The Wellness Mama Podcast

Episode Highlights With Jess How she trained in adventure therapy and learned to race dog sleds What adventure therapy is and how it can be helpful Resilience is being adaptable in the face of stress and how to nurture this The nervous system is very hungry What biological resilience is and how to increase it Lack of nourishment sends a signal of being unsafe to the body and can deplete resilience...

Episode Highlights With Dr. Christianson Why he goes to bed at 7:30pm and gets up around 4am each day! The top five hormonal symptoms that people might not initially associate with hormones Why hot flashes can actually be dangerous and why to pay attention to them How to address hot flashes and other hormonal symptoms Why do hormones change as we age and why this isn’t the case in all animals, lik...

Episode Highlights With Stephanie How a very difficult adult experience led her to the work she does today and how it profoundly impacted her too What a stuck identity is and how they can get in the way of achieving what we want An identity is when we take on a point of view to help achieve something and why the stuck identities are the issue What happens when we have two conflicting identities at...

Episode Highlights With Bethany How she was homeschooled k-12 and how this shaped her life in many ways She almost died from IBS and got back on her feet with a holistic approach Surprising things that were irritating her gut that you may be eating Why it doesn’t just matter what we eat but how we prepare it The surprising food prep step that helped her digestion heal A nutrient packed fruit smoot...

Episode Highlights With Kristina How she was born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore and was selected for the Olympic reserves multiple times Why too much positivity can actually be detrimental to us and how to safeguard against this Life is like a dance and there aren’t necessarily simple answers or linear paths How she defines authenticity and what happens when we aren’t authentic to oursel...

Episode Highlights With Diana Her journey backpacking from china to Thailand to learn Traditional Chinese Medicine and what she learned How she went from pre-med heart expert to multi-modality acupuncture and holistic health What acupuncture is and how it works How acupuncture works with energy and electricity using water and metal to conduct electricity and the scientific backing for it Is acupun...

Episode Highlights With Sara How she got into the work of creating resources to help kids through something tough The importance of talking to our kids about the hard stuff Why we need to have the real conversations with them or they will make up stories about what is happening to help them understand Why using simple language and explaining how this will affect them are two important pieces How a...

Episode Highlights With Barton Why we are all facing a lack of nutrients in our food supply and why this is a new phenomenon This issue is important because we are getting 50% less minerals in food but can’t easily take in 2x calories to compensate so we have to figure out what to do How his Mom's struggle with life threatening health issues led to his work in this area The body is always putting...

Episode Highlights With Todd The problems with most wines today Why most wines are not natural and the unsavory things added to most wines today What we don’t know about wine may be hurting us Alcohol is objectively toxic and why Todd, as the wine guy, explains this in depth and why it can be best not to drink it at all Todd’s own rules around drinking to minimize negative effects and why he choos...

Episode Highlights With Bridgit Her experience living in a rice farming village for a year What toxic mold is and how it develops Mold is a natural part of the world and it serves a purpose but can be problematic when it thrives in our home environment The most common and most noticeable effects of mold exposure and the lesser known effects Why mold is really hard on the gut How to test for mold i...

Episode Highlights With Rick What we are made of and how minerals come into play Where do you think you came from? We are a combination of minerals and water (among other things) Why the Germ Theory of Disease is inadequate The reason western medicine misses things by just looking at the level of germs or of the organ systems and not looking at the cellular level and mineral balance Mineral balanc...

Episode Highlights With JJ Why we should all stop trying to lose weight and why she says this after decades as a weight loss expert The problems with some of the weight loss trends right now Things that have helped her thrive and feel amazing in her 50s! The importance of skeletal muscle for maintaining a healthy body composition Muscle loss vs fat loss Creatine, protein, and resistance training R...

Episode Highlights With Ryan How he shifted from just talking about stoicism to bringing this into parenting The imbalance in the domestic load that often exists between moms and dads and what he views as paths forward to help balance this Why there aren’t a lot of good parenting books, especially for Dad Modern times expect much more of parents and how this has shifted parenting Why it might be a...

Episode Highlights With Lenore How she initially rose to fame by letting her child ride the subway alone and how she got the title “America’s worst mom” because of it The way we got to a point where we're afraid to let our kids do things that many of us remember doing Crime is lower now than when we were kids so why are we more worried? Two big things that happened in the 1980s that shifted parent...

Episode Highlights With Jonathan Why his favorite thing to do is walk and how he cultivated this habit The basic foundational building blocks of understanding water and the real definition of water How water can communicate and how to help it communicate better Why water is alive in a simple way and why this is important to understand What the terrain model is and how this relates to water How inf...

Episode Highlights With Kiana How she is also a doula and how she got into female sexual health Her work as a somatic therapist The importance of pleasure in our lives and how it impacts wellbeing and relationships beyond just physical pleasure or sexuality How the nervous system is like the window through which we see the world and how this can make it difficult to identify if it is dysregulated...

Episode Highlights With Megan How she got into the world of dietetics and metabolism Her own experience with nutrition, weight loss, and metabolism Teaching over telling, and how she has helped hundreds of women with this approach What metabolism actually is and what we need to understand to work with our bodies Metabolism is actually how the body uses what is put into it The body is something tha...

Episode Highlights With Juliet and Kelly How Juliet survived a run-in with a hippo… the most dangerous animal on earth after the mosquito Their journey into the work they do now and the world of movement The ten key techniques to enhance your capacity for movement Why the ability to get up and down off the floor without putting a hand or knee down is correlated with living longer and having fewer...

Episode Highlights With Chris and Melissa How they got into the work of helping families and doing family brand The biggest challenges families face today and how they navigate those challenges “More is caught than taught” - importance of modeling How to keep values from coming across as a list of dos and don'ts and how to do values well Ways to identify and incorporate your family values Every fa...

Episode Highlights With Dr. Sandi How she once taught disco dancing Her different approach to clinical psychology and why she doesn’t like focusing on the “what's wrong with me” but on what the strengths are Why positive psychology is not happyology and why this difference is important How her psychological approach is different and how it relates to health A tribute to her mentor: how to refuse t...

Episode Highlights With Dr. Izabella Wentz The thyroid adrenal connection and why it is important to understand What exactly adrenal dysfunction is and how to know if you have it How adrenal issues can lead to other hormone imbalances in the body and the stress connection Some symptoms that may point to adrenal dysfunction Her own personal experience with adrenal fatigue and how this led to her wo...

Episode Highlights With Dr. Shefali Why she wrote this parenting book and how this one is the how-to for parents How we can move away from control and into connection with our kids The chaos and nonsense we can create as parents without realizing it How parents accidentally create the cycle of dysfunction in families No human being likes to be controlled and how this control backfires with childre...

Episode Highlights With Matt How he was shot in a robbery He spent $45k on sleep and these are his main lessons Inexpensive things related to sleep that anyone can do: light, sleep environment, temperature, food timing How temperature drastically affects sleep Ways to improve deep sleep Why one hour of sleep is worth two hours (with some nuance) The reason when you work your body you tend to get m...

Episode Highlights With Aaron His own amazing story with adoption and using functional medicine to help his children How he was able to use these techniques to help his daughter who they were told would never walk or talk or even crawl Fascinating therapies he learned about for his daughter that are helpful to many of his other patients More reasons to avoid processed foods and vegetable oils and...

Episode Highlights With Dr. Jolene The things women are told are normal that aren’t when it comes to health and hormones Why many of the things women are told about our bodies are wrong What period symptoms are common but not normal and how to fix them Why urinary incontinence doesn’t exist in France because they do postpartum therapy to help that How to stop peeing when you jump or laugh Why to k...