March Nutrition

Buh-bye February! Loved you. Mean it. You were great and all, but at Enhanced Wellness Living, we’re ready for Spring!

Have you finished reading Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart? What an expansive journey that book took us on. Wow. In the end, it was perhaps these words of hers that will resonate the most for us: “My hope is that we find that solid ground within us, that shore that offers safe harbor when we’re feeling untethered and adrift. The more confident we are about being able to navigate to that place, the more daring our adventures, and the more connected we are to ourselves and each other. The real gift of learning language, practicing this work, and cultivating meaningful connection is being able to go anywhere without the fear of getting lost. Even when we have no idea where we are or where we’re going, with the right map, we can find our way back to our heart and to our truest self.” 

Welcome to March, as you may know, March is National Nutrition Month so we’re going to focus on food and the value of loving our food. 

We all know what it’s like after finishing a food reset where you’ve been restricted for so long. All you want to do is throw in the dish towel, feeling absolutely bored with your food. Not anymore. We’ll help you discover ways to make your food fun again. Using simple things like herbs and microgreens, can help us all turn up the flavor while seriously upping the nutritional value of our meals. This, of course, puts our Atomic Habits reading to good use and will, no doubt, increase our ability to be more resilient in the unfolding year ahead.

Let’s get inspired together in this month’s Good Reads: The Plantpower Way: Whole Foods Plant-Based Recipes and Guidance for The Whole Family. The book’s authors are Rich Roll and Julie Piatt, with a foreword by CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta, MD. Here, Dr. Gupta shares with us that most doctors don’t learn nutrition in medical school, a fact he finds absurd given that our food can literally be medicine. And he encourages us to learn more by saying “this is not your typical recipe book. It is a book about hope, and the universally shared belief that any one of us can be better.”

As the book states, let’s get “plantpowered”! Now is the time to embrace the next level of nutrition to live your best life.

Getting six to nine cups of vegetables into our bodies every day is no easy feat—some days it seems like too much for even the most dedicated of us. That’s where The Plantpower Way: Whole Foods Plant-Based Recipes and Guidance for The Whole Family comes in to save the day. And don’t worry, just because it focuses on plant vs. animal protein power doesn’t mean we’re trying to turn you into a vegan. 

Both Atomic Habits and The Plantpower Way are valuable resources that embody functional medicine, for you to go back to again and again in your life. Consider them very handy (read important) tools in your toolbox to help you live the healthy lifestyle you seek. 

At Enhanced Wellness Living, we believe that eating whole foods—and avoiding foods that are modern, processed, and refined—helps to build not only our metabolic reserves but our overall resiliency too. Metabolic reserves are like the backup generator or backup power source for our bodies. Extending the “well” period of our lives should be intuitive for most of us, wanting only to live longer if we can live well.   

The fact is that when we deplete our metabolic reserves, we have nowhere else to pull from because we don’t have a backup generator or reserve tank. Living in a constant state of depletion depletes our reserves.  

You can help restore your metabolic reserves by following a healthy nutrition plan, one that puts extra gas (not extra calories) in your tank. Be aware of the nutritional content you’re putting into your body. With all the unpredictability we have in our lives, we want to be living in such a way that when stressors happen, we have enough metabolic reserve to weather the storm and come out the other side without any residual problems. 

We go through seasons of our lives and might feel as though we have the eating part down, but maybe we aren’t getting adequate sleep, or we’re fielding too much stress in our lives. In those cases, our metabolic reserves are being depleted. We know that even with the right food, nothing else will be as impactful as leaning into the Five Pillars of Health. Functional Medicine is not food only. We need to develop and employ simple strategies to live our best lives. 

Kelly Engelmann’s personal story about the importance of developing strategies for maintaining metabolic reserves hits a nerve for all of us. “When my step-dad fell in his 80’s, he didn’t have any underlying health issues, but was admitted into the hospital for a fractured hip to have surgery. Because his metabolic reserves were so low, he couldn’t pull out of it, and he passed away.” 

The point is, you never want to be at the point where your metabolic reserves are low. Be conscious of how you are and what life’s been tossing at you. Maybe you’ve been dealing with a ton of stress, or too busy to eat right, or just taking one too many withdrawals from your health account without making any deposits. This month, strive to be resilient as we dive deep into nutrition! 

 

Enhanced Wellness Living of Ridgeland, Mississippi is your leading Functional Medicine, Holistic Health, Lifestyle Medicine, and Integrative Medicine clinic!  Nurse Practitioner, Kelly Engelmann, and the Enhanced Wellness Living team have supported all of Mississippi including Ridgeland, Jackson, Madison, Brandon, Hernando, Starkville, Flowood, Vicksburg, Oxford, Olive Branch, the Mississippi Gulf, Cleveland, Clinton, Hattiesburg, Canton, Bolton, Hinds, and more since 2004!