It’s All About Context

The thing no one wants to hear in the health and wellness world is: it depends.People want hard and fast rules.They want to be able to say this is healthy and this is not.They want to jump on a bandwagon and have it be the bandwagon they are on for life.There are very few rigid, definitive statements about what is healthy I can make at this point in my over a decade experience in the world of nutrition.One is: properly raised animal products are necessary for a stable endocrine, digestive, cardiovascular and nervous system.You cannot not eat animal products and thrive to the level you could if you did.Humans evolved eating animal products.You wouldn’t expect a wolf to thrive if you fed it a vegetarian diet and so the idea that humans could thrive on a diet that is not evolutionary appropriate to them is just insane and shows us how far we have moved away from nature that we have so many people believing eating more veggies is the answer to their health issues.Do we need to make sure to eat animal products that are organic, pasture raised, grass fed and finished, etc, yes, absolutely. Eating unhealthy animals force fed diets they are not evolved for will not make you, a human animal, healthy either. This brings me to the other thing I can definitively say makes people healthier and that is reestablishing a connection to nature.This could be waking up with the sunrise every morning, going outside and bringing your body into closer connection with the natural cycles of daylight and dark.It could be making friends with a local farmer and buying some vegetables from her.It could be going on a walk every day and opening your body to receiving whatever is there:  birdsong, wind, and trees.It could be going outside when it’s less than perfect weather out and just letting your body commune with the elements.Reestablishing your connection to Nature could be so many things, and any of them will most definitely make you healthier.Other than these two generalized things, everything else is context.This is where taking responsibility and running health information/recommendations through your individual system comes in hard and fast.Here are some of the biggest places where I see people jumping on health trends without actually understanding the context:Saunas and Cold Plunges:They could be really beneficial or extremely detrimental depending on the state of your body’s nourishment/depletion and your body’s resiliency to stress.Mostly, I see women who are over stressed, depleted of vitamins and minerals, with zero excess energy/redox potential doing cold plunges or saunas thinking that they are helping their body when they are actually stressing their body out even more.These are inherently stressful practices. If you are burning through minerals or your cortisol is super dysregulated cold plunges and long sweaty sauna sessions will only further deplete you.However, cold therapy and especially infrared saunas can also such amazing therapeutic tools.It’s not an all or nothing either. It’s about finding where the benefits start and end in your unique and individual body at this season of your life.For example, if I did a whole body cold plunge it would send me into a dysregulated state I would be dealing with for days after.However, I have been doing face ice baths and feeling a lot of benefit from just that. Same with saunas. I can do about 20-30 minutes of infrared sauna with great results, anything more and it ramps up my stress response so much it makes it hard to get back to ground level in a reasonable amount of time and therefore increases my depletion.FastingThe science people report to have around the benefits of fasting/intermittent fasting is reductionist and cherry picked at best. It demonstrates an oversimplification and total disregard for the differences in male and female physiology.Fasting is stressful on the body and if your body is in fight/flight most of the time fasting is only going to further drive that state in.It may give you a “high” and make you feel good/loose weight initially but ultimately unless you are a man with a very resilient and well nourished system just a normal period of fasting over night while you sleep is enough fasting each day. .I have seen certain therapeutic contexts where fasting was very supportive of things like weight-loss and blood sugar regulation in men.CoffeeCoffee and caffeine are like revving the engine on a car.If you don’t have gas in the tank it’s not going to be good or helpful.However, if you do have gas in the tank, then it can be totally fun to move a little faster.There are a lot of medicinal benefits of good quality, mold tested, organic, high grade coffee drank in combination with other nutrients and after or at least with food.Some options are making sure to never drink coffee black but always with one or a few of these: raw cane sugar, raw cream, egg yolk, collagen, colostrum.Drinking coffee can also support binding inactive iron and increasing the master antioxidant glutathione which supports the liver.When you do not have gas in the tank or you drink coffee by itself, on an empty stomach, caffeine spikes your blood sugar which increases stress hormones and decreases insulin sensitivity. It taxes the liver and depletes glycogen stores.When you drink good quality coffee with raw cream and cane sugar and after you’ve eaten a good sized meal, it can be very supportive to the liver.It’s all about the context.The context of our body is something a practitioner can help you unwind, but the ultimate rule is that you are your own best resource.I don’t believe we will ever feel healthy if we are constantly looking to someone else to tell us what is good for us.Each and every human has a unique set of circumstances, health histories, ancestral heritage and perception of stressors in their current season of life.Context is everything.You cannot expect a practitioner, even one that does their due diligence collecting as much information about your body as they possibly can to understand the whole context of what it is like to be you.You are the only one that can do that.You are the one that needs to run every piece of health information you receive through your body and feel how true it feels for you.You are the one that needs to be willing to practice and experiment and move through some trial and error when it comes to healing protocols, lifestyle changes, and dietary shifts.You are the one that needs to take the responsibility for the choices you make around your health. Period.This is a huge piece of my body of work.In FED, my 6 month journey into deep feminine nourishment, we start to understand our body’s history and story more clearly.We start to understand where our habits, aversions, preferences came from and which ones are serving us. We start to relate to our needs differently and start to really see and understand what we need to feel nourished and fed on all levels.We begin to lovingly unwind why we continually make choices that do not serve our well being. In my nutrition deep dives, I help you see your body story to the best of my ability and make very personalized recommendations after we take it all in together.Then, you do the work. You put the recommendations that feel best for you into practice and see what happens.And along with my guidance and expertise, you start to see and create the path you want to take toward a more integrated, healthy you.In HOME BODY we simply sit with our neutral attention on our bodies in a ceremonial field and start to see what opens.I guide you in HOME BODY as well but it is you and only you who has the experience and knows what the experience means and what it is guiding you towards.I am simply a guide who has made it my life’s work to be an example of how to rebuild, retouch, and remember the overflowing well of inner resources I have access to and how I can to cultivate those resources, and therefore be the permission you need to do this for yourself as well. We’ve all heard the saying: the dose makes the poison.Coffee can be good for you, and it cannot be.Running could be good for you; and it cannot be.Having a baby could be wildly depleting for you, and it could be wildly generative.You could need to be really rigid and strict with what you eat and you could also need to let go and just eat whatever.The context is what matters in these situations.And only you can really know that for yourself.Ways to Work with me:FED 6 month group journey starts the end of August. Message me if you feel called and we’ll do a call to feel into if it’s a good fit.Nutrition Deep Dive, 3 sessions diving deeply into your unique vessel and its story. You can message me if you feel called for this.HOME BODY a 2 hour online ceremony honoring your body as your home. A self massage, lymph and fascial work practice and guided visulalization that helps you tune into what your body is asking for. This month’s HOME BODY OS happening this Sunday, July 30th, 9-11am PDT. $44. This is a perfect way to come and taste my medicine if you’re feeling called but not sure where to start.Sign up here: https://buy.stripe.com/14k8wF6j8cui9pu4gp This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe