Create Your Eating Timeline to Understand Your Food Story
Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor.
Around 2018, I was living in Denver, Colorado and I was in my ongoing process of combining the fields of somatics, nutrition, nervous system, and trauma. I've wanted to learn as much as I can about all of the possible perspectives of what affects and shapes our food interactions. I was a member at the Denver Botanic Gardens and found out they were holding an all day nutrition workshop with Dr. Deanna Minich. I had been following her work for a long time and was so excited to learn from her in person. Some of the things I learned at that workshop I still cite today in sessions. I have admired the way Dr. Minich combines nutritional science and spirituality. So you can imagine how overjoyed I was when she agreed to come on the podcast and share her wisdom.
Dr. Minich is a pioneering nutrition scientist and thought leader with over 25 years of experience bridging science, spirituality, and art to redefine holistic health. Internationally recognized for her work on color-coded nutrition (“eating the rainbow”), detoxification, and hormone health, Dr. Minich brings a multidimensional lens to wellness that is both grounded in research and infused with a soulful approach. For over a decade, she worked closely with the “Father of Functional Medicine,” Dr. Jeffrey Bland on R&D and functional medicine education with the Institute for Functional Medicine and assisting with the start-up of the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute (PLMI) and now on the Board for PLMI. In 2025, she was awarded the Linus & Ava Helen Pauling Award by the Institute for Functional Medicine — one of the highest honors in the field — for her groundbreaking contributions to science-backed integrative health. As the Chief Scientific Officer at Symphony Natural Health, Dr. Minich leads the Science-Medical Team’s innovation in endocrine, metabolic, and circadian health, developing evidence-based approaches that empower people to reclaim vitality through rhythm, root-cause healing, and renewal. A passionate educator and communicator, she develops transformative curricula and continuing education for health professionals, while also creating accessible, inspiring resources for the general public. Her work meets people where they are — whether they’re practitioners seeking clinical precision, or individuals seeking deeper connection to their body’s wisdom. We chat about the relationship between food and spirituality, lineage, ancestry, generational trauma, personal food stories, food associations, the power of sensitivity, and embracing color and creativity with food.
Before we dive in, ways you can support the Satiated podcast include leaving a review anywhere that you listen to podcasts to help others find the show. You can also check out all of my affiliate links, join Satiated+ and be able to Ask Me Anything each month, or check out working with me 1:1 or in any of my programs. I have self paced programs and my three month live Somatic Eating® Program which you can join the waitlist for now and doors actually open in two weeks for the next class that starts on May 21st. All links are in the show notes. Now, welcome Dr. Deanna Minich! I am really excited to get into our conversation today, and I said this in my intro, but I just want to reiterate that I came across you many, many, many years ago, and then I actually got to see you speak live in person, which was such a unique, special experience. So to get to connect with you, kind of in person now feels like such a unique experience to go through. And so I'm just so glad that you're here.
Dr. Deanna Minich 04:30
I'm grateful that we're going to have this conversation, and thank you for the kind invitation. I feel like the things that we're going to talk about are really important for this time that we're living in, especially for women, I'm looking forward to this.
Stephanie Mara 04:43
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And you know, I always like to get started with how you got into this work. You have such a unique lens to nutrition and the body, and I'm curious to hear more about your journey.
Dr. Deanna Minich 04:56
Yeah, well, I would say it all started with my mother actually. So I'm 55 years old, and that put me into the 1970s when I was growing up. So like, way back when we had rotary phones, and, you know, we didn't have all the devices and technology that we have now. So I remember that my mother was pregnant with my brother, and he was number three. I was the first born. So by the time he was born, I was like between eight and nine years old, and at that time that she was pregnant, I remember she got really into her food and her faith. It was kind of interesting to see both of those two different dynamics come together. So I grew up Catholic, so I remember her going to church every morning, and she started to be much more conscious about what the family was eating. And it was kind of odd for me, because I was going to school with brown bread sandwiches in the age of Wonder Bread, which was like, you know, white enriched bread that you can like, roll up. It was like nothing. It was like fluff. That set the stage, I would say, for probably my later interest in food and nutrition and perhaps also spirituality. You know, I kind of find it very interesting that, again, she was into food and faith, but I had really pushed back from both of those things, so I was just about to be a pre teen, and I didn't really care about eating healthy at that point. I just wanted to be like the other kids. I wanted to have all of the foods that they were having at school. You know, many times what I ended up doing was actually binging on high sugar foods. Like, one of my favorite foods was Oreos. So Oreo cookies and, like, chocolate, chocolate anything. And I had a newspaper route at the time, so I would spend my allowance just going up to the candy store and binging because there were so many things that I couldn't have, and I had already had, like, eight years of having anything I wanted, and then all of a sudden, her going through this transformation was just too jarring for me throughout my teen years. I would say that probably, if I look back now, I had an eating disorder, right? So kind of like this overeating, this binging eating in secret, and also having a lot of gut issues and gynecological issues, and many times those two things go hand in hand. I would say that I was kind of like the sensitive kid, and so I was the one that was just more prone to just upheavals in my emotions. So when hormones came into the picture, it was like, oh, wow. Like, even more. And on my father's side, there was a history of endometriosis and a number of other type of gynecological things, all of which I developed myself. I really wasn't in tune with what I know now then, so I didn't think that nutrition and lifestyle would do anything. In fact, I was really kind of a nerd. I was into science, so I decided that the way to figure out my body issues was to study science and to be pre med. So I went to college, I studied biology, and I took my first yoga class when I was 19, and that kind of lit me up in terms of, like, wait a minute, there's a whole other world out there if like, thinking differently and seeing the body differently. I learned about the chakras, like, you know, kind of like this rainbow within us, and how the different poses or the asanas would connect to these places. So that kind of intrigued me, right? And I started taking philosophy courses. I started taking literature world religion. So I became very, I would say, curious, during this time of life, like between 19 and 22 but then I had to make a decision, like, am I going to go and study medicine, or am I going to go and do something else? And I didn't feel as inclined toward medicine anymore, even though I still like science. So I decided to go and study nutrition, of all things, which was kind of crazy because I was so against it. But, you know, I kind of feel like sometimes we go and study the things that we're really personally interested in, and I love that you asked me about my personal journey, because for so many of us in this field, it all started with trying to heal ourselves, trying to figure ourselves out. And I think for me, eventually, what happened was creating this combined path of science, art and spirituality in an effort to grow spiritually and personally in every way. But I wasn't thinking about that in my 20s, it just was part of the process of growth. So I would say that's kind of my story. Short cutting to today, you know, I was a scientist, so I went on for my master's and my PhD in science degrees. So I did that until I was close to 30, and then I went into the working world, and I started working for a food manufacturer. I started working for a dietary supplement manufacturer. I started doing more education, and I still had health issues. I must say, I didn't completely resolve them, and we can get into that a little bit more, but basically, I was doing a lot of nutrition, a lot of lifestyle, but I don't think I was dealing with stress really well and that's where art into the picture. I started creating images large canvases with bright colors. And in a way, I kind of feel like art and color became like nutrients for me, in much the same way that like a vitamin C or B vitamin would be good for the body. It was like art, color, creative expression was becoming like the nourishment for something that was more emotional within me that needed an outlet. So I kind of have this combined path. But I would say everything started with my mom, and it started from a lot of tumultuousness and just trying to figure my own body out.
Stephanie Mara 10:38
Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I hear so many overlaps, also in what I've gone through as well. I was like, I went to my first yoga class when I was 19 too. Yeah. And I was like, oh, like, I know that age. I know that path, and how much you are dealing with a sensitive body I have as well, and continue to but when you're dealing with sensitivities in your body and symptoms, I do find that there's this curiosity that gets sparked of like, what's going on here, and there's just so many different lenses to look through, and I hear you looked through so many different lenses to try to understand it. And that I always found, even on my journey, or with those that I work with, that we are exploring the lens that we're ready to look at when we're ready to look at it, you know, when you were just saying, like, I wasn't ready to maybe, like, look at the stress piece. You know, I find that it's like, it's peeling back the layers of an onion, you know, not to use that cliche, but that it's like, oh, this was what I was ready and then this is what I was ready for to get to a place where it's like, okay, there's always like, more here that we can be exploring.
Dr. Deanna Minich 11:46
There is and actually, I do like your analogy of peeling the layers of an onion, because it's kind of like that, like, I don't think we can just dive into our life and then just do everything simultaneously. It's like one thing leads to another, and there is kind of this trust that I eventually developed in divine synchronicity. It was kind of like, okay, I'm doing this, but I'm meeting these people, and then this is leading me here. But everything was always about like, let's look at the patterns. What is emerging? Like, why do I have these things? Like, I just had this insatiable curiosity to look deeper. You know, I was always like a rabbit hole thinker, where it was like, sometimes a little bit too deep. I would create depth where perhaps there wasn't a lot of depth, right? So it's kind of like, yeah, the layers can be interesting. And I really like what you said about being sensitive, because I think for so many women, they see this as a downfall, like they see this as a character flaw. And now, later in life, I look back and say, wow, that was kind of a superpower. I didn't realize it at the time, but I felt things that other people didn't feel, and my feelings in those moments kind of directed my path. So if I didn't feel so much emotional sensitivity would I have gotten into art? Would I have met certain people in the healing field? Would I have chosen to even go down the path of a healing oriented profession? Right? So I kind of feel like everybody finds their way, and I feel like it's all ultimately perfect. I can look back and see that now, and you know, sometimes I'll hear on podcasts, like people are being asked, what would you go and change about your younger self? What would you tell them? And I kind of feel like I don't know if I would tell her anything, because I do think that there is perfection in the seeming imperfection. Like, you know, you can see that somebody might be struggling, but that struggle is taking you somewhere. It's perceived as a struggle, but actually it's a catalyst in some way. So it's kind of neat to see where we all kind of land in the end, and then how do we evolve our journey from that point forward, right? And knowing what we know and making conscious choices.
Stephanie Mara 14:00
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I don't feel like I really started to see my sensitivity as a superpower until I went to graduate school for somatics, and it was a supervisor that was like, you pick up more than most people do. And I was like, maybe...She was like, own that. Like, this is a superpower that you have, you need to step into it because it's going to help you as a therapist. And so, yeah, I feel like we get a lot of societal messages of needing to dull or numb ourselves from our sensitivities so that we can kind of fit in of why isn't anyone else making this a big deal, or why isn't anyone else feeling what I'm feeling, and I know that that often leads to a lot of women being confused about what to eat or how to take care of themselves, because for maybe many years or even decades, they've been disconnected from their own sensitivity and trust within their own body.
Dr. Deanna Minich 14:57
Yes, oh my gosh. So well said, and especially for a woman coming from a place of disordered eating, where there was this mismatch in cues, and so leaning into food as a refuge or as emotional support, right? I've worked with so many women where, instead of feeling they were eating down those emotions. And so just even from my own experience, I started to work with women doing these workshops. And one of the first times I can remember, I had a circle of women, and it was a workshop focused on eating, and I think it was also like an emotional overlay to the workshop. And so the first thing that we did as a group, we were all sitting in a circle, and I asked everybody to go around and to say how they were feeling in that moment. And I can still remember to this day that the first woman who who had to report on how she felt, she said, I'm concentrating. And then I was thinking, okay, well, that's not really a feeling, but let's just keep it going. The second woman said, I'm focused. And I said, okay ladies, just a second here we're working from our cerebral self, our cognitive self, our mental self, right? These are thinking words and not necessarily feeling words. So sometimes what's needed is to bring ourselves from head into heart and doing what you do, like the somatic world. My husband is a body worker, so I get a kind of a sense, because he's very kinesthetic. And not all of us have that ability where it's like, you know, feeling it somatically right, like we're up here, or maybe we're not even here, we're out here. And especially if we come from trauma, where we've dissociated from our bodies, it becomes even more difficult sometimes to really connect into when are we truly hungry and are we craving food, or are we craving something else? But we're looking to the food to pivot to giving us to what we're actually needing, right? So there's a lot there in terms of having women really honor their body's messages. And me being in nutrition, this is really interesting. So when I was in grad school, this is before I started doing my PhD. I was in grad school, and I found that there were so many women in the same program with me who had issues around food, meaning that there was almost like a fixation. And I had the same, because I had had this past, and I liked science, but I wanted it to be applied in a certain way that I could understand and that I had interest in. But it seemed like all of us kind of had like our particular thing around food and eating so and you think about that as a woman goes through each decade of life, right? She moves out of puberty, she's in her 20s, and into her 30s, you know, just kind of looking at the menstrual cycle, her cycling and her overall health, and her eating cues, and how there can be so much in the way of this dynamic flow. And then she moves into another transition of life, like 30s into the 40s, into sometimes the early 50s, and now we have more hormonal transitions that can be tickling through a lot of the hormonal webs. So when we think of eating and a lot of the appetite cues, I'm thinking of cortisol opening the day. I'm thinking of insulin throughout the day, and then I think of melatonin as the final bookend of the day. And of course, we have all of the other hormones throughout that circadian web, but there can be so much. And if we are in some ways dysregulated from a circadian perspective, a time perspective or a hormone perspective, it's like a spider's web, right? Like now, we start to tug on that particular hormone, and then our appetite, our satiety, our sense of fullness, our sense of really being grounded in the body, just can not feel as strong.
Stephanie Mara 18:53
I'm glad you're moving in this direction, because just from the lens of women feeling so confused as to how to trust their bodies or when to eat, or how to eat, or what to eat, and that it changes from decade to decade, especially as our hormonal life changes. And I know you talk a lot about circadian rhythm, and even you recently put out a post on kind of like color in circadian rhythm, and I'm curious if you could say more about that, because I find that a lot of women who listen to this podcast also feel often deeply confused around the mixed messages of when to eat anymore. Like, are they supposed to do intermittent fasting? Are they not supposed to do intermittent fasting? Like, does it matter when they eat? Does it matter if they have a snack before bed? And there's just so much confusion out there, I feel like of how to interact with food throughout a day.
Dr. Deanna Minich 19:49
That's a big question, Stephanie! I love it. Let's just dive on into it. Well, first and foremost, let me just back up and say. That we are living in the 21st century where it's very difficult these days to make general comments about food and eating, because we are all so different. So I definitely want to acknowledge that. So we're all different as women. We're all different even as a woman going through each decade, even every year, every day. But there can be some general guidelines that I can speak to, but I really do want to honor that every person is very unique, and as we move through life, things can change, where the things that we were doing before now we can no longer do. We might develop allergies or sensitivities or like, oh wow, my body just doesn't deal with that the same way. Or, wait a minute, I'm hearing that carbs aren't good, but I feel more energy if I'm eating complex carbohydrates, and more fiber. So what's happening to me? Shouldn't I be avoiding carbs? You know, there's a lot of mixed messages out there, and I think that when I look at the land of social media, what tends to happen is you have maybe an N of 1, you know, a person that finds that they have success with a certain way of eating and then applies it broadly without kind of saying, you know what? This is my experience. It may not be your experience. So that said, let's just back up into circadian rhythm, because there is something that all of us share, and it's the 24 hour day night cycle. We are all enmeshed in time. We can't avoid it. Even if you live in darkness, which not many of us are doing, we are still subject to this 24 hour rhythm, and that changes depending on where you live. So that's another layer of complexity, right? So are you living where there's four seasons? Do you live in the Pacific Northwest, like me, where it's cloudy, where, you know, I don't have the same amount of daylight. Are you near the equator? You know, all of those things, northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere. So you can see it's like added complexity. But in general, there is a flow to the day night. So when we first wake up, this is when cortisol. Cortisol is strongly connected to eating. So typically, when cortisol is up, we think of that as being a metabolic signal, like whoa. We are starting our day. We tend to think of cortisol as a stress hormone, but it's also by way of helping us to deal with stress, it's kind of engaging our metabolic network. So cortisol when we first wake up, we have what's called the cortisol awakening response. So it tends to be high when we wake and then it comes down through the day. So if we tend to think of cortisol with insulin and glucose and kind of forming that triangle, we would want to start our day with a metabolic push in the direction of energy, because that's what our hormones are telling us. The other hormone that's high in the morning is testosterone. So cortisol and testosterone kind of get us up and out of bed and motivated to, like, go and do something. And that's a good thing. And for many women, what can happen through years or just decades of cortisol dysregulation is we can start to see a flattening of that morning curve where now she doesn't have quite the same strength of signal, and she might actually get the signal some other place in the day, but traditionally and classically, biologically, we want that signal early in the morning, because cortisol and melatonin are like brother and sister, we can't have melatonin at the same time as cortisol and vice versa. So as melatonin is coming down from the night, we have the rise of cortisol, and then cortisol is coming down through the day, and then melatonin comes up with dim light. And once melatonin comes up, insulin works less effectively, which is why oftentimes we just hear the message, don't eat late at night. Well, there's a hormonal reason why we don't really want to be doing too much at night in the way of eating, because we don't have quite the same strength of insulin working because melatonin is now being released from our pineal gland, sending our bodies the signal of the circadian rhythm and that it's time to prepare for sleep. So in terms of eating, just to answer your question, yeah, having a bit more breakfast in the morning, higher protein quality, fats, having some diversity in the way of foods and fiber. You know, I was laughing with my husband, because some of the breakfast that I make, they actually look like other people's dinners. Yeah, you know, like, we don't always have, like, the standard, like eggs and bacon and, you know, the cereals and the bagels and the different traditional breakfast items. In fact, this morning we had like an ancient grain mix with lentils and buckwheat and quinoa and amaranth with poached eggs and with green onions, broccoli, mushrooms. It was like a scramble kind of a thing. So it was kind of like a stir fry rice, but it's not rice. I do think that bringing in that strong morning signal will help you to set your day's rhythm. And then I think, you know, you moving through the day, and then having something kind of like when it's light out and bright out. So we think about lunchtime, like that 12 to 2 kind of frame. I think that that is also a good time, metabolically, to be looking at a lunchtime, some kind of lunch meal, or some kind of meal, and then just having less as we move into, like, the 5 to 7pm range. So, you know, it makes me think of that quote, and I even remember this from my mom, you know, looking at Adele Davis's work, she was one of the early nutrition pioneers. It was something like, eat breakfast like a prince or a princess, lunch like a king or a queen, and then dinner like a pauper, right? Like, kind of like, mirror your hormonal rhythm to your eating rhythm. So I think that that makes sense. And now the only time it doesn't make sense is if there is dysregulation, where, if a woman is very stressed and her blood sugar is not, let's just say, not connected to like fine tuned insulin signals so she might have higher blood sugar, her insulin might be higher. She might be more prone to cravings or just not feeling very centered, like maybe she can't think well, or, you know, all the signs of insulin resistance, essentially, she may have to shepherd her blood sugar a little bit more carefully through the day. With somebody like that or even if they're diabetic, can they have these long, extended periods of no eating at night, like a 14 hour nightly fast that might be a little bit challenging for somebody who's had a lot of stress, who has dysregulated blood sugar or insulin, so that may need to be looked at. I mean, just even for myself, I remember I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor. This was when I was perimenopausal, and I was just experimenting on myself, wearing a CGM, which would look at my blood sugar, and I noticed that I would wake up at around, like between 2 and 3am which is a common wake up time for women and for men, too, some of them. And what I noticed on my CGM was that my blood sugar would plummet. It would go down to 40. So it wasn't that my blood sugar was too high, it was too low, which is a danger signal to the body, right? You don't want too high or too low. So I had to adjust my own eating times a little bit closer into bedtime with with a little bit more fat, a little bit more protein, just things to give me a little bit more energy into the night so that I wouldn't plummet. Now, that didn't last forever, but that was a good, I would say, just some good information from data and wearing a device which I may not have otherwise, got that information so, and I must say, I was doing some pretty stringent fasting because I was trying it out. I was thinking, well, you know, maybe I need to do like a 14 to 16 hour fast? Well, that was way too long. So when we hear all this talk about fasting, we really need to be careful with that, for ourselves, looking at our energy, looking at our sleep. And also, if you're like me, where you come from, disordered eating, it may provoke, you know, this feeling of like control and withdrawal from food, where now we start again. We go back into that kind of response that we used to have, where we want to be really attentive to our body signals and bring down our sense of presence and feel energy in the body, physically, emotionally, mentally.
Stephanie Mara 28:35
I just really want to appreciate you and how much you're bringing in the concept of bio individuality and answering a question in a way that's like, hey, here's kind of a general guideline, but also this is going to be unique to your body and the time of the life that you are in, especially as a woman. So I just really appreciate that perspective, because it puts like, I'm always trying to explore with individuals around like, let's put the power back in your body. Like, your body gets to be kind of your nutritional expert, rather than anyone else that I love your example of like, N to 1 of like that is just telling you based off of what worked for them. And I find we have to more start maybe in the nutritional and therapeutic world, teach someone how do I figure that out for myself? Rather than it's like, do this. It's like, well, what are the experiments that I need to do? Like, your experiment was wearing a CGM and kind of starting to collect that I call it body data, to be able to understand this is what's going to work for me. And I find like that's not really taught very much, like I'm wondering within even the conversation of women's health, like you talk so much about that in a different perspective, what do you feel like we are missing, that women aren't being told?
Dr. Deanna Minich 29:57
That they truly own their body and have so much authority in terms of those decisions, right? I really love what you're saying about not co opting that information from the outside. I mean, I think it's good to do some information gathering. Obviously, we need some of the facts and some of that structure. But then there's this place of what I like to refer to as nutritional sovereignty. It's like you are the keeper of and you know your body the best. Even if you go to a nutritionist, you go to somebody skilled in the art of nutrition science, there's only so much time in terms of, like, what they can gather from you. You know your body because you live in it 24/7, and so one of the things that I use clinically as a tool to help people with this, I actually have a number of different things, and it would just depend on what the focus would be like if there were more emotional things or more like physical symptoms. But one of the things that she can do, and I use this within functional medicine, is I have a log, like back in the day, when I was first starting with nutrition consulting with people, I very simply, just had them take a piece of paper, or like a journal, fold it into two, or make a line down the middle, and then track what they were eating, not with the amounts, per se, because I kind of feel like that just takes us up into the head. Let's just just write down the foods in general, and then on the other side, I want you to write down, like physical things that happened to you, or even emotional things. And eventually I created a food and mood tracker where it was, like, colors of food, colors of mood. So it could go in a variety of different ways. But I think just when you're starting from scratch, just to really see, like, how do you feel when you have certain foods? You know, I have a 12 year old niece right now, and so I'm kind of doing this even with her. Like, the sense of connecting to your body after you have food. Like, do you get energy from the food? Or do you feel depleted? Like it just took energy. And she loves mac and cheese, like, so we were talking, and I mentioned to her, I said, I forgot what the food was that we were talking about. And I said, Ellie, this gives you energy, but mac and cheese can take your energy. I also have this energy inventory kind of exercise where people can assess, again, it's just one piece of paper. They divide it in two. We do this exercise where it's like, we can keep it limited to food, where we say, like, what are all of the foods that give us energy. Like, if I have raspberries, if I have herbal tea, like, I just know that there are certain things. I feel good if I have quality protein. I'm not like, you know, my blood sugar isn't erratic. I feel really stabilized. I feel centered. Like, there are just certain things, you just know, then there are certain other things where it's like, oh, wow. If I have milk chocolate or something like that I am just going to or caffeine or something like this. Like, I know there's a cost for me to do this, and it's not to say that you can never do it, but it's kind of like, I think of energy in energy out yin yang. It's just like your currency, of your metabolic fuel, but also like the longer lasting effects, right? Like, if you do have that piece of cake at the birthday party for, how long will you have lost your energy thereafter? Will you have a headache for six hours? Is it worth it? Right? And you kind of get to know your body, like, oh, I just know I don't do well with that. The other thing that I saw clinically was I did a lot of what's called the elimination diet. I don't like the term for that, but basically all it is is removing a number of the top allergens. And so that would be like things like corn and soy and certain citrus foods and wheat gluten. We take out sugar, we take out caffeine. Basically, we'd strip the diet of things that are known to be allergenic or that people are intolerant of. And it was amazing, because the first week was always very tumultuous, like, emotionally, it was like, yeah, but I want my bread and cheese in the morning. We had to figure out, like, creative ways to kind of work around that, because most people, when they went into this, we all knew it was temporary, right? So most people could kind of wrap their head around like, okay, I know that this is just an experiment. This is just something I'm trying out, but the first week was challenging, and just after that seven to 10 day period of removing so many foods that were in their daily diets, because I think we get into food ruts where our bodies haven't woken up, we were not able to make a conscious choice, because we're eating without thinking or feeling or connecting, so we're just moving through and again, I call that food ruts. Like food ruts usually are connected to life ruts where we're just doing the same thing, day in day out, or we have some like food safety issues where we feel like these foods are safe, and I don't feel like I want to veer away from those foods. And what I've done clinically in that experience is say, okay, let's just have, like, little itty bits of many foods, and have micro rotation where, like, your body isn't in withdrawal of anything. And actually, this is better for your gut microbiome diversity. But back to the elimination diet. I have just felt like, when we remove certain foods for that first seven to 10 days, it can be difficult, but taste and sensitivity around things that you're eating improves. Women create, I think, more body awareness and more of a sense of, like, somatic response. And it was so interesting because after like 21 to 28 days, when we would go to reintroduce the foods, some of the women would tell me they're like, I don't want to even reintroduce cheese. I just know it's bad for me. I just know that I don't want to do that anymore. Or one other common one, aside from cheese, was just dairy. So many people, you know, we would look at like, why is there the fixation with dairy? And I have this really interesting activity called laddering, where we would take a food, a food that they would have a very difficult time letting go of. It was just a way to get into the subconscious mind. Like, why is there this fixation with that food, everything from potato chips to peanut butter, to coffee to ice cream. Like I would workshop these where a woman in the audience would say, I cannot give up ice cream. So she would come up to the front of the room, and then I would have, like an easel. We would write it down. And like I would just say ice cream to her over and over again. And lo and behold, you would always see, like there would be something percolating on up where she would have a memory or some emotional connection to the food. I remember, for one woman, it was all about her father when she was eight years old, when she was in the summer with him, she was having a good time, but she hadn't really thought about the connection between ice cream and this memory with her father. When she was growing up, she just had ice cream whenever she needed comfort, and she couldn't really figure it out. But when we were in this kind of quiet space, but yet a very intuitive, quick space of like, let's just see where this goes. This food, we can see that every food, in some way, has some kind of an emotional tie or a memory or something that is deeper connected to us that we may not even realize. It may even be epigenetic, I'm not sure, but that would be interesting to explore. Do we have tags on our genome based on, you know, certain experiences with food, and we just continue to go back into that, especially ancestrally?
Stephanie Mara 37:20
Yeah, I completely agree with you, and that is a lot of what I explore with people somatically, is that there are associations that get tied, but in our somatic memory to specific foods, and we just don't remember them unless we are kind of sitting and being like, wait a second. Okay, what are my memories around this food? And it's fascinating I agree with you, with what comes up for people of, oh, I never really got to see this parent. And when I did get to see them, this is the food that they would bring me, or, oh, this is the food that we would eat after everyone stopped fighting. Or, you know, like all of these associations that start to happen with food. And then I appreciate you going into sometimes we need to I think of it as play like I agree with you I don't love the term elimination, because that kind of even puts my body into a like, a restrictive place of like and, and I think it's like, okay, if we can play with food. I agree with you that we get stuck in these food ruts where we're not really hearing our body's feedback anymore of how does this food actually digest and assimilate in my present day body? Sometimes, like you were even naming it, gets associated with, well, this meal, or this food, has become associated with safety because I've eaten it so many times and I know it digests maybe kind of okay, so I'm gonna be okay eating this, but we're not really hearing but does this still work for my body now.
Dr. Deanna Minich 38:49
Exactly, and just kind of going through the motions with food, just because we have been accustomed to it and maybe grew up with it, or, like you're saying, have this association with safety or a memory, so we just pivot back there. I've also explored with people what I call the eating timeline, where, and sometimes I've done this in groups. It's always powerful to do one's eating story within a group, to kind of tell, kind of like, what you asked me, like, how did you get here? And I brought in a lot of my food history. We all have an eating story, all of us, even if you didn't study nutrition, we all have an eating story. Eating is what connects us as humans, right? It unites us, which is always so ironic to me, that we see so much division and polarity around the different ways to eat, the sense of righteousness, rather than the sense of embracing the wholeness and the connection that we can experience. So with an eating timeline, one of the fun things to do here in functional medicine, we talk a lot about the timeline, like, if somebody has a condition or an illness, many times we like back it on up on a timeline to see what were some of the root causes, when was the groundwork for that condition to establish, right? Like, was there a trigger here, or was there something that you're constantly exposed to that mediated that. So with eating, what I like to do, if I'm workshopping, this is, I'll say, and I make it like a time bound activity where I'll give people, like, 15 to 20 minutes, and I'll say, I want you to, in a, you know, just draw a line on a piece of paper, go back as far as you want, but I want you to list out 10 top eating events in your life that you remember, whether you know any kind of feeling about it. I'm not going to put a label on a feeling, but you know, you had a feeling about it, or there was something that happened, maybe when you were four with eating, or maybe something that you knew about your mother when you were in utero, when she was eating, like some of her cravings, whatever it is. And it's so interesting, once people get their 10 and they've really kind of like, journaled on these a little bit and plotted them on their timeline, and then they tell their eating story in front of everybody, it's kind of like, okay, this happened, and then this happened. It's kind of like, you know, it's amazing how much eating can really say something about who we are at a very deep level. Again, back to our ancestry, back to our family, how we grew up, our environment, our sense of connection to the earth and to food in general, cravings. And what are we craving for? So everybody does their eating story in a little bit of a different way. There's no prescriptive way to do that, but what we all unite with is like, okay, 10 events. What are those? And to kind of bring out your eating story. And what's interesting Stephanie is that you might actually have a different eating story for the different times of your life. This isn't something like a one and done, like you just do it once you do it in a group and you're done. No, you might have iterations of this eating story where when you're 35 now your journey is longer than when you were 20. So how has your eating story changed? What is now relevant? And how do you see your eating story within your current framework or perspective of your lived life? And then to go into 55, 70, you know, it's always so interesting, because I've had mixed groups of women, where I've had 75, 80 year olds, and then I've had 30 younger, I'll just say younger, because it's been all through the spectrum. But I definitely have had older women in these groups. And it's so interesting, because I love the intergenerational wisdom that emerges when you have groups of mixed ages, because you can see that in more of the elder women that you know, the eating parts are not like, they're more enriching, like, there isn't as much depleting in the way of aspects around food. It's like now food is like enjoyed. And so I think hearing those stories in light of other people's stories, which may have ups and downs, right? It's just it's a beautiful process to witness everybody's eating story and to acknowledge them all as valuable, and to really honor that place that we're coming from in terms of food, because how we eat is how we live, and how we live is how we eat. So our story is actually saying something really profound about our lives.
Stephanie Mara 43:20
I really love that, because it also brings in that this is never just a one and done. And I find that, you know, I experienced that I also went through a decade of navigating the binge restrict cycle. So I also know what that is like. And I think at the time, you know, in my teens and early 20s, I thought, like, okay, once I heal this, like everything will be okay. It's kind of only one part of the food journey. If you know, for anyone listening who has struggled with food, it's only one part of that and that you're going to keep evolving in this relationship and interaction with food, that it never ends. And that's always the perspective that I like to take, too is to continue to like we would in any relationship, to say, okay, in your marriage, in your partnerships and your friendships, what's working, what's maybe not working, what needs to be updated, what needs to be looked at. And we can do the same with food in a very loving, compassionate way. You know, I find that when it comes more from maybe, like diet culture perspective, or like wellness culture perspective, there's so much judgment and shame and, like, personal ownership of I'm doing something wrong, rather than ooh, I went to a certain place in my interactions with food. What does that have to tell me about something like you were naming where I'm at in life. What are my food interactions? Trying to relate to me about our nervous system, states, our stress levels, like if we are kind of in this very monotonous place in our life, and that I always feel like, from a somatic perspective, that I see eating as a somatic practice, that it's always informing us of something and how our body is processing, or like our external and internal worlds.
Dr. Deanna Minich 45:13
Yes, that's really beautifully said. And if you look at the process of digestion and absorption and elimination, it's such a beautiful process to think that what we choose to take in becomes part of our being, like literally at the cellular level. And I know that we always hear that phrase, you are what you eat, but it's more than that, right? It's kind of like we embody the physical aspects of that food, the caloric intake, to what you're saying, like the somatic aspects. Yes, we get energy. We get an emotional connection. And maybe, like, our mood changes after we have that particular food or beverage, maybe our mind and our thinking changes. Maybe we can learn better or less well. And then I think that there's more of an energetic aspect. It's kind of like I've had many different spiritual teachers. I've had I've studied with Char Sundust, who is a shamanic teacher in the Seattle area. I've had other teachers, and there was always this reverence around food, because that food is actually becoming you. And so wouldn't you want like highest, most honorable connection, and to infuse that with gratitude, love. You know, there's so much about how that food is prepared. And you know, just even if you can grow your own food, like, I just know that when I grow food during the summer, it just takes on a very different feeling. It's like, I know its origins, right? I just have this appreciation. So to me, food is physical, it's emotional, it's mental, it's communal, it's relational, it's environmental. In functional medicine, we say food is information. We've also heard food is medicine healing, but I would say the overlooked piece is that food is incredibly spiritual. You know, so often we talk about nutrition. I studied nutrition science, right? I mean, there's a classic macronutrients, protein, carbohydrate and fat, micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, phytonutrients. That's what I studied during my graduate school thesis, carotenoids, that's all beautiful. But then if we go deeper into each of them, there was a point that I started to look at all of those nutrients in an energetic, almost a yogic sense. I was like, you know, what is the feeling in the body that we get when we have protein, and even protein from different sources, like legumes versus nuts or seeds. Like, what is the difference in the body's energy? And I'm not just talking about like, do you have energy like ATP, but a more subtle energy to it, right? Like, I think the closest I can get to this is through traditional Chinese medicine, which my husband, as I mentioned to you, is a shiatsu body worker, but he also does acupuncture. So in fact, he kind of fuses them both together in his practice. And I love conversations with him about food energetics, as is seen in TCM, because it's all about like the elements of food. Like, is this food too moist? Is it too damp? Is it too hot? Is it too drying? Is it astringent? It's like, you know, this is like common language that we can translate all of those elemental concepts in an energetic, subtle way in the body. Like, if I have something spicy, how does that heat up my body? It's almost like we could talk with children about this. It's so basic and so informational, and in some ways, like, we could take it to the other level of, like, really looking at it as, like, quantum and subtle energy, and even more of like the spiritual energy, like, where did that food come from? And I think that if we look at now how there's kind of like, you know, this talk out there about, you know, certain foods being good or bad, I think instead of looking at it from right or wrong, it's kind of like, what is the energy it carries into me? Like, what am I becoming? And I do think that we bring a lot to the meal itself. It's not just the food. It's also kind of the reverence, the spirit that we bring into the meal itself, and how that can also change things. There was even a published study some years ago, I believe it was from Dr. Dean Radin, R, A, D I N, where they looked at chocolate, one of my favorite foods, and infused it with intention. And there was a way that, now forgive me, because I haven't looked at the study in a long time, but essentially, they found that when people were having more of the intention infused chocolate, like their overall mood was different. I just think that even though the science hasn't caught up to it, I do think that there's the energy of the food, whatever it brings, and then what we bring to it through our own as you might say, like the somatic response, like our whole beingness, the many layers of whatever we're comprised of, and how we bring that to the eating occasion. It's really beautiful, and it's amazing that we get to eat so many times a day and have this connection, and have the ability to become more conscious and aligned with our becoming through the act of eating.
Stephanie Mara 50:25
Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing in the spirituality piece. And I know that sometimes even the word can mean different things to different people. So take on whatever spirituality means for you, for whoever is listening of you know it could be connection with nature, like it can mean whatever you want it to mean. But there's this spiritual piece to food that I find I had to also rediscover, rather than it being this, like, right or wrong, or good or bad, or how is it going to affect my body? Kind of fear, place of wow I am interacting with, kind of the earth. Every time that I eat, I'm interacting with the sun and the rain and everything that went into, like, growing this food and like, you're beautifully naming even the ancestry and the lineage. It also makes me think of I also haven't looked at this piece of research in a very long time, but they, like, took a group of individuals, and each person was from like, a different country, and they fed them some other different country's breakfast. And so it was like, you know, they gave someone in like Sweden, like the American breakfast, and, you know, vice versa, and all sorts of things. And they found that actually, when someone was eating someone else's breakfast, that they're like inflammatory markers went up and that when they were eating their own breakfast from their own country, like it was a very more non inflammatory, stabilizing experience in their body. So I love that you're bringing in this piece of it's so much deeper than just what's the like right or wrong thing to eat, and it's also like what we are taking in when we are eating this food. And I hear you on just the even the intention, and I see that if we bring it from a nervous system perspective, that if we come into a meal with an intention of like I want to nourish myself, and I'm safe to be here, and I'm safe to connect with this food, we're going to be more in a parasympathetic nervous system response where we can actually optimize our digestion, whereas if we come in with fear and judgment and anxiety, then we're going to be more in that sympathetic response where we're not even, like even the healthiest foods on the planet that are termed that way won't really assimilate very well in our body.
Dr. Deanna Minich 52:38
Yes, and that is why, if we do have certain fears or anxiety around food, it may not even be that food itself, but now it's kind of like, coupled with the sympathetic nervous system, and we know that that can trickle on through the body to create things like leaky gut and all kinds of changes that would not be helpful for digestion. So that's why I kind of have, like, I do a lot of travel, and I kind of feel like, you know, food is so important to me, and, you know, there's a certain way that certain foods I like to eat, and that I feel really good with, and so, but when I travel, I let go, because I feel like, if I'm going to be so controlling in every place that I go, and even internationally, like, if I'm going to be in Taiwan or South Africa, it's like, I can't expect I'm just going to jump into a Whole Foods or, like, have certain foods everywhere. So I just bring down that bar of any kind of stress. This is my thinking. I want to, like, really get to know the people, like the culture that I'm in, and part of that is taking in the microbiome. And the microbiome comes through the food, the air, the water, all of those different elements. So it's like, the more I can synchronize to that place, the more I feel like I do well in those areas, because I'm not stressing about food, it's like, I got to get here. But I mean, I make reasonable effort to eat certain foods in a certain way, but within the context of whatever I'm presented with. You know, Stephanie, I just want to go back to something that you said too, about, I love that study that you mentioned about the breakfasts and about like you having a different breakfast. You know, does that generate any kind of stress response? One thing I've pondered, there's no research on this, but I'm just going to throw it out for conversation. So if we think about what is the cellular organelle where we extract energy from food, it is the mitochondria, the mitochondrion as like the solo. But mitochondria like the more of them that we have, the more that we're harnessing energy for ATP, for energy. So our mitochondrial DNA come from the maternal line comes from the mother, primarily, the majority of it. And so I've often thought, would we benefit from eating more like our maternal ancestors? Because our mitochondria have seen that food over transgenerational transference, right? I have found no studies on this, but I always put it out there. And sometimes, if I'm working with people, and there are challenges around food, I will ask, you know, what is your maternal ancestry like? Oh, I'm Eastern European. Oh, do you eat a lot of tubers, and what about stews? And, you know, a Borst or beets or, you know, we'll kind of get into certain foods. And it's like, oh, no, I don't like any of that food. I had that growing up, and I don't like it. And it's like, you know, that's a really interesting point to kind of go down discussing just in terms of the maternal line, what have the maternal genes seen over time in the way of food signals? And you know, for most of us, there would have been poverty, famine, war, trauma of various types. But for many of us, famine would have been seen in our genes. I often think when things are trending, it's like what is happening epigenetically? Are we being called into look at certain epigenetic patterns like this stringent intermittent fasting? Is that trying to bring us back to times of where we had to create resilience because we had no food again? This is just philosophical questions. These are not science based, but I do think about the maternal connection with our energy harvester within the cell, because it's coming from mom.
Stephanie Mara 56:31
I completely agree with all that, and it makes me really excited. I'm actually getting my PhD right now, and I have been trying to, like, read so much of the research, of like, there also isn't a lot of research out there on somatics and our food behaviors, and so I'm excited to contribute to that, but I agree with you that it brings a lot of curiosity, of like, what is informing us of why we're eating, what we're eating, what we're drawn to, what we're avoiding or restricting. And I agree with you, sometimes I think of it as like generational food trauma, that you know that piece of like scarcity, where someone will come to me and say, like, I've never experienced food scarcity myself. I've always had enough food in my home. I know that I have enough financial security to go buy whatever food I want to get, and I still feel this immense fear that I'm not going to have enough, and I always think that that's really interesting of then what is in someone's ancestry or lineage around food scarcity and famine, like you're talking about that it's not your lived experience, but it's just what's been passed down to you. And I even think sometimes, because I'm pretty close with my husband and his family, and his mom always talks about how much she was just ate pounds and pounds of mashed potatoes when she was pregnant with my husband, and his favorite food is mashed potatoes.
Dr. Deanna Minich 57:53
Yeah, that makes sense.
Stephanie Mara 57:59
It's really, really interesting, just to see that happen, of what informs us, of even what our food preferences are based off of something that was entirely not within our own control, but what we were being fed when we were being created.
Dr. Deanna Minich 58:14
Absolutely and I wonder how much of it is from the developing fetus to the mother as well. Because if you look at children, so why doesn't the mother have the same cravings with each child? Have you noticed that it's a little bit different depending on the child? You know, just even within my own family, there were three kids, and when my mom was pregnant with me, it was all about chocolate like she had, just like these chocolate cravings, like she described what she was eating. I'm like, oh my gosh. But for my sister, she didn't have that at all. For her, I think she said it was more like salty foods. You know, it's just interesting. Like, why is it different? Is it something about the dynamic of the fetus and the mother? Is it more the mother bringing in those foods? Because I don't know if we will know that, because it's bi directional, right? There's a shared space and a shared communication around food. It's like, Hey, Mom, I need this energy, or I just think it's fascinating. And I always feel like, again, looking at the mother, because we did have that shared space of eating at a very young age where there could be tags put on our epigenome as it related to the foods that she was eating. Does your husband still have cravings for potatoes or...?
Stephanie Mara 59:29
Yeah, like, I would definitely say he loves potatoes. It needs to be white potatoes. Like, I'm more a sweet potato person, and he's just like, could, like, take them or leave them, but yeah, I mean, like, if he wants something that feels like comfort and feels like home, and just knows it's gonna like, feel really good in his body, it would probably be like mashed potatoes, right? Or, you know, even just like baked or fried potatoes, or something like that, and it's not like a potato chip, it's like, specifically a potato so I yeah, I would say, like, he still kind of has that sometimes, and it is really interesting. And I appreciate you also bringing in that this is the communication that's happening from, you know, fetus to mother, and this is why I find also somatic work so powerful is that we don't have to cognitively remember this. You know, it's stepping back into like we were talking about way earlier, of the sensitivity of our body, and say, okay, there's something about this food that I feel drawn to. Can I notice what this feels like, what this invites or evokes in me, and just kind of sit with that for a second, not as if I have to do something about it or fix it, or I should want to choose this food less, but just what does this feel like? And then what does this maybe inform me of? And I agree with you that it's there's so much focus on what we are eating. And I liked your example of just like, oh, when people say, well, I don't like those foods. And it's also interesting to kind of explore what we're not eating or what we feel, I don't want to use the word resistant, but, like, some tension around eating those foods, that it could be so much more than just I don't like that. Like, there could be a lot of things that what we're talking about in our lineage, that you're being informed of, like something about your body and its interaction with that food.
Dr. Deanna Minich 1:01:29
Sure, and you know, there are food aversions, where maybe in an early life experience, we had some kind of an effect, maybe we vomited, or we had some kind of sickness from a food. So then it's like, somehow that just remains, like you can't go back to eating the food, because it's like you go back to that from a memory standpoint. But yeah, I mean, that's why food is intriguing, what we're drawn to, what we are not drawn to, and then that whole overlay of our environment, our ancestry, our memories, that eating story, I feel like, is such an important feature of people's journey with food, because it really does highlight for us, because many people aren't conscious and like thinking about it on a day to day basis, of like, how they're eating kind of culminated in who they are today. Like they're just thinking, like, what am I supposed to how do I get enough protein? What should I be eating for breakfast? Like they're all, like the tactics, but not like the why, the five whys under that. Well, why is that? Well, why is that? You know, just to keep going deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole.
Stephanie Mara 1:02:33
Yeah, I feel like I could talk to you for just hours and hours and hours, but I want to also be respectful of your time. You've given so many amazing baby steps today of what people can play with or explore. And I always like to leave listeners with like a baby step that they can maybe take with them to start to play with. You already just mentioned again, just the eating story. I'm curious if there's anything else when individuals that were listening to this conversation of putting more trust and empowerment in their body and curiosity and listening, and also just the sacredness of food. Like, is there anything else you feel like you've explored with people that someone could practice?
Dr. Deanna Minich 1:03:14
Well, I can't believe we didn't talk about this at all, but now is the perfect time to leave everybody with this, which is, eat for color. Have fun with food. You mentioned play. I feel like that's great for so many people, but color. Color is another value add. It also adds esthetics and beauty and artistry to our eating. And so look at color. What are the colors that you're eating? What are the colors that you're wearing. Explore color because, you know, my whole book called The Rainbow Diet is really a deeper dive into each of the different colors of food. Why those colors are important, primarily coming from nature, of course, like the red food, looking at inflammatory response, the orange food, looking at endocrine health, the yellow the gut, the green the heart, the blue purple the brain. So, like there's a color code. But, you know, even though there's information to the code, I got into the whole rainbow concept also because of my journey with art. So I feel like we're kind of coming full circle to the end here in terms of, you know, just focus on color. For some people, I have said over the years, don't count calories. Count colors. If you're going to count anything, just count your colors, right? You're getting on the colors and make it an art. You know, take pictures and you know, your plate is like a canvas. It's like potential, just waiting for some kind of, like, beautiful array of shapes, sizes, colors, textures. So I kind of see approach food as an art, because I really do feel like that is one angle that so many people are overlooking, and women especially super creative, right? I mean, and as we move into midlife, there's almost like a reinvention of a woman's creative expression, because, you know, she's changing from being physically creative and now going in other directions of creativity. So maybe food becomes part of that creative journey.
Stephanie Mara 1:05:12
I love that, and it does bring in starting to tap into your own like you're saying creativity, and we've lost that art of that with food, that food can also be this creative process of being like, yeah, how many colors can I bring onto my plate? And how do I even want to plate this food in a way that invites my body into the eating experience? Because when I look at it, I'm like, I want to take that in.
Dr. Deanna Minich 1:05:38
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Beauty, esthetics. I mean, this is not just fluff. We're creating some kind of signal and connection through that as a medium. So I love that. And that's something I talk with my niece about. I remember I was in her preschool, kind of like showing the different colors and how they connect into the body. That was so fun. So, you know, you could talk with young children about this whole idea of color and art, and you can talk to a 25 year old, you could talk to a 50 year old, you could talk to an 80 year old. This is like a message that cuts across the entire spectrum of ages, like we all connect to all of the our senses, like, just to bring it back to your world of the somatics. I mean, sight, touch, smell, hearing, like all of these senses that we have. How do we engage them more in the eating experience? I feel like that's fun and it's artful to do that.
Stephanie Mara 1:06:33
Yeah, I completely agree, and I just absolutely loved our conversation and all the really interesting places that we went to. I'm curious how listeners can keep in touch with you and your work.
Dr. Deanna Minich 1:06:44
Sure, very easily, they can find me on my website, deannaminich.com, so on the website, you'll see blogs, resources. I have a whole resource tab with all these downloads that I was talking about. I have an eat the rainbow kit. I have a food and mood tracker. I've got a bunch of different things there that people can just download, and then also Facebook and Instagram, you know, the obvious social media handles.
Stephanie Mara 1:07:07
I will put all of those links in the show notes, and definitely recommend checking out what you post, and your books. They're all amazing and great, and you are just providing such an important lens in the nutritional world. So I just really appreciate the work that you're doing.
Dr. Deanna Minich 1:07:21
Well, thank you. Thank you so much for reconnecting after some years, and this was an awesome conversation. I like where we went with this. We kind of jumped in, kind of organically, and it just feels right. You know, there's so many great nuggets here for women, I think so. Thanks for having me.
Stephanie Mara 1:07:36
Yeah, absolutely. Would love to have you back sometime. We could probably go in an entirely different direction.
Dr. Deanna Minich 1:07:43
That'd be fun. Thank you!
Stephanie Mara 1:07:45
Absolutely. Well, to those that are listening, as always, if you have any insights or aha moments, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime, and I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of the day. Bye!
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