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Ferdinand Barrett
6 years ago
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1 Hi Brett. Welcome to Additive Free Made Easy. Thank you so much for being part of this course with us. We re really super excited about it and we can t wait to hear some of your opinions and get you to answer some questions for us. Thank you. Start off and tell us a bit about yourself. Sure. First of all thank you for having me on board. It s great, the topic s obviously something I am excited about and really passionate about so it s great to have an opportunity to come on share and to chat about it. I am a chiropractor by trade so that s kind of how I got in to my whole health and wellbeing journey but over the years I have gone along through the process I have realised there was more that I could do for people on top of the chiropractic and that what they were doing when they weren t with me in terms of diet and their lifestyle, their emotional health was making a massive difference as well. Obviously as a chiropractor I m very passionate about making sure that their spinal and nervous system is functioning well and that s really the foundation to good health. Over and above that realising that there was more I could do and that led me to write my book which is, How to eat an elephant and it s all about helping people make life style changes, sustainable lifestyle change which has been great. It s been out for a few years now, we ve sold loads of those and that s been very well received and really popular for helping people make lifestyle changes. From there I then started podcasting, I ve now got two podcast shows, The Wellness Guys which is Australia s number one health podcast show still kind of blows us away it s been an amazing journey which then morphed into more podcast shows so I also co-host a podcast called, That Paleo Show which is all about that sort of paleo way of eating and getting lots of healthy meats and fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds in to the diet which has been awesome. That then spurred the whole podcasting network, we now have 18 podcasts on our podcasting network. We have a wellness summit that happens once a year where we had 700 people along to this year, we have a wellness breakthrough where we do a retreat each year so it s kind of just taken off and expanded and as I have gone through that journey I have continued with my writing with my newsletter, I ve now written a couple of more e- books. I ve written the barefoot running e-book with Kim Morrison, I ve written an electrolyte e-book which is healthy electrolytes rather than the Gatorade and all that stuff, it s getting a healthier alternative. I m just finishing at the moment writing a healthy kids eating e-book which is going to be pretty topical for what we re talking about today. Definitely It s kind of been my journey. It s all been quite organic to be perfectly honest and I still haven t really had a plan along the way, it s just been things that have come up that I ve been excited about and passionate about and I ve just had an opportunity to share that with people and I love sharing with people, I love going on the wellness summit and having all those people there sharing with me and saying, Hey look, I listen to this podcast and this is what I changed and this is how it changed my family or changed my community or

2 whatever it happens to be. It s such a joy to see people being so proactive and actually taking information and making a difference. It s just so exciting. Absolutely. I totally 100% agree and we with additives and preservatives it s definitely a journey that both me and Jo are still on. Jo s journey is quite involved and quite intense and the people on the course will have already heard a bit about it. We want to ask some opinions of you. I believe you said you follow a paleo diet? So it s a strict diet and whilst we re not a paleo website or anything like that there are certain aspects of the paleo lifestyle that we absolutely love and that s the same for any healthy eating lifestyle of health food and diet sort of things because it strips down to basically cutting out the chemicals. Yeah Why do you choose to eat a strict diet? That s funny. You know I never think of it as a strict diet. People just sort of look at paleo and think it s a strict diet. For me it s quite a diverse style. There are a lot of things I do eat and for me it s just about eating stuff that nourishes my body, that makes my body feel great and that I know is going to allow me to do what I want to do in my life so I don t actually feel like I m restricting myself at all by doing the paleo diet. I don t do the paleo diet 100%, I have exceptions to that as well. I don t feel like I m restricting myself, I actually feel like I m giving myself a gift when I do it. For me, the core of it comes from my chiropractic philosophy and in chiropractic one of the things we re taught from the start is that your body doesn t need any help, it just needs no interference. Your body is actually an incredibly intelligent amazing eco system that s actually evolved over millions and millions of years to be perfectly suited to its environment and that if you give it what it needs and don t give it any of the stuff that it doesn t need then it s actually amazing. It s phenomenal how well it does what it does. Based on that chiropractic philosophy the understanding is that we just have to remove the interference. I started looking at my diet and started thinking well there s a whole bunch of things here that my body probably doesn t recognize all that well that my body hasn t really evolved to require or in fact evolved to know how to deal with. Looking at all that how could I give my body all that it needs to thrive and give my body less of the stuff that doesn t help it thrive so that I can get more out of my body. For me I don t see that as being restrictive, I don t see it as being a negative thing, I see it as being a positive thing. When I get an opportunity every day to give my body some stuff that is going to give me an opportunity to love myself and to love my body and nourish my body so that I can do the things I love doing in my life so that I can have energy to play with my kids, play cricket, be a chiropractor, podcast, so that I have the energy to help other people. I see it as a gift I give to myself, to help myself do what I love. Yeah. The families on this course are transitioning from possibly having eaten highly processed foods or highly packaged foods in to now more cook

3 it yourself, make it yourself sort of thing. What are some of your hints and tips to make that transition easy? To not stress people out? Just to give a bit of background so that people understand my journey and where I ve come from. I think it would be great to understand. When I was in my early twenties I was working at a hardware store and my lunch everyday was a pie, a pastry, a 1.25 litre soft drink and often a mars bar as well. I would have that every day. Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night I would go to the pub, drink way more than I should and I was nowhere near a picture of health. My journey was exactly as I ve sort of spoken about in How to eat an Elephant. It was one bite at a time and what I realised was that I had tried a few times to go on a bit of a crash diet, I d go on a crash exercise regime and it didn t work. I looked at people around me and realised that very rarely does it actually work. They try to change everything at once and that s not a very successful way to try and do it. When I looked back on my journey and I said my journey has actually been quite organic, it was kind of I d just learn something new and I d try something new and I d feel good so I d keep rolling it. I was lucky that I was in this chiropractic environment where I was constantly getting to learn new stuff and getting exposed to new stuff which was great but as I look back on that what I realise I d done is just picked one thing at a time and made one small change at a time. What I encourage people to do is make a little change. Pick one thing, don t pick the thing that s hardest for you, the temptation is to find the hardest thing you ve been struggling with for like 10 years and try and change that one but that s the hardest one for a reason. It s hard to do. What s easy to do, find the easy one? Find the change that s going to be really easy for you and make that one. In fact find the one change that s going to be the most fun for you. Out of all the things you could change, find one thing that s going to be easy and fun for you and pick the smallest increment of change that you can. If you re going to drink a little bit more water then just drink one more extra glass of water a day. Don t try and drink three liters a day, just drink one extra glass a day. Make gradual change and the key to that is that it allows you to succeed. My idea is that you should find one so small and easy that you couldn t possibly fail. Yeah The idea is you re setting yourself up for success because when you succeed you feel good. You feel good not just because you made a positive change to your health but because you succeeded at it. That sets up an entirely different environment within your body, it sets up an entirely different mindset which is, well I can do this, and I can make change. Of course then when you go to pick the next one it s a little bit easier and a little bit easier each time. My book, How to eat an Elephant, has 97 chapters in it. It s not a massive book, it s a little book. There are just very short chapters and each chapter is a different challenge. It s a different aspect of health and wellbeing you could choose to take on to make that little incremental change.

4 Relating that to kids, that makes total sense. Relating that to kids that may not eat a single vegetable at all is it a matter of saying look let s just eat one pea and then the next night you add one slice of carrot and It might not be peas and carrots. There s a whole host of strategies you can use for kids and this is just one of them. We might talk about some of the others in a second but it might not be peas and carrots for kids. What I say to my parents is, mums or dads or whatever, is why don t you find the one thing that they love? What do they love eating? What is a fruit or a vegetable that they love eating? Start with that. Get them to eat that each day, because what happens when they start eating real food, they start eating vegetables, they start eating fruit, is that they start to evolve their taste buds and the taste buds start to change. It s not just their taste buds but also preferences that start to change, even their cravings, their physiology starts to change and it makes it easier to take the next step. Start with the simple ones, with the ones that you know they love, get them eating that and then you can gradually start to find out what s one that maybe they don t mind. Start gradually expanding it from there and I guess the other things with kids is keep trying. It s so tempting to be like my kid doesn t eat this, many times you hear a parent saying he won t like that don t give it to him but maybe he didn t like it last time but it doesn t mean he won t like it this time and you just keep trying. The thing with kids is, we re talking about this one bite at a time, making small changes, they ve got a whole life time ahead of them. What you want for them is to be healthy when they re 80, there s no rush. What is far more important to them than creating instant change is creating sustainable change. That s the key, the key to sustainable change is about teaching your kids to love eating healthy, rather than teaching your kids they have to eat healthy. It s a fundamental difference in the way you communicate it with your kids. If you re forcing them to eat that pea that they don t want to eat they re not going to love eating peas. You want to have them eating something that they love so that they are enjoying it or you want to teach them why in their framework, in their preferences why they may want to eat a pea. Why that may help them get what they want out of their life. That s a really cool conversation to have and that s what my e-book is all about. show. I m super keen for this new e-book. We re getting details on Yeah I ll make sure I send your review copy through. Some favorite foods of yours that are going to fill kid s bodies and keep them full for hours. I know what mine are like, they get off the school bus and they are starving. They take a packed lunch box let me say. I ve got teenage kids, teenage girls and they re pretty busy after school as well so are always on the move. What are some of your favorite foods to help kids stay fuelled? I think the first thing I d say is when it comes to staying fuelled the key to that is foods that will give them better fuel for longer. When Nora

5 Gedgaudas talks about this and she talks about the different types of fuel and she says that carbohydrates are kind of like kindling on your fire, they burn brightly but they burn out pretty quick. Protein is kind of like adding some sticks to your fire, fat is kind of like adding a big log to your fire, it burns longer and it burns slower. You want to think about your ratio of fat to protein to carbohydrates when you re feeding your kids. Now that doesn t mean you have to go to some extreme high fat low carb diet but it means that you have to get a more appropriate ratio of those. Many families will find that if they look at what they have having there will be a lot more carbohydrates in there whether that s bread, grains and cereals or its just fruits, whatever it happens to be there s a lot more carbohydrates there then there is protein and particularly than there is fat. If you can balance those out better then you ll tend to find that you can sustain your kids for much longer. They ll actually do better when going to school because they will have a more steady flow of energy rather than spikes and drops as they go through breakfast and lunch and morning tea and those sort of things. They will tend to do better at school and there will be less craving when they get home from school and as a parent they will probably tend to hassle you less for food. There will be less for you to do, it will be easier for you to do and manage. Start thinking about the ratio of fats to proteins to carbohydrates. As far as meals that are great to do that my kids favorite by far is pancakes and so we make some paleo pancakes. They re so easy, it s like two eggs, one banana, a little bit of cinnamon and a little bit of vanilla essence that s it. You just blend it up, it sounds a little weird if you re used to making regular pancakes. We ve got one on the website, I do two eggs two bananas. It s so simple and it works great. It s delicious, the kids love it. I usually do it with some coconut cream and maple syrup and my kids It sounds quite nice. Yeah a little bit of cacao, sometimes I chop a little bit of blueberries in there. That s probably my kids favorite one that we do. We make lots of nut balls. Nut balls are really easy. You can make big batches at a time. The kids can get together and roll it up. That s another great tip for getting your kids to eat healthy stuff, is to get your kids involved in the process whether that s letting them choose what they want. It s about getting them to love it so let them choose from the shopping center. Say, hey here s the fruit and vegetable section, just find one fruit or vegetable that you d like to have. Let your kids choose the ones that they want. It may be you growing something, even if all you ve got is a little pot, just grow a little herb or something because your kids will eat it if they grow it. Get them involved in the cooking, if you re making nut balls, get them rolling the nut balls, get them involved in the process. Obviously depending on their age will change how much of that they will be involved in and what they can do. Get your kids involved. Nut balls are really popular. They re really simple. A little bit of dried fruit and nuts and coconut oil, you re getting a good balance of fats and proteins in there. Smoothies are really easy for kids and you can put in all sorts of things in

6 your smoothies. You can get in egg and coconut oil and those sort of things to get more fat and protein in there but you can also get lots of greens in there, you can out some cacao, berries, you know all sorts of really good stuff in your smoothies. That s a really nice way of Do you think sorry. Do you think you can have too much of a good thing? Do you think at times that they can overload on too much of berries or too much kale or? Yeah absolutely. Too much of anything can be an issue. Literally anything too much of can be an issue. Too much of water can be an issue. Generally you have a broad range when it comes to the healthy stuff, you can cope with quite a lot of that and I think I d be far more concerned with too much of the unhealthy stuff than too much of the healthy stuff. I wouldn t stress too much about that. I think as you get further in to your journey you can start thinking more about trying to balance it out a bit more and trying to make sure you re getting more of variety and more different colors and those sort of things but when you re just starting out make it easy on yourself. If there s something that they love that you know is helping in getting good food in to them stick with what works and then gradually add to your repertoire as you go forward. I love it. Keeping it simple. It s right. Go easy on yourself. Be kind to yourself Oh yeah. Why make things harder than they already are. Our lives are already hard enough. Absolutely. At least keep it simple. With processed foods, we re trying to cut them. I mean some processed foods are okay but to strip back the additives, strip back the chemicals is really hard for some families to get their head around it. My question is how do we make it easy? I guess we have already covered it with keeping it simple. Yeah and Google. Google is your friend. What happens in my household is my kids I ll give you a classic example because I ve been going through this journey and doing this communication with my kids for a while and teaching them to be eating healthy and all sorts of stuff. We re in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago and my daughter Charlotte comes up to the counter and picks a, there was a packet of this bright pink tic-tac s on the counter and my daughter loves anything that is pink so she s like this is fabulous. I m thinking here we go, she picks the tic-tac, walks across to me and she goes, hey dad can you make a healthy version of tic-tac s at home? I m like I haven t figured out that one yet mind you, that s on the to do list, we re going to see what we can do. The point of the story is that you start developing, you start realizing that you can make healthier versions at home and literally often it is as easy as whatever it is your

7 kids have nagged you to get. Pick up your phone and Google healthy version of and type it in or I might put paleo tic-tac s. And whatever it is you Google it and a recipe comes up and it tells you all the ingredients you need, tells you how to cook it and seriously I m not a great cook, I m on a massive journey expanding my repertoire in terms of getting in to the kitchen and cooking and using my thermamix and doing all that sort of stuff. If I can Google a recipe I just have to follow it through start to finish and it works for me. I ve got this little Teledex kind of thing on my counter so if it s a good one it gets written in to there and that gets kept for later on and I might use that one again later on. Over time you then start to develop a kind of repertoire of healthier things that you can do, that you know your kids can love, that are easy for you to do and you sort of develop a broader range. Just start with one, what s the one food that your kid s love, that you think you might be able to do a healthier version of, that you might be able to make from scratch at home, jump on your phone, jump on your compute, enter it in to Google, and see what comes up. Brilliant. Love it. Love everything. All right that s probably about it. So thank you so much for being involved. Websites, s, where do we find you? Instagram? All of it. The best part is to go to my website which is drbretthill.com, you can go to the shop there and you will find all the different e- books I have been talking about. The healthy kids eating e-book is out in mid- January summer. I m not sure when this is going live so it might not be out yet but if you sign up to my newsletter on drbretthill.com you ll be first to know when it does come out but it s not going to be far away. Obviously the podcasts are all on the wellness couch which is you can go there. On Facebook Dr. Brett Hill, on Instagram, on twitter it s all Dr. Brett Hill. You ll find me there, We will have all that information put up for you. Thank you again, thank you so much for being involved and I ve sat here and learnt, I ve sat here I think with my mouth open, I ve been going concentrating almost. Awesome. It s brilliant. I m sure our families are going to get so much advice and help so thank you. That was excellent. perhaps. Perfect. I ll look forward to hearing from them on social media Absolutely. I m sure you will be. There will be an influx of how do we get hold of the book. Thanks. What s the new one called?

8 It s called Nourish without Nagging. The subtitle is how to get your kids to love eating healthily. Who doesn t want to know that? Yeah. Excellent. Thanks again and we ll stay in touch. Cheers. Bye.

Living Homegrown Podcast Episode #18 Making Wine Salt. Show Notes:

Living Homegrown Podcast Episode #18 Making Wine Salt Show Notes: www.livinghomegrown.com/18 This is the Living Homegrown Podcast, episode #18 Announcer: Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast, where