Show Notes on How to Effortlessly Reduce Inflammation:
Thank you for listening to Wholebeing RN Radio! Join me for this episode diving deep on 7 ways you can effortlessly reduce inflammation in your body and energy.
You are probably thinking, "Effortlessly reduce inflammation?" I know, I know, even I cringe when someone says that something is effortless, but as someone that has been there done that, and helped hundreds of others do it too...I can say that there truly are some effortless ways to reduce inflammation in your body and most of them come with some extra benefits for your health and wellness. This may include using such products as Mission Farms CBD oil to help calm down these inflammed areas, amongst other resources that will be mentioned below.
In this episode, we are talking about these key inflammation reduction points (you can scroll down to read the article if you prefer) :
- What is inflammation?
- What does inflammation cause?
- What causes inflammation?
- What are some ways you can tell if you are inflamed?
- 7 Ways to Reduce Inflammation Effortlessly
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Free Wellness Tribe
- 7 Days Spark
- Wellness Tools (Supplement Brand Recommendations)
- crystal elixir for clear skin recipe card here
- Body Wisdom Waitlist
- Meditation Quickie
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7 Ways to Reduce Inflammation Effortlessly
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Effortlessly reduce inflammation? I know, I know, even I cringe when someone says that something is effortless, but as someone that has "been there done that," I can say that there truly are some effortless ways to reduce inflammation in your body and most of them come with some extra benefits for your health and wellness.
This week we are taking a deep dive into inflammation, what is inflammation, what it causes, and what causes it. We are also going to take a look at some signs that your body is inflamed, and finally, I wouldn’t give you all that juicy information if I wasn’t going to tell you how to fix it. We are going to talk about 7 ways you can effortlessly reduce the inflammation in your body.
What do I mean by effortlessly? Well, that is the thing, as always, take what resonates for you as effortless and leave what doesn’t. Some of you may find all of these items to be effortless, and some of you may have 1-2 you think, “wow, what a pain!” and that’s okay because there is something here for everyone.
What is inflammation?
As we talked about in episode 031, inflammation gets a bad reputation. There are 2 types of inflammation, chronic inflammation (that’s the bad stuff) and acute inflammation. In simple terms, inflammation is the body's first line of defense against invaders that it doesn't like, know, and trust.
Let’s start with acute inflammation, this is the type of inflammation that is responsible for healing your body. It’s why I recommend AVOIDING using anti-inflammatory medications right after injury or surgery - not to say you should suffer in pain - but you also shouldn’t stop your body’s ability to heal quickly, right?
When you have an injury, the first thing that happens is inflammation to start the cascade of various systems that your body uses to heal, regenerate and repair tissues.
So what about the bad type of inflammation? Chronic inflammation is when your immune system finds something it doesn’t know, like, or trust and begins to turn itself on to fight it off, and the switch gets stuck to the on position.
What does inflammation cause?
A shorter answer, would be what doesn't inflammation contribute to? That answer is nothing because contributes to all the things.
When our body’s immune system is stuck in the “on” position, chronic inflammation builds upon itself and generally, bad stuff happens. It usually starts with catching a cold, or otherwise getting sick, you might get an illness like strep or the flu. If it keeps going, you could end up with an autoimmune disease, arthritis (osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis), Alzheimer's, heart disease, depression, anxiety, asthma, and even the big C...yep, cancer. Inflammation is the underlying physical cause for every single one of those things.
What causes inflammation?
The main causes of inflammation fall into two main categories, food stuffs, and energetic/emotional stuffs. (There are also low-grade bacterial infections - but it all sort of works together.)
Inflammatory Foods
Let’s check food first...I like to call these the big 5 IF’s or inflammatory foods, they are sugar, artificial sugar, vegetable oils, gluten, and dairy.
Sugar
Sugar is a common inflammation culprit. It is a highly, highly inflammatory ingredient in so many things. And you know what? If we're being honest here, if you don’t have a condition that means you absolutely can’t have sugar, then it's okay to have some sweet treats. Organic fruits, honey, organic cane sugar, that sort of thing is okay on occasion. I’m not advocating for getting rid of sugars everywhere when fruits and organic sugars are done the right way and in moderation, it can even be healthy and good energy promoting.
But here's the problem, most of us have some level of inflammation and or eat too much sugar all together. When you eat too much sugar, and too much is categorized by more than about 100 unbalanced carbs or unbalanced grams of sugar in a day. (Unbalanced means that it's not matched by fiber.) When you eat more than 100-120 carbs in a day of unmatched carbohydrates you are created a havoc of inflammation in the body. Many people when I first start working with them eat 100-120 or more grams of sugar for breakfast...try adding yours up and see. If you fall into this category and are suffering from symptoms of inflammation...this could be the culprit.
Most of the time these are hidden sugars in packaged and processed foods, the more of these you eat the more sugar you are eating by default as it is used as a preservative in many of these products. My freebie 10 day Gentle Sugar detox will help you learn how to spot these hidden sugars in your foods and detox from sugar without the nasty side effects.
Artificial Sugars
We all know, whether you want to admit it or not, everyone knows artificial sweeteners cause cancer directly. Did you know they also contribute to cancer indirectly, through inflammation?
If you aren't reading the studies about artificial sweeteners causing cancer then maybe you think it's all a conspiracy theory...but here is something you can relate to, artificial sugar enhances glucose intolerance. So, yes, cancers deadly, it's bad. But a far bigger problem for us as just a population and possibly a far bigger problem for you is the potential for Type II diabetes. And that kills far more people than cancer does every year.
Let’s set the cancer data aside, artificial sweeteners do two bad things. One, they enhance glucose intolerance, which leads to Type II diabetes. And two, they disrupt your body's ability, your intestines, your gut biome's ability to properly digest other stuff. Sometimes what happens is, somebody is eating all the things artificially sweetened (often thinking they are helping their health and weight troubles), drinking all the diet sodas, and then they start having inflammatory reactions to other things, other foods.
What happens is, the gut becomes so damaged that everything you eat inflames further. Then you end up one of these people, "I can't eat this. I can't eat that. I can't eat this.”
The first step to healing this inflammation is getting rid of that artificial sugar, getting rid of all the inflammatory foods, healing your gut really, really nicely and then slowly adding those things back in to determine what you actually can and can't tolerate. But, until you stop that artificial sweetener, it makes it really, really hard to find out and nearly impossible to stop the inflammation.
Vegetable Oils
When I say vegetable oils, it's not just the type of vegetable oil labeled as such on the bottle. For our purposes, “vegetable oil” includes soy oils, corn, sunflower oils, safflower oils, and palm oils, and any foods that are fried in them.
These types of oils have two problems. One, they're high in Omega sixes, which is the inflammatory omega. And they're very low in the Omega three department, which is the anti-inflammatory omega. They also contain really high levels of something called AGEs, advanced glycation end-products. These are highly oxidized free radicals and they reek havoc on your cellular health. Cellular health is really, really important because we've discovered through the research of epigenetics that taking in these foods not only damages your body, but it actually affects the way your genes express themselves. So, it changes the outcome for the worse, in this case, of how your genes would have expressed themselves from birth.
Vegetable oil is in a lot of things. Packaged foods will often have vegetable oils used as a preservative and it's often rancid after it sits on the shelf.
Notice that I have thus far mentioned vegetable oil, sugar, and artificial sugars as being in...packaged foods. They are common culprits that people often don't think they are consuming. It’s easy to think, "Well, I'm not buying vegetable oil. I'm avoiding it my home cooking. I try to avoid it when I go out to eat." Or, "I don't go out to eat that often."
Well, if you're eating mayonnaise, salad dressings, barbecue sauces, crackers, bread, potato chips, oftentimes these oils are hidden in those foods. So make sure, flip it over, read the ingredients. Because, if you can't read it, if you don't recognize an ingredient as food, your body won't either and it will start the inflammatory process.
Gluten
Gluten is highly inflammatory, and this is still a hot topic, such a hot topic. I’m not even sure why it's still such a hot topic because it is clearly proven that gluten causes inflammation.
Of all the things we talk about nutritionally, there are really two things that aren't healthy for anybody, and gluten is one of them. It's just a varying degree of how unhealthy they are. In my clinical and anecdotal experience as well as the available research, gluten has a role in inflammation from obvious inflammatory bowel disease, to not so obvious arthritis and psoriasis.
When you remove gluten, you reduce inflammation in the entire body. Sometimes that's not the main problem, but it's a really great quick win if you're having these sort of inflammatory troubles. If you have arthritis, or rheumatoid, or any autoimmune disease, any inflammatory bowel or otherwise disease, get rid of gluten.
Actually, you can enhance this benefit, by eliminating or at least greatly, greatly reducing all grains from your diet because all grains have a pr- inflammatory effect. Grains weren't always that way, but this is what has happened over decades and decades of commercial farming, and altering the DNA makeup of the plants, and all the things we do to make sure there's enough food on the planet for everyone.
Dairy
Dairy is the often overlooked and oh-so-inflammatory partner to gluten. I found that the majority of people don't tolerate dairy well. They may not know it, they may even be in denial about it but it's true. If you have a problem with mucous, even if it's just seasonal, in the fall maybe or in the spring, depending on where you live. If you always have a cold, if all winter long you kind of had that snotty cold nose going on, dairy going to be the culprit for upwards of 85-90% of you. Many times people don't even realize it until they eliminate dairy from their diet.
I see people everyday scarfing down blocks of cheese, complaining about all the medicine they have to take for their allergies. They're bloated, they're waiting for their stuffy nose to clear up. They can't figure out why their tummy hurts or why they can’t get a good night's sleep. And most of the time, it's the cheese on their burger, a simple sensitivity to dairy. From an inflammatory perspective, dairy causes a mucous inflammation reaction in all people. It's just what it is no matter how grass-fed, organic, raw, et cetera. It causes some sort of inflammatory reaction in all people. So, if you're experiencing inflammation, I encourage you to give up dairy.
If you are inflamed, and you give up gluten and dairy, you will get big wins really, really fast, both in inflammation and weight loss, and in overall energy, and all the things that go with it. The cool thing is, it only takes about 72 hours. If you can just go no dairy, and that's lactose and casein (you have to really read labels or not eat anything with labels), eliminated for 72 hours, you'll probably feel a whole lot better. Then test yourself by adding it back in and see what happens. In my Body Wisdom Method ™, I teach you how to do this without having to suffer through the testing of this, but it really is eye-opening to experiment with and see in 3-D if you need dairy in your life.
Emotional/Energetic Causes of Inflammation
In the emotional/energetic category we have stress, and there are numerous kinds, psychological, environmental, emotional. Stress, no matter the cause actually changes the immune response in the body, starting with a hormone cascade involving cortisol.
We now know that stress also changes the expression of our genes, turning genes on and off that contribute to inflammation and other diseases. It is proven that stress actually creates an immune response in your body. A response that is perceivable on lab work, a chemical change in your body.
What makes it so fascinating is that stress is something that most people deem for themselves to be uncontrollable or out of their control. I would ask you to think in terms of this...what else is possible? Because you have bought into a conclusion here, that stress is out of your control. It’s not, and we are going to talk about some ways that you can mitigate stress if not avoid it all together.
What are some ways you can tell if you are inflamed?
Are you full of energy? Do you have skin trouble? Maybe it's cysts, maybe it's acne, maybe it's rashes, bumpy skin, sebaceous cysts even. Do you suffer from seasonal allergies? Do you have headaches? Do you have mood disorders? Are you anxious, depressed? These are all signs of inflammation, believe it or not. Chronic low low-grade inflammation symptoms to be specific. That is inflammation that's been hanging around for a while and it's starting to affect other areas of the body other than what it originally started for.
7 Ways to Reduce Inflammation Effortlessly
You can, in fact, reduce inflammation effortlessly…
1. Lose Weight.
I know, you are thinking, “wait, you said effortlessly and the first thing you tell me to do is lose weight?!?” But seriously, the method I teach for weight loss IS effortless. It’s called the Body Wisdom Method ™, and it does so much more than teach you to lose weight effortlessly. You can get a taste of that in my free 7 Day Spark ... there’s no tracking food or counting calories, you get to be free of that...forever.
Part of losing weight is moving your body - not killing yourself on the treadmill or pumping iron till you can’t lower yourself on the toilet… but just moving your body. Exercise is by nature inflammation reducing and boosting to all the good endorphins that continue to reduce your inflammation long after you move your body.
2. Earthing.
You’ve heard me harp on this before - earthing or grounding is mega important, so get outside barefoot in nature. So get outside - this will work if you just walk outside and take some deep breaths. It’s one of the reasons people go “get air” when they are agitated or stressed. Now you can amplify that by layering more energies in there, so the anti-inflammatory effect is amplified if you go outside barefoot. Studies show (2) this reduces pain and inflammation by 80% when you do it routinely.
If you can’t be barefoot (because it’s not only convenient - but I would have you challenge that conclusion) then find yourself a tree, or if you can get barefoot on some grass, get barefoot and ground yourself to earth. And this actually reduces the positive electrons in your body and has an anti-inflammatory effect, physically reducing the blood levels of inflammatory molecules.
These are perceivable benefits via scientific measurements of your body, lab results, EKGs, EMGs, et cetera.
This is something really effortless. It's something easy. Everybody can do it. Everybody has time to kick your flip flops off, even if you just walk from the house to the car, from the car into the house. If you can’t get barefoot, you can go put your hand on a live tree or take some deep breaths outside and shed the inflammation in this simple way. And guess what, if you do this one...you are automatically doing some movement as we discussed in the first point here.
Although earthing and grounding are used interchangeably, I think of “earthing” as more getting outside and in contact with the earth and grounding more as something you can do anywhere even if you can’t get outside - like say you’re on a plane. The cool part is - the effects - the measurable effects are the SAME. What a crazy miraculous universe we live in, right?
Grounding can occur a couple ways to reduce inflammation - and stressors too. Earthing, of course, has this effect as I just mentioned, and so do certain crystals, which we will talk about in a few minutes... BUT...here’s one very practical thing you can do anywhere and any time without any tools...it is using a “Grounding Cord.”
It’s very simple, here’s how you do it, you simply sit up straight, feet flat on the floor (remember you can always layer the energies further and do this barefoot outside) and visualize a cord coming from your tailbone down into the center of the earth, energetically grounding you in the earth’s safe, warm, gentle energy. Feel or see the energy in your visualization travel from the earth, up the cord and into your being and the stress (emotional, energetic, physical, and environmental), inflammation, and physical inflammatory markers begin to heal.
Another way to achieve this same grounding effect is to start at the upper legs and run the palm of your hands (hovering not touching) down the front, back, inside, and outside of your legs all the way to the ground. I find this works best while standing, but it can be done sitting too.
3. Energy work.
Theoretically, much of what I have talked about today could fall into the energy work category. Meditation, Crystals, Massage, Grounding, after all, we are just concentrated bundles of energy (thank you physics) so really all work on ourselves is energy work on some level. For this category, I wanted to touch on working with the meridians, specifically a technique I call Pulling.
This technique works best if you know where the inflammation is stemming from and can also be beneficial for acute inflammation and pain.
Place your left hand over the area of inflammation, you can hover instead of touch if you like, and face your right palm away from the body, move your left hand in a counter-clockwise motion to pull the inflammation out of the area.
If you are unable to pinpoint where this inflammation is from, you can find a qualified energy work practitioner to work with you for an in-person or distance appointment.
4. Massage.
Massage is important for self-care but can also help to reduce inflammation in the body overall. Seriously, it's science. If you need an official recommendation - I can write you a note, seriously. Studies show that massage lasting 45 minutes or longer actually lowers your levels of inflammation, specifically pro-inflammatory cytokines linked to chronic inflammation.
Local peeps should definitely check out Pure Synergy for your massage needs, they have a variety of therapeutic massage techniques available to help you with inflammation (or other issues) - tell them Audrey sent you!
5. Meditation.
We have talked many times about the benefits of meditation, and meditation goes a long way just like earthing, to reducing the inflammation in the body. Recent studies expand on the benefits of meditation by demonstrating measurable impacts on the brains “circuits” that improve health and reduce measurable inflammation in the body. More importantly, the study shows how the meditation aspect is more important than just simple relaxation.
Today's freebie is going to show you how to do exactly how to kick stress to the curb. It's a quick download of ways to meditate and reduce stress even if you don't have time to meditate, or you don't know how to meditate, you can’t clear your mind, or you're not good at it. It takes away all the excuses and makes it really, really easy.
6. Crystals.
I have 2 favs for reducing inflammation. One is a tried and true and been my go-to for many years now, and that is Hematite. Hematite is very grounding, it is an iron oxide and both its color and vibrational frequency are grounding for the person.
You can place hematite near the area that has pain or needs an inflammation reduction, or alternatively, you can place it at the Earth Star chakra which is about 6 inches below your feet, you can leave it there while you sleep or even while you are Netflixing on the couch. Another way is to carry it on your person, like in your pocket or sit with it near your root chakra.
A newer crystal prescription for inflammation is aquamarine. I have recently been working with aquamarine through my newest layer of crystal healing certification and research. This one packs a powerful punch for inflammation, because of its very cooling and soothing energies.
Now you know I like the layers of science so I mix all the things to get the best and most practical outcomes, and aquamarine is no different.
Aquamarine is a beryl, which to get all science geek on you is a beryllium aluminum silicate mineral, the blue color of aquamarine is from iron. Now aside from its spiritual properties, energetically this lends itself to soothing with the color tone AND grounding with the iron. You could use this in crystal elixir which you can use topically if you are worried about the aluminum content or you could meditate with aquamarine or simply carry it on your person.
There is a third layer of science behind why this works and that is in the hexagonal structure of both aquamarine and hematite at a molecular level. The hexagonal shape of the molecular structure connects us with nature because hexagonal is the preferred structure of nature (think of honeycombs, and the molecular structure of carbon). When we align vibrationally with crystals from the hexagonal system, we are reducing the entropy (disorganized vibrations) and inflammation in our bodies as well as grounding.
Just like the energy work, if this isn't something you wish to do to yourself, check this out to schedule a crystal healing session.
7. Supplements.
Just like the foods we eat are uber important in reducing inflammation, we can help combat existing and new inflammation by making sure we supplement the nutrients we aren’t getting enough of.
Important supplements to reduce inflammation include Omega 3s, Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and Probiotics and these help calm your immune system naturally. Everyone always asks what brand to use, so visit my recommendations page to check it out. (By the way, these are important for adults but super important for kids too!) In addition to supplements, people may wish to consider medicated creams like this cbd cream, which can provide targeted relief and help calm things down a little. CBD is known to greatly reduce inflammation in humans and animals alike, so if you're suffering from some serious inflammation and you're needing to find a remedy, perhaps take a look at something like a PlusCBD coupon so that you can give such products a try at a discounted price before paying in full.
To wrap up inflammation talk...
I hope that you have found a method or methods of reducing inflammation that resonates with you.
I really want you to take away from this information, that you have the power in your life and existence to choose, you can choose to live better, you can choose to mitigate stress, you can choose to reduce your inflammation.
Ultimately you and the expression of you in your human suit is up to you and the choices you make, so work towards making good ones.
It’s as simple as that, meditate and mitigate the stress, sleep well, eat well, have good energetic hygiene to reduce the inflammation in your body.
Feel free to ask questions, comment below, or jump into the Wellness Tribe for all sorts of benefits, including a complimentary Q&A each week.