Transformational Techniques in Nature with Cynthia Thurlow Part 2 (of 2)
“I’ve learned that slow and steady wins. If we try to change too much all at once that can be overwhelming. So we want to make little small wins all the way along.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM cynthia
Cynthia Thurlow is a globally recognized expert in nutrition & intermittent fasting, highly sought after speaker, CEO and founder of Everyday Wellness Project. She’s been a nurse practitioner for 20+ years, is a 2x TEDx speaker: her 2nd talk on intermittent fasting has been viewed over 7 million times. She has been featured on ABC, FOX5, KTLA, CW and in Medium and Entrepreneur. Cynthia was recently listed in Yahoo Finance as one of the “21 founders changing the way we do business.” She’s also the host of Everyday Wellness podcast, which was listed as “20 podcasts that will help you grow in 2020” by Entrepreneur magazine, and in Business Insider “21 podcasts to expand your mind in 2021.”
From Hospital Bed to TEDx Stage
“In October of 2018, I accepted my first TED Talk. And then very soon after that, I was I was told that I was in the running and made the second round of cuts for a talk that was going to be in Greenville, South Carolina. In February of 2019, I actually was able to accompany my husband on a business trip for himself. And I was in Hawaii, he's working during the day, and I'm writing this talk out. I get home. And 48 hours later I developed like the worst abdominal pain I've ever had. I was nauseous vomiting, sick... I thought I had food poisoning. I was like that's my luck. I go on vacation, I come home, I get food poisoning. A couple hours later became apparent It was not food poisoning. I was like something seriously wrong. And so we went to the emergency room and I find out that I have a ruptured appendix and I'm so sick, they can't even take me to surgery, I'm now septic. And I had something called pan colitis. So it means that the entire length of my call my colon, my large intestine was inflamed. And if they took me to surgery, I could have run the risk of having a colectomy meaning they could have taken my colon out and that was even as sick as I was. And so down the rabbit hole I went of spending 13 days in the hospital. I lost 15 pounds and I had every complication you can imagine. I had a small bowel obstruction. And I was very cognizant that I was very sick. I all I did was dream about water because I was so dehydrated. And of course you can't drink anything when you've got a tube down your nose into your stomach. And so long story short, they did the third CAT scan in a week and they found that I developed an infection so I had abscesses in the cavity that all your internal organs kind of sit within. And it was only when they put drains into these things that I started to kind of turn the corner. But by the time I got home, I had missed every deadline for this second TED Talk.
And so I had to have my husband reach out to the organizers. And I still remember the organizers said to my husband we need to get her on a phone call because we don't want this to impact her healing. My surgeon was kind of optimal, trying to be as optimistic as possible. I was still getting antibiotics around the clock, antifungals. I got on a call with them, and after the fact they told me that I looked like a corpse I was so skinny. And so fast forward, it's four days before the talk. And I still have this drain into these abscesses that hangs down out of my stomach onto the floor. And I kept going for these CATs, these MRI scans to make sure could they pull this out. And so every week they saw that I still had the fistula, which is communication between my intestine in my appendix. And they're like, if that's still there, you have to keep the drain in four days before the drain gets pulled. And I went on to do this talk. And I took my 13 year old who at the time was 11 to come with me. And I remember the night before we spent the whole day going to the zoo, we went around the whole town.
And the morning of that talk, I just intuitively felt like, if I can do this, then I can show my kids that your mind really is the most powerful thing you possess. And so I remember being very nervous, and they were very nervous about having me there, they were convinced I might not be able to do this. And so they let me go third. And remember, I got up there. And unlike my first talk where I was allowed to talk and talk, this one was 12 minutes long. And so there's a big clock, which I wasn't paying any attention to. And all of a sudden, I realized I got a less than a minute. And I probably have four more minutes to give this talk. And I had to fast forward three minutes ahead in my talk, and then ended. I got off the stage and honest to God, I walked into my coach saying, that's the worst talk I've ever given in my entire life. And she looked at me and she said, Cynthia, you were fine. I was very nervous. It's why people criticize me because I paced, because the only thing I could do is move back and forth. And so I said, that's the worst talk I've ever given. And she said, No one knows that you cut part of your talk out, you did a great job, you should be so proud of yourself, your son's up there beaming in the audience, you have other family members here. Go enjoy your day. And so I went off to enjoy my day.
But that talk was done purely to challenge me. It was never done with any other intent. And so the funny thing is, the talk was released in May. I remember a good friend of mine texted me and said, Oh, your talks been released! And I was like, Oh, that's cool. And she said, I think this is going to be different for you. And it was, because the day it was released, it had 89,000 views. And then I had no idea what that really meant. But my business exploded. I mean it was like a dam breaking, and you're trying to stick your finger in a dam. But I think that on so many levels, so many levels, the universe takes and the universe gives. And so I never did a talk with the intention for anything other than challenging myself. But I feel like I almost lost my life in 2019. And then I had arguably one of the biggest professional wins of my life, unknowingly. But what was most important to me was to demonstrate to my kids that you can get really sick. And then you can go on to still do something professionally or do something to challenge yourself.
But the backstory is what's most important because that resiliency, I could have had every excuse in the world for not doing that talk. I mean, no one would have even criticized me they would have said I totally get it. But I'm grateful I had a surgeon that believed in me and the curators for and my coach, my obviously my family believed in me enough to put me on a plane and send me down to South Carolina and do that talk. I always feel like my grandmother and my South Carolina heritage was with me to help support me give that talk and be able to nail it.
Intermittent Fasting
“Intermittent Fasting is really eating less often. And as a society, I think we have shifted into some pretty dangerous territory. There are many reasons why we have escalating rates of obesity, and diabetes, and metabolic and flexibility. So from an ancestral health perspective, years and years ago, before there was refrigeration, when we had to go out and hunt our food. Physiologically, eating less often is what saved us because our bodies intrinsically would go into stored body fat, and break it down. And it would keep our brains alert. It's also a principle that is embracing all the major religions. So I like to remind people, it's not new or novel. This is a concept that has been around since biblical times. And so I think it's it started to gain more traction over the last 510 years. And certainly probably the last two to three years, I've seen greater interest in it. Because people are tired of gimmicks. We don't want more potions and powders and junk. And we don't want short term fixes, we want sustainable strategies. And so if you do nothing else, eating less often is going to benefit your body in so many ways. Just from a hormonal perspective in the body, when our insulin levels are low in our body, we are very cognitively clear. So when I did that, by both those talks, I was completely fasted, because your body loves that as a fuel source. And so it allows you to have all this mental clarity. The hormone piece is something that's poorly understood, but absolutely critical. And so when we're eating all day long, we're spiking insulin all day long. Each time you eat something or drink something that's a sugar sweetened beverage, you're spiking insulin, and insulin is designed to be a hormone that moves sugar into the cells. But when we are eating constantly, and drinking sugary beverages constantly, our body just gets resistant to the messages of insulin. And insulin is not a bad hormone. It's a hormone that we want to have control over. It's much better to eat two meals a day and spike insulin twice, then spike insulin 16 to 17 times a day, which is what the average American is doing. So when you look retrospectively how ancestral health patterns where we ate and when we were full, and then we stopped eating, whereas now we just have food that is accessible. I mean, think about every 711 or, you know, grocery stores, or quick Mart's at a gas station, I mean food highly processed, highly addictive food is accessible all the time. And we recognize it's not just things like the rise of the processed food industry, which is really taken about over the last 50-70 years. But it's also ingredients that have been added to our foods that are contributing to this problem as well. So we look at like seed oils like canola oil and soybean oil, and we look at high fructose corn syrup that are driving a lot of these problems. So if you're eating all day long and you're eating highly processed foods, it's nearly a recipe for diabesity. It's a nearly a recipe for metabolic and flexibility. And so that's where intermittent fasting as a strategy can be hugely beneficial for helping people. You know, I think people come to it out of Curiosity in terms of weight loss, but they stay for all the other benefits. And that's, that's where I always come from. I'm like, Listen, I know everyone focuses on the weight loss. But people stay with it over time, because of how good they feel they sleep better, their clothes fit better. They know that they're doing all sorts of beneficial things for their bodies by eating less often.
Food Detective
“I would say get to be a food detective, read the labels. And so if you do nothing else other than just avoid seed oils, that's a great first start. I think it's also really important to structure your meals in a way that you don't need snacks. And let me be clear about this. We are very carbohydrate focused culture ever, I just talked about the proliferation of seed oils that drive carbohydrate addiction. When you consume seed oils, you're not going to crave healthy foods, you're going to crave more junk. So I think it's important that you structure your meals that you're focused on protein and healthy fats. Healthy fats are things like avocado and coconut oil, and butter and ghee, and tallow and lard, etc. nuts, seeds, things like that. So if you're structuring your meals properly, you should not be hungry, from breakfast, to lunch and lunch to dinner.
Now, I think you have to get the structure of your meals down first and pull out the snacks before you try to fast, I've just come to find that people will be much more successful if they pull the snacks out first, because you try to rip the band aid off all at once, that can be a little challenging. So I would start there. And then experiment with whatever this crazy fasting stuff is. Sometimes people are fasting without realizing it. If you eat dinner at six o'clock at night, and then you have breakfast at 8am, and you don't eat anything in between, you've already fasted 14 hours. So we talked about flexing your fasting muscle, if you will. And so this could be as simple as going from 14 to 15 hours, or 15 to 16 hours. And then kind of experimenting with how you feel, recognizing what makes a fast clean. Clean fasting is consuming things like plain water, or plain bitter teas. It's green tea, black tea, and then playing coffee. And those are the things you can consume while you fast so it will not break your fast.
Also buying things that are seasonal, so seasonal produce, getting to know the people at the farmers market being conscientious about where you're purchasing your fruits and vegetables as well as your meats and fish. If you eat animal protein, which I'm a huge advocate of, I think that's a good start. And those things are not so woefully overwhelming. I've learned that slow and steady wins. If we try to change too much all at once that can be overwhelming. And then people feel like they don't have a little win. So we want to make little small wins all the way along.”
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