Nutrition (sans the Nonsense) – In Conversation with Marissa Winters, MA RDN NBC-HWC (Ep. 99)

Food, diet, and nutrition are always difficult topics to cover – because everyone appears to be an expert. What shocks me is that all of the experts have very different solutions to what ails us. Thanks to marketing and processing and plain old deliciousness of bad food – we all have an issue with what we consume. And I’m tired of conflicting information.  So, this being National Nutrition Month, I decided to get a real expert. Not a person who reads an article and can repeat it; not a person who did it 40 years ago and hasn’t kept up with the times; but a person who lives and breathes it constantly.  Marissa is a pro – and what I really appreciate about her work is that it’s more than just what nutrition is on your plate. Marissa is focused on the whole person – and what nutrition can mean beyond food, and brings a coaching mentality (others first!) to the table to make it really work.  The idea of nutrition and food as self-care is fundamental – and far beyond what many others will preach. Often we separate the physical (our diet) from the mental (what we need for our mental wellbeing) – but they are intertwined far more than we realize (and science continues to uncover more).  I want to say that Marissa cuts the BS out of it, which she does, but she does it in such a nice and caring way that BS is too strong a word. She takes the nonsense out of nutrition – and sets you up for a good way to approach what you need. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed chatting with her! For more information on Marissa:  Contact information: [email protected]; [email protected]: Marissa Winters, MA RDN NBC-HWCHackensack Meridian Health: search “Integrative Health”The Center for Conscious CaregivingInstagram:@centerforconsciouscaregiving (TCFCC)Facebook: The Center for Conscious Caregiving Your Title Goes Here Your content goes here. Edit or remove this text inline or in the module Content settings. You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings. Click Here for an Unedited Transcript of the Podcast Okay. 3, 2, 1. Welcome to bellweather. Thank you for joining this week. We have a phenomenal guest. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know, that, you know, just last week I had the big shtick on wellness and we, we reorganize wellness. We talk about wellness all the time on this has these different components. One of the frustrating things I have with talking about wellness is there’s a lot about the, what needs to happen, less on the how. And I always like to bring in experts to talk about these types of things. And, and I do a lot of work in the background. You don’t necessarily see it, you see it when they come, but we find the really good people that are gonna give you really good, good knowledge. And that’s what we’re gonna do today. A lot of people, when we talk about physical wellness, you talk about your diet, your fitness, your sleep. Speaker 1 (00:55): And if you read the book, you know, we talked about how much, what you eat impacts your ability to think about things and, and your cognitive ability. And, and there’s this kind of big, whole circle of everything thing that, that we want to talk about today. I brought in, uh, an integrative nutritionist. She’s brilliant. She knows exactly everything, uh, that we want to learn because nutrition is such a big topic. And it’s so big. It’s so confusing. Everybody seems to be an expert when they’re not, they have little context as to what you need, and we get confused trying to find whatever the fad diet is, or I want a short term thing. And, and so let’s just cut the, cut the BS, and let’s get to, to an expert. And, and that’s why we have Marisa winter here. So Marisa, thank you for joining us on BAA, the hub. Please tell us about yourself and then let’s get right into it. Speaker 2 (01:46): Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m, uh, thrilled to be here. I am an integrative nutritionist. I’m a registered dietician nutritionist. I have a master’s in holistic health from Georgian court in good old Lakewood, New Jersey. Um, and I am also a certified board certified health and wellness coach right now. I’m working with Hackensack, Meridian, integrative health, and wellness. So I do have a clinical practice with that group, um, which is an amazing learning experience, terrific bunch of people, a wonderful team. And, um, I also do a lot of work with the center for conscious caregiving, which is more of the coaching end of it. Speaker 1 (02:29): Excellent. And so when we, now this being, I should have just said, we’re kicking this off a national nutrition month. So this is, you know, the perfect time to have this discussion. What I like about you and, and what we’ve talked about before, you know, before we actually recorded, this is there’s a balance between what’s factual, good information regarding Nutri, but then also the coaching people on how to get there. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, you say it’s ultimately about self-care, but give me a little bit of your philosophy on nutrition and how we should be thinking about nutrition and, and getting our, our heads in the right place before we really talk about the house and everything else. Speaker 2 (03:09): That’s, that’s a, it’s a great segue in, um, I think what has happened and where a lot of the noise and the confusion comes in is that over the last, I don’t know, 20 years, maybe probably a little bit longer, most of the nutrition research has focused on individual nutrients. It’s all about vitamin D or whatever the nutrient of the day is. Right. And the reality is that that re way of looking at things doesn’t necessarily serve us. It’s great for the science aspect, but we eat food. So we tend to think of things when we read about nutrition, 10 power foods that will change your life and all that stuff. And, and, you know, let’s face it, it tho that’s, it’s not that bowl, you are eating food and you’re putting it into a system. So I always look at it like, you know, the body, instead of being a, a mechanistic type of, uh, paradigm, right? Speaker 2 (04:14): So let’s just say like, I hurt my shoulders. So now I go get my shoulder repaired. I have clogged. Our are reason my heart. And so now I have a workaround. I can get a bypass, right? In reality, we’re not machines. We’re more like gardens. And, and that’s how I kind of propose it to a lot of my patients is you’ve gotta look at the whole thing. So you can’t just look at an individual nutrient and then target the foods that provide that nutrient. Because what we know also is that eating patterns are really the thing that create health and wellbeing in people. It’s not that, you know, your macros are aligned it’s that you are eating food that is nourishing, you’re eating, uh, a compliment, a variety, a balance. You know, you are giving yourself nutrients together because we know there’s a synergistic effect in nutrients, right? So if you eat something orange with something green, it’s gonna work better. So two plus two equals five. Um, so it’s, it’s shifting more into the mindset of how am I gonna take care of myself? And what’s the broader picture, like pull back the lens a little bit, versus focusing so much on the nuts and bolts and getting it right. And Speaker 1 (05:37): I like, and I don’t like the garden analogy. I like the garden analogy because well, people don’t eyes, is that a garden doesn’t just happen when you plant the seeds. It happens throughout the year, even in the off season and everything else. Right. What I don’t like about that analogy is I tried to do that with my daughter and it was an absolute disaster. So figuring out the garden is, uh, and maybe that’s my segue into the question is how much do we have to learn in terms of figuring out these things that pair well together? You said the ora...