned in your life, not just about nutrition and food, what are the 3 most important recommendations you have to people who want perform well every single day? What would you tell people is most important?

Holli Thompson: You know, number one is to be happy. I mean you can eat all the great food in the world, you can run, you can have your fitness everyday, but if you’re miserable doing it, you are doing more harm than good. I really believe that. It kind of comes back to this white knuckle approach I talked about. If you’re over training, over measuring your food, and over obsessing what goes in your mouth, it’s not a good thing.

Number 2 would be to get some movement in. Get some movement in everyday. Your food I believe is your lifeline and it’s the key to living a long healthful life, and being the best you can be, but your body needs to move. It was designed to move. Sitting is the new smoking. Get up, get out of your desk, move.

Then number 3 is figure out your nutritional style. Believe it. Believe your body. When your body tries to tell you something, listen to it and honor it, because our bodies are wise. They know what they want. They know what they need. If something is wrong, take a hard look at your food. If that doesn’t work, try something else, and get help. There are a lot of great health coaches, nutritionists and lot of fantastic advice. Nutrition is a new field, it’s a new science. As you have exhibited, we’re learning more and more everyday, but pay attention to what goes in your mouth. That’s the key.

Dave: Alright, wonderful advice Holli. Where can people find more info about your book? Where do you want them to go to pick up a copy and check out some of your work? Where can we learn more?

Holli Thompson: Yeah, come meet me at … come see me at HolliThompson.com, and that is H-O-L-L-I-T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N.com. You’ll see a link to buy my book there. Books available at Barnes and Nobles and on Amazon.com. It’s called, Discover Your Nutritional Style. There’s a fun quiz to take on my site, lots of weekly blogging and notes that go out. I’m a connoisseur of … I like to think of myself anyway, as a connoisseur of all things healthy. So beauty products, even down to home cleaning products. I really believe in a holistic nutrition lifestyle. So yeah, come visit me there. Love to see you.

Dave: Thanks Holli, have an awesome day.

Holli Thompson: Thanks Dave, it’s been great seeing you here.

Dave: If you’re looking for a way to know which foods are making you weak, check out the free app called Bulletproof Food Sense. This app is free. It’s called Bulletproof Food Sense and it’s available on the iPhone store.