– Welcome, everybody to today’s Building My Legacy podcast. I have with me today, Megan Swan. She is a nutrition, health, wellness person. She looks at, how do you become really healthy, have healthy nutrition, and doing it from a plant base. So she’s looked at all the different components that go into, what is it that, either promotes health, takes away from health, creates those aches and pains that none of us want, and as those of us that are getting ready and want to build a legacy, one of the things that holds us back is our health. And so this is a gift that Megan brings to us today. So Megan, I’ll let you tell your story. How did you get started in this?

– Sure, of course. Well, I’ll briefly back up a little bit and tell you how I got to Mexico, which became an integral part of my story. I sort of did my own eat, pray love tour, if you will, I turned 30, and knew I wanted to travel the world, and it was a better time now than ever. And I had my yoga teaching certificate in my back pocket kind of thing and just left, sold my things and left and went. Mexico was my first stop, my plan was to go to Bali, and I didn’t know where after. But long story short, I’m still in my first stop 11 years later. And well, I started opening and practicing yoga, teaching yoga, I opened and closed two studios here where I live, and then I had a health and wellness magazine. And then in sort of overlapping that, I started myself working with a health coach. And I really hadn’t heard or understood like what I even was until a friend of mine offered me the service, and it really changed my life. So from then I just went full in and took the course that she took and I went several levels. From there, I’ve also specialized in detoxification, and this year I completed my chef certification in vegan or plant-based cuisine. So it’s kind of been a long journey.

– How did it change your life, Megan? What was it about that that was so transformational for you?

– Well, my yoga career started and really shifted many things for me at that time, I essentially learned to breathe. At that time, I actually, looking back, I cut out dairy out of my diet. And I don’t think I realized the amazing benefits that gave me at the time until later setting as a health coach understanding how it does affect us on so many levels. But I think really the most important moment was after I’d had my two children, I just never felt like I was getting the same. I never felt myself again, I was just exhausted all the time, I felt frustrated. And often, I mean, I had blissful moments of motherhood, but they kind of like, were not the majority of the moments. I just felt I was barely getting through my days. And also, I knew that I wanted to get back to some sort of career, and I didn’t see how yoga was gonna be enough for me, for the rest of my life. So working with a health coach changed my life. And I think what you learn are sort of the backstory around a lot of the narratives that we grow up with, in terms of culture, in terms of society, in terms of government, and you are given the opportunity to sort of experiment with yourself, I mean, one really important part of the EIN, which is the school that I stay with in New York, is bio individuality. So understanding that there is no one perfect diet for every single person, it really depends on many aspects, and the stage of our life that we’re in, our gender, our blood type, our physical location, seasonally, all these things can affect what one individual should be consuming. And under sort of having that liberty to understand that you’ve been fed one diet narrative, if you will, and it just doesn’t work for you. Or maybe it works for a while, but then you always fall back to what you were doing before. And so I really teach and for me, it is changed my life to find a sort of intuitive eating balance, not being so obsessed about food in general. And one thing I do think is really important to consider, I know in a busy lifestyle, it’s difficult to completely eliminate processed foods, but being aware of processed foods as being something that might be weighing down your energy is definitely key.

– Okay, so I think if those are huge issues, ’cause part of what happens, I think with a lot of people in their careers is you get so busy, you go and you buy what is ready made, most of that is processed. So how do you help people to look at time management around health management?

– Well, several things. One is to understand how important it is to read labels, like there are definitely better processed foods than others. And the outside package is designed to trick us basically. So it’s understanding that you literally have to read the list of ingredients and understand what those ingredients are. I have some tips and tricks on how to sort of general rules you can follow, so it’s not so overwhelming. And obviously, you need to do that like a few times. And then you know what in the grocery store you wanna buy, and other things you wanna avoid, right. But I think also, it’s important to consider that going back to these narratives we’ve been taught about, what a dinner plate or what a lunch plate has to look like. And understanding that there’s a lot you can do with fresh food in five, 10 minutes with some olive oil and salt and pan. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. it doesn’t need to be time consuming to have delicious, fresh, not processed food options. And it’s a balance, right? So maybe you have like 30% of your dinner plate is something you bought at the grocery store and 70% is sick, rice that you prepared or a new batch cook on Sundays. Another good tip is batch cooking on Sunday to get certain things ready in your fridge so that it’s just like a whipping them together quickly in the evening.

– It is so true. Having those things ready and at the fingertips is huge. And I think one of the mistakes many of us make is we go shopping when we’re hungry. And then you don’t always make the best decisions, do you?

– Well, and I like to focus on sort of the outside of supermarket, which generally is where the fresh produce is, and the dairy or dairy alternatives. And I really stress to my clients that it’s important to incorporate spices, some superfoods are definitely worth investing in. And you think of like nuts and seeds as sort of like a go to snack, which are rich in healthy fats and plant-based protein, just to start bringing in other forms of feeling satisfied, and you never wanna be hungry, you always wanna feel like you’re fueling your body. And nuts and seeds are really important for our brain health, focus, concentration, those kind of things.

– So I wanna go back to labels, you mentioned that there’s a way of chunking that down so that you can read labels more efficiently. Could you share with us how we do that?

– Sure, definitely. So one easy trick is, anything that has more than five ingredients, it’s probably not ideal, but certainly anything that has like 20 ingredients, there’s probably a laundry list of things and a bunch of chemical words that you may or may not understand. Five ingredients, meaning wheat, salt, and all words that are, even your grandmother would understand what the ingredient is. It’s not sort of some scientific mumbo jumbo trying to basically hide what the ingredient actually is, right. So that’s one less, than five ingredients. From there that they’re easily understandable, that was another tip. I also recommend that there’s certain things if the product has these things, you just don’t buy it, you can find an alternative. An example I like to use are pickles ’cause my kids love pickles. I don’t buy a lot of processed foods, but I do buy pickles once in a while. And some pickles have dyes in them, they have a dye called yellow number five. So it has like a sort of like Delhi dill pickle, vibrant color. And yellow number five is a carcinogen. In fact, all the colorings are there are four or five. So caramel coloring, you’ll see is a common one, blue, red, sorry, blue and red number five, and I believe blue has a number 40 and yellow, number five. But basically, if you see any artificial colorings, and sometimes we’ll get around that by saying just artificial colorings instead of the actual name. They are non-carcinogens and really at the end of the day, certainly when it comes to children and behavior, you will notice like a stark change in behavior when they consume them. It’s just kind of like puts them on edge and it’s just not natural. So, the other thing is high fructose corn syrup. I think most people have maybe heard of that at this point and are more aware to avoid it. But it is essentially a highly processed form of fructose. It is much sweeter than sugar or fructose. Fructose is the natural occurring sugar that comes in fruit. So if you’re craving something sweet, just eat a piece of fruit, an apple, a bowl of strawberries, I keep tons of frozen fruit in my berries, because it’s harder to get them here in Mexico, but I love to have fruit on hand and also visible. So if you’re at the office, you can have like a giant bowl of apples out. So like the first thing that people see are the apples instead of doughnuts or something else. And you get so much energy from an apple instead of like some sort of processed carbohydrate type thing. So high fructose corn syrup avoid, generally avoid if sugar is the first or second ingredient because the ingredients are listed in terms of quantity or percentage in the product. So the first two ingredients, first three or four arguably are really key. And often it breaks it down for you in the list of ingredients what the percentages are. But essentially, if sugar is first or second, the product is 50% sugar. Another way to check that, is on the opposite side of the product, there’s a list of percentage of transfats, fats, carbs, sugar, and I believe maybe other sugars, is another one for calories. And it’s per 100 grams of whatever the product is. So I like to choose products that are 10 grams of sugar or less, as like a good easy rule of thumb, like a mainstream chocolate bar might be like 150% sugar. And even if it’s 50% sugar, you really have to wonder, there must be a better alternative, right? From there, I think it’s just not being pulled in. Like even in your healthiest of health food stores, you need to read labels, because there is always labeling on the front of the package that’s basically designed to trick us, things like low fat, you don’t wanna buy, even dairy, you don’t wanna buy low fat dairy, because they’ve added sugar, that’s why it tastes okay, or maybe better than the full fat version. So dairy in itself has its own natural sugar. So it’s like increasing your sugar unnecessarily. Yeah, I mean, even, for example, a package of bacon. You think it’s bacon, like, is pork, what else is there? No, no, no. And you’ll have, and particularly in United States, you’ll have like dozens of options. And it’ll just take a few extra minutes of the first time you do this to take time to read all the options and figure out is there anyone that really only has five ingredients, is there 20 ingredients, I found several bacons have sugar added, I don’t think that’s necessary. Like, obviously, it has some sodium, but just figuring out what the percentages are and picking the product that has the lowest percentage of the things you know you wanna avoid, like sodium sugar, artificial colorings, and artificial sweeteners.

– Tell me again, if somebody wants to be really healthy, where did they begin? How do you begin looking at that? So for me, I think the first is doing an assessment, cleaning out your system a bit. But even before that, what is a healthy nutritional lifestyle? It’s part of what we’ve talked about is cutting out all those unnecessary foods. But what really goes into that and part of it is also how you build in exercise. So if you just walk us through a little bit about what it means to be healthy?

– Sure, well, I think I’ll say, I know there’s so many aspects, but I’ll try and break it down into five that I think are essential. One is your diet, and I like to think of that as intuitive eating. So helping my client become more aware of what foods serve them, make them thrive, make them energetic, are they’re easily digestible, and what foods are not. And from there, figuring out the perfect balance for them. So somewhere around the 70/30, for example, would be a good example, a good balance for plant-based living, or, I try and eat 80% plants and 20% healthy animal products such as salmon or organic eggs, or sometimes eat organic cheese, that kind of stuff. So, but that’s me, and my client might be completely different. And so it’s a little bit of doing, we do a lifestyle audit when we first start working together, and it determines, they go through and really get detailed about what they do consume on a weekly basis. And sometimes that’s even just seeing on paper, what they consume on a weekly basis helps them see where they can course correct a little bit without too much difficulty. So from there, and the intuitive eating, I like to talk about adding things in, like, I don’t focus so much on, “Oh, don’t eat this or don’t eat that.” No, it’s like add a salad, add a vegetable soup, add a green juice, add something that supports your body and its natural mechanisms of detoxification, and cell regeneration, and all these things that keep us healthy in the long-term. So then the second thing I really focus in on is tuning in or understanding what our own bio rhythms are. So we are creatures that rise and fall with the energy of the sun, right. And so there are three phases in our day, the elimination phase, the appropriation phase, and the assimilation phase. So, understanding that there are those three phases and supporting our body, getting into it like, what are those actual phases will depend on like where in the globe you are, exactly what hours, those things are happening for you. But supporting your body, for example, when you’re in the elimination phase, which is usually between 6 a.m and somewhere between noon and two in the afternoon, you don’t wanna be overloading your body with a lot of hard to digest things, you wanna be drinking a lot of water, maybe some warm tea, and maybe extending, like this is where intermittent fasting works for some people, but not for others, right. And then the appropriation phase is like when the sun is the hottest, you can think the Ayurvedic medicine in India, they think of the digestive system as a fire, right. So you wanna think intuitively of what supports a fire to burn efficiently and what does not. So when our fire is strongest is when the sun is strongest. So eating the most in your day between say noon and 6 p.m. And then allowing your system a good window of time before you really wanna go into sort of your rest and restore or assimilation phase where your body is taking advantage of the nutrients that you’ve given it for the day and working to get rid of the toxins that you’ve consumed through the day. And so just little shifts sometimes and timing of meals and how much water and when they’re drinking the water really can do wonders to improve overall health and feel and have more energy without dramatically changing even what they’re eating, that’s just when and how. From there, I think honoring our sleep cycle is so key. And really everything I’ve already talked about, it’s this like self fulfilling prophecy of honoring your sleep cycle or not, meaning, what you eat throughout the day and when really can affect how long and how restful your sleep is. So I always ask my clients are you dreaming, because if you’re not dreaming, then you’re not really getting a restful sleep, you’re not getting a good solid three hours of REM. And that is when our body is doing its most profound healing. Like throughout the day, the body keeps up with sort of like every day detox, for example, but it might not allow, it if your system’s focusing on digesting a heavy dinner, it’s not allowing the body to do more deep healing, cell regeneration type healing overnight, if it’s focusing on a simple thing as trying to digest a full stomach of complicated or heavy food, right. From there a really easy tip. It seemed I mean, besides drinking water, I always get my clients to drink more water, but I think we all know that one, right. So from there, I think the coffee consumption can really be something that we’re just so used to doing. And I know, it’s all about portions as well, like our coffee cups just seem to be getting bigger and taller and bigger, right. And so one tip, if the amount of coffee you’re drinking afternoon is a lot, I would really try and switch it out for matcha tea, which is a powdered version of green tea. It’s healing, it helps with digestion, it’s an antioxidant, and it helps actually with your hunger too. But I personally like the flavor. But in general, you can just switch out coffee for tea and you’re gonna be way better off and you’re gonna get a lot more restful night, than if you’re drinking like a coffee at four o’clock in the afternoon. From there, I think a mindful practice of some sort is essential. So, a mindful practice does not need to be meditation, although I often try and introduce meditation to my clients. And I would say eight out of 10 of them have taken meditation with them. For the rest of their lives, it’s like now a part of their lifestyle. But, it’s not for everybody. And you can get the same benefits out of doing certain everyday tasks, like washing the dishes, like going for a walk, like spending time with your loved ones, and just being like extremely present and centered, and not distracted for even like a 10,20 minute period per day. Right now in our lifestyle, we’re just highly distracted. Whether it be constantly checking our email, or sort of paying attention to our phone, waiting for a message, like you just have all these levels of your brain, different files open, and you need to take time to be really present, look at your loved ones in the eye, spend some time really being present. Again, I mean, you can make washing the dishes, a mindful exercise, really noticing the texture of the water and the bubbles and just not being in a hurry doing it, just doing it with care, this is my act of service in the family today, like just all of that can make it a mindful practice, even though it’s something you have to do. Breathing exercises, journaling, or all sorts of things that can fit into the mindful practice. And then, as you mentioned, some sort of movement practice, doesn’t have to be going to the gym, doesn’t have to be a lot of cardio even. But just getting the system moving is so important for circulation, particularly as we’re getting older and just like moving, helping again, your body to itself detox on a daily basis, which is getting the toxins, the stagnant energy. And I personally believe that everything you consume on a daily basis is affecting your mental, physical and spiritual well-being. So, you just need to get that stagnant energy moving, and you always feel better after some sort of movement, whether it be walking, swimming, yoga, palot ease, I mean, I personally love running, but it’s not accessible, or something that everybody likes to do. And I certainly think for women, as we get older, it is important to have some sort of strength training, incorporated, like maybe twice a week. But I also think like you can get a lot in with just using your own body weight, you don’t necessarily need to be in a gym, lifting weights, just doing some basic, like 25 push ups or your sit ups for the week, that kind of thing, just to keep the blood flowing. And when we use our muscles, it really supports our bones in terms of the calcification over time.

– You talk about detoxification, I wanna come back to that, because there’s so much discussion about that. What really is it, what does it do? And how often does one need to do a detox?

– Well, I think, ideally, some sort of detox, meaning like a moment in time that you pay extra special attention to supporting your body, again, in these natural things that it’s trying to do on a daily basis. I like the story, which I’m not even sure where I heard it from. Now, but the story is that think of your system as your body as a house and your digestive system is the kitchen. If you spend the entire day, just like you start the day, the garbage can’s full, you gotta take it out to the street. When you come back, the garbage can’s full again. That’s what you’re doing all day, it’s going back and forth, back and forth. There’s literally no time to repaint the house, or do like the sort of like finer detail preparations of the house that aren’t 100% necessary in this exact moment, but over time can build up and the wear and tear of the system shows. So a detox for me and there’s many styles, if you will, you can do like 100% juice detox, I always run the detoxes that basically it’s gluten free and plant based, minimum three days to really have an important effect on the system, ideally seven, and then you could build up to 10, or even 21 days. But there is also a process, so if someone has never done a detox, they shouldn’t just start at day one. They should do like a pre-detox and a post detox, meaning like cutting out little by little so it’s not like a shock to the system. Because, depending on how much sugar, caffeine, gluten even, processed foods in general, they’re consuming, literally is a withdrawal type situation on the system. And so the first few days it’s common that you don’t feel great, you have headaches, you’re kind of exhausted for two reasons. One you’re off coffee, and two, your body is just moving into focusing on detoxing on a whole deeper level than it usually allowed. And so by this time second or third day, people start to feel the new levels of energy and so much to the point that they’re not even worried about what they’re eating so much. Often, people that live off of a lot of processed foods, they’re designed to be addictive. And so we’re constantly have this like, internal dialogue, “What’s for lunch? Or what are we eating for dinner?” This focus on what are we eating. And when you kind of take that off the table, if you will, what you’re eating is seemingly boring, in quotes, from what you usually eating. Meaning like, only fruits and vegetables, whole grains, rice, what else, olive oil, lots of salsa has lots of nut butters, whatever you want to flavor, a lots of spices, spices really helped to kick up our digestive system and our circulation, both are really important for having a successful detox. So then, by day three, you’re just feeling amazing, your skin’s glowing, and I can’t believe you’ve never felt like you’ve had this much energy before. And if you keep going, you maintain it. And most people find that, then they have a new level of awareness, they’re more in tune to their body after the fact. And maybe not the first time you do a detox, but the second or third time, you might have other sort of more personal awareness type realizations of other things like media, or relationships or your career, things that like are toxic to you. And you’ve just been withstanding them, and maybe it’s something that you wanna consider changing or shifting.

– It’s so helpful to just get an overview like that, because I think people want to be healthy, they don’t know where to start often. And there’s a lot of clutter out there in terms of what you should eat, what you shouldn’t eat, how you should eat, when you should eat. And so I appreciate your perspective. Again, things that we’ve missed, that the audience should hear about, know about, relative to being healthy nutrition, plant-based. What have we omitted that should be mentioned?

– Well, my signature approach, I call sustainable integrative wellness. And why I think that’s so important is a little bit of what you just said, that there’s so much out there in terms of diet, culture, mentality and quick fixes. And I really believe that long-term sustainable and integrative wellness involves slow, gradual, small changes over time, so that they can become easily integrated into the person’s lifestyle. And they become a lifestyle, it doesn’t feel like there’s a list of things that they’re trying to accomplish every day in terms of their health and wellness, it just becomes a part of who they are. And with that, there’s just so many messages out there about quick fixes. And I don’t believe that a detox, for example, is often misused as a type of diet. And I think it’s really important to look at it as a tool to become more in tune, to your biorhythms, to your sleep cycle, to your stress levels, to all of the things that tend to consume on a daily basis, like processed foods, coffee, alcohol, all these things we tend to cut out and once you cut them out, is really when you can understand how they have been affecting our system. Our systems are extremely intelligent and can pretty much adapt to anything. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way for our system. And you might be surprised how much more energy and vibrance you can bring to your life by just making a few shifts. And for me, one of those things that’s really important is considering eating more plants. And I love talking about ways you can do that, but, it might be a whole other podcast.

– There will be another podcast and you have your chef’s license now for that as well. So, what a gift that you have. Megan, thank you so much. I think people want to be healthy, they just don’t know how. And so I appreciate this very much and as people move through their career, in the heat of the career, the thing we tend to put off is our own selves and our own well being, so I appreciate very much your wisdom and input on this. We will have information about Megan in the show notes to this podcast. So you will be able to contact her and get information about her, should you want some advice or input or help on your health and your nutrition. And if you would like some help contacting her, just let us know and we’ll be glad to make that connection for you. Megan, thank you so much for being with us today. And for those of you with us on Building My Legacy podcast, thank you.

– Thank you so much.