Episode 273: Re-Imagining the Back to School Busy
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Back to school and the transition to fall has become synonymous with busyness. In this episode, Erin addresses the “chaos energy” that can accompany times of change. She explains how food plays an impactful role on your mental state, and why it’s important to evaluate food choices for both yourself and your family. Throughout this episode you’ll hear thought-provoking questions designed to help you assess the impact of busyness on you and those around you — and alternatives for a more positive effect. This is not your typical “back to school” conversation!
In this episode:
School lunches, food cravings and the brain [6:09]
Using food as a grounding anchor [12:22]
The ripple effect: your reactions and how they influence others [14:30]
How to set intention for massive change [23:21]
Why you default to “busy” — and what it means [24:42]
Questions to reflect on during times of transition [31:59]
Resources mentioned:
Carb Compatibility Project™ (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
The Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™
Erin’s inspo for feeding kids:
Qualia Mind (Get $100 off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with code FUNK)
Organifi supplement powder (Save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase)
Ned Natural Remedies (Get 15% off your order with code FUNK)
Learn more about Mindset
Related episodes:
175: Our Food, Our Immune System & Our Kids (A Town Hall on Health)
119: Building a Healthy Child with Dr. Melina Roberts
123: Creating Your Morning Ritual
222: Creating Sacred Space for Healing & Transformation
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
Welcome to The Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. I'm your host, Erin Holt. I'm an integrative and functional medicine nutritionist with a feisty attitude and well over a decade of clinical experience. I work with women all over the world through my online programs, and I'm also the founder of the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school and practitioner mentorship where we help other clinicians level up with functional medicine methodologies. I've got a bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model that are both systematically failing so many of us. Creating a new model is my life's work, and this is what this show is all about. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment.
Erin Holt [00:00:47]:
If you like what you hear today, I would love for you to subscribe to the show, leave a review in iTunes, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Now give me the mic so I can take it away. Hello, my beautiful babies. Does anyone know what movie that's from? I feel like people don't usually get my weird references. If you do DM me, let me know. It feels like fall here in New Hampshire, which is appropriate for today's conversation. I'm going to speak into the busyness of this time of year, like the back to school period. My daughter's back in school tomorrow, so this is going to be for teachers, for parents, for caretakers or leaders in any capacity.
Erin Holt [00:01:36]:
I think it's funny because even people who aren't parents or teachers are like, this is a busy time of year. It's this transition into fall, which can sometimes create a little chaos for us. Before we get into today's topic, I want to shout out listener love. I love doing this because, one, I think people just really like hearing their names called out on the podcast, so it makes people feel good. But two, it makes me feel good when I read these. And when I feel good, I get into heart coherence when I'm recording. And then you get to feel good, too. PS.
Erin Holt [00:02:12]:
We're going to talk about the whys behind that later. So this is from Darcy Haas, who's actually a Funk'tional Nutrition Academy student, so she's an FNA student of mine. She says, I've listened to at least 90% of your podcast episodes, many of them more than once. Life changing, literally. Your unique approach to the beautiful web of our physical, emotional, mental, and energetic well being is so powerful. One message I heard you share last year that quite literally changed my life is that I don't have to be perfect or have it all figured out or be completely healed in order to help someone else. This is what gave me the courage to start FNA. I certainly don't have it figured out.
Erin Holt [00:02:53]:
All figured out. But I do have a message to share. My experience means something has a purpose and my voice needs to be heard. I can feel that in my throat chakra. Darcy. I love that. I think that's the most beautiful thing.
Erin Holt [00:03:12]:
And for anybody interested in FNA, enrollment officially opens September 1. That's this Friday. This is a phenomenal training. It's also a real boutique mentorship experience. We cap our cohort size so nobody ever gets lost in the shuffle. I know some people are not real big participators. They prefer to learn on the periphery, kind of exist in the shadows. That's actually my preferred learning style.
Erin Holt [00:03:38]:
I'm just like lurking. But some people really like that high touch. They just do better when they're in a part of a group and get more hands on. So we kind of offer all of that for you. We meet you where you're at, and I am really excited to invite the next cohort in. So Friday is the day. Get your applications in and let's go. All right, back to school.
Erin Holt [00:04:04]:
How appropriate you're going to come back to FNA. So let's talk about busyness. I personally have been in about a five month period of deep internal reflection. From an outside perspective looking in, you can see that I do a lot. I manage a lot. I create a lot. I have a high productivity output.
Erin Holt [00:04:27]:
Some would say I am busy. But if you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that that's not really a word that I allow into my vernacular, because I believe that so much of our busyness is a choice. I think busyness can be a little bit of a sirens call, and I'm going to speak into why many of us choose that, why we get lured in by that, whether it's consciously or not. Having said all of that, I will admit this year has felt real busy. I was in a long season of overwork, and by the time July rolled around, I was like in full burnout, like proper depletion state. I was planning a sabbatical in July, so I wanted to take the entire month off. Didn't really happen like that, but I did have a couple of weeks and just totally off and all of a sudden, without the distraction, I'm going to call it distraction, without the distraction of working really hard and being super busy, shit kind of hit the fan. And there was this whole slew of things that I had to look at.
Erin Holt [00:05:44]:
And that's kind of what can happen when you hit the pause button on busy. It creates space and opportunity for you to see your own shit clearly. And sometimes that's uncomfortable. It's always for the best. It's always for your highest good. It always shows you what you need to see. But sometimes I'm going to tell you what, we don't always want to see it. So I'll circle back around to that in a minute.
Erin Holt [00:06:10]:
Currently, I'm working with a friend on some media strategy. I'm the CEO of our company. I'm also the CMO, and I was really looking for some help in that department. And she suggested that I do like a back to school type of thing. She was kind of talking about how to build school lunches. And when she said that, I was like, first no, secondly, I think I'm going to take this conversation I like the idea I'm going to take this conversation in an entirely different direction, and that is speaking into the chaos energy of this time of year. If you're like, no, tell me about the lunches,
Erin Holt [00:06:49]:
I do have content about school lunches. My Instagram highlight, School lunch, is all about that. And I will, I promise to in my stories because I pack my daughter's lunch every day. I promise to showcase what I'm using. I'll do that more regularly as we gear up at the start of the year. I also have a highlight called Feeding Kids that you can take a peek at. And then episode 175. I talked about our food, our immune system, and our kids, which is a town hall on health.
Erin Holt [00:07:20]:
To be honest with you, I don't really have a whole lot more to say about kid feeding than that. Everything that I have to say has already been said before, and there are other people doing that really well. But I think my magic is in talking to the caretakers, in talking to the parents, in talking to the moms. I want to help you set yourself up for success so that you can set them up for success. That's my magic. That's where I shine. Because for the most part, it's not that we don't know how to feed our kids. It's that we are so burnt out, we're so maxed out, we're so busy that we default to what's easy.
Erin Holt [00:08:01]:
We default to convenience. And my goal is to get you to a well resourced place, because when you are well resourced, it's easier to make the changes that you want to make, whether it's for yourself or for your family, your kiddos, whatever. And I will absolutely admit that changing the way that we eat or that our kids eat can really feel like you're fighting an uphill battle. James Clear says, we don't rise to the levels of our goals. We sink to the levels of our systems. And sometimes these systems are hardwired programs. We have nonconscious brain systems that are influencing our motivations and our behaviors. And this extends to our food and our cravings and our food choices.
Erin Holt [00:08:51]:
Your brain is hardwired to recognize certain properties of food as good. And when we eat those things, when we consume those things, our brain releases dopamine, which essentially tells us, hey, do more of that. And guess what? Kiddos have brains too. So this system is working for them as well. And those properties of food that our brains deem as good are high sugar sweet flavors, refined carbohydrates -that's your breads, your white rices, your pastas, fats, salt or salty flavors, which is kind of this constellation of properties, is kind of the hallmark of processed foods or what we condemn as kids foods. Think your Goldfish, your frozen chicken nuggets, your Uncrustables. And the reason that I say it's like fighting an uphill battle, it's because of this concept of evolutionary mismatch. The way that our brain circuitry is designed to interact with food and our food environment is mismatched with the current reality of our food environment.
Erin Holt [00:10:40]:
And so once we understand this concept, we can actually recruit our brain to support our health or even our weight goals. And our goals become easier when we're working with our brain rather than working against it.
Erin Holt [00:11:38]:
And when I say this, when I'm talking about non conscious, I'm not even alluding to subconscious belief work. You know I love me some of that. That can certainly be helpful too. But I'm actually talking about the specific food that we eat, that we're motivated to eat and our certain eating behaviors. And this is exactly what we do in the Carb Compatibility Project. Registration is open now, by the way. It's a course that we only run twice a year. And there's a lot of really wonderful resources, including live classes for Q&A that will help you kind of understand this, how your brain is wired, and also how to make choices in alignment with your goals.
Erin Holt [00:12:22]:
When I allow myself to occupy my personal zone of genius, which is talking to you about your health, what we pretty much always see is some type of trickle down or ripple out effect. The very first round of the CCP that I ran, like maybe five years ago, quite a few of the participants said, my family is eating so much better which was an interesting thing for me as the creator, to witness, because it's not a food plan that I developed for kids. I wasn't like, I'm going to get on a mission to make every family healthy. I was literally just listening to what my clients were saying and creating a solution for them for their issues. But we know that modeled behavior and introducing new food into the household can impact the entire family. And I just think that it's a really wonderful and cool thing to witness. We know that food is medicine. The way that we eat and what we eat can give us more energy.
Erin Holt [00:13:27]:
It can give us more even balanced moods. We are less reactive with our family, with our friends, with our coworkers. I remember a teacher that joined the Carb Compatibility Project one year, and she told us that she had more patience and more energy for her students. Like, it's a legit ripple out effect, and it starts with how we eat. That's actually why I decided to run the CCP now. We haven't done a fall CCP in a couple of years because we usually have other programs going right now, but we moved some things around so that we could accommodate a fall, like start of the school year CCP. I'm like, we got to do it, people need to feel the effects of eating well, we got to make it work.
Erin Holt [00:14:12]:
The way that we eat can anchor us and it can ground us. And I want to say that again, the way that we eat can anchor us and ground us. It can resource us, and we need to find ways to resource ourselves. When we are underresourced, it becomes very easy to respond to busy or stressful times with chaos energy. And the reality of the situation is, even though this might be wicked frustrating to hear, you get to choose how you respond to every situation that you're in. Responding with chaos is actually a choice. And this was, a little level with you. This was a tough love moment I had to extend to myself recently. So consider that if you typically approach the back to school season with a level of chaos and discord and lack of harmony and just like the Cathy comic, right, just like completely frazzled, are you approaching this fall transition with chaos energy? Because another thing to consider about that is that that energy will extend out to those around you.
Erin Holt [00:15:35]:
How you respond to every situation will impact the people around you. And I just taught a Manifest Your Health class about heart coherence, and I think that this is a message that we all need to hear and continuously be reminded of. Again, this is a lesson that I had to relearn over the past few months, but I was talking about how I make the conscious choice every day, or at least I try to every day to prioritize my health, my peace, and my well being. I've said it before, my home, my relationships, my work, my energy field need to feel like a safe space for me to exist within. So I prioritize that. And in doing that, in investing my energy into me, in this way, I recognize that I'm also investing it into the people around me. And this has everything to do with heart coherence. Your heart generates an electromagnetic field, and it's the most powerful rhythmic field generated by your entire body. It can be detected or it can be felt by other people around you.
Erin Holt [00:16:57]:
We are always creating this field, this field that's being sent out from our heart. We're always creating the field and we create it with our thoughts, with our feelings, with our emotions, with our attitudes. Whatever we're experiencing, that's what we're creating our field with. So the field becomes more organized or coherent during positive emotional states. When you have feelings of compassion, of tenderness, of love, of safety, of acceptance for yourself, you are amplifying that out into the field around you. We're literally putting those things out, those feelings out into the field around us. And other people can feel and sense that too. So we consciously get to choose, we decide what we're putting out into the electromagnetic field environment.
Erin Holt [00:17:57]:
And in doing this, we can make really powerful, really positive contributions to the world through our own energy. Isn't that so cool? That's why it's absolute bullshit to think that caring for yourself, slowing down enough to feed yourself, nourishing yourself with good food, meditating, getting yourself into heart coherence, taking care of yourself, it's bullshit to think that that is selfish. It is actually the opposite. Because when you take care of yourself, when you feel good, when you curate your own energy field, and you do that as your primary goal, you carry that with you wherever you go, people can feel that. People can feel that coherence people want to be around that. They want to feel that. They want to co regulate with that. They want to match to that energy, to that frequency.
Erin Holt [00:18:57]:
So I want you to think about right now, as we're talking about this, think about somebody who makes you feel good. Like when you're around them, you just feel good. Why do you think that is? This is why. This is exactly why. But then on the flip side of that, think about walking into chaos or somebody who makes you feel a little chaotic inside. What does that feel like to you? You don't have to be an empath to pick up on that. We can feel chaos pretty quickly. And is that how you want others to feel around you? Is that the frequency you want to introduce into your field, into the field of those around you? One way you can approach this season differently.
Erin Holt [00:19:43]:
This season or really anytime, because you might be listening to this six months down the road and you're like, it's not back to school season, it still applies. One way you can approach any new thing or any time period differently is to set your intention to do so, which might sound a little annoying, and I want to breathe some life into the reality that there might actually be more on your schedule right now. Like you and your family schedule might be a little bit maxed out right now. If that's the case, I truly, truly do understand. I have a kid. Like I said, she's back in school tomorrow. She's got activities in sports, the whole nine. We've got friends, we've got a big family, we've got social events, we've got plans.
Erin Holt [00:20:25]:
I work full time. Not only do I work full time, I occupy multiple full time roles within my company. I'm the CEO. I am the CMO. I am the chief content creator. I research, I develop and create all of the offerings that you see in my company. It's me. I'm doing it.
Erin Holt [00:20:43]:
Including this podcast. Hello. Hi out there. So I legit understand having a packed schedule. Truly, truly, truly I do. But what I had to remember and relearn in July is that we have the choice of what energy we bring into every situation.
Erin Holt [00:23:00]:
You can choose chaos in discord. And for some of us, that's just like a default. That is our go to. Or we can say, I am no longer available for that energy anymore. We can say, that doesn't feel good to me and it doesn't feel good to those around me. We can ask ourselves, what's the energy that I want to bring into this? What's the energy I want to bring into this beginning chapter of something? Or this transition or this new season? How do you want to feel and set that as your intention? When we set an intention and we do it with heart coherence and we come back to that over and over again, this affects massive, massive change.
Erin Holt [00:24:10]:
And that's why if you join the CCP, we're doing an orientation call together for this exact reason. You're never going to do a program with me without some type of intention setting opening circle, because it's that important. What you decide, what you choose with conviction and with amplitude really matters. So I love holding people accountable to like, what's your intention? What do you want to do here? What do you want to get out of this? Really set that intention, whether or not you do the CCP, set an intention for something. And another thing we're going to do, another thing we're going to do is we're going to address some stuff like head on. And one of those things we address might be why you are actively choosing busy. There is a reason, a real clear cut reason, that many of us choose the busy and default to the busy. And interestingly enough, it's not dissimilar to what we talked about earlier.
Erin Holt [00:25:11]:
The reason that we choose Lay's potato chips over broccoli, our brain wants to move us away from pain and toward pleasure. Not to say that broccoli is pain, but moving towards pleasure. And we can use and many of us do, many of us are really, really skillful at this. We can use busyness as a form of escapism or avoidance. That's why I say it's kind of like a sirens call. OOH, this feels like a lot. I'm going to opt out, I'm too busy. Our intuition, our higher self is always trying to commune with us.
Erin Holt [00:25:48]:
I've got lots of podcast episodes about that. Sometimes the messages aren't always convenient or what we feel like hearing in the moment. Sometimes it reveals emotions or experiences or things that we've ignored or suppressed. Sometimes it's showing things in your life that need to be examined. But if you're always busy, if you're always busy, burnt out, exhausted, it kind of keeps these messages at bay. There's not a whole lot of space for those messages to come in when you're like, I'm too busy, I'm too busy, I'm too busy. Again, natural human tendency to want to avoid this discomfort, to want to avoid this pain. So this is why we reach for things to opt out of feeling them, whether that's wine or workaholism or busyness.
Erin Holt [00:26:40]:
And food is a way that we can stay busy. Binge eating, overeating, binging and purging, dieting. Hyper fixated on our diet, what we're eating. Hyper fixated on our weight. Weighing and measuring our food all of the time. Thinking about the next diet and the next diet. What if I try this and what if I try this? And what about keto? What about carnivore? What about, what about, what about? Spending a lot of time with that mental chatter, trying different diets all the time. Hyper fixated on food reactions. Oh, that's another one too.
Erin Holt [00:27:13]:
I'm not saying that they're not real, but it is a really good way for your mind to stay preoccupied and not make space for anything else. I will tell you, when I stopped trying out different diets, I freed up a lot of extra time and energy for myself. And as I've said before, I just eat. According to the CCP, the Carb Compatibility project, I spend zero time worrying about my diet. And when you free up that energy, you can direct that energy into creative projects, which is really cool. And by creative projects, I mean, like, for me, it's usually work stuff. I am an entrepreneur. But it could be goals, it could be stuff for your family, your kiddos.
Erin Holt [00:27:58]:
So when we have that time freed up, if we're using food to stay busy and we stop doing that, we have that time to free that energy freed up. We can put it into some cool shit or that space can be real anxiety inducing. Have you ever done that? Have you ever carved out space and all of a sudden your anxiety really amplified? When the busyness slowed down, your anxiety ramped up. When you're so used to being busy or preoccupied and you slow down, it creates an opportunity for you to look at your own shit. Like I said at the start of this episode, and this can be uncomfortable, and our tendency is to want to run from the discomfort, which is why we default back into old patterns. Like I said, we don't rise to the levels of our goals. We sink to the levels of our systems. And a lot of this is happening on the subconscious level.
Erin Holt [00:29:04]:
So what if you took some time to make it conscious, to observe your patterns around busyness or around food or around eating? If busyness is a way to avoid the pain, the discomfort, the emotional overwhelm, what if we decided to just look at the pain and the discomfort and the emotional overwhelm head on. What if we created an opportunity to do that? The reality is we spend so much of our energy trying to avoid the things that create that discomfort. So when we're no longer trying to do that, more energy is freed up. And when more energy is freed up, we have greater access to our own healing, creating a different reality, reaching our goals. And so this is why, while the Carb Compatibility project is a food plan and a lot of people just do it for that, they're like, never mind all of that, just teach me how to eat. Okay, but if you're in for a bigger journey and a bigger experience, we do have tools and resources available for that as well. One of the things that we'll be doing is EFT, or Emotional Freedom Technique, which pretty much does exactly what it sounds like. We free up those emotions.
Erin Holt [00:30:22]:
It's literally a way to free ourselves from trapped emotions, energy densities that might be standing in the way of what we want to do. But this EFT tapping also reduces stress. So it reduces cortisol. It can shift immunoglobulins, it can shift brainwaves. And so this is why people see better digestion with constant EFT use or constant continuous all the time. You're just tapping all the time. Like Gregory Hines. I meant to say consistent EFT use.
Erin Holt [00:30:53]:
People will see a reduction in cortisol, like I said, but a reduction in weight. Some people will use EFT as a weight loss tool or body composition tool. So I'm really excited to introduce it because that is one thing that I haven't brought into the CCP before. So anyway, super invite you to join us. Like I said, we don't usually run it in the fall. We're doing it this fall. We only do it once a year. We get questions all of the time, like, when are you running the next one? This is the last one we'll do this year.
Erin Holt [00:31:23]:
So if this is something you know you want to do, even if you're traveling, just join and you can kind of do it at your own pace. One thing that I kind of tell people is like, you want to learn how to eat while you live. So if travel is a part of your life, cool. Figure out it's a really good opportunity to do the CCP while you're traveling so you can learn how to navigate this. It's not like you have to put your entire life on hold in order to learn how to eat. Ideally, you are learning how to eat while you're living your life. But some questions just to kind of round out this episode, some questions to ask yourself for some reflection at this turn of the season, this entry into fall. Can my current habits carry me to my desired future? Great question to ask.
Erin Holt [00:32:18]:
If not, what needs to change and how do I want to feel? Always a really solid question to ask yourself. In this situation how do I want to feel? How do I intend to feel? And another cool question, especially for my caretakers and my parents and my moms out there, how do I want people to feel around me? Because you have so much more control over that than you think. But it's not necessarily by micromanaging everybody else's experience. It's more so setting your own inner experience as a priority. So with that, I wish you an easeful back to school season, and I will catch you next week. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
