005: My Journey to Holistic Wellness: From Sports Nutrition and Mental Illness to Whole Foods, with Cody Cox

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Welcome to the Real Food Mental Health podcast, where we explore the powerful connection between mental and physical health. My name is Cody Cox, a holistic nutritional psychotherapist, and I'm here to guide you on a journey to true wellness mind, body, and spirit. If you're tired of quick fixes and want real solutions that address the root cause, you're in the right place. Let's get started on your path to lasting wellness. You're listening to Real Food Mental Health with Cody Cox. Now that we are a few episodes in, I thought I would share a little bit of my story. You may have listened to the first episode where I interviewed Rebecca, one of my nutrition colleagues, and she shared her story, and I think I mentioned in that episode that most people have a story, especially when they come to holistic health. And it's usually it's kind of a hero's journey, sort of a thing where it's something along the lines of a person has health problems. They see doctors, they see therapists, they get medications, they try surgeries. Things only sort of help and they get frustrated. So they take. The responsibility upon themselves to address their own health, which I think in many cases might be a wise decision. That's actually how medicine used to be before. Oh, I don't know. Before the last century or so in America, even, we used herbal medicine, we used holistic medicine. And then Rockefeller came around and injected millions of dollars into what we now know as Western medicine. And so typically, like I said, people have health problems. They go through the medical system, they get frustrated because they're only getting their symptoms addressed rather than addressing root causes. And that leads them down a path of holistic wellness. So my journey started about 20 years ago, actually. And I mean, I, I might even say it started at birth. I'm pretty sure I was born with metabolic health issues, as I hear about. Certain things that happened when I was a baby, when I was, uh, a growing fetus. Things like that. And as a therapist, I always have to take that into account, like, I, I have been told by some patients that they were born with the umbilical cord wrapped around their neck, for instance, and that alone can cause a lifetime of anxiety because you're born into the world feeling like the world is unsafe. And so of course that's going to make you feel anxious. Um, but for me, I think I was born with metabolic health problems. And, uh, just like most therapists, I suffered from mental illness for most of my life. And it's probably related to the metabolic health problems. Now that I have the training that I have, I look back and I'm like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. And of course, I mean, trauma is part of it too, for everybody. There's there's always a psychological component. But for me, I remember getting therapy as a child. And I remember being on medication as a child, and I remember only sort of getting helped and like, nothing really totally felt right to me. And then it was about in the early 2000, I got really into going to the gym. So I was a quote unquote gym rat for a while. I would go to the gym like six days a week for a couple of hours at a time, doing cardio, doing weightlifting, doing classes. I really got into spinning classes and yoga classes. Uh, I enjoyed that lifestyle, but I think it kind of led me down. Well, I mean, it got me into nutrition, so I guess I can be grateful for that. Of course, it started with sports nutrition, and I think that is where most people start with nutrition. If they weren't already raised in a household that was holistically oriented it, for many people, it starts with with sports nutrition. And then over the years it evolves into more of a holistic perspective. And that's exactly the case for me. So I was going to the gym, got really into the protein bars, the protein powders, smoothies, things like that. And quite frankly, I did not know what I was doing when it came to nutrition. I was doing what was conventionally thought of as being healthy, which was the low fat, high carb diet. I bought everything I could that said, low fat or light or like the skim milk or, uh, back then soy milk was all the rage. And so I bought soy milk even though I had no lactose problems. So. Looking back, I kind of look at how much of a mistake that was. But again, I was naive. Like most Americans, I was naive. Yes, I had taken health classes in middle school, high school and college even. But frankly, those classes in public schools do not give you very good information. It's superficial at best. And so I didn't know what I was doing. I even took a nutrition class as a university student, and I still didn't know what I was doing. I remember seeing a natural path of sorts. She wasn't really a doctor. You might call her more of a traditional naturopath rather than a naturopathy doctor, but I remember her telling me that I should follow the Mediterranean diet and that I should get into the martial arts. And so at that time, I just happened to be in college. So I took an aikido class. Didn't really resonate with me, but I was doing my best to follow her recommendations. I think the whole idea of her giving me that recommendation was that I needed to practice self-discipline of some kind, and so the aikido didn't really do it for me. And frankly, I was too poor to follow a mediterranean diet. So I did my best to eat what I thought was being healthy. And that usually consisted of granola bars, yogurt, string cheese, baby carrots once in a while, peanut butter and jelly on multi-grain bread. I did make an effort to make sure it wasn't white bread and a whole lot of cereal. Like. Usually it was like mini wheats or something that I thought was healthy. But essentially I was a vegetarian for a couple of years because I thought being a vegetarian was healthy based on just kind of the general conventional perception. And I think a lot of people make that mistake where like, we get this idea that eating meat is bad for us because you hear all these studies about how red meat causes heart disease or saturated fat from animal products, cause heart disease, things like that. And so we're naturally inclined to think, oh, well, if saturated fat is bad for us, then being vegetarian or vegan must be really, really healthy. Now, I was not a healthy vegetarian. I was a vegetarian for about two years and granted I did eat dairy. Like I mentioned, I ate string cheese, I ate yogurt, but I was mostly eating grains. I was not eating very much vegetables like baby carrots. Once in a while. I wasn't eating a lot of fruit unless it was bananas. And so that was not the way to go. Also, I know now as a therapist and as a nutritionist, that vegetarianism for many people is a gateway to eating disorders or disordered eating, I should say. And I do feel like I developed some disordered eating habits from being vegetarian. And I've definitely seen that in many of the patients that I've had. I do think there is a healthier way to be vegetarian, so if anyone's listening who is vegetarian, I do think there are healthy ways of doing it, but it is very, very difficult to get the nutrients that you need to fuel your brain. Particularly certain B vitamins and iron and healthy fats is another one. Like when I started finally eating grass fed butter, the Kerrygold brand, my mental health really improved. So to continue with my story, I was a vegetarian for two years and then I found. Dave Asprey and his bulletproof diet. And so at that time, this was 2014, I found Dave Asprey podcast that was called Bulletproof Radio. Now it's called The Upgraded Human. But I started listening to his podcast every day, so I listened to a lot of back episodes at that point. I had a cubicle job, and I worked at a company that catered to the deaf, and so a lot of my coworkers were deaf, which meant I sat in a cubicle. I stared at a computer screen all day. I didn't talk to anyone because many of many of the people around me couldn't talk anyway. I would instant message them. It's not like I was unfriendly or anything, but because I wasn't really talking to my coworkers, I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts. So I listened to Dave Asprey podcast. He talked about the Bulletproof Diet, which essentially is a ketogenic diet, but it's scientifically tweaked according to what Dave Asprey thinks is more optimal. And if you listen to his podcasts or read his books, he'll explain that he's he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars researching this stuff. And so it's not. He hasn't tweaked the ketogenic diet based on speculation. And so as a nutritionist, now, I can look back at the bulletproof diet and I can say that's a pretty sound philosophy, honestly. Like for some people it might not work, especially if you've had your gallbladder removed. But for many people, that is a very good diet to follow. And I think the main theme here that is going to make the biggest difference for the most people is simply that the bulletproof diet is whole foods and the highest quality foods that you can get. So you're not just eating an apple, you're eating an organic apple. You're not just eating steak, you're eating grass fed steak. You're not just eating butter, you're eating grass fed butter. So the highest quality of food that you can possibly afford. Um, but this isn't to say that the bulletproof diet is really the answer for everyone. And that's exactly what I do. As a nutritionist, I recognize that nutrition is very bio individual, which means a ketogenic diet might not be right for you. Maybe for you, you need more carbs. Maybe you need to follow something more like the gas diet. Or maybe you need to just focus on whole foods in general. It's very much a bio individual approach. So I found the bulletproof diet and I started to implement that the best I could within my budget. Like I was probably never in ketosis to be honest, because it is very hard to follow a whole food diet when you're surrounded by people who don't follow a whole food diet, especially during the holidays. I'm going to be releasing this episode. Probably right before Thanksgiving, maybe a little bit after Thanksgiving. And so if you are listening to this episode, when it has been recently published, you'll know what I'm talking about as you're going to your Thanksgiving parties, your Christmas parties, you're trying to eat healthy. But those Christmas cookies are just so appealing. It was really hard for me to follow the bulletproof diet, but I did my best. I just so happened to move out into the middle of nowhere in the desert of Nevada for about a year, and I met some friends who owned a ranch, and they raised pasture raised, grass fed beef. So I bought a quarter of beef from them, and I bought a chest freezer to put it all in. And my wife and I just started eating a lot of beef. And at that time, we also got a Costco membership. We had to drive 2.5 hours to get to Costco, but we made that trip once a month because it was worth it to get the kerrygold butter. And the organic produce that they now sell at Costco, thankfully. So we would buy organic produce, we would buy grass fed butter, and we would eat our grass fed beef. And let me tell you, my energy got better. My mental health got better. It was amazing. Also, at that time I had read about mindfulness years before that on blogs and things, but it wasn't until that time that I was in the middle of nowhere Nevada, that I finally found a free app to teach me how to practice mindfulness. So if you're in the United States, you may have heard of Calm or Headspace. I guess headspace might be available in the UK as well, but the issue I have with those is that you have to pay for them. I think they're great apps, but mindfulness is it's an ancient practice that really should be free. And so I found this app called Smiling Mind. Which is a non-profit organization based in Australia. And because it's a nonprofit organization, they put out their app for free. And so I found this app. I started doing their adult program. I went just went from the top of the list and just went in order. It was called Mindfulness Foundations. They recently totally revamped their app. Now, I'm not even sure if the Mindfulness Foundation's program is in the app anymore, but nevertheless it is filled with very good stuff. So I still highly recommend the app. Um, but as I was practicing mindfulness, uh, it furthered the improvement of my mental health. It was amazing. I practiced it every day, 2 or 3 sessions a day. It kind of depended on how I felt and how motivated I was to do it. But it was 2 or 3 sessions a day using this app and. So at that point, I had experienced an improvement in my mental health from changing my food habits as well as practicing mindfulness. So at that point, I had discovered a more holistic approach to nutrition, and I had discovered mindfulness, and I decided to become a therapist. I already had a college degree, and so I started to research graduate schools, trying to figure out, like, where can I go? That would have a holistic perspective, because I knew that if I had just gone to a conventional university, especially if I want to study nutrition, it wasn't going to be the right perspective because I had taken a university nutrition class. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't quite right. In fact, I even considered becoming a registered dietitian. But because I took that class as an undergraduate, I knew that it wasn't for me because what Dave Asprey was telling me on his podcast. Is not what's taught to dietitians. So I was looking for graduate schools that had a holistic orientation. And unfortunately, I couldn't really find one that would also allow me to become a therapist. But I did have some previous experience being in nature, going backpacking. And so I did find a graduate school that at least had an eco therapy program and an adventure therapy program, which I thought was pretty cool. We also had some workshops on yoga for mental health. There was one workshop on nutrition for mental health. So like it wasn't like a full on class, but just like a one hour workshop. So I got some exposure. Um, and just like any other therapist, I had to do a practicum, do internships, get supervised clinical experience before I could become independently licensed. And that took several years. But, you know, as a supervised clinician, I kind of felt like I had my hands tied in some ways. I couldn't really get the training that I wanted to get. I couldn't really practice the way that I wanted to practice. I just focused my efforts instead on getting the hours that I needed, getting the continuing education I needed so that I could become independently licensed. I started to look for nutrition trainings and. I want to back up a few years. Actually, I had seen a naturopathy doctor at one point who she said, you know, you really should look into the Western Aid Price Foundation because they have a really good perspective on nutrition. I had been listening to their podcast. It's called Wise Traditions for a few years, and I really, really like their perspective. And so I've kind of evolved away from Dave Asprey Bulletproof Diet. I still think it's a good diet, but I've gotten more into the Weston Price Foundation and the ancestral nutrition that they teach, and I was looking for nutrition trainings based off of the Weston A Price principles. I had a really hard time finding nutrition trainings that had such a philosophy. Like I said, I had considered becoming a dietitian, so I knew that I didn't really want to get a university course or another degree. And so I was looking for holistic programs, and I had a really hard time finding what I was looking for. I finally did find one. Um, in fact, it was actually between two different ones, and I finally just chose the one that I chose because it was a little bit cheaper and they had financial aid. So glad that I chose the one that I did. It was such an amazing experience. It was a year long program, surprisingly very rigorous. It actually felt like getting another graduate degree because of the coursework involved. The live weekly classes. We had a final exam. We had to do presentations. We had to do a practicum experience with practice clients. And this is exactly the training that I was looking for, honestly. And so now at this point, I can say that I'm a certified holistic nutritionist and an independently licensed psychotherapist in private practice. And so. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'm the only nutritional psychotherapist in the whole state of Utah, and so I have a very unique perspective. Granted, I'm not the only one in the United States. There are many outside of the state of Utah, and because of that, I'm actually following Doctor Chris Palmer, Doctor Georgia Reed. They are both metabolic psychiatrists, and they have both written very great books on metabolic psychiatry or nutritional psychiatry. And so I'm kind of following their research and other research from Stanford University to inform my practice. Um, but the services I offer currently are nutritional psychotherapy. This is really my flagship service, with one caveat. I mean, you have to be in the state of Utah to utilize this service because I am only licensed in Utah as a therapist. However, if you are interested in my services and you're not in Utah, you may be able to utilize my nutrition services. Essentially the nutrition service is it's whole it's nutritional psychotherapy minus the psychotherapy. So it's strictly nutrition. We will touch on mental health, but it's going to be more of a format that I was specifically taught in nutrition school where we do a nutritional assessment, a food and mood journal. I'll analyze your data, gather your medical history, I'll make recommendations based off of the charts that I'm seeing, and we'll make continued recommendations as we work together with the nutritional psychotherapy. You're going to get all of that in addition to psychotherapy sessions. So as part of the psychotherapy sessions that I offer, I do eMDR. It's a well sought after type of therapy. It's a trauma therapy, and it's been around since the 1970s, but I practiced that. I also practice EFT. Now to clarify, there are two EFT, and I think even a lot of therapists get confused between the two. So there are two EFT. And I actually have training in both of them, but the one that I practice is called emotional Freedom techniques, also known as tapping. This has also been around since the 1970s. I don't know which one came first, whether it was EFT or eMDR, but they are both trauma therapies, and I like EFT because you can use it as a skill between sessions. And so if you come to my psychotherapy sessions, I will teach it to you as a skill, at least the basic protocol, and I'll have you do it as homework between sessions in addition to the nutrition homework. So I also do for people who prefer the talk therapy format. I do more mindfulness based cognitive therapy. So what that is, is it's mindfulness. So like I mentioned in my story earlier, mindfulness really benefited me. And I know that it can benefit almost everybody else. And and I do say almost everybody else because I've had some patients who come back and they're like, it doesn't really do anything for me. And I don't know if it's because they're just not practicing it or if they are practicing it, and it really isn't doing anything for them. Maybe I'm not framing it the right way for them, who knows? But most people who actually do practice it end up with great cognitive and mental benefits. So I use mindfulness based cognitive therapy, which combines mindfulness with cognitive therapy. So cognitive therapy is a little bit more of a common form of talk therapy where it's more about monitoring your thoughts changing your thoughts to improve your emotions. I also happen to be a certified yoga teacher. I did my training in India right before graduate school, so sometimes I might talk about yoga, but I generally leave that out of my nutritional psychotherapy package and as of late I've added some additional bonuses to my packages. So not only do you get so many sessions per month or and the nutritional assessment and all those things that I mentioned before, but if you get actually if you get either package, you get the endless hard copy of a gratitude journal. And essentially what that means is if you fill out this gratitude journal completely and you're still seeing me for certain for services, I will give you a fresh copy for free. So as long as you fill it out completely, you'll get you'll keep getting fresh copies for free. And if you're seeing me remotely, I will mail it to you. The other bonuses. It depends on which package you're getting. If you're getting the nutrition package, which is good for anybody in Utah or outside of Utah, kind of depends on which state you live in. But if you're getting the nutrition package, you will get the gratitude journal as well as a keto mojo, which is it's an electronic device and it's a ketone meter as well as a glucose meter. So you can test your blood to see if you're in ketosis. Or you can also test your blood sugar. Very important biomarkers there. Um, and then you also have the option of for an additional fee getting a metabolic blood panel. So that's the nutrition program if you want to get the nutritional psychotherapy program, which is only for people in Utah, this is really my flagship program. But you will get the endless gratitude journal. You also get a choice between either the keto mojo which I mentioned before, or. A therapy lamp. It's a 10,000 lux therapy lamp, which is great for people who suffer from seasonal depression. And you will get the metabolic blood panel for free as part of the package, and you'll get that for free every three months. So you've got some options there. We're coming up on the end of the episode, and you may have heard me say in previous episodes that I am offering 20% off the first payment for my packages until the end of the year. So I'm going to go ahead and put that plug in here again before December 31st. If you sign up for one of my packages, either nutrition or nutritional psychotherapy, you can get 20% off by using the promo code podcast 24. That's podcast two four, and you'll get 20% off your first payment. If you want 20% off the entire program, pay for the entire program upfront. Otherwise, you'll just get 20% off the first month. So remember podcast 24 and go to my website to purchase that package. Beaver Creek wellness.com. Real Food Mental Health is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The information presented on this podcast is not intended to replace any medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. While I am a health care provider, I am not your provider. Always seek the advice of an appropriate health care practitioner with any personal questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you've heard on this podcast. Reliance on information provided by this podcast is at your own risk.