The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Lori Balue: Empowering Women Over 50 to Achieve Lasting Health
Ever wondered how a complete health transformation is possible after 50? Join us as we bring you an inspiring conversation with Lori Ballou, a certified functional nutrition diagnostic practitioner and health coach, who shares her remarkable journey. From battling obesity and depression to achieving a 100-pound weight loss, Lori's story is a testament to the power of holistic health approaches. In this episode, she reveals the sustainable health solutions she discovered and now uses to empower women over 50 to manage their blood sugar and reverse diabetes.
Explore the often-overlooked aspects of gut health that play a critical role in weight management and overall well-being. Lori provides insights into the importance of addressing biofilms and overgrowths such as SIBO and SIFO. We discuss a compelling study on microbiome transplants in mice, shedding light on how gut bacteria influence obesity and epigenetics. This episode underscores the necessity of a personalized health approach, encompassing diet, rest, exercise, stress management, and targeted supplementation for lasting wellness.
Discover the significance of identifying food sensitivities for effective weight loss and health improvement. Lori discusses the benefits of eliminating foods like eggs and wheat to reduce inflammation and enhance immune function. The episode also covers the Mediated Release Test (MRT) and its role in pinpointing food sensitivities, allowing for tailored dietary changes that can lead to significant health improvements. With practical tips and personal anecdotes, Lori highlights the transformative power of nutrition and lifestyle changes, offering actionable insights to help you reclaim your health.
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Hello and welcome to an interview today with Lori Ballou. Actually, I didn't ask you how to pronounce your last name. Is it Ballou? It's Ballou, like the Baloo bear Ballou, ballou, ballou, yeah, ballou.
FLORENCE:So Lori is a certified functional nutrition diagnostic practitioner. She's an ADAPT certified function health coach who's helping women, in particular over the age of 50, to lose weight and to live the last half of their lives if we get another 50 years, but the latter part of our lives, you know in fantastic health. And she has been on her own health journey. She'll tell us a little bit about that. But basically she's lost a hundred pounds. But her mom she was telling me how her mom, when she was like a kid, put her on the first early Atkins diet when she was 200 pounds. So this has been a problem that she's battled, clearly for decades. She's the creator of the holistic low carb method, which is her signature health adventure experience, which is focused on weight loss and diabetes, the reversal of diabetes, so blood sugar regulation, and see what else do I want to say? I think that that's it. She's really here to empower us, to tell us what's possible, that even when you think you're never going to get this, it's possible to get it. Welcome, lori.
LORI:Thank you, thank you, I appreciate it. It's. I'm always really excited to get in here and talk about this, because it's just become my mission and my passion, because it took me so long to get the results that I would find my solution. So I just kept looking, I kept reading books and I just trying to find my weight loss solution. So, yeah, finally got it. And it wasn't until I was at least 53, I think 5354. And so it's like, oh my gosh, finally the solution is in front of me and I want every woman, especially women in their 50s, to know that they don't have to struggle, that there is a solution, and then that the solution is also a diabetes solution.
LORI:Because why? Why settle for something? Why settle for prediabetes or diabetes and the risk of all of that, all the complications of that process, because it's all the same metabolic dysfunction and that leads to the Alzheimer's and dementia. But if we can prevent that, this is what my passion is and it's my promise that anybody who wants this information and wants to get together with me, I'm going to lead you to it, because everybody deserves to have it. So the information needs to get out there.
FLORENCE:Thank you and tell us a bit more about your journey. So when it started, you know what it was like at the worst, like what you did to turn it around and what your life is like now.
LORI:Yeah, so, like you were saying, it did start when I was younger. It must've started in grade school and I was the only one out of seven to have obesity. But I also had major depression and my mom. I remember my mom trying to take me to a psychologist but I couldn't talk, I wouldn't talk, and so they couldn't do anything with me. And then I just remember just being like completely absent in just like in a solitary space, but it so she put me on Atkins and that pretty much brought me back to life. I was able to kind of reset my metabolism and get down to, I think, about 115, kind of stay there. So it stabilized me. So that was one of the things that must have really set the stage for me as an adult.
LORI:And so, you know, throughout my whole life I've been on diets and losing the weight, gaining the weight back and starving myself, like most women do, because you know what do you do? You're trying to figure this out. They say we need to do this so that we eat too much, so to lose the weight we need to eat less. And yet Matt didn't ever work for my brain, because I always had in the back of my brain. There was always this feeling of not having optimal health, like there was always the fear of gaining weight back and of not living, of not being able to feel excited. And I didn't know until later that I had food sensitivities. But that's what was causing me to not really thrive. And it wasn't until my mid thirties that I really started my weight loss journey. Because one day I just kind of walked in with my eight-year-old son from an outing and my then husband was sitting on the sofa, didn't even look at me and just asked me when are you going to lose the weight? I was 225 pounds, I had asthma, allergies, sinusitis, bronchitis. All the time I was afraid of cameras, didn't have any beautiful clothes, I was just miserable and I'm sure so many people can relate to that feeling and it's like you know, it's kind of overwhelming. What are you supposed to do? Well, you know, all I could think back was I gotta, because I've done Atkins a couple of times, but I never really made it a lifestyle. I still wasn't ready, I still wasn't there.
LORI:At that time it was, um, you know, back in my mid. You know it was the fat free era. It was Susan powder, it was the all the fat free. So I jumped on the fat free bandwagon, cut out all the fat kept in the sugar. I did lose weight, I got I had had two more children, so it fixed my PCOS because I did have PCOS at the time, so it did help me stabilize had two more children, gained all the weight back, probably between each one, lose it, gain it, and that went on.
LORI:But the interesting thing was I never felt healthy. I always had asthma, I always had the allergies, there was always the depression and then I would gain the weight back to 200 pounds. And so it was almost like I was trying to stay. You know, because even as I work with women today, it's like, oh, let's get you under 200 pounds, because I know how psychologically damaging it feels to be over 200 pounds. And so it was always like the goal was to stay under 200 pounds, no matter what. So you know, starve yourself or whatever. So that was the goal, no matter what. So you know, starve yourself or whatever. So that was the goal.
LORI:And so I eventually started researching ancestral health and paleo diets and I started reading those books by Cordain, rob Wolf, and I started studying Chris Kresser and I took, you know, eventually took his health coaching program and I studied. You know why we get fat. And then, all of a sudden, like HCG was the thing, and so I did HCG and it was amazing. And then, you know why we get fat. And then, all of a sudden, like HCG was the thing, and so I did HCG and it was amazing. And then, you know, everybody told me you're going to die, you can't eat like that. And I'm like you know, I lost, I must've got down to 145 pounds. I felt like I was resetting my metabolism and yet as soon as you bring the wheat and sugar back, it just all just turns that sugar switch back on and the insulin levels come back on and you gain it all back. And so, even though you can use it but you'd have to do it like every year and reset your weight every year, and it got to the point where I didn't want to be fat free. I didn't feel that was healthy.
LORI:The more you know nutrition I studied, the more and the more I understood is I needed more fat and so I didn't want to be fat free and so I stopped doing it. But that's when I turned the corner and started. I discovered the Bulletproof Conference and the Bulletproof Diet. And since I get excited about things I read, so when I study the books and I want to find out what's going on and how I could find that weight loss solution I've been looking for my whole life. I know it was there because I had a dream to wear, you know, a pretty pair of jeans and a white shirt and I'm like I could look good, just plain. You know, I just wanted to look pretty and plain in my body. That was my goal and um.
LORI:So that very day at the conference I met a 10 year brain cancer survivor on a keto diet and he was a body type scientist and I spoke to him after the conference and he took one look at me and he says you can't have any fruit Because guess what I was eating? Goji berries, golden berries, mulberries. I don't know if I how much sugar I was keeping in at that point, but that was my snack, my trail mix. I was a snacker. I used to do jelly beans. Now it was trail mix and it was the berries. So it was still too much, because when you throw fire on the flame and you have insulin resistance, that's still too much sugar in the body and so I couldn't tolerate it. My eyes were wonky, I was still 185 pounds, I had insulin resistance, I was probably pre-diabetic. I didn't go to the doctor, but I had all the symptoms of prediabetes, and so I don't know how far into that I was. But, oh my gosh, I started Bulletproof diet that very day, dropped 20 pounds I think it was pretty quick, like in within a month or two, and then nothing for three years. But I was excited. It turned my brain back on and my excitement came back. My passion came back and I could just there was just cloud that lifted off my brain back on and my excitement came back. My passion came back and I could just, there was just cloud that lifted off my brain, and so I got excited.
LORI:I started studying functional nutrition. I double certified in functional diagnostic nutrition, and here I am today getting this message out. And you know, I also want to let women know that even if we're in a stall, if our body has stalled and we're on a plateau, don't ever give up. Your body has changes inside that it needs to make. There's cardio metabolic actions happening. You're remodeling, you're deleting the visceral fat, you're correcting what's going on inside the body, and so if you're not gaining weight, that's still a success, and so don't beat yourself up, even if it's just two pounds a month. Two pounds a month can be 1010 pounds in six months.
FLORENCE:But as long as we never gain it back, that's the success we want to look for. So so you lost 20 pounds, so I don't know what the bulletproof diet is. Can you tell?
LORI:me it is a keto. It was a kid, the ketogenic diet at the time a keto diet. So I've kind of processed more towards low carb overall. So I do focus on low carb lifestyle overall, not necessarily a super high diet, but I do a focus more on protein because, being a woman over 50, I want to make sure that I keep my muscle mass and my bone health and so I do focus on muscle growth more so than a high fat diet for him. So I probably kind of fine tuned my way into more of a holistic low carb process.
LORI:And yet, you know, as I kept at it, you know, because that was just the start, that was just the 20 pounds, but there was so much more that I needed to do that I didn't know. So there was gut health to correct, there was hormones to balance, there was circadian rhythm to pull in and I needed to leave the job I was at and there was stress there. And as soon as I left that job started really focusing on my food sensitivities and getting out and grounding and tuning into my diet completely, I dropped another 20 pounds within a year. And so it's just really dialing it in and just knowing that it's a lifestyle, not a diet, that made the biggest change for me and it just gave me my life back. I mean I yeah, I was never beautiful. This is the first time in my life that I can feel beautiful in my body and I think that is something that you know, we don't have to be ashamed of, to want that, because if we're feeling beautiful, then you know we have vibrant health and that's healthy.
FLORENCE:Yes, yes, so you, that's healthy. Yes, yes, so you, uh you, you learn about the keto diet.
LORI:You start this um ketogenic diet and you lose 20 pounds.
FLORENCE:And then you didn't lose any weight for three years, for whole three years at a plateau.
LORI:I just plateaued, you know, I just had to. I think I had too much stress. And then, um, there were some gut issues because I remember one time I mean I remember when I would get out in nature and have road trips and get out and have a health adventure, which is why I'm very big on circadian rhythm I would lose a couple of pounds of weight, I would get feeling better, the weight loss would drop a little bit and then when I'd go back to my regular life, I would just start to gain the weight back again. And so part of what was going on was just stress and I and stress and gut health.
LORI:Because I listened to a podcast one time about with bio-optimizers and I was listening to all their enzymes and I decided I was going to do that program. So I could feel like biofilm disrupting and something letting go in my gut. And then all of a sudden I dropped another 15 pounds within three months and so we got. We know we need to address the gut health, like what's going on inside the gut, Cause that's 80% of our immune system and if our gut's not functioning then that can cause problems also with the brain and our neurological health and how we feel in the depression and that was one of the reasons why I couldn't succeed until I went on a keto diet was because I am sensitive to dairy and wheat and that was affecting my brain and my depression. And I do have to have protein and fat in my diet and if I bring back any sugar or too many carbohydrates, that just affects my brain.
FLORENCE:Yeah, and it's an interesting comment that you know. You know going keto. You're eating whole foods, you've bumped your fat, you've got out the junk and still it took three years for a lot of deep repair work to happen and it wasn't enough that you couldn't just do it with food.
LORI:It sounds like no, I couldn't do it with just.
FLORENCE:It wasn't just um food, yeah it wasn't enough to heal the microbiome, that you need to do some biofilm, which means you might have had SIBO or SIFO or something like that. Exactly yeah, did you ever test for SIBO or SIFO?
LORI:Not at the time because, um well, I yeah not at that time. I don't think so. I remember running a gut test, but by the time I did run a gut test by GI map, everything seemed to be fine. But I must have run it sometime after I did the enzyme change.
FLORENCE:Yeah, yeah. So for those of you you probably know, small intestinal bacteria overgrowth or CFO, small intestinal fungus overgrowth or candida overgrowth, which can be localized or systemic, and often there's biofilms around those pathogenic bacteria and the fungi and they need targeted interventions that no matter how amazing we eat or how much sleep we get or how much exercise or how much we pray, that sometimes the missing link is to actually work directly with those biofilms of those organisms and there's tests for those, those two conditions, and it's interesting for you to to sort of draw to light that for you it wasn't enough to just have your diet dialed in and your lifestyle.
LORI:No, because I never cheated. I never cheated. I felt better than I've ever felt my whole life. That was my solution, and I didn't know how I was supposed to lose more weight. But I just figured if I kept doing what I was doing, it would eventually work, because I was following the process. I read the book, I studied it, I went to the conferences I'm a voracious reader I listened to all the podcasts. I was doing everything I needed to do, but I had to biohack my health. I had to figure out what was the next steps for my specific body, and that's why I just eventually it's it all about diet, rest, exercise, stress and targeted supplementation.
LORI:That really made me turn on my body and to get it to be fine tuned to where I am now, that I could actually keep 95 pounds off while I build a muscle, and so it's just super exciting to be able to wake up and know to never have that feeling again, that feeling that I'm just going to gain the weight back, that this is never going to work, that even though I've done this, there's still that stress.
LORI:I don't have that stress anymore and I think that you know so many women wake up and we have that stress like you know that we're going to gain weight, that our clothes aren't going to fit, that you know we keep three sizes in our closet. I finally did that closet audit. I threw everything out and I am a size eight petite. I you know I could go, you know I could lose a little bit more weight. But that's not my specific goal. My goal is just to be strong and maintain what I'm doing, and if my body wants to let more go, then I'll be ready. But I don't know what the next step is for that, and I'll be ready but I don't know what the next?
LORI:step is for that.
FLORENCE:Got it.
FLORENCE:Yeah, so I had interviewed a scientist, a biochemist actually, who was talking about how, when he was in biochemistry school, he said one of the most memorable lectures that he had ever heard in all of his degrees years of doing his degree was a Japanese researcher who was studying the microbiome and he had a control subject.
FLORENCE:Oh my gosh, okay, so this is kind of complex, but and I don't even know how they do it he was saying to me when we were talking I don't know how scientists do this, but they can. They have these mice that are considered sterile in their, their colon. I don't know how you can make a colon sterile, but anyways. So they took these two groups of mice and they took microbiome species from mice that were obese and for mice that were thin and naturally slender, and and they put how does this go exactly? Okay, they put the microbiome in each of the two control control groups and and saw what happened. So the mice that had the microbiome of the slender mice, they got obese, they became obese, stayed slender and the microbiome from obese became obese.
FLORENCE:And then what they did is they introduced intermittent fasting and the mice that were slender lost weight and the mice that were obese did not Interesting and he said this is not okay. I'm not condoning this, but he said they literally the mice would starve to death like fasted to death. And they did not reverse, did not reverse.
LORI:Wow, yeah, three years, and I was doing intermittent fasting because I was following the Bulletproof plan, which is Bulletproof coffee and intermittent fasting, and I did it. Everything he said to do to lose the weight, yeah, and so?
FLORENCE:he's like what is this? Now, that's not the most interesting part of the story. The most interesting part of the story is that he then, like, got his graduate students and his labs and his team and his money to research this. He realized that certain bacteria strains that were common amongst the mice that were obese and the strains that were common amongst those that were slender right, those were how we picked the species, the bacteria species, and when he put them in these sterile mice, that the mice that were exposed to the species bacteria species that got obese and stayed obese and there was, they couldn't fast them out of it. They couldn't, they would starve to death.
LORI:I've never heard of that one. I have heard, no, they can put the microbiome of obese mice into thin mice and then they might. They will become obese as well. That's what my understanding is, but I haven't heard that one. That's very interesting.
FLORENCE:Well, that is that these mice were normal size the same ones, yeah yeah, so, but what the interesting part was he's like why, why, why, what is this? He realized it was epigenetics, that these bacteria species were actually flipping on uh switches and no amount of fasting flips it off, that you have to actually work with the microbiome, which is what you were talking about.
LORI:I have never heard that.
FLORENCE:I know it's so interesting. So he then showed that the epigenetics that okay, so we've heard this before, but I didn't understand the guy who was doing this research out of Japan. This research out of Japan, he showed that the bacteria that were the obesogenic bacteria species strains, were actually crying out for carbs, like crying out for the foods they fed on, the sugars and the carbs and the high carb foods. And it wasn't just about insulin. It was about what these bacteria, the proliferation of these bacteria. That is just so much more complex than we think. And he said that we have to actually have targeted strategies to actually deal with these pathogenic bacteria in order for and sometimes diet will do it, but not always, which is where targeted supplements, CFO protocols, CFO protocols right Come into play, where you actually have to work with biofilms because you have this biofilm that protects them from our immune system attacking them.
LORI:So, anyways, it's very fascinating, but it's really, really, I imagine, helpful for some people who are like I swear, I promise you I'm doing everything Exactly and that's why we really you know, that's a really good thing, because I mean I didn't know if I was doing something wrong and obviously I needed to heal my gut. So I don't feel bad about I didn't blame myself for anything. I mean I was just doing everything I needed to do and I figured, okay, now I'm listening to this and they say that this will help me lose weight. So I'm going to give this a try. And sure enough, it was like magic. It was like and I could feel stuff moving.
LORI:And so over the years I've been practicing like what supplements can help my body work better? Because I'm already doing the intermittent fasting, I'm already doing the diet. What you know, I needed to do stress reduction. I needed to do movement, the right movement, and I needed grounding in sunlight. Sunlight is like amazing battery action for me, because when I got the, you know, go out for solar sun and go out for a walk in the middle of the day oh my gosh, that just turns off my stress and it puts me into a fat burning mode, and that was part of how I lost the last 20 pounds was getting that dialed in. But then I also think I had to really dial back dairy and not do bars, but may focus most specifically on whole food and then take out whey, because I had left whey in until I figured out that I can't tolerate it because I am dairy sensitive.
LORI:And so, if you know, a lot of the times people don't realize that that there could be fighting and losing battles. So it's not that the diet is not working for you. What's interfering, like what's going on in the gut? What are your stress hormones doing and what food sensitivities are you dealing with? Because if you're eating, you know if you're eating a low carb diet but keeping in wheat, you know because they have that wheat gluten breads, that you have a still low carb and they they're still very inflammatory for most people and if you're eating those you're going to have gut dysfunction. And so I always tell people, especially on my YouTube station I got it out there it's like don't eat the wheat gluten. I mean it's such poisonous food, we don't want that in our diet. And and yet I mean it could still be a food bridge to still get off the processed food. So there's kind of like do the food bridge if you have to and if you've got severe depression and you can't give up the food completely. I can understand that. I have a family member that's going through that. You know it's either. You know I. I can't do it because I've got this depression and I need to eat this food. But slowly. Some people have to do it slowly. I just did it. I don't, I didn't do it. I didn't, I don't know. It just seems like I did it all at once.
LORI:Once I started doing keto but I had to work up. I started reading the wheat belly diet, why we went, what we need to do to lose the weight and all the ancestral health, but it's. You know. I remember thinking honey was still. You know, I worked at a natural food store. Honey is healthy for you. You can eat honey on a paleo diet. So I did. And yet I felt like my brain was out of control, like I still. I drove two hours one time to go pick up a raw apple pie that was saturated in honey, because that's healthy for you. It's just apples and honey. But my body was like, yeah, we're going to go get you some of that. That was part of my food addiction, that was part of my sugar addiction, and that's why I don't ever cheat either, because I don't want to feel like that anymore. So for me, once I got off sugar, I never went back to sugar and I won't touch it.
FLORENCE:That's amazing. That's amazing, lori. I just remembered. One other part about the mice study is that it was this that the mice that had the bacterial strain from the slender, normal weight mice in meals they could he could see that they were. That in between meals the body was burning fat. They'd eat, it would stop. The body would burn off the fat and the carbs in the meals and then between meals it would. It would go right back to burning off fat. That's how they stayed slender. That's how it worked. And the mice that that. That it couldn't, they could, could not. They were not burning fat between meals at that. That switch had been turned off by the bacteria.
LORI:Yeah, you got to fix the microbiome. You know, and that is something that I focus on, you know, cause I? I run functional diagnostic labs with my clients to see where the underlying, hidden healing opportunities are, where their weight loss blocks are. And someone asked me the other day, you know, is it really necessary to run the labs? I'm like you know, I helped my brother reverse his diabetes and get seen. His food sensitivities is like oh, I know exactly what I need to eat now to reverse my inflammation. He was very empowered to see that and it was easy for him to make the choices seeing that.
LORI:So there can be. You know, some people think you don't need them, but if you're sensitive to eggs and you're eating the eggs, you're going to have inflammation and so you need to take it out for three to six months or longer, depending on how your body reacts to that. Same thing with wheat. If you're been, if you're wheat sensitive, that's huge, that's a forever thing that you want to leave out of your diet. And because you will have inflammation, you will have your antigen.
LORI:You know, if you look at a GI map, it shows your antigen response in the body and your immune response in the body and there's some, and even your pancreatic function and the steticrit, which is your fat digestion. So if you're looking at all these markers, they're hidden healing opportunities and when you address them, weight loss can happen more readily. And so that's you know. It took me eight years to lose the rest of my weight. But if you can find this information in collapsed time, tests are going to be really worth the value of the information they give us so that we can correct everything.
FLORENCE:Right, so? So if it doesn't happen really quickly, so let's say you go on your low carb or your lower carb or your keto diet or your intermittent fasting and you're on whole foods, you've unhooked from all processed junk and it's not turning around pretty quickly. All the fancy stories that we hear on the internet then this is where, right, it's really good. Okay, what else is there? Don't spend years trying to buzz with the diet, because it's a piece of it and it's essential, like anything else you do cannot.
LORI:well, I think part of the problem is people look at it as a diet too and then they think they can go at a restaurant or on vacation. And if you really have a brain dysfunction, if you really have obesity and you have insulin resistance, every time you put more of the fire on the fuel you will just gain the weight back. But it messes up your willpower, your drive, your excitement. It upsets your brain, it makes you feel less positive and so you lose the excitement. I think that excitement is really part of the process of being on a weight loss journey and you want to look at it as a journey and a lifestyle change, because if you want your best health, it's not a diet that you're just going to do for for six months or three months and then and because diets you just gain the weight back you don't want to look at it as a diet. You want to look at as a permanent solution for weight loss, to reverse your risk for disease and diabetes. That's what you want to have and that's where you're going to get that radiant. Look, lose all the visceral fat loot. Turn off your disease causing genes in genes in your body by flipping that sugar. Switch off and, believe me, once you get there when you've done this for even just six weeks to two months to three months.
LORI:I've got a client that's 95% less pain in her body after working with me for four months. Her completely, you know, a completely new life. One and a half inches off of inflammation, off her feet One and a half inches, and all of her shoes are too loose and all the clothes are fitting now, and that's just for months, just to think, you know. But she didn't know what was going wrong in her body or why it was happening, and so it's so. It's really it's so much more of the fast track, everything that's happening, if you can address what's going on in the body and so you know, just like we take our car in, we need to take our body in for a check-in, for a checkup, and look underneath the hood, see what's going on.
FLORENCE:So talk to us a bit about food sensitivities testing. So for me it's always like wheat dairy sugar, wheat dairy sugar, wheat dairy sugar, wheat dairy sugar. Are you a human being? Wheat dairy sugar. Now I appreciate there's outliers with the dairy. Some people think they can do it and maybe some think they can or mostly get away with it, but for most people those are the common ones. How do you test for it? And there's so much controversy about whether or not they're very accurate. So tell us a bit more about that.
LORI:So the one that I use is the MRT by Oxford Technologies and it's a mediated release process where it's actually testing your red blood cells, your antigen response, the mediated response for antigen and inflammation in your body, and so your white blood cells will react and so they will shrink. And if you are reacting to the food that that you know with the blood, they will put that food into your blood and they will check the mediated response and so if you're reacting to it, they'll score that and it could be a green or it could be a yellow or it could be a red, and red isn't necessarily worse than yellow, isn't necessarily worse than red. It's just that if you're sensitive to it and you're reacting to it, you need to take it out to actually heal and seal the gut, because if you keep reintroducing those foods, you're going to continue to have leaky gut, dysbiosis, food sensitivities and inflammation in your body and you may never succeed at the weight loss. Even if you're starving yourself and trying to do all the right things, you're still going to have inflammation. And so if there's pain in the body, that's your body talking.
LORI:I remember having like pain in my elbows and that eventually went away, but I still hadn't fine-tuned all my food sensitivities. So if there's any pain in the body, like, what food are you reacting to? And, like you're saying, wheat is across the board pretty much from everybody. I've had a couple of people who may not be showing a reaction on wheat on a food sensitivity test but they may show it with the zonulin levels on a different test, and so you can, you know, run several tests to actually correlate between them. But yeah, that was what my problem was. I had red sensitive on dairy and wheat and that was causing depression because that was causing severe dysbiosis and leaky gut.
LORI:And you know, leaky gut, which was causing leaky brain and causing depression. And that's what's really interesting. If you think about it, you really kind of want to know that because it gives you the power to say you know what, I'm sensitive to that and that's like a poison to my body. I don't want to eat that. If you don't know that information, you may think it doesn't matter that you cause I you know, you might decide that you can just do intermittent fasting and have a piece of cake after dinner because you've been fasting and it's just a tiny piece and it's not going to hurt you. But if you have inflammation in your gut you're not detoxifying and you have high beta glucuronidase because the estrogen detoxification is stuck and not working and you know your colon is inflamed and you have all of this. Inflammation from food sensitivity is causing more problems.
FLORENCE:Then that antigen response in your body is going to keep you from healing and losing the weight that you want to have. And even if you don't have weight to lose, like exactly you could be thin, you could be one of the. You got the good bacteria species and the good genetics to be naturally predisposed to being a normal weight.
LORI:Yeah, I have a client that she's lost 10 pounds. She's at her goal weight but she is sensitive to the wheat. But she could actually she can actually do some dairy. She didn't show red on dairy and yet so she balances the dairy. So there are some people who might be able to do dairy, but most people have congestion. If you have any allergies or asthma or any kind of tinnitus and you drink you're eating or drinking dairy you have to think about how is that affecting you. Even one of my clients, she had jaw pain and when I finally it took me a year to get her off the dairy, but finally she got off the dairy and she's like, oh my God, the jaw pain's gone. Emj, huh.
FLORENCE:Interesting. So, um, um, uh, what was I going to ask about food, food sensitivity. So what did you discover about yours?
LORI:so mine is. I had the um trifecta and a wheat and see, the thing with wheat is the if you're sensitive to wheat, you're more than likely going to be sensitive to to corn and dairy because they have similar proteins and because they have similar proteins. And if you're highly allergic or highly sensitive to wheat, you're going to react to dairy and corn. So I definitely had that trifecta and what was really interesting was when I was paleo, when I still had dysbiosis and leaky gut, I was reacting to sweet potatoes, spaghetti sauce, zucchini, because what was I? I was eating those foods and they would always cause me to have weight gain and I didn't understand that at the time. But if you eat foods you're sensitive to, you're gonna have water weight, you're gonna have weight gain and you're gonna feel more bloated, and so I always thought that those foods just had too many carbohydrates for my body. But it turns out that they were foods I'm sensitive to, and even things like blueberries, like I still, to this day, have trouble with blueberries. Now I don't know if it's the sugar count that if I have blueberries I always crave more. So it could be a part of that sugar addiction or it could still be part of the sensitivity where it just sets off an immune response in my body. I'm not really sure with the blueberries, but they're, you know. But yeah, so I just I can't have whey. I react to whey with congestion. I had congestion my whole life. I would eat ice cream, anything with dairy. I would be doing that all the time.
LORI:And then I had this whey shake on the way to go visit my daughter. She was in Lemoore and I was in. I'm in Southern California and she's up in Fresno area. So I was driving up there drinking a whey shake and I was like so congested, coughing up and phlegm, and I'm like what is going on? And it just, you know, I didn't, I don't think I had run my food sensitivity test yet, and so when I figured that out, I'm like, oh my God, no wonder I've had all these problems all these years.
LORI:And then the other thing was this was about only a few years back I decided I can have some yogurt. I decided I was going to have some sheep yogurt because I didn't show sensitive on sheep yogurt, but the dose is the poison, and so you could have a little bit of cheese and maybe you react to dairy, but you could probably tolerate some cheese. It just depends on the dose. And then so I had eight ounces of sheep yogurt because I was going hiking and I'm like I'm going to have a little bit of higher carbs, I'm going to have some fruit and some keto granola. I woke up in the middle of the night just tossing phlegm out of my body. I was just congested. I've never seen anything like it. I was coughing and phlegmed over and it woke me up and I had so much phlegm it was I'd never had yogurt again. I mean I would never eat that much yogurt again, ever.
FLORENCE:I mean it was just a really severe reaction to something and that's the crazy thing is we get more sensitive.
LORI:Well, because you can finally listen to the noise in your body, is what it comes down to. Normally, we have so many food sensitivities and we can't hear what's going on. It's like going to a loud party and something drops. You can't hear it drop. Well, when you start taking out the food sensitivities you have, you stop eating them and then you bring them back. You can all of a sudden feel the inflammation, hear what your body's telling you and notice that you don't feel good when you eat it. And so that's what you want to do. You want to see can I bring this food back in three months or six months, or am I still?
FLORENCE:reacting, and so that's part of the lifestyle process and change that we have to go through. Yes, yes, yes, waiting people to do the full on elimination diet, rip the bandaid off, get down into you know, get down to the basics and then see how good you can feel and then bring them back in, but as long as they're like no, I'm giving up all these other things. I don't want to let go of this, or I don't want to, and then never really get to this lovely base where they become so attuned.
LORI:Well, I think the way I looked at it and the way my brother looked at it and another client. She goes oh, look at everything that I don't react to. These are what I get to eat. And if you don't have to have disease in your body and your brain can function, what are the opportunities that you can have in life? And what other foods can you learn to enjoy? Because it just takes a couple of weeks or six weeks to really ditch the taste and change your taste buds, change your bacteria, and once you change your bacteria you don't crave the same things. They never taste the same again, ever again. And so you know you can.
LORI:I, I'm a baker, my grandmother was a baker. I just baked everything keto, you know I don't. I I'm not full-on um carnivore. I still like to have. Like for saint patrick's day I'll make a irish soda break, because that was the big thing that I used to love to do, but I'll do it with almond flour. And then I also make a pecan loaf. I'm going to make it this weekend. It's a pecan loaf with pecan flour and pecans on top and coconut butter and eggs and that's it, and it actually tastes really good.
LORI:But you know, if for those people who want to have a little bit of something that makes you feel good. Those foods, you know they're not going to help you lose weight, but they're. They're like eating cake and so you want to look at it as a dessert, not necessarily something that you're going to, you know, eat all the time, but then you also got to look at stuff is, if you're going to binge on things that make you like, if you still have that sugar addiction where you know I still have a sugar addiction If I eat foods that make me binge, then I don't really want to eat those and I'll stop making them and I'll go a long period of time without having it, like if I were to have this. There's this one ice cream I'll have at Thanksgiving or Christmas with my brother and I just buy a pint, but I'll buy two pints so that we could share it and I will just eat it till it's gone and I cannot stop. And I'll have that with some keto carrot cake but and I'll have two pieces but that's it and then I don't want any more. But you know, but I will binge.
LORI:At the moment Now I can't stop it. I do the same thing with blueberries. So blueberries are no for me, because I can't control how much I will eat.
FLORENCE:Right, right, absolutely, yes, yes, amazing. This is so great. So is there anything else you would like us to know?
LORI:Anything else you would like to add. So the thing that I have really come in to understand, like the underlying issue is you know, we are trying to lose weight, we are looking for a weight loss solution, but I think underneath that people don't understand that when they do dial that in. And why it's more important than just weight loss is because when you turn off your sugar switch, become a fat burner and give up sugar for life, you have actually recreated the health of your body from the metabolism. You've reset your metabolism, metabolism. You've researched your metabolism and I have, from everything I've studied and read and understand this is the epigenetics process where you're also flipping off your disease causing genes. You can turn your disease switches off. You don't have to have prediabetes or diabetes. So you know if you need something else to understand, because a lot of the clients that come to me they don't just want weight loss, they don't want the pre-diabetes, they want to make sure that they're healthy and not in a nursing home. And so when you look at it like that, it's not that you're giving things up, You're looking at the opportunities and you're looking at an understanding that you don't have to have disease as you get older that you could actually live to your nineties or hundreds because you've chosen to. That's the opportunity, and there's still so many foods we can enjoy. Like I said, I just make everything keto if I want to eat it. It's just based on my food sensitivities, because I will react to butter, and so if I'm putting butter and cocoa together and those were both sensitivities I might have a problem with that, but one or the other or just a single serving won't hurt me as much. And so, yeah, I think, if everybody understands that. That's why I like to use the term weight loss and diabetes solution, because we want to look at this, to be empowered to know that if we stop eating the things that raise our blood sugar and stop eating the foods that are causing inflammation in our body, we can reverse the risk for autoimmunity, we can correct our thyroid, correct our metabolism. We don't have to have a drug to do that, because food is information to our body. So when we use food as information to our body, we can actually say or have our body turn off the disease process, and that's what I've done with my body.
LORI:So, like it was unfortunate, you know, my brother came to me in 2020, and I already started FDN and I found him on a low calorie diet. I said, oh, you can't do that. And so he was eating sugar and counting calories and he was always hungry. And I'm like, no, you can't do that. And so I put him in my program. We ran the labs. He's found his food sensitivities, he was estrogen dominant, he has cancer turned on and you know a lot of things that he needed to correct. And so he did. He reversed should I say reversed, or written remission. He no longer has diabetes. He's no longer on any medication.
LORI:The hardest medication to get off of was the blood pressure medication. But he did hack that and I'll tell you the hack in a moment Down to like 178 pounds and he was walking death and I have those pictures posted in my Instagram and it was the before and after. And you know what comes back? The smile and the peace of mind comes back, and that's it's so cool. So he did the work. He reversed and doesn't have to live with the diabetes anymore, because this doctor wanted him to go on insulin and he said I want to try diet, and so we fixed that. He fixed it. He did the work.
LORI:But I also had a. Our eldest sister was over 400, between 400 and 500 pounds and she couldn't do it. She wasn't able to do it and she succumbed to it and passed away just before 20, just about 2020. And you know there's it's the brain, and the brain can get so messed up. And that's why I think it's so critical that if people could just take the out of your diet, don't do if you don't do anything else, at least go gluten free. And if you can just take your carbs and take them under 100 and just go down to fruit and then bake keto, use dates if you need to, or maybe even coconut sugar, but just start lowering the processed food in our diet and that goes a long way towards correcting our metabolism and then see where it is that you need to go.
LORI:What does your body need to do? Get a food sensitivity test. You know that's really empowering to everybody to know that. You know that's foundational. Can't you know if you have any pain in your body? What is your body telling you? At 61, I have no pain in my body, none. I'm on no medication.
LORI:I completely hacked it by food and supplementation and that was the thing my brother is like, you know I would send him resources, I would send him podcasts.
LORI:Now he sends me podcasts and you know I don't know how we got started in it if I sent it to him, but I'm like, oh, mouth taping.
LORI:You know that book by the one, that yellow book that's breathed. I forgot the guy's name but I read that and I've listened to information on mouth breathing and he started taping his mouth and he called me up one day. He said guess what? I'm not on my blood pressure medicine anymore. I said how did you get off of it? He said mouth taping. It's so fascinating what we could do and how we could get our body to work, because our body has a pharmacy inside. If we could just get our body to work to create the nitric oxide and to take away the interferences, and so if we look at food as information to our body and if we look at it, some of it is poisonous and some of it is good for us, then we could get our body to work the way we want it to work and have vibrant health, and that's reclaiming the second half of your life. That's the weight loss and diabetes solution that we want to have.
FLORENCE:I love it. How can people find?
LORI:you and I understand you've put together a little free gift for them as well, so maybe you can. Yeah, so I have a gift. That is the belly fat buster mini course. It's a workshop, a workbook and a cheat sheet and it's pretty much the basics of all we need to do to hack our health. To start getting started, you just, you know, take out the wheat, go gluten-free, focus, you know, don't focus on anything super strict. Tell yourself you're making the action plan to get into a low carb lifestyle so that you could feel good and get your brain turned back on. And then, you know, each week, make a new action, see what you can do next, you know, start building those actions.
LORI:And yeah, but I'm on Instagram at Lori Blue Weight Loss and I have a YouTube station which is the holistic I think my names are too long, but holistic low carbs method for women over 50 in YouTube, but it's Lori Blue weight loss in all my areas. And also on Facebook, it's Lori Blue, so that's B-A-L-U-E. There's no other Lori Blues, that's just me, so hang out with me. I do have a private Facebook group as well and that is the holistic low carb weight loss and diabetes solution for women over 50. That's on Facebook, so come join me there because I do post more things about what I'm eating and what I'm doing, and I do videos weekly for Instagram as well as YouTube, because I'm you know, I'm trying to help inspire, motivate and educate women over 50 to make the choice to be healthy, and it's choosing health as our wealth, because that is our wealth, if we have health. That's what matters.
LORI:I think you know I never cheated on sugar and I won't eat wheat because I understand what it does to our body and I look at those foods as poison to my body. They're toxic, you know. They are considered a toxin in high quantities because you you got to look at at what acts as a drug in our body and how is it affecting the body and if and if it's causing problems in your body, then you want to take it out and see how your body does without it. So do a 30-day challenge it's the best thing you could do to see how your body turns back on, and then your body will tell you if it wants it in there or not.
FLORENCE:Totally, oh my gosh my gosh, I totally agree.
LORI:Yeah.
FLORENCE:Best place to start. Just just run the experiment. Yeah, Run the experiment. Don't listen to don't believe Lori, don't believe me, don't believe anyone on the internet. You first hand.
LORI:You know I also have a six week jumpstart Slender Forever program that includes a food sensitivity test and it is $200 off if anybody's interested in that. That's my podcast special. There is still the cost of the test itself but you know it's a really good value to work with me for six weeks dial in your holistic low carb methods. You could get five to 10 pounds of weight loss and but what that does is it's going to empower you too, because I've got a lot of conviction and certainty and when you're hanging out with like minded people you're going to get that energy and I am going to help support you to get started and figure out what your food sensitivities are and really help you dial it in so that you can be empowered to continue going forward.
LORI:No more guessing, no more like I'm doing everything right, but I mean, it took me my whole life till I was 53. And then another eight years before I got the rest of my weight loss off. You know I'm not skinny. I you know I could put on a bikini, but I don't know if I'll go anywhere in my bikini. I go in the backyard and get sunlight, but you know. But I could actually put it on and, like you know, it's not that bad. I guess you feel comfortable, it's not that bad.
FLORENCE:I guess you feel comfortable. What does the MRT? Is it the MRT? Is that what it was?
LORI:It's the MRT LEAP, a food sensitivity test, by the Oxford company Oxford Technology. What does that usually run Like just ballpark. It's $359 for the test, okay, great.
FLORENCE:Yeah, that's cool. And it's one last question Do you know anything about CBCs, lab tests and low numbers of cbc? Does that reflect potential food?
LORI:allergies, cbc. I'm not sure if I'm familiar with the term. That's cool, that's cool.
FLORENCE:I just remember some one of my podcast guests saying that they had some expertise around understanding those cbc's uh differential, so it's actually related to white blood cells counts. Ah, and I wasn't sure if that was related to allergies, if you'd made that link, but it might be related to that.
LORI:Um, I my food sensitivity test does have some low white blood cell count, but I've also been. I have a lot. I run a hair tissue mineral analysis and I've been running it for the last couple of years to find my mineral balances. But I also have a lot of aluminum in my body and I'm doing a metal detox right now with some zeolite and zeolite and it's just I'm throwing metal out of my body. I finally have mercury mobilized, and it's taken me two years to get mercury to mobilize and to throw it out of my body and it's just like interesting to see. But I'm absorbing my calcium now.
LORI:So a lot of people don't realize it that the calcium gets stuck. We have a calcium shell and we can't actually absorb our calcium. It gets stuck in the soft tissues, and so there's different. You have to balance your minerals and you have to lower your models to be able to absorb that calcium, and so it's not about taking a calcium supplement. You need to know what your minerals are doing inside your body, and so that's something that is really. That's a bonus test that I always give with my six month signature program.
FLORENCE:Very cool, amazing. All right, thanks everybody for tuning in today and thanks for your time, lori.
LORI:You're welcome.
