Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. By the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. On this podcast, we usually focus on communication skills, both at work and in our personal lives. But my guest today, Maja Miller,
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is here to talk to us about how our bodies communicate with us. So we are going to delve more into internal communication and stress burnout, what the causes of those are. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Maja to the show. Hi, Maya. Hello. It's so nice to be here with you today. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. I'm really excited.
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But before we get into that, please introduce yourself. So my name is Maya Miller and I am a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. What does that even mean? It's just a fancy way of saying that I run clinical labs. So I will take stool samples, blood samples, hair samples, saliva samples, and run a whole host of diagnostic kind of clinical labs to figure out.
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What is going on in your body? Most of the clients that I work with have seen around 12 doctors. They're experiencing things like anxiety, depression, insomnia, gas, bloating, lack of energy, lack of libido, skin issues. They go to their doctors, their doctors say, oh, all of your labs are fine, or oh, it's just part of being older, or this is a part of being a woman. And they know that those symptoms aren't normal. So they come to see me.
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I run my own labs, I use functional ranges versus clinical ranges. That's really important to understand the difference between that. And then those labs kind of paint a picture of what is happening in all of the systems in your body. And then I use those clinical lab results to create tailored bio-individual protocols that reverse your symptoms so that you have the energy that you need in order to.
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You know, slay your day, run your company, manage your family. Because you know, the clients that I work with are playing really big in life. They're trying to live a life filled with possibilities and you can't do that when your body is really failing you and not working in an optimal way. That is very true. I mean, we've always said that health is number one. Your body is number one because it's what does the work. But when I'm listening to what you just said.
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What is wrong with just telling you, Maya, just go and eat healthy and exercise. So that's probably one of the cringiest things I can hear is eat less and move more because it's so vague and it's built on this theory that really looks at how systems operate in a perfect environment. And I don't know about you, but my life isn't a perfect environment. There are stressors.
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You know, there are physical stressors, there are biochemical stressors, there are emotional stressors that change and impact your metabolism. And how you feel today is a result of all of your past decisions. So I always like to say that your biography, all of the things that have happened in the past, create your biology, what is happening at a cellular level in your body. And I think a lot of people.
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don't understand that they've actually put themselves through significantly more stress than they think. They think, you know, a stress is okay, my boss is being a jerk or I lost my job. Well, there's also biochemical stressors. Do you have a parasite? Are you drinking alcohol? Have you taken over the counter drugs like Tylenol, like Advil, like Benadryl? Have you taken a lot of antibiotics?
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Are you sleeping well? Those are all biochemical stressors. And then you have physical stressors. Do you have poor posture? Do you over exercise? Those are all physical stressors. And all of those stressors do the exact same thing. They tell your body, your adrenals, which are these like tiny little organs that sit on top of your kidneys. So you have two of them. They're tiny, but they are very, very mighty. They control so many things. And one of the things that they do is push out
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Cortisol in the body. Well cortisol in small amounts is very very good, but in large amounts so long-term prolonged acute long-term stress Cortisol actually is a catabolic hormone, which means it breaks you down at a cellular level So if you are now 35 40 45 50 years old You've had a lot of experience with those three kinds of stressors that I explained the physical the biochemical and the emotional stressors
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Now your body is literally breaking down at a cellular level and your metabolism is impacted. So somebody in a crashed, you know, adrenal dysfunction state or a tired and wired adrenal dysfunction state is going to need different exercise and also probably some different kinds of foods to help heal them. So to circle this back to your original point, which is eat less, move more.
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eat less of what, move how, move when. Well, that depends. That depends on your biography, what stage of adrenal dysfunction that you're in. And so for me, I am like allergic to cookie cutter plans. It depends, you know, keto for one client might work really well. For another client- Go vegan, go vegetarian, go keto, go carnivore.
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What am I supposed to do if I'm sitting at home and trying to figure out what is wrong with me? And I think the answer is it depends. You know, there is a place for a keto diet. It's not long-term, that's for sure. There is a place for a carnivore diet. A lot of my clients with autoimmune disease, which is highly tied to gut health, there is a place for that. It's not long-term. I personally believe that a vegan or a vegetarian diet
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only works for a very small percentage of the population. You put the wrong person on a keto diet and they're having to have their gallbladder removed, which helps them process fats. You put the wrong person on a vegetarian diet and they're gonna have neurological symptoms like multiple sclerosis. So it all depends. And I have had clients that have come to me, they've been vegan for 15 years.
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They've been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. We put them on an animal-based diet and all of their MS symptoms have gone away. Some people may have heard of macronutrients, proteins, your carbohydrates, and your fats. You need them in larger quantities. That's why they're called macronutrients. Those macronutrients get broken down into micronutrients. You need them in smaller quantities. These are your vitamins, your minerals, your amino acids, your essential fatty acids.
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Those micronutrients are the co-factors and enzymes and things that you need in order for your cells to produce energy. It's ATP, the Krebs cycle, right? And so if you are eating the wrong macronutrient ratio, then you, for your particular body type, for your particular tribe, for your particular set of circumstances, then you are going to get the wrong micronutrients, which means you don't have the fuel.
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for your cells to produce energy. So if you have a brain cell that doesn't have the energy to produce energy, you're gonna have neurological symptoms. And so it's really important to understand that these cookie cutter programs rarely work for people that have at least experienced a significant amount of stress. When you're like 19, 20 in your high school, and you would think, oh, I need to lose a couple of pounds in college,
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You know, just thinking about it, you lost the weight. The weight came off really easily. But I bet you that a lot of your listeners are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Your circumstances and your environment is different. And so you need to take all of that into account. So I never prescribe a certain diet without understanding what's going on with detoxification, what's going on with liver, what's going on with gut.
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what's going on with hormones, what's going on with mineral balance. You really need to have that full picture of what's happening in the body so that we can kind of create these protocols that tell you the right thing to do at the right time in the right order. Because yes, sometimes you're doing the right thing but at the wrong time and you're not gonna see the results. That's kind of my take on the eat less, move more, eat less of what. We teach what we need to learn.
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For me, the reason that I'm in this line of work is because in my twenties, I was very sick. I had an autoimmune disease, anxiety, depression, irritable bowel syndrome. I was getting Xanax for the anxiety, another pill for the IBS. And at the end of the day, I still had all of my symptoms. It would have been one thing if those things actually like fixed what was going on. I thought I was living in California. I had a very kind of high stress corporate fortune five job.
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I was traveling 70, 75% of the time. I was very disconnected from family and friends. I thought healthy, right? Quote unquote. I was eating sushi probably three or four times a week. And when I finally worked with a functional medical practitioner, we tested my mercury levels and I was in the 95th percentile for mercury toxicity. Two of the biggest symptoms of mercury poisoning are anxiety and depression.
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I was eating healthy, I was eating a lot of sashimi, I was eating raw fish, you know? I ate protein, you think what am I doing wrong? Yeah, so it turns out that it's not healthy to eat that much tuna and salmon because of the environmental impact that we have on our oceans and our fish right now. So what does healthy mean? I think a lot of times we don't know what we don't know and it's very difficult in the United States because the US government does not protect us.
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The EPA does not protect us from garbage in the water. And I'm not just talking about cities like Flint, Michigan that have been in the news for poor water quality. If you go to, I believe it's ewg.com, it's the environmental working group, you can put in your zip code for your tap water. I have, I believe, 12 cancer-causing agents in my water in Austin, Texas that are above EWG levels.
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If you are, for example, not filtering your water, you are getting- Does filter jugs work? I'm worried though. Well, there are certain filters that work and there are certain filters that don't work. Our water processing plants today do not filter out pharmaceuticals. So every woman in the United States that's taking a hormonal birth control is going to the bathroom. Those hormones are in the urine. It goes into the water.
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It's not filtered out. And then we drink that again in our water. So for example, I have a filter at my sink for our drinking water. And I recommend a whole home filter because all of those chemicals can get in through the steam in your shower. You inhale chlorine, fluoride, fluoride, which is a neurotoxin by the way. You inhale this, you absorb it through your skin, and then you drink it.
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These are tiny things that you're doing every single day, right? Every single day we're taking a shower. Every single day we're cooking with water from our tap. Every single day we're either drinking bottled water, which is filled with micro plastics, the illusion of cause it's bottled, it's better under the illusion that if it's bottled, it's better. And so all of these things, for example, our endocrine disruptors, these pharmaceuticals, these plastics.
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They are obese and genic. They mimic an estrogen in the body. So we don't even understand that, right? So many of us have very high level estrogen levels. Well, when women have very high certain estrogen levels, oftentimes they get breast cancer. Even something as simple as drinking water, I work with my clients to say, okay, well, what is the quality of your water? What is the source of your water? Is it well water? Is it city water?
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You know, you would think that in the United States, this is not like a third world country where we would have like the EPA, you know, some sort of environmental agencies protecting us. Speaking of third world countries, I come from South Africa, considered a third world country. Minute made orange juice. There was pulp in the juice. It was pure oranges, hardly any sugar. I came to the US. The sugar content is so high and there's no pulp. It tastes very different.
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When you say that there's no protection for the consumers here and the way that they change the food, why do you think that is? All right. I mean, I think it comes down to big business, politics and money. I believe there's something like two or three food companies that control like 90, 95% of all of the brands that are out there. So you've got
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big food, you've got big agriculture, big ag, you've got big beauty, you've got big government, you've got these really big lobbying groups that are acting in the best interest of the business unit, which is high margins, higher prices. They literally have two different formulations. So if you look at French fries from McDonald's in the United States, there's over 20 ingredients that are in French fries.
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There are three, maybe four ingredients, oil, salt, potatoes, maybe a little bit of cornstarch or something like that. In the United States, there's over 20 ingredients. And a lot of these ingredients are chemicals that are flavors that they put into the food that are meant to impact the pleasure center of your brain. So you are literally being biohacked by these food companies.
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in the United States doesn't do anything about that. In the UK, in the European Union, I believe there's something like 1800 chemicals that are forbidden to be put into consumer good products, your lotions, your toothpaste, you know, the products that we use every day on our bodies. In the United States, those 1800 chemicals, many of them cancer causing, I mean, like talc, for example, you heard Johnson and Johnson. The lawsuit, yes.
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They started targeting minority communities. It's egregious what is happening. These things were being put on our babies and our children. Johnson and Johnson is a perfect example of that. The reality is, is you know, we could talk about that for probably six hours. The reality is, is like, if you don't know that this is the environment in which you're swimming in, this toxic swimming pool of like messed up water and chemicals and you know, all these things.
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You may think that you are being healthy when in reality you are making very, very bad decisions for you and your family. You know, you think, oh, range free eggs, range free eggs, range free chickens. Okay. Well, that's very different than pasture raised. There's this constant new marketing terms. Grass fed used to be grass fed.
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But now what they're doing is feeding them a little bit of grass for cattle, for example, and then finishing them off with a bunch of grains. Grains kill cattle. If cows were allowed to live as long as their natural lives were, and they were fed a grain diet, they would die. They are meant to eat grasses. So now I have to look for grass fed and finished cattle. You can't keep up. You can't keep up with it.
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hormone discussion when you talk about cortisol. You mentioned anxiety and depression. Now, before we get into that, sometimes when you go on social media and people are discussing this and somebody would say, oh, you know what? I exercised and I did this and I ate healthy and I was on less medication for depression and anxiety. And then somebody said, don't you dare, this is medical, it's got nothing to do with diet. What is it about depression and anxiety that...
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You feel like people are not understanding yet. A lot of people say it's got nothing to do with diet. It's a medical issue. So that's interesting. Have you heard of Hippocrates? He was a Greek philosopher. He's considered the father of medicine. And he said, let food be thy medicine and let thy medicine be thy food. This is the father of modern medicine. What we put in our bodies, what we put on our bodies is very important. And.
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It is medical. The food that you eat is medical. And we know that your guts, another word for it is your, the microbiome, your microbiome, your gut, everything from your mouth all the way to your anus, that whole system, right? That's where we eat our macronutrients, our proteins, fats, and carbs in the small intestine and large intestine. Well, starting in the mouth, but really, you know, in the stomach, it's those macronutrients start getting broken up into micronutrients.
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Those micronutrients start getting absorbed in the small intestine and the large intestine. Those micronutrients are like what program your cells to have enough energy, right? Every cell has a mitochondria. It's like the...
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power plant of each cell and it produces energy so that a liver cell can be a liver cell. So a brain cell can be a brain cell, right? Mitosis, meiosis. Yeah. We need energy from macronutrients in order to get micronutrients, our vitamins, our minerals, our amino acids, our essential fatty acids, so that our cells have the things that they need in order to work. And so...
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We know that that whole system is very, very important. 80% of your immune system lives in your gut. You have more neurological cells in your gut than you do in your entire spinal column. They say that your gut is your second brain. It's incredibly important. And so the kinds of foods that you put in your gut can inflame your gut, can cause an immune response in your gut.
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And so if you are eating healthy animal, you know, grass-fed, grass-finished, you know, animal products, um, organic fruits and vegetables, if you're eating whole foods, if you're not eating factory created foods, you know, random, like granola bars and frozen foods, frozen pizzas, all of these drinks, if you're not eating those kinds of things, then you're going to have a healthier gut. And we know that this gut lining, they're called epithelial cells. They are.
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identical to the cells that create your blood brain barrier. So your gut has this line of cells that protects the very delicate internal world from a very toxic external world. That same barrier exists in your brain. It's a very important blood brain barrier. You don't want the things that are like in your blood or toxins or anything like that.
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to get into your brain for obvious reasons, right? It's the supercomputer in your body. And so we know that if you have gut permeability or leaky gut, you oftentimes have something called leaky brain. And that is where a lot of these neurological symptoms, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, all of these things that now been highly linked to gut health, parasites, the bacterial overgrowth, a lack of exercise. I mean,
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One of the top things that you can do in order to address anxiety and depression is to move your body and to have sun exposure, daily sunlight. Unfortunately, we have kind of created this environment in the United States where we think that like doctors have the solutions. Doctors don't have the solution. If they did, we wouldn't have a population 80, 85 percent are
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20, 30% have been diagnosed with autoimmune disease. We have one of the sickest populations in the world. So if modern medicine was doing such a bang up job, if they were doing such a good job, we wouldn't have a mental health epidemic, diabetes epidemic, a heart disease epidemic, you know, an obesity epidemic in this country. That is what is common. And I like to show people what is optimal.
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that's an important distinction to make. So it sounds to me like if you continue to listen to your body, like you said, we are talking about communicating with your body despite going to the doctor and the doctor says you're fine, but you're feeling, no, this is not kosher, this is not optimal me, you need to keep searching. There's no such thing as normal diarrhea. There's no such thing as normal anxiety, normal depression, normal psoriasis.
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normal, you know, doctors say, oh, this is normal. Oh, this is fine. And the reality is, that's not true. Our bodies are meant to be in balance. We are meant to wake up with energy. We are meant to be able to go to sleep at night. And so our bodies are communicating with us every single day. And there is an inherent wisdom in our bodies. And that wisdom is not being taught by a
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that like we probably don't have time to get into right now. But if your doctor is saying things like, oh, you're a mom, all moms are tired and anxious and have no libido. That's just not true, right? Like there are plenty of moms that have lots of energy, that have a healthy sex drive, that feel good. The reason that I went back to school to be able to run my own labs is I'd be working with my clients and I would say, hey, I'm not a doctor.
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But you know, this is really reminding me of like autoimmune disease, something going on with your thyroid. Have your doctor run these five thyroid labs. I want to see, you know, TSH, T3, T4, reverse T3, reverse T4, thyroid antibodies. They would come back to me and oftentimes the doctor would flat out refuse. They say, we're not going to run this lab. You don't need this lab. Or they will run one of the labs.
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not that whole panel of like six or seven metrics, or they'll run everything and then they'll say, Oh, you're in range. You're normal. Your labs look good. Next to normal again. Here's a piece that's going to educate your clients. When you run labs and your doctor says everything is normal, right? You have all of these symptoms that are not normal and you go to your doctor, they run the labs and they say your labs are normal. You can say, okay, you're using clinical ranges.
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What are optimal ranges for a woman of my age or a man of my age? When's the last time, Roberta, that you went to the doctor and asked to run labs when you felt fantastic? Probably never. Right? You go to the doctor when you feel like crap. Yeah. Okay. So there are two main diagnostic companies, Quest and CPL. They will take the blood sample and then they aggregate all of that information. All of the results.
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So all of the men that have taken this lab, all of the women that have taken this lab, and then they give you a statistical range, an average, and they say, this is in range. It's just telling you what's common. It's telling you what is in range for an ever increasingly unhealthy population. Well, do you want to be compared to-
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You want to be compared to what's optimal. What is optimal for a 40 some odd year old woman? What is optimal for a 35 year old man? And so that's the difference. These ranges are massive. I use functional ranges, which are smaller. They tell you what's optimal. And outside of those functional ranges, you can have symptoms in a clinical range for 10, 15, 20 years.
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before you get clinically diagnosed with hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism. Well, in the meantime, you've lived suffering for 15 years. So what can your listeners do? The reality is, is your body is communicating with you every single day. So the first thing that you need to do is just listen, take a breath. How do you feel in the morning before things get crazy? Do you have good energy?
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Are you hungry first thing in the morning? Can you wait until two, three o'clock in the afternoon to eat? None of this is normal. Do you go to bed absolutely exhausted, so tired, but absolutely wired and you can't go to sleep? This is your body telling you that something is wrong. Do you have anxiety? Do you have depression? Do you have irritable bowel? Do you have skin issues, cystic acne? Is your hair falling out? Your body is whispering to you.
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and you have to listen. You sometimes eat healthy, you eat salad, you eat your greens and everything, but your waistline keeps increasing and you're wondering, but I'm doing all the right things. Yeah, then I would say work with a professional. And I think that getting data around what's happening in your body is invaluable. I no longer work with clients unless they're willing to run labs with me.
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because they've tried all the other stuff. They've tried eating less, moving more, some random vitamins, like they've tried and that didn't work. And so if you have tried something over and over again, and it still hasn't given you the solution, then you need to find a different solution. And I believe working with a professional that can run some basic labs and help paint a picture of.
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what's going on in your body is the most effective and efficient way to move forward. Because without that information, you're kind of just like throwing stuff at a wall. And the reality is, is a lot of my clients have done like a lot of trial and error. You know, they started diets, stopped diets. They've been working at this for a very long time. They're exhausted. They're over it. They are kind of on their last drink and they need some forward momentum, some progress.
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And the reality is, is if you're working with a professional that is good at their job, you'll start seeing results very, very quickly. I have clients that are like, man, I made this one change and I lost five pounds in one week. I'm like, yeah, you know, it's not supposed to be hard. It can be easy. I mean, I've been told for decades that the body has its own wisdom. It has its own healing mechanism. So in conclusion, based on what you're saying today,
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The gut health and the whole body composition is the reason we have burnout, we have stress, we are exhausted, chronic fatigue. Yeah, you know, that's got health as one component of it really burnout is due to stress. And once we understand that there are three kinds of stress, physical stress, biochemical stress and emotional stress, we will understand that our body's natural self-defense mechanism
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we were meant to see a wooly mammoth once and we're meant to turn on our flight and flight or sympathetic nervous system. We're meant to run away from the wooly mammoth or the saber-toothed tiger, and then that goes away. But today we are under stress 24 hours a day while we sleep, while we're awake. And that stress is what is kind of creating this burnout. And it is possible to live life in a different way. And
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You're responsible for that, right? Like at the end of the day, there is no night and shining armor. Nobody's going to like swoop in. You have to do the work, but you can work smarter versus harder. And that's where working with a professional is the more efficient, the easier way to go. And Taylor make a solution for you specifically. Yeah, of course. If somebody is telling you how you should be working out what you should be eating.
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without understanding, for example, whether you are in a dysfunctional stage of adrenal function, then I would turn around and run away, right? If you are, for example, tired and wired or completely crashed when it comes to adrenal health and somebody prescribes HIIT workouts, hot yoga, CrossFit for you, that's gonna be incredibly damaging. And then also, what time of day should you be working out?
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So if somebody is telling you, this is what you should do to work out, this is what you should do to eat without understanding the roadmap and kind of the blueprint of your body, I would turn around and run because more than likely you've already done that. And what got you here isn't going to get you there. And there is a body that has energy that can sleep, that wakes up refreshed, that has a strong sex drive, you know, that has clear skin, that has
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daily consistent bowel movements. I mean, I think that we've completely lost the zest for life. Yeah. We're tired and we're stressed and we have to continue being entrepreneurs, being professionals and working. We have to take care of ourselves and our families. So this is the kind of work we really need to do. How you do that matters and you're not going to be very helpful to your family if you are riddled with depression and anxiety.
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and you can't leave the house and you don't have the energy to like run your business. You know, at the end of the day, we have one body, one life, and we can't really sail to our final destination. If we're sailing on a rusty wrecked ship, right? We want to have an intact hole, a good engine, a good motor and good navigation skills that we can get from point A to point B with style and grace.
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Words of wisdom from Maya Miller. Thank you so much for being here today and for sharing such trends with us. Before you go, where can we find you? Please share all your social, because this is a very important conversation. Yeah, you know, I'm not really big on social. You can find me on Facebook. You can message me there. You can go to iopnextlevel.com and...
31:39
There you're going to be able to set up some time to actually speak with me. We'll get on a zoom call. I'll ask you a couple of questions just so that I kind of know what's going on ahead of time, but I like to be really accessible to my clients. Sometimes you just want to like hop on the phone and talk to somebody and be like, Hey, here's what's going on. Can you help me? So going to IOP next level.com.
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is where you can schedule some time to chat with me and Facebook from a social media perspective is the place where you, I've got a lot of posts, you know, a lot of knowledge that I share on Facebook and that's just Maya Miller and it's Maya with a J. So I would love to chat with everybody. I'm obviously passionate about what I do. And I, at the end of the day, I love helping people. What's really important to me is that people are safe, seen, and heard, and you can't beat any of those things.
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if you feel like crap in your own body. So the world has a lot of things that we need to fix. And I kind of place my bets on like amazing entrepreneurs and innovators and intrapreneurs to be able to make a positive impact in the world. And like I said, you can't do that if you don't feel good in your own body. Constantly tired and burned out, obviously not, yes. Your work is very necessary, Maja. Thank you so much for being on the show today and I will drop all the website and the Facebook details.
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on our show notes so that we can continue to contact you. Thank you. So nice chatting with you. This was a wonderful conversation as well. That was Maja Miller, the Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and Health Coach to help us today with all that we need to understand when it comes to why we are stressed, burned out, and sick, constantly tired all the time. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating, and a review, and we'll be with you next time.