Nagina Abdullah MasalaBody.com Nagina struggled with weight her whole life. After two pregnancies and a very demanding job, she realized taking care of herself needed to be a priority. She knew that eating bland, boring foods would be setting herself up for failure, so she began experimenting with different spices and added whole, unprocessed foods to her diet. Nagina went on to lose forty pounds in nine months and today is passionate about helping others lose excess weight and have more energy. Caitlin: Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Work-At-Home Summit. I m your host, Caitlin Pyle. I m here with Nagina Abdullah. She s a health coach for busy professional women and the creator of the website, MasalaBody.com. She s also my health coach, and she s been featured in Business Insider, People.com, Huffington Post, and on Fox News for her easy antiinflammatory system to boost energy, feel better, and lose weight. Welcome, Nagina. Nagina: Thank you, Caitlin. I m super excited to be here. Caitlin: Well, I m excited to have you here with us today. Now, you ve been my health coach for the past couple months, and I have loved the opportunity to work with you, and so guys listening to this right now, I can speak first hand to what Nagina says. It works. It s all your mindset, and it s about making your choices effortless. We re going to be talking a lot about that today. Not everybody knows what you do, though, so let s talk about that first and kind of your background and how you got to where you are, healthy and vibrant as you are right now. Nagina: Oh, thank you so much. Well, I had a personal transformation where I had struggled my whole life to feel the energy that I wanted to feel and also to be at my goal weight. It was just something I always struggled to do, and I tried every way of healthy eating. I went to exercise for so many days a week, and I never was able to get to where I wanted to get. And then I started working in an extremely demanding job, working for a top-four consulting firm in New York City, and then I had two kids. And so at that point, I was overweight because my job was so demanding, and then I also had two pregnancies that I went through, and I realized I don t have the kind of schedule where I can just go and work out for hours a day and just feel better about myself. I needed to figure out something that was more for the modern, ambitious woman who was always traveling. I was always staying in hotels. I was flying places as a consultant, and when I came home, I had my kids. And so this was a very kind of dynamic lifestyle, and I realized I needed to change what I was eating so that I could feel better, have more energy, and be at my goal weight, and I was dreaming of it being effortless versus being a yo-yo, which I had been on for my whole life, going up and down and losing five and putting on ten sometimes. I really wanted a sustainable way of eating and of living that I would feel good about, so I started studying lots of different ways to eat, and I found that by doing a few things like making a few shifts in what I was eating, a few things, for example, really taking down the sugar, taking down the processed foods, adding whole, natural foods that ended up being anti-inflammatory for my
body, and also adding flavors and spices to make everything taste good and have extra health benefits. I actually lost ten pounds in one month, and then I went on to keep doing what I was doing, and I lost forty pounds in nine months. I was able to get into clothes that I never thought I would be able to ever fit into, and I felt so vibrant. I did feel vibrant. I felt so much energy, and I felt like the woman, the ambitious woman that was had been coming out in my work. It was now coming out in it was like exuding from me also. It wasn t just about my work. It was all around, and so that s where I started my website, MasalaBody.com, and started writing about healthy tips and ways to eat, ways to meal plan, ways to cook or plan or travel and just effortlessly be healthy, which is how I feel today. I don t think about it anymore. It s just one of the routines that I do, and I enjoy what I m eating, and I enjoy how I m living, and I just constantly feel this boost of energy beyond what I had ever felt before. Caitlin: Yeah, so it sounds to me like you have created a ripple effect, and you ve figured out a way that works for you, and I think that s what gets people hung up is that they think of healthy eating and making life making it a lifestyle change as this giant overhaul that you go from a way that you are comfortable, but how comfortable are we really if we re not fitting into our clothes and not having a lot of energy? But we feel comfortable. We resist change naturally as humans, so we go from that, and we think, Oh, we have to just switch everything overnight, but it really just comes down to making small decisions that are easy to make, that we want to make, and that, whoa, lo and behold, if I start eating things that are whole foods versus a whole bunch of peanut butter cups and that doesn t mean you can t ever have peanut butter cups. I eat peanut butter cups every dang day. You can still have your peanut butter cups, but you don t have to eat the entire container of peanut butter cups, making small changes where you can enjoy your life, and it kind of ripples out into the rest of your world. And so you re did you find I definitely found in just improving my eating decisions instead of choosing the fried food that s going to give me a stomachache, I choose something that is maybe a rice bowl with some beans and some tempeh, like a really yummy sauce and some sprouts on top and something that has a ton of flavor. That more aligns with who I am as a person versus the fried food, that I have a lot more energy, and I started learning to crave that energy, and when I focused on how I felt instead of what I wanted to look like and what that energy that I got could do for me, giving me that competitive edge to get more done, just to feel better and just to be in a better mood, to not hate my life or hate the people around me or feel snappy and mean, that the way I felt when I don t like myself. It kind of ripples out negatively onto other people, but if I feel good and I have a lot of energy, then that will affect everybody around me. Then that s what makes it effortless is just focusing in on the benefits that you get from making these good choices, so let s talk a little bit about some of those small shifts that you made to make that effortless over time. Nagina: Yes, so absolutely. I mean there are really some really small changes that you can make. One thing I want to emphasize is that sometimes I think we don t realize the connection between what we re eating and how we re feeling, and a lot of times, we eat because that s just what we re used to doing, and then you feel tired, especially around 2 o clock in the afternoon. There is usually this natural what we think is a natural slump that you go into or when you wake up in the morning, you feel really tired and you just think that s natural. Well, it doesn t have to be like that. You could actually wake up in the morning and feel totally ready to get out
of bed and to get to work or to get with your responsibilities. You don t have to feel that tired feeling, and in the afternoon, you actually don t have to feel a slump if you re eating the right way, and imagine if you didn t have that two-hour slump, how much more work you could get done and how much more productive you could be. So if you are maintaining what you re eating, it has massive benefits to your productivity, to your energy, and there s also been studies that it actually helps to elevate your mood so you re not feeling cranky or emotional. And also it increases your memory so you can think of things better and for longer, and it also decreases your stress because when you are eating sugar or extra amounts of sugar or certain foods that are not good for you, then it actually it has an effect on your brain, and it makes you feel a little bit foggy so you re not as clear, and it also just starts this cycle of stress, so you start feeling stressed about what you ate, and then you get more stressed. And as we know, as people that are working at home and that want to build businesses, it is really about making sure that you are feeling good and not feeling too stressed because then you can get so much more done. So a few quick things that you can do are, first of all, I think it s really essential to plan your snacks, so a lot of times we end up thinking, okay, we re breakfast, lunch, dinner or sometimes lunch and dinner because we don t have enough time for breakfast or we don t feel like eating in the morning. And so we think lunch and dinner. Well, what happens is if you go for many hours without eating and you didn t eat very efficiently. You are going to start feeling these cravings, and they re almost uncontrollable, and so what you can do is you can plan a healthy snack so that you don t start having those sugar cravings. You actually eat before you re hungry. That is a major tip that I have for people that I work with is that eat before you re hungry. Plan something out. So for example, a really healthy snack to have are almonds, just unsalted almonds. You can have you could either just eat them. I recommend eating two tablespoons, which is around 20 almonds, because almonds are really filling, but you really only need that much. After that, they become pretty heavy for you. Having a little bit of almonds, having Greek yogurt with blueberries or raspberries or strawberries that s a really great snack as well. And one of my favorite snacks is called my I call it my healthy apple cinnamon pie, and so but it s not really pie. It s a healthy pie, and what you do is you get a half a cup of cottage cheese. You sprinkle a fourth teaspoon of cinnamon on it, and then you cut a fourth of an apple into small pieces, and you combine them. And if you don t eat dairy, you could just leave out the cottage cheese part and have the apples with the cinnamon, and it s a really tasty, sweet snack, but it s not unhealthy for you, and it s not going to change your it s not going to give you that sugar high and the sugar low, which actually is the cause of those kind of dips in energy. Caitlin: Yeah, that s a good point, differentiating between the types of sugar, and so there s the carb carbs people think of the word carbs, and it s like a four-letter word now, which carbs is five, but carb is a four-letter word, and people are scared of carbs, and so they think, Oh, I can t eat quinoa or I can t eat a banana or I can t have an apple because there s carbs and that s not green beans have carbs, and so or carrots. I once saw in a low-carb book, it said not to eat carrots because they have too much sugar, and I was like, Oh, my gosh. Any book any book that tells you not to eat carrots, just run in the opposite direction. It s like, there s nothing
wrong with carrots. But carrots and carrot cake are two different things, and so we ve got to look at and the same thing with potatoes, so potatoes are not the same as french fries or mashed potatoes that are full of heavy cream and butter. You ve got to see how you re preparing those foods, and if you look at the nutrition facts for potatoes, they re actually higher in potassium than bananas, which is the food that all of us think of when you say what s a food that s high in potassium. You automatically think bananas. Well, white beans and potatoes actually have more potassium in them than bananas, and so and then potatoes are also really high in or really low in fat. There s no fat, and they re really low in calories, but they fill you up because there s lots of fiber in the skin, so I am a big fan of potatoes, and sweet potatoes of course have a lot of nutrients in them as well. So let s talk a little bit about I want to go back and talk a little bit more about energy and having that be your foundation for self-care, and some people might be they re thinking selfcare, and they re thinking brushing your teeth. That s personal hygiene, right? So what s the difference between hygiene and just taking care of your human needs, going pee, eating when you re hungry, things like that, and actual self-care? Nagina: Yes, so in a lot of ways, they re actually very similar. Sometimes you and I have talked about this, Caitlin, when we re working so hard that we don t even get up to go to the bathroom. It s like you re just waiting. You re like, No, I can put it off for ten more minutes. That s really like the basic self-care that we don t even give ourselves because we feel so consumed by work, and that s an example of when you have to say, You know what? I will actually perform better if I step away for a couple minutes, take care of what I need to, and then come back. I will be able to be more creative and free with my thinking, and I ll have more time overall. So that s an example. So when we actually it s really important to do self-care, taking care of yourself actively because, the reason is, you actually do perform better. So if you re trying to push yourself and get everything in and work so hard because you think that s going to make you so much more successful, it doesn t mean that you re going to actually create better results. So when you take a little bit of time to take care of yourself, and I ll talk about some ways to do that, it actually shows up in the type of work you re doing, so the work is not only about how much time you re spending. It s the quality that you re giving it. Now, Brendon Burchard he is a one of the top self-improvement speakers. He just wrote a book called High-Performance Habits, and so one of his major habits for high performers is that they create energy, and this is so important. It s like if you are just sitting and working and just feeling like you re really feeling at the top of your game you just get there once in a while you re not going to be able to create the best result. So sometimes you have to actively look on how to create energy for yourself. One of those ways is eating the right foods. Another of those ways is just taking care of yourself, and so by self-care, it s really something as basic as getting enough sleep. When you get enough sleep, when you get seven to eight hours or however much you know that you need, you will wake up feeling awake and feeling just fresh and ready to go. And so I personally am very serious about getting my sleep. I will leave places so that I can get my sleep so that I can wake up early and be the best version of myself, and I know that if I m not the best version of myself, it s going to feel painful, and I m going to feel tired, and I m not going to be able to perform the way I know that I m capable of. And so actually making it a
point to do something like get your sleep, which sometimes means you have to tell people I can t be here. I m going to go to sleep. There are some hard decisions sometimes that come into that, that you just have to do, so that s one example. Another example is really taking care of yourself in terms of movement, like maybe taking a walk in between calls or jumping on the trampoline like I know you do, Caitlin, which is amazing, and just getting all the motion going. It sets you up. It just releases so much in your body. It doesn t have to be about exercising to lose weight. It s more about movement for how you feel, and those are all going to lead to great things, and it s all going to create energy for yourself. And so sleep, movement, and food those are three major things that, even if you were to do a little bit of that, you would just be taking such amazing care of yourself, and then you can add on other things as well, whatever makes you feel good. Maybe it s getting a massage once a month or once a week, getting your nails done, going somewhere with your best friend, something like that. Those actually help to recharge you and make sure that you re not burning yourself out. And the moment we get burned out, it s really hard to keep going, so it s important to maintain yourself, and sometimes that may mean that work may take a little bit longer, but over the long term, you re actually going to produce much better results for a longer time. Caitlin: And you ll just be happier. I think one of the small shifts that I made when I started working with you was that, instead of and I didn t do this perfectly, but instead of having a cocktail or a glass of wine after a long day of work, I went out and took a walk or turned on the TV, and for 20 minutes just jumped on my trampoline. The thing that I the reason I would get a drink on the normal the old version of me, as I like to say, is because I would feel this I d hit a wall in my brain, and everything just felt so tired, and it s like the brain fog had set in. I was just done for the day, and I was like, the only thing that s going to make me feel better is a glass of wine. Well, when I started to take a walk and take some deep breaths and drink some water or jump on the trampoline and just kind of relax, I got the same effect that I did from a glass of wine. My brain started to decompress. That s really the only way I can describe it is that I felt decompressing, and that was easy. Jumping on the trampoline while you watch Netflix is really fun. I just love it, and it s the best way because I like to watch TV, but it s the best way to kill two birds with one stone, getting more done in less time so I could be I could still be efficient and take care of myself at the same time and get my shows watched and check those off the list or whatever, stay up to date with Grey s Anatomy, and I can just kind of jump on the trampoline. It feels really good. It get my lymphatic system moving. That s just a really simple behavior, and plus, I save myself the calories of drinking, and I think that that helped me slim down quite a bit, and it s really not about the numbers on the scale, too. And I think some people get so obsessed with the numbers, and so that s when they get into more extreme behaviors like when they re hungry, they don t eat because they think that the less they eat, the more weight they re going to lose, and that s just not the way that it works. And so I want to talk just briefly, and this is not on my list of questions, but I m just curious. What are some ways that you see people sabotage themselves when they re really trying to take care of themselves?
Nagina: Yes, so that I mean that s something that definitely happens. Now, the biggest thing is that people try to do too much too fast, and they will try to all of a sudden, when you want to get healthy, some a lot of times, all of a sudden we get motivated to get healthy, and so what I see happening is that people will start making lots of changes right away. They ll completely change their diet. They ll set up they ll say they re going to the gym three or four times a week when they haven t been going at all or maybe they were going once in a while, and they set themselves up really to fail because it s too hard to go from zero to ninety miles per hour. You don t have to do that, and so what I recommend is actually starting with one thing, starting with a healthy breakfast. That s going to take you so far if you can start with one thing, a proteinpacked, healthy breakfast, and then move into adding a healthy snack into your day, and then maybe you add in one day to work out and then increase it up to two. And this is every week you could add on a couple more things, and by doing that, what you re doing is you re setting up habits, and you re creating a healthier lifestyle for yourself versus putting yourself back in that cycle of just getting healthy and then getting unhealthy because you re burnt out from how healthy how much work it took to get healthy. So this is really just key in terms of really understanding, okay, it s not about getting there quickly. It s more about getting there for the long term, and once you do that, that s when things start to become effortless. So I really feel like the sabotaging sometimes it starts right in the beginning when you don t create a plan, and you just jump into it. So going slowly is a lot better, and then the key is that you want to be consistent, so you want to set yourself up to be able to do this, this week and next week and the week after, and so how do you do that? By starting slow and by not making it stressful, and then you re going to start getting used to more things, and it s going to feel easy. So once it feels easy, it s a part of your lifestyle. Caitlin: Yeah, I love that, and it s funny that there are so many parallels between getting healthy and starting your work-at-home life when you were saying that the biggest mistake you see people make is that they take on too much too fast. I see that every day in my line of work where people are like, I want to make money at home, and so they try to learn an entire skill in one day, and they try to get 800 clients in one day instead of just starting with one skill and one client, and that s the way we explain to create a ripple effect is start with one client, with one skill, or start with one skill. You can t get a client if you have no skills, so you start with one skill, and then you get one client. You do a really good job with that one client, and then it just grows from there, and the same thing it sounds like and it works for me is you can commit to one walk a day or even one walk three times a week and then or like ten minutes of jumping on the trampoline or doing ten squats everyday and just building on from there as you feel better. It s so much more important to be consistent than it is to be all in. And this whole all-or-nothing mentality is rampant in pretty much every area of life. Whatever change people want to make, they think, well, I get so motivated. I ve got to do it now. But then exactly what happens with getting healthy happens in working at home. We get burnt out, and then we just give up, and we think that we re failures, and that s really not the case at all. The truth is that we ve got to build habits, and I like to think of my habits any habit I build, anything I m not great at habits. I consider myself a total rebel when it comes to doing things other people expect or even that I expect of myself, but I can say whatever thing I m going to do in my life, it has to be simple. It has to be something that I m going to do. It has to be sane, meaning
I m not going to go to extreme lengths to make it happen. I m not going to starve myself when I m going to lose weight. I m not going to eat things that taste disgusting to lose weight. I m not going to do a skill that I don t enjoy or it s just not I m not going to be a bookkeeper. I m a words person. It doesn t make sense for me to do that. And lastly, the skill has to be sustainable, something that I not only can do, that s simple enough for me to do, but something that I m going to be able to do for the long haul. And so if eating cardboard and leaves is not it might be simple, but is it sustainable? No, and so I m not going to do it. It s not something that s going to fit into the ideal life that I want for myself. But can I eat relatively healthy during the week, and can I have one peanut butter cup a day? Yes, I can. The peanut butter cups aren t going anywhere. There s no reason to eat all the peanut butter cups right now, and I like to use peanut butter cups because they re my favorite, as an example. But it could be anything. Do you have to go for a run for your first workout? No, you do not. Can you just do a ten-minute walk for your first workout? Absolutely, and just do something that you enjoy that makes you feel good because if you go and you do a crazy workout or you try to complete an entire course in a day or something like that because you think it s going to help you get there faster, what it s going to do is you re not going to feel good about it. And that s not going to encourage you to keep going. Nagina: So true, and, Caitlin, you were a prime example of how it s actually better to not be perfect because you don t have once you start hitting that perfect place, it s just it feels like a lot to maintain. So if you are eating as healthy as you want to eat, eating as healthy as will make you feel good, and having those healthy practices, and then you want a peanut butter cup today, and maybe you want to have a drink tomorrow, you decided to do that, and that s okay because it won t you actually are okay with how it s going to make you feel, and it s and you ve been doing so good with yourself that you feel fine about it. And so it s not about having zero unhealthy things or never having a drink or never having chocolate. No, it s absolutely about having balance and just creating some healthier habits but not being perfect because the minute you try to be perfect, it s almost like you don t want to do it at all. Caitlin: Because it s unattainable. We literally if we try to be perfect, we are setting ourselves up for failure because it s not possible to be perfect, so why set that as our goal? Why do we let ourselves feel bad when we re not perfect because it s not even possible to be perfect? So we need to get to a place where we re doing the best we can and we feel great, and we aim for feeling the best that we can, but also enjoying our lives because life is short, and it s just too short to not eat a peanut butter cup. It s too short to not have a cosmo on a Friday night if you ve really had a long week. Nagina: Totally agree, absolutely. Caitlin: You could jump on a trampoline and drink a cosmo at the same time. You can just have fun with it and do what makes you feel good and just live your life and enjoy it. So we talked about reducing sugar to increase our energy because the sugar does especially the bad types of sugar like carrot cake and not the carrots will increase your blood sugar, and then after a while with insulin response and stuff, you ll come down and that s the sugar crash.
So let s talk then about the types of food that improve your energy and productivity. We talked about almonds. What are some other ones? And then I want to get into your specialty, which is spices, and we talked about having flavor in our food. So how do spices specifically help with energy and productivity and specifically fat burning in terms of being productive within our bodies? Nagina: Yes, absolutely. So some really good things to do, like some really healthy ways to add energy to your day, and this is without getting the ups and downs, but it s actually ideal to be even in your energy so you re always at a constantly good energy. You don t have to be super high, or you don t have to be super low. You re just in a constant energy. It feels really, really kind of empowering to have that. So having more protein in your diet helps you do that, so protein are things like obviously there s meat, fish, tofu, lentils, and beans, which are really, really great options. There s also several other things, but having protein actually digests more slowly in your body, and so because it takes so long to digest, you feel full for longer, and you re also burning more calories while you re digesting protein. So it s something that is it doesn t just you don t just digest it and then it goes away. If you eat a piece of white bread for example, you eat it and two minutes later you re hungry again. So if you re eating something that s protein packed, it digests slowly. You feel full, and you feel satisfied. Another really, really key thing to have in your daily diet is things that have foods that have more fiber in it, and fiber digests really slowly in your body, and it also keeps you full for longer, so these are ways to trick your body almost. That s how I like to think of it, like trick your body into it feeling full, but it s actually getting the nutrients it needs, but it s not just going in and out. It s staying there for a while so you feel satisfied, and so foods with high fiber are really lentils and beans are amazing. I mean they are just absolutely amazing, and I ll talk about how when you add spices to them, that s how they really, really burst with flavor and with more even more health benefits. Any other foods that have vegetables have a ton of fiber, so I always have a cup of broccoli. I just steam my broccoli because it s really easy to do that, or I might roast it once in a while because that gives you fiber, and it gives you so many nutrients. You ll feel the energy after you have a cup of broccoli or if you have a green smoothie, something like that. You re going to get that extra fiber in. Pair it with a protein and then a healthy carb. Healthy carbs are some of the foods that I ve been talking about also, but you don t want to not have carbs. You just want to have the right kind of carbs, so sweet potatoes, quinoa, also lentils and beans, things like that. Those are great, so if you have you combine these foods, you re going to have a powerful meal, and you re going to feel this consistent energy that literally leads you to success when you re working at home. I mean you re just going to feel so even. You re going to feel so amazing about yourself. Caitlin: That s a big change that I made in working with you is just eating protein in the morning, and I got a recipe from you. It s like a lemon-ginger tofu, and I added steamed kale to it, so I would cook the tofu, and I put kale because I didn t want to just eat a bowl of tofu even though it was really good. I wanted something else with it, and so I love kale. You don t have to like kale. You can probably use spinach or some other green or even broccoli with it, and I just eat that for
breakfast, and sometimes I have some leftover quinoa. Actually, this morning I had some pinto beans with quinoa, and I added that to my I just had this bowl of awesome. It was so, so good, and I really do feel fuller longer, and when I I do notice that when I m eating stuff like that, I don t have nearly the cravings that I used to have where, especially if I m eating before I get too hungry because sometimes what would happen is I would do the thing that we were talking about before where I m like, ten more minutes, and then I ll reward myself with food. I m using food as a reward instead of something that I need, which is what it is. I need energy, and so I m saying, Oh, I m going to finish writing this email, and another hour would go by. And would still be hungry and I d be hitting this wall, but when I switched that and I started prioritizing what I was putting in my body, so instead of saying I m going to get an hour of work done before I eat breakfast if I m hungry when I wake up in the morning, I m going to eat food. And I ve noticed that I feel so much better when I do that. I used to think I had to get in a workout before I ate because I won t I ll burn off my breakfast instead of burning off fat, and it s just not the way it works. You can eat food and not be hungry when you work out and still have the benefits. I stopped working out specifically to burn calories. I started working out only to feel good, and it even helps me work out on vacation. Sometimes I ll go on vacation, and I know that I want to get back into working out on a regular basis when I return, but just doing one or two workouts just to keep my muscles engaged makes that first workout back from vacation so much better. And it actually improves my vacation because I have more energy and just being a little bit sore from doing maybe some squats and some push-ups or something like that. It wakes my body up in a way that I wouldn t normally because, let s face it, when we re on vacation, we can t always choose what we want to eat. We might be visiting family, and they might put something I have a sensitivity to dairy, and so I will sometimes have to eat dairy just to make somebody in my family happy, and that really makes me feel bad. And so the more I can do when I m on the go to feel better, that might just be like a short cardio workout or ten squats in the morning just to wake me up, maybe some jumping jacks, some push-ups on a chair or counter top to get me feeling better; it really, really helps. So I want to talk about spices because that s something that I ve amped up in my meals, too, just keeping I have this Moroccan spice I really like called berbere, and I keep it on my table, and I just sprinkle my food with that sometimes just to give it a kick because it really does make the healthier food that maybe would taste a little bit bland completely burst with flavor. But they have some properties that I want to ask you to talk about, and I m excited, so I m rambling a little bit, but let s talk about the properties of spices that not only amp up the flavor of your food, but they actually help you incinerate calories at a faster pace. Nagina: Yes, oh, my gosh. So spices first of all, they have powerful health benefits. They re overall very anti-inflammatory, which is really key for our bodies because a lot of times, you think of anti-inflammatory for things like arthritis, but it actually our bodies get inflamed with the foods that we re eating, and it could be inflamed in our bellies and in our faces. And so a lot of times it s not just about losing weight. It s also like we want to maintain our body so that it s it has the right composition, and you don t want to be inflamed anywhere. And so it s also for longterm health. It s really important. So when you add spices into your diet, there are so many antiinflammatory benefits. There s also many other benefits.
I want to talk about a couple I think that would be really easy for those listening to use. One is cinnamon, and so cinnamon is first of all, it s so much fun to use because it s a sweet spice, and a lot of times spices are thought of as spicy, and there s a few that are, but there s many that are neutral, and there s some that are actually sweet. And so when you use cinnamon, you don t have to use as much sugar as you might otherwise use because you re getting the benefits. You re getting that sweet taste, but your insulin is not being released as it would be when you re eating sugar. And so that s really key for some of the other things we talked about like improving your mood, improving your memory, improving your focus. You re getting that sweet kind of taste, but you re not getting the reduction in all those other things. So when you have cinnamon, what happens is that it actually maintains your blood sugar, and it helps you store less fat. So if you were to eat something that would make your blood sugar rise, it helps you to keep it level, and of course, it s better when you re eating foods like the protein, the vegetables, the healthy carbs that we talked about and also adding cinnamon to it because then you are you re lowering your blood sugar, and you re lowering your fat storage. So it s really great for your energy levels as well as just overall health, so cinnamon is a really great one to add. And a quick way to add it is to add it to your coffee or to your tea in the morning or whenever you re having it or to your smoothie because all you do is sprinkle it in. You don t have to have a set requirement, though; 1/4 teaspoon or less is all you need, and it s just an easy hack to add these this the blood-sugar-maintaining properties into your day. So. yes, that s one that I really love. I think do you like cinnamon, Caitlin? Caitlin: I actually have a mild allergy to it, but I really like it, so occasionally I ll just eat it anyway, but it makes me mildly itchy in random places on my body, so I tend to steer clear of it, but I love the smell, and I love baking with it especially during the holidays and stuff. So but I know that it has the anti-inflammatory. And really when it comes to spices, whether it s cinnamon or curry or berbere, which is the Ethiopian spice that I like, it comes down to increasing the satisfaction you have in your food, and the better your food tastes, the more that you re going to enjoy it. Nagina: Yes. Caitlin: And I think that a big mistake that people make with food, especially when they re trying to lose weight, is they think that it s not supposed to taste good, but the reality is, the better your food tastes, the less of it you need to feel satisfied. And so you find yourself naturally eating less because your food is more satisfying. Wouldn t you say that s the case with it? Nagina: Oh, absolutely. That is so key. This is also something about making things sustainable, so when you like what you re eating and you re not eating it just for a goal, you re eating it to feel good and because it tastes good. You re enjoying eating it. It s really key to build these in as we re meeting goals in our lives, not to make it miserable. It doesn t have to be a miserable experience. You can make it enjoyable and pleasurable, and what s going to happen? You re going to end up continuing to do it because it doesn t seem hard. And so spices are really so powerful because they have these massive health benefits, but they also make your food taste good so it s so much easier to eat healthy when you integrate them.
Caitlin: Yeah, I agree, and then annoying things start happening where maybe the scale is not moving, but your pants are fitting looser, and that s exactly what happened is, like, I got back into working out, and I started doing more strength training, and the scale really didn t move at all, maybe like a pound or two, maybe three pounds total in the time that we were working together each week, but I took photos. You got me to take photos, which I m not very good at, but I took photos, and you could see the differences in my body. Things moved around. The clothes fit better, and I m putting on pants that I m like, Oh, my gosh, I don t look good in these pants, but it s not because I m feeling fat or feeling that I ve put on some weight. It s because the pants don t hug my body anymore. They re too loose. And so I m in the case right now where I m like, I ve got to find some pants that fit in the complete opposite way that I have in the past, and it feels effortless because I ve shifted the way that I feel about food and using it as I think that s where the effortless thing comes in, too, but it s all the mindset. It s like what I put in my body, it s like why would you give your cat Skittles? Why would you put orange juice in your car? And I ve mentioned this. I mentioned this with Rachael. She s a lifestyle coach that is also with us on the Work-At-Home Summit. Why would you give your put orange juice in your car? That s not going to make it function at its optimum level. You won t get very far at all. Yet, every day, there s people all over the world that are putting garbage in their bodies, and we could argue about the food industry is having a lot of impact on us, mindless eating, and the way packages are marketing and stuff. Food marketing gets us to eat all this nonsense, but the reality is we get to make a choice with every single meal, and so even if you mess up one day, you don t have to throw everything to the wind and say, Oh well, I had three peanut butter cups today. That means I have to eat the whole container, and I ve seen that happen a lot where we have this all-or-nothing mentality. Really it is about finding that sustainability and reintroducing satisfaction into what we eat, and I ve definitely found that introducing more spices, flavor into my food, has helped that. And so I always I don t even look at recipes that I find boring anymore. I m never I don t eat steamed broccoli ever. I roast it or I saute it with a bunch of other stuff and a ton of spices, so there s just so much flavor to where it s like I want to eat the broccoli. I m craving the broccoli. Talking about broccoli right now, my mouth is kind of watering because I m getting kind of hungry. I just got I love the fact that I ve this whole year I ve been working on this, reintroducing satisfaction and pleasure into my eating. I don t watch TV while I eat anymore. I put my phone away. I focus on what I m eating, the way things taste, and then I notice when things don t taste good anymore, and that s my body very subtly telling me that I m done eating. And just that small change, too, can make weight loss effortless because you realize, Hey, normally I would have eaten this entire bowl of beans and rice, but I noticed because I was paying attention that after two-thirds of the bowl, that it didn t taste like anything, and so I covered it in Saran wrap and put it in fridge, and I ll eat it again when I m hungry, and lo and behold, it tastes good again. Holy smokes! And most people don t realize that your body gives you these signals that you re done eating, and so that s a big thing that I ve paid attention to this year as well is just paying attention to my body telling me whether or not it s had enough food, and that s made it effortless to slim down and not put on weight as well.
Nagina: That s so true. It s just like being aware of how your body is reacting to food, knowing that it is. It can change the way that it that you feel depending on what you eat, and then just being aware of what s working and what s not. And sometimes you just have to just take that moment to become aware, and everything shifts. I mean it really it s like you have a complete you can have a complete transformation just by becoming more aware and then making some small switches in what you re eating. And I love how you described it, like making it more pleasurable and introducing satisfaction into your eating, which is absolutely the way that I lost forty pounds after a lifetime of struggle because I always felt like I had to deprive myself to be healthier. And then it became more than just weight loss. It was like I feel so much better with these things that I m eating, so now a lot of times, even if I go out, I still will indulge when I want to, but a lot of times I don t really crave those big, heavy meals because I just know how I ll feel walking out of the restaurant. And that s really powerful once you start becoming aware of that cause and effect of food. Caitlin: Yeah, and I think just in anything, awareness is often curative, and so just a lot of people watching the Work-At-Home Summit right now, they re becoming aware of how much control they actually have over their income level, what they put into their brain, what they put into their mouths, how they think about the world, the fact that they may have been viewing the world and their own opportunities through this set of dirty lenses. And so I like to encourage people to be aware that you may be looking at the world through lenses and that you can take those lenses off and put a new pair on or stop looking at the world through lenses at all and just see the world as it is, as this mountain of opportunity, the fact that you have a ton of power to change the way that you think about food, the way that you think about yourself, the way you think about opportunities around you. It doesn t matter where you live. It doesn t matter what skills you have. You can learn new skills. With the advent of the internet, you don t need to live in a big city to be able to make a living at home, and that s what we re trying to communicate here with the Work-At-Home Summit, and it s important to us that it comes full circle because even if you have all the skills in the world, if you don t have the energy to, that s going to affect your motivation. It s going to affect your confidence if you re not feeling good because you re not fueling yourself correctly. That all matters, and so that s why we ve chosen to include information about food and energy in the Work-At-Home Summit because it s about more than working, right? It s about living, and we work at home. We home at work. We live regardless of what we re doing. We have to have a vibrant life. So, Nagina, we re out of time. I want to say thank you so much, and like I said when I got started, I love working with you, and I felt so much better over the past couple months, and I m hoping that the folks tuning in could sense that energy. And I just appreciate having somebody there weekly to remind me that I need to remember to take care of myself. It s been a lot easier, and it really is about creating that ripple effect. Taking care of ourselves allows us to do so much more both for ourselves and for other people and really have the impact we want to have in our short lives. So, guys, if you re watching this right now and you re anything like me, you usually put yourself on the back burner to get stuff done. Self-care isn t something we even think about making a
priority sometimes, but now, thanks to Nagina, we know that it really doesn t have to be that hard. It can be fun. It can be effortless, and it can feel amazing. For everyone joining us here today, Nagina is giving away her Sweet Spice Cheat Sheet for absolutely zero dollars and zero cents. It s free. It includes three health benefits of using this particular spice, five ways to use it in your day, and an easy recipe to use this spice, so go grab that if you want to know what spice we re talking about. Nagina is also an instructor here at Work-At-Home School, and you can find her Fat-Blasting Spicy Snack Bundle inside the Curious Level curriculum package. Inside that bundle she s including, you ll find all the tools you need to stomp afternoon sugar cravings, improve your focus and productivity with the food you eat, and learn some awesome snack combos to keep you going through your day. In essence, you ll learn how to effortlessly create a ripple effect of energy in your everyday life. Links for both of those are below this video. Thanks again for being here today, Nagina. Nagina: Thank you.