hi and welcome to healthy inspirations i'm your host lindsay smith today we have an exciting show planned for you my good friend and fellow health coach emily levinson is here to share in her inspiring story of overcoming multiple food sensitivities and how this transformation led her to help others do the same so welcome thank you for having me yeah i'm excited to chat with you today so tell me a little bit about your story and your kind of your food story yeah my husband probably five years ago at this point decided one day he wanted to become a vegetarian which on the outside sounds like a really great food choice and for him it was he lost twenty pounds he felt great had more energy than ever and i gained twenty pounds felt like death warmed over had chronic migraines and just was getting sicker by the minute and couldn't figure out why a choice that was so good for him and about being so miserable for me and went in for acupuncture to start going down the road i had an eight week magazine that wouldn't go away and acupuncturist was the first person to tell me i had food intolerances and when i went down the road to discover it i learned that all of the foods that we had started eating as we became vegetarians were all of the foods that i was sensitive to and of course  migraine cold sores every two weeks it led to job contemplation of surgery irritability on morning mood swings so there were so many other health complications that came with it that when i figured out what it was it was almost a relief  know i was limited in terms of what i could eat but it was really relieved to know it was going on and when i cut the foods out of my diet my health totally changed for the better and really went from being completely miserable all the time to feeling the best i had ever felt in my life  what's the difference between there's a lot of talk like sensitivities and intolerance isn't allergies can you kind of help us understand what the differences between the things sure a food allergy is what i think most people think of when they think of food sensitivities  a food allergy something that can cause shock it can cause approach to close up the mouth to swell hives to hoppin vomiting things like that and it can alternately lead to death if there's enough exposure to an allergen food  tolerances are a little bit different in the sense that it's more of a gut reaction and a gut response so it can lead digestive troubles bloating irritability skin issues acne things like that and food sensitivities are really just kind of a broad spectrum term to really just mean that the body doesn't process it very well and there are things that may not be full blown intolerances or full blown allergy but the body still doesn't respond very well when it's in the system and so we i personally use that term to describe just sensitivities it's sort of the umbrella term so to speak so food sensitivities tell me a little bit about it's how you can have the spectrum of that because i know when we think of allergies or sensitivities we think of what gluten and wheat and when we think of sensitivities it really can be any suit out there it can be pretty much anything under the sun that your sensitive to are reacting to and when i was first diagnosed my big grouping of food is called the night shade family and that's why potatoes tomatoes  plant peppers all that good so all the good stuff i ended up or so pretty much any anything i was eating included my french fries and my catch up in the pasta with the tomato sauce all of those things are really off limits about point but i've tested people who are sensitive to things like bananas or apples fruit sugar you know and then all of the common ones like gluten wheat dairy and soy so that was i know when you tested me for my sensitivities one of the things that i was shocked about was how healthy foods you know could actually your body can be sensitive to them so one of them for example that i tested sensitive to was coconut yes and i remember i'm like oh my goodness kokomo is like the huge craze and here i've been having coconut oil and i've been drinking coconut water and coconut milk and here my body was sensitive to it and i was like the kind of shocked here there's this health food that's the big wave and everyone's talking about it but it may not work for your body right and that's something i found too i mean who thought of tomato would be such a bad thing and the truth is that if your body sensitive to it it doesn't matter if it's the health food of the moment or if it's you know junk food you know you're buying candies and sweets and whatever the case may be if your body sensitive to it you're going to have a reaction and it's not going to make you feel very good and if you think about it the foods that we tend to get the most often are diets if we're not feeling very good they tend to be the ones that get eliminated first and that come up in the testing so take me through the testing that you do yeah it's called bio energetic assessment another word for it is electro dharma screening and it's basically a computer system that we use that puts a small pulse of energy through the body every different food element bacteria virus pretty much the cloth that you're wearing anything out there has a unique collection or frequency and we can gauge the body's response to that based on the frequency and how the body reacts energetically to the food or the element that we're putting through it so we can get a really good gauge around is something ok to eat is something not ok and it doesn't matter if you've ever eaten a food before i've never met anybody who's ever had a bear and it's on the test and every time i come up to that  i get a good chuckle around it so we can test foods that you've never eaten before we can test foods that you currently eating doesn't matter for taking into histamines or other kind of allergy meds we can get a true sense of whether that food is causing reaction and i so it's really nice because i know a lot of people who've gone in for the blood test if you're not if you're on anti histamines or allergy medicine you actually can't get a true reading from it because it'll block it out so we can work around some of those limitations which is really nice one of the things that from the testing that i noticed about myself was i got back that i was weak sensitive and i know it was a kind of knew that but then i was able to eliminate we and i feel much better so thank you and but one of the things that was i was really curious and what i think this testing was so amazing that it did was it actually shows you how long you pretty much need to get it out of your system so you can kind of is that right there by saying that right yet we can look at when we do the testing we're looking at all the different foods and me we start with berries we look at beverages which is generally were where people start to hate me because i'm taking away their coffee and i'm taking the alcohol and then we get to dairy which is generally where i lose the rest is about ninety percent of people i test  test for dairy and usually all forms of it do you think that lactose intolerance is a bit of a misnomer because it's not just luck to us that people are testing for when they test for dairy sensitivities but then we work through different grains which is about seventy percent of picture based on that outcome of what's going on for people and you know it really is something that casts a big net and it can be intimidating but so it's helpful that we can look at than what are the number one priorities when we're looking at food so if you have a fairly long list i know from experience that when you're told you have to cut out fifteen things from your diet your eyes glass over and it's like how do i do this i don't know how to function i don't know how to eat for myself anymore and i certainly don't know how so what can i do about this so we can look at priorities we can say this food group is the most important one to cut out we can look at so we can give sort of a pathway for people that if you're not ready to cut everything out all at once you can cut out one thing at a time and work your way down the list the other great thing is that we can look at how long it takes or how long you should avoid the food before you come back and get retested so is it a three month window is it a six month window i've had people with a year  out and it's really and part of what we're looking at there too is do you need other supports in play and we can look at what kind of complimentary treatments are going to help you because i found that it's really not just about the food it that a lot of times stress in our lives and other mood as you know and i see the restriction that people put on place it's very difficult sometimes and it makes them either want to eat more or they give or so how do you deal with with working with people i think the philosophy of leaning into something and really taking on one piece at a time has been helpful and so looking at if we if we know the priorities and say gluten is number one priority start there it doesn't have to be that every single thing on your list has to get cut out right away start with the biggest impact try it first two weeks move on to the next one so that you start to build up this familiarity you start to learn recipes that work for you and you start to make better choices based on that and then what you're feeling good it helps to keep you motivated to keep going through and i personally was a cold turkey kind of girl i needed to cut everything out i was so desperate and so miserable after eight weeks of a migraine that i was i was willing to just eat brown rice and lettuce for the rest of my life  migraines but not everybody is like that and i can get a sense for when people get the glassy eyed look and say this is overwhelming and i don't know what to do and one of the great things that over the course of my experience with food sensitivities i've really built up a great index of recipes and they're all labeled in terms of gluten free dairy free night shade free that people can use that as a tool and i work very hard in my consultations to make sure that people don't leave the room feeling overwhelmed that they least have one or two action items that they  or what would you say about that not necessarily and it depends truly on where it came from if it's genetic sometimes it's not always going to be the case where it can go away fully but you might be able to get certain foods back and it might be that  needs to heal from something that's going on for me it took me three years and i was frustrated with a lot of time because my husband you know things that come up for him and it's like six weeks and he's back to eating all the foods he loves and it took me about three years to work through it but it took a lot of work around kind of you know massage around acupuncture and doing other complimentary treatments i worked with the natural path in our office who does really the big picture testing and worked with her to really heal the body and figure out what was causing  with so what what it's what some advice that you have for people that maybe are interested in learning more about it or seeing sensitivities they may have come point even if you're not in your side or in the pittsburgh area we can certainly do distance testing so wherever you are we can certainly look at what the picture is that's going on if people are interested or not ready to commit to the testing i know it can be a little daunting to have a list of foods if you're not ready for it one thing would be to try and elimination diet and pick some of the more common allergens dairy is definitely a good place to start like i said ninety percent of people i test test for all dairy so really cutting all of that out at on e not just milk not just cheese but also going for yogurt we've protein or you know things that you wouldn't always think create such a big issue but can cause problems gluten would be the second place to start seventy percent of people are there not just we were bred or pasta but really all gluten containing grains and then the night shades which is surprising but that's about fifty percent of people really are also there i've never even heard of before until i was  no idea and and you know given a pat on the head when i was told my sensitivities and said you're smart girl figured out that there was nothing out there and so it's nice to have a resource and for a good three years on the blog that was literally the only thing i wrote about a poste r recipes that were nightshade free and dairy free so i have a good stockpile and good ways i've learned to be creative when it comes to that so if anybody wants to try and change free diet i have plenty of recipes and resources there ok great  thank you emily we're going to take a quick commercial break but when we come back we're going to hear more from emily l something's happening to the polar bear arctic sea ice is melting away two thirds of the world's polar bears will be gone by twenty fifty and the entire species could be go to save the polar bear dot org today welcome back to healthy inspirations we're going to continue talking to emily levinson about food sensitivities so this is such an interesting topic and i think one of the things about food sensitivities and intolerances and allergies it's hype everywhere i mean literally everywhere you go i see gluten free dairy free soya free not free you know which is great i think especially because this this hasn't this is kind of a new or i think it's something that's always been there but it's making headway but what do you say about that i mean some of it just like come on there there is a bit of new attention around it and i have to say i'm happy about it because it makes my life a little bit easier to through when i tell people you have to avoid certain foods or this is what's coming out because there are more resources and tools and foods available that are very clearly safe for people to be eating so i'm happy about it on some level and i do recognize that there are you know with everything and allergies have gone up incredibly some of it is that people have there's better diagnosis some of it is that people are more aware of it and some of it i really think is about the food system and where our what's happening to our food there's been a homogenous nation around the different crops it's the same wheat crop that all of us are eating in every single ounce of our food so there's no variation there same thing with tomatoes there used to be a hundred different varieties of tomatoes and now we probably have three available to us so there is some sense around our food system that when all the heirloom foods and we are growing our own that there are so many different varieties that if you are sensitive to one chances are you weren't going to overdo it in your diet where now there's so much out there that's the same quality that is being grown same corn the same we all of those things that are really in our food everywhere that we really just can't get away from it and so you're starting to notice that people are having adverse reactions there and then there is just that people feel better when they cut out gluten and that people just feel better when they stop having dairy that that that's really what you're going to find and that's use your body as the gauge there that if you feel better when you don't have wheat stop eating it if you feel better when you don't have dairy avoid it i mean that's just as you know trust trust that intuition your body and that it's telling you what it really needs in the foods that are out there i love that's part that's one of the sections of my book as you probably know because i know you read it junk foods and junk moods is that treat your body like a test because you know you can get these tests and that's ok but if there's another food that you don't feel sensitive to or you eat it if you don't feel good then you probably should need it very brings up a story my sister in law i tested her probably year ago and she tested for gluten and we and she avoided it felt incredibly better had more energy her brain fog lifted she wasn't meeting that afternoon up anymore and she felt great and and would kind of test it just to see how things were going would have a sandwich and a feeling sort of drunk on the couch and have to take a nap that her head was spinning and just really felt out of it for a couple hours and i suggested she go get a test to rule out celiac disease and also to see if there was a gluten intolerance and her doctor did the test everything came back negative laughed at her and said why are you avoiding this this is silly and yet her body was very clearly telling her this doesn't feel right so you know take all of this testing with a grain of salt your body is the true lab and if you feel better when you avoid it avoid the foods if you don't notice much of a difference maybe it's going to take a little bit more time or maybe it's more than just one food group that you need to be thinking about how as a combination of all works together and that's where it gets a little more complicated no harder to tease it out i know from experience doing an elimination diet it took me about eight weeks to give up and say i need to get tested i felt fifty percent better cutting dairy out because that was one of my big ones but still couldn't figure out the rest and you know with things like cinnamon tomatoes cayenne pepper i would have never figured it out on my own yeah those are very very specific very very  specific i know one of the foods that i was tested sensitive to we were talking about this on the way here was bananas and you know that i'm like obsessed with bananas i eat every day all day every day and and you're like how did that go for you and one of the things that i notice is even just the time periods so when i would have a banana in a smoothie i'd be fine it would give me energy i'd feel good and then the after that i would have it later afternoon just by itself it did not sit right with me but i had been doing that for years and not paying attention to it right and and again your body's laboratory and i've had the same thing with bananas it's fine in the morning i get wicked and gestured at night like i can't i can't breathe it hurts so badly and bananas tested for me at some point so so i do know that there is is truth to that piece too sometimes foods can create sort of hidden information that you may not feel it but it's still causing problems in the body so you know there's a little bit that you know doing the food sensitivity testing alone if you feel better and that answers that for you great it's not always the full answer for people which is why it's nice to add in other things or to compliment the treatment listing the naturopath or going in for other complimentary treatments like acupuncture like energy work things like that that will help to move you forward and allow the body to heal in ways that just cutting out the foods alone may not be able to do for you what about so the other treatments those things  they complement each other and are they specific to each body type as well yes and we can actually test with the machine that does the food testing to see what kind of alternative treatments or complimentary treatments are needed at the moment i think we look at creating a safe  can look at acupuncture we can look at chiropractic psychotherapy so we can really look at everything that's out there and see if that's what resonates most strongly in the body so what about one of the i wrote a little thing on face earlier about questions people had for you and one of the questions that came up was weight loss and one of the woman one of the women said that she had a cut out saw gloom and she still can't lose a pound so her sensitivities is weight loss is that connected or it can be and because and for me it was for sure i mean i cut the foods out and probably lost ten pounds in the first week and a half to we spent a lot of that was water weight bloating and just that my body had no idea that what i was putting into it was food and fuel that it thought of it as an invader and stored it away it fought it and then i also couldn't digest the other foods that i was eating because my body was so busy fighting the other stuff that it wasn't able to digest things as well so there is some truth to you do lose some weight also i was eating french fries a lot and a lot of pasta and i couldn't do that as much my food choices change drastically eat a lot more vegetables a lot more whole grains my diet did a whole complete sort of turn around that i was eating a lot better too so it made it a little easier for my body to say ah we're getting food this is good stuff we know what to do with that and now we're going to work efficiently for some people though it's not enough and it's not the full answer to what's going on it could be that there's something else that's causing the food sensitivities to happen and that also is causing people to retain weight or to make it more difficult so looking at you know looking at the big picture can also help with that but usually when people say i can't lose the weight i can't lose the weight there's something else going on and it's really not about the food it's about what else is going on in their life and and it weighs you down literally and figur focus on food you're missing the big picture and you could be missing a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to losing weight so my suggestion is for people who have a lot of food sensitivities and you're still not taking the weight off in a way that you want to start to look at the big picture and look at other areas of your life adding in things like meditation yoga breathing acupuncture massage get in touch and work on the emotional piece that's connected to it and chances are you'll make more progress than you would just by  crucial i think you can test this but so many people come to me for strictly i want to lose weight i want to lose weight i want to get down to this wait that i was in high school or you know and it's just like you're never going to be that way to get you know and that's ok but i think we put even as a society so much pressure on ourselves to lose this weight and to get it off and that pressure is actually making our body anxious and so it stores is fat in our cells and then we're not able to lose weight and the other thing that because i'm so stressed out of my body and my gut can't function at an optimal level and so my food sensitives come up again and i know for me that the symptom and that's the big picture that i have to figure this out i have to look at what's causing me to stress i have to go back to those kind of areas that help me and go back to meditation i focus on deep breathing i do more yoga and i learn to take care of myself in a different way and i find that when i do that the food sensitivities start to minimize that i'm not a sensitive anymore and that i just start to feel better in general but stress and food sensitivities have a huge kind of connecting role together and if you're not addressing the other areas you're never going to get rid of it you're never going to heal you're never going to get past it one of the things that i think is really interesting is how much our emotions affect our bodies and for someone maybe i mean i i like yoga and meditation all those things but are there any other things besides those kind of activities that can help i know you do a lot on stress that can help calm people down that's not necessarily especially for someone that's maybe new to it and then you know when i when i first i sort of started meditating when i was twelve ok and i thought that it was like i had to go in this room and i had to be on this pillow and i had to sit there with my legs crossed my palm just stop thinking and it was hard for mix my mind was racing and i was there there a couple things but when i do stress management workshops and i do that's generally the most common one that i do and like december around the holidays they tend to get a little bit more populated but one of the things that i teach in that is deep breathing and in sixty seconds you truly can feel a benefit sixty seconds everybody has time if you're sitting in the bathroom lock the door do a couple deep breaths if you're laying in bed before you kind of go to sleep sixty seconds everybody can fit that into their time frame and it's really more about you know finding taking the breath taking the time to kind meditations that you can choose from they're all free and they're guided so for somebody who's never done it before or somebody like you who in the beginning couldn't quiet the mind out fantastic tool the other thing that's great is changing how you think a matter of thought patterns really do affect how we feel and if you can start to change thinking even you know gratitude journal thinking about five positive things that happen during your day oftentimes is enough to start to make that shift and happen that's great so emily thank you for coming in traveling with us today i'm always it's always a pleasure to talk to you and learn i learn so much from you all the time where can people find more information out about you and your services i have a website emily levinson dot com and e m l y l e for tuning into healthy inspirations as always the goal of this show is to encourage and inspire individuals to take action in their life and their high if you know of any local inspirations that you think would be a good fit for the show please email me at info at food moon girl dot com again thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time