Family Chiropractic

FF 14: 'Mindfulness for families' with Charlotte Thaarup

Children's chiropractor, Dr. Dorte Bladt, discusses the practice of mindfulness with Charlotte Thaarup of The Mindfulness Clinic.

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dorte Bladt, the Switched-On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt: I've got Charlotte Thaarup here today. I’m very excited. She's from The Mindfulness Clinic. Charlotte, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Charlotte Thaarup: Well, I’m in a very privileged position because I work with what I’m most passionate about and I know it works. I see it on a daily basis. So, I work with mindfulness, and I have for the last 10 to 15 years. Of course, it’s extremely researched. They have 150,000 research documents and articles on it. Many of them are nonsense ones but nonetheless, it points to their effectiveness. Of course, what it does is that it mirrors and matches the ancient practice of mindfulness which sits within Buddhism and it matches that beautifully, so that’s exciting.  

Dorte Bladt: Just to make sure that we know that we’re all on the same page - what is mindfulness?

Charlotte Thaarup: That’s a good question because I think there's so many different definitions. Some define the practice, some the outcome - that’s confusing in itself. So, if you are doing mindfulness, it’s a “doing” thing. It’s not something you can read in a book. Reading about mindfulness is not going to make you mindful because it requires awareness, so it is a practice where we start to get to know our minds. Of course, our mind is a result of our past, so we start to observe how the mind works so that we can direct it more in wholesome ways and away from unwholesome. That’s really what we’re doing.

Dorte Bladt: Can you give me an example because that sounds very beautiful, but I’m not quite sure if I can see it in my head.

Charlotte Thaarup: So you'll notice thoughts - thoughts pop up all the time. You'll also notice sensations - feelings in your body arise all the time, so when you observe something that comes up that’s not very pleasant, let’s say you observe jealousy, and you'll notice that as a sensation that sort of sits in the chest and in the gut. You can go, “whoa, I better just breathe a little bit now so that doesn’t become a really big cloud.”

That’s one example when you catch it in the body and you just sit with it and you know it is a visitor. It’s not a truth. You can just be with it. You might notice a thought that goes, “oh, I don't know why he's saying that. What a stupid thing to say,” and you go, “whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me not continue further on that one.” Just take a few breaths and calm down and then see other options of thinking, because every time you think of a thought that’s kind of charged in that way, you’re strengthening what we call the angry, greedy, arrogant, reactive wolf within, and what you want to do is you want to kind of dial that down. Every time you follow those neural pathways you strengthen it.

We want to really dial that one down while we enhance the other. I think that’s what we’re talking about today, how we enhance the happy, healthy, wholesome wolf within and one of those ways, of course, is gratitude.

Dorte Bladt: Okay, so going back to that, you say we have thoughts that are going on in the back of the head, and I think we all do, we have several types and lots of stuff going on. What I’m finding is that I myself frequently realise that I don’t hear the voice. It’s sitting almost like the subconscious.

Charlotte Thaarup: Yes, an undercurrent.

Dorte Bladt: But is that a voice that you work with in mindfulness?

Charlotte Thaarup: I love that question because the first practice of mindfulness is not mindfulness of thought. Actually, that’s the last. The first one is mindfulness of the body. If you have undercurrents, which we all do, of kind of negative or frustrated, stressful, resentful, impatient, which again we all do, then you will notice that actually they arise from a body state that matches that. It’s so clear that, from a very calm and contented body state, those thoughts cannot arise. So, that means when you're working on keeping your body calm you'll also naturally have a calmer mind.  

Therefore the first practice in mindfulness is mindfulness of the body. That means we’re always checking in with where is your body at? When the body is an anxious or uptight or what we call charged state then our first responsibility is to calm that down.

Dorte Bladt: How would you do that?

Charlotte Thaarup: I love that question, too. The first thing is to pay attention to where that charge is in the body. You can also - and this works really, really powerfully - you can simply place your hand over your body, over your heart or where the charge is, and then you pay attention to the warmth and you're just in the mind reassure the body, “dear body, it’s okay. It’s okay. We’re safe and all is well.”  

That just down-regulates and you'll notice it happens very, very quickly. Even if you're prone to panic attacks you can do that. You may, if it’s a panic attack, need a little bit more of an attention grabber, which could be a slight pinch in the inner arm, because as soon as you pinch and you feel the pain your attention goes to the pain and away from the generation of the anxiety. Does that make sense?

Dorte Bladt: Totally.

Charlotte Thaarup: You can also, of course, do what we call the five magic breaths, and it’s all on my website, where you're just doing a longer out-breath and in-breath which gets you into the parasympathetic nervous system, but sometimes if we have a real charge, we can’t even access that so the body is the first place to down-regulate.

Dorte Bladt: Very good. How would you explain that to, let’s say, a school child because I’m sure you're aware that kids are under more stress than they've probably ever been before, and I have definitely experienced a lot of kids that come in and have issues with anxiety and they’ve got nightmares, they’ve got a lot of stuff going on. Does this work in children?

Charlotte Thaarup: Yes, beautifully. Actually, I had a young girl - she was only 11 - who came in and I showed her the little panic attack interrupter of the pinch. She came in the next time and she said, “look at all my bruises.”

Dorte Bladt: Poor thing

Charlotte Thaarup: But that’s much better than training the wrong neural pathways.  So absolutely they get it. They also get it from the perspective of “your dear body just wants you to be safe” and it gets a little overactive in that way. It is your job to check out is there a real danger and if there isn’t, then you calm it down - but don’t rely on the mind. Look around and see; if there's no great buses coming your way, most likely you are safe, because the mind, once your body is charged, as we said before, is going to look for the dangers. That’s how it’s trained.  

So children like the idea that, “oh, so I have to work in collaboration, in effect, with my body to calm it down”. So when my heart is racing, I can just put my hand over there and I can say to the heart, “dear heart, it’s okay. We’re safe and all is well. We’re safe and all is well.” Children get it very quickly.  

Dorte Bladt: Children probably actually get it quicker than the rest of us that are going to sit there and think “is that going to work? How is that going to work? How is that going to affect the hormones?”

Charlotte Thaarup: That’s right. I had a lovely friend who said to me, I just want to tell you how it worked for my son. She's been doing the Dear Body Program and so she shared that with him when he was sick, and he was really in a state, and she said, “let’s just sit and talk to your dear body.”  

And he just put his little hand, he's six, his hand on his body and he just kept caressing the body and going, “dear body, dear body,” and he just, of course, got out of that very anxious and upset sick state to a calm and he said, “my body is a little better now, mummy.”  

Dorte Bladt: That’s beautiful.

Charlotte Thaarup: So children get it.

Dorte Bladt: So there's a lot of advice around suggesting we should meditate every day, but what’s the difference between mindfulness and meditation?

Charlotte Thaarup: I'd say that mindfulness is a type of meditation. Meditation can be a guided meditation. There are many different types of meditations but mindfulness is a practice. It’s a type of meditation where we’re really observing the mind. That’s the key thing. So, you might have some lovely meditations where you're sort of following a wandering path or being with nice light, etcetera. That’s all good and lovely but it’s not mindfulness training.  

So technically speaking, it doesn’t help you get to know your mind.  It takes you to a good place and it strengthens the right neural pathways but it doesn’t get you to know the mind. That’s where the power is in order to create, to feed the right wolf, if you like, getting to know it.  

Dorte Bladt: I might be putting words into your mouth here but what I hear you say is it’s almost like mindfulness is a way of living, where mindfulness is retreating a little bit from living. Am I wrong?

Charlotte Thaarup: That meditation is?

Dorte Bladt: Meditation is a place where you sit down, you remove yourself, you go for your wandering path uphill to the beautiful waterfall.

Charlotte Thaarup: Yes, like an escape almost.

Dorte Bladt: Yes, like you are removing yourself from the situation. What I hear you say is mindfulness is almost something that you’re doing with your eyes open. You're in a situation. You might be in front of a teacher that’s a little bit scary and you can actually, at that particular point, in a conscious way tell your body to do what it maybe would be better off doing rather than going into this panic state.

Charlotte Thaarup: Yes. Yes and no, because what you're describing is the mindful way of living where you're observing in life what’s going on and down-regulating. However, it’s very hard to catch yourself out in that way unless you do some formal practice, so all the good research is based on a minimum of 10 minutes a day over an 8-9 week period, because that down-regulates your system in the first place.  

It also sharpens your attention muscles so that you start to be able to observe what’s actually going on and of course you generally become more aware. So, then we have informal practice and formal. Some of the ones I actually talked about before are informal practices but we shouldn’t ignore the formal practice. It’s really, really important. Particularly if you're feeling high levels of anxiety, your 10 minutes a day is all it takes to make a big difference in your life. You just start to sleep better, for instance, and we know that not sleeping is one of the early indicators of mental illness and all sorts of mental challenges, if you like. So mindfulness is very, very linked to creating much better sleep. Quality and length of sleep. So the formal practice, don’t ever ignore that or dial that down.  

Dorte Bladt: Okay. I want to return to that in a minute but I just heard you say a couple of times “down-regulating the system” and you also mentioned the “parasympathetic system”. Can you maybe explain a little bit about what you mean by that?

Charlotte Thaarup: So, we have something called the amygdala that some of your listeners may know about, and they're deeply embedded in the old brain. They are little threat-alerters, if you like, so as soon as there's a perception of threat, they get activated. When they're activated, we see the world through a perspective of danger-danger, problems-problems.  

When it activates, the body changes actually. It changes from being potentially in a calm state, what we call the parasympathetic. It’s also called the rest-and-digest state.  That’s actually supposed to be our home base. It activates us into another state that’s about getting away from danger or moving towards what we think is going to feel good.

In that state, there's kind of a depletion of resources, if you like, if it’s sustained. It’s a fantastic thing for just that little energiser, if you like, to move us up and get us into what we need to get away from or get towards something, but the problem is, in our culture more and more, we've kind of moved in there so we’re constantly living in that state. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. You can think of the analogy being firemen.  If there's no fire, then what are they doing? They're cooking, talking, preparing, maintaining, etcetera. Then the bell rings and they go out to the fire. Maybe some of us are living as if we’re always out putting out fires. Of course, they burn out and so do we.

Dorte Bladt: Burn out, yeah, literally.

Charlotte Thaarup: That’s right.

Dorte Bladt: Absolutely.

Charlotte Thaarup: Sorry, I didn’t answer that. The down-regulation is when you observe that you are in that state and then you bring yourself back to the rest-and-digest or the parasympathetic. You do that just by making a long out-breath and in-breath, by putting your hand on your chest and saying to your body, because it brings you into the present and the present you is not generating stress.

Dorte Bladt: That’s beautiful. That’s very nice. So, we’re talking about gratitude and gratitude being a type of mindfulness state, I suppose.

Charlotte Thaarup: Well, we talk about really from that perspective kind of strengthening the healthy. So, the healthy, wholesome wolf within and gratitude, along with love and compassion and joy is one of those domains that we strengthen. So, gratitude is a beautiful, healthy mind state. We all know that. If your listeners want to go and just put their hands like in the praying position and then bow their head and say, “thank you” just try that for a moment. “Thank you.”

Dorte Bladt: Am I supposed to think what I was just thinking?

Charlotte Thaarup:  Yeah, you do that.

Dorte Bladt: I’m thinking “thank you”.

Charlotte Thaarup: What do you observe?  

Dorte Bladt: I actually observe a really nice light spreading out on top of my head.  It’s a bit like sunshine, sunrise. It’s very nice.

Charlotte Thaarup: It’s beautiful, isn’t it? So simple. You also notice a calming instantly.  A muting of the self and a calming. So, we consider that gratitude has always been part of human lives through our religions and we've kind of dropped it. We used to say grace. We used to do offerings and things and now we don’t do any of that and it’s at a great loss, because we almost do the opposite. We sort of sit in this idea that we deserve - we deserve everything, but no one - on the way into this life - promised that you're going to get a special deal. Actually, we want but we were promised nothing.  Really, that’s the truth. We were promised nothing and when we really sit with that and we get, wow, we were promised nothing, then everything is kind of a bonus and that brings us to gratitude.

Dorte Bladt: That is a very good state to be in.

Charlotte Thaarup: Yeah.

Dorte Bladt: Taking you back to “we were promised nothing”, well, we've been born in Australia.

Charlotte Thaarup: Yes, at the right time - but you weren’t. We weren’t born in Australia, but in a Western-safe world at a time.

Dorte Bladt: So what can people do? Walking around with your hands folded on your chest is maybe not going to work so well. Are there other ways we can reach this state?

Charlotte Thaarup: Well, you notice that within a split second you were there so there's no reason you can’t when you go to the toilet to do that. You go to the toilet many times a day and you get sort of a double dose of pleasure, right?  

You can do it when you wake up. You can do it between meetings. You can say a little grace and that before you start your food, for instance. There's lots of ways we can integrate that little pause of opening the heart and bowing the head. That’s in effect what we’re doing. That I’m just a little human and I am grateful for the journey and the experience.

Dorte Bladt: So you mentioned… I can’t remember. That might have been before we started, but you mentioned the traditions that we have had and many cultures have that have integrated. This seems like the traditions that we have now are more of an escape, whether that’s watching something on TV or watching something on your phone, but it almost seems to be like a flight away from our present state. How do you feel that we can potentially create more of that grounded presence into our culture in 2018?

Charlotte Thaarup: Again, we come back to the body. So, when you sit down in a chair… and children are really easy to get into the body because they are in the body in the first years. We all are. So, the problem - we just get out of them when we start to identify with our heads, so we get back into the body. As we’re sitting on a chair, you become curious around the sensations of your bottom against the seat, of your feet against the floor, of your hands, of what you see, of what you hear, what you taste and what you smell. So, you come back to your senses. It’s actually a really rich place to be in.

Dorte Bladt: Yes. Almost a little bit of a moment when you point it out like that. Lots of things to pay attention to.

Charlotte Thaarup: That’s right and as soon as we’re in this with our senses, we’re present. Also, I think we’d be kind of curious with ourselves and what am I trying to escape from? Some of it just bad habits. You know, social media and those things are geared towards addiction. They give us a little dopamine squirt that is just a little hormone that squirts so that we keep doing it. Is it all right when you're 84 to have spent a lot of time on that? The average amount of hours that Australians spend in front of a screen right now are 46 hours a week.

Dorte Bladt: Per week!

Charlotte Thaarup: So is that a good use of time?

Dorte Bladt: 46 hours a week that’s more than the minimum weekly work hour or work time.

Charlotte Thaarup: That’s right.

Dorte Bladt: That is outrageous.

Charlotte Thaarup: Many of us, of course, use screens for work as well, but nonetheless does it deliver the life quality? Or just take a moment of gratitude, for instance, and notice the difference. What are the experiences? Which are the wolves you want to feed in that space?  

Then there's a lovely little gratitude practice that’s an ancient - sort of a mature person’s gratitude practice, because many of these things, like gratitude, it gets hijacked by the West. It becomes kind of... I always think of candy floss. It becomes like a candy floss thing rather than really substantial, nurturing practice that they intended to be. Whether you do that with your partner or with your children at night or whatever, it’s very simple. You just say, “what have I received?”

Dorte Bladt: Today? As in, this is the tradition you're trying to make for a night time ritual?

Charlotte Thaarup: Yes. Exactly. “What have I received?” “What have I given?” And then, “What difficulties may I have caused?”  

Sometimes we think, “oh, that’s a bit hmm-hmm” but just the fact that we perhaps had chicken for dinner that means that something suffered for us, and it brings us back into humility, so for the grace of God, and which brings us back into gratitude. So it’s a lovely, round, circular practice of gratitude, appreciation, humility and reflection.

Dorte Bladt: That’s very nice. Do you have any experience with that particular practice with children? Like you say, it’s easy to do with children, but what are the changes that you have observed, maybe?

Charlotte Thaarup: I get lovely stories back from… so I mainly work with adults apart from our Mindful Caring Program. It’s so lovely that parents will say how they've shared this with their children and then the children will catch them out. They go, “oh, but mummy…” So the children become the teachers because they take to it so quickly.

Dorte Bladt: Coming back to being present in the body, they're much better at not getting lost in all those thoughts that are going around and around and around. “Now, I need to… I know I’m reading you a bedtime story but really I have to go fill the dishwasher and I should put another load on in the washing machine and, oh, my goodness, lunches for tomorrow!” We’re just on that merry-go-round of what’s next, what’s next?

Charlotte Thaarup: Indeed. That’s right and I don't want to add to the pressure of parenting because I think there's so much we’re bombarded with but personally, I think apart from the basic things - ensuring that your children sleep and get some good food and lots of hugs and love, it is that you are in a state of calm for much of the time, because we know that little brains form in relation to big brains, so you’re contagious. Your words become their inner dialogue. So that calm state is a huge gift you can give to your children and also in terms of not generating their anxiety any further.  

Dorte Bladt: How many of us have experienced that where you hear your child say something that you think you're not saying but it’s in your head and you think, “oh, my goodness! Where did you learn that phrase?” And you know that you might not say it in front of them but you think it. It’s like, oh, caught out.

Charlotte Thaarup: That’s right and our states are contagious. Work by Dr Dan Siegel, it’s very, very clear that you may not say a word, but almost the content, the state of your brain is being downloaded. So watch your state.

Dorte Bladt: Easier said than done but it can be done.

Charlotte Thaarup: But the good thing is we know how. We know how.  

Dorte Bladt: So we know how by what? Coming back into the brain?

Charlotte Thaarup: Down-regulating. Becoming aware. Your daily mindfulness practice. They're five magic breaths, longer out-breath and in-breath. I have a lot of free resources on my website so you can just go to www.themindfulnessclinic.com.au.  There's eight weeks of daily email reminders that are free. There's all the nine mindfulness trainings that are free and lots of additional resources, because it makes a better world, to be honest.  

Dorte Bladt: So you have what? Nine? What did you say?

Charlotte Thaarup: So they're the formal practices of the 10-minute mindfulness practice. There is a gratitude one there too. There's self-compassion, there's a goodnight one, there's all different ones. If you're new to it, I would suggest that you start with the gratitude. That’s a nice one, but also just the basic, what we call the ABCD, which is your basic attention training. There's lots of research on the website around why that’s a good place to start. We know that our ability to manage attention is the most powerful predictor of a good life.  

Dorte Bladt: I have been interested in that. Can you tell me more?

Charlotte Thaarup: Well, the study is based on, you might have heard the Marshmallow Experiment. Have you heard of that?

Dorte Bladt: Yes.

Charlotte Thaarup: For the listeners who are not aware of it, it was done I think about 40 years ago in New Zealand. A group of children had a marshmallow placed in front of them and then the teacher says, “if you don’t eat that by the time I go and come back, you'll get a second one.” A third ate it straightaway, a third waited, and a third was somewhere in between.  

So, 35 years later the researchers went back and interviewed these children and they were curious around how they had fared. What they found was those children that had managed their attention… and of course there are a couple of elements to that.  Like if they kept looking at the marshmallow, it would have gone. So they had to shift their attention from that and maintain it on something else and, at the same time, remember the reward.

There are kind of three domains in attention management. They found that those who had had, in every way, had better lives and that was much more of a predictor of a good life than the school they went to, the postcode, the profession of their parents and all of those other… and that’s from a very basic test around you haven't gone to prison, you're considered that you have a good family, stable family life, a good job, a good income, etcetera, which is really exciting but not surprising. Everywhere your attention goes, that’s where your experience flows. So you’re constantly experiencing things according to where your attention is and you’re forming your brain according to where your attention is.  

Dorte Bladt: It’s interesting that that whole thing of I remember hearing about this story but talking more about the delayed gratification. At the time when people told me about it, it had more to do with that thing of you will put in the work now and you will reap the benefits later. So they were talking about better education and maybe being able to build for a bigger…

Charlotte Thaarup: Reward.

Dorte Bladt: Yes, you can get a bigger house or whatever, but it is interesting that it actually affects everything else that you're doing in all areas of your life… but yes, it makes sense if you can keep your attention on other tasks that is of most benefit to you and not what’s right in front of you makes perfect sense.

Charlotte, I thank you for your time. Can you just run through again, because it was a very long website, where can people get a hold of you?

Charlotte Thaarup: It’s the www.themindfulnessclinic.com.au and there are lots of resources in there. All the audios, the guided meditations, your eight weeks of free mindfulness reminder emails and many other good things, there's podcasts and lots of things there, so enjoy.

Dorte Bladt: Sounds great. Thank you so much for coming.

Charlotte Thaarup: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Outro: The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host. Brought to you by Family Chiropractic Centre Charlestown, serving the families in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Charlestown.

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by Family Chiropractic

FF 13: 'Movement makes the brain' with Anna Campbell

Dorte Bladt discusses movement and disabilities with exercise physiologist, Anna Campbell.

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dorte Bladt, the Switched-On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt: I'd like to welcome Anna Campbell from HealtheCo to our podcast this morning. Anna, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Anna Campbell: Hi Dorte and thank you for having me and thank you, everyone, for listening. I’m an exercise physiologist (EP) and I run a business called HealtheCo who specialises in pediatric disability. Also, we do see clients who have musculoskeletal conditions and other chronic conditions but 99.8% of our portfolio are kids with disabilities.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent. So tell me about - what is an exercise physiologist compared to a personal trainer?

Anna Campbell: We get asked that a lot, actually. Often the question is “what’s the difference between an exercise physiologist as compared to a physio or a personal trainer?” So, there are some similarities but there's also a vast difference in what we do. Exercise physiologists prescribe specific movements for medicine. So we don’t generally diagnose injuries. We leave that usually up to the physiotherapists and doctors.

You do sometimes find an exercise physiologist out training people in gyms and in football teams and things like that, but most of the time, we spend our time in the middle, working with people with chronic conditions, so for me, I specialise in the disability area but there are lots of exercise physiologists who may specialise in oncology, diabetes, arthritis.

Dorte Bladt: So when you mention those, do you mean exercise physiologists may work for example with someone following surgery for breast cancer who may have trouble moving their arm. Is that what you mean?

Anna Campbell: Absolutely. Yes. So, exercise - the more they study it, the more they realise if it could be put into a pill, every single person on the planet would be taking it and every single doctor would be prescribing it and, basically, the government would be fully subsidising it.  

Dorte Bladt: However, there's no money in it so…

Anna Campbell: Exactly. So exercise is, fortunately for us, finding its way into so many treatment modalities such as a female who may be suffering from breast cancer. The exercise can not only help with the outcomes of the chemotherapy but it can also help that person feel better throughout the chemotherapy whilst also treating side effects of the chemotherapy such as oedema or swelling, lack of movement through the body, pain in the body, all those types of things.  

Dorte Bladt: So that’s obviously not your chosen field?

Anna Campbell: No. It’s not my specialty. I certainly have an interest in it and follow, I guess, all of the research that’s coming out in those areas but, fortunately, I found myself in a very specific area which keeps me really busy in the paediatrics space.

Dorte Bladt: How did you end up there?

Anna Campbell: Interesting story. So we’re going back to 2002 when I graduated university. I was probably not one of the first exercise physiologists but I was one of the few that came out of the first round of the university degree. I’m showing my age now. Nobody really knew what exercise physiologists were when I first graduated. So I came out and I found myself working - where lots of EPs back then were working, in insurance.  In that space, there's a lot of people who were suffering from chronic pain and pain-related illnesses, so I got to create a strong foundation on understanding pain, the neurological components of pain and how to use exercise to manage that pain.

I spent eight years or so specialising in that area, then I had my first son, William, and I couldn’t go back to working full time - it just wasn’t going to work for our family, so I started the business HealtheCo. I thought I really want to move into maybe another direction with exercise physiology and one of the biggest areas that I kept getting questions around was postnatal women’s health, so I started educating myself on that area which I found extremely interesting. I started working in women’s health which then led me to meeting a lot of mums, led me to meeting you guys here at Family Chiro, and then I came across a mum who had a little boy with cerebral palsy.  

She basically started asking me a few questions. She said, “could you help out?”  

I thought, “I’m not so sure, but let’s give it a go.”

And I started seeing him four years ago and we haven't looked back now. My portfolio is full of kids, which is great.

Dorte Bladt: To me that seems like that would be a very different way of doing exercise to a person, but how do you do it?

Anna Campbell: It does, on paper, sound like it would be completely different, but I think that’s maybe why we've been so successful in that we actually don’t really treat the kids any differently than I would for an able-bodied child. I want to say I have the same expectations but I don't have the same expectations in it - I know that all the kids that I see may never be able to run or they may never be able to walk even, but I expect, I guess, the same level of improvements from the kids, you know? We work hard and we play hard in all our therapy sessions and that doesn’t matter whether it’s an able-bodied child or a child with disability. I work across all aspects, so I guess that’s where we find that we’re most effective, I suppose.

Dorte Bladt: What would a session look like for a child that has difficulties learning to walk?

Anna Campbell: Great question. Sessions are all play-based, so our clinic probably looks like you're going to a daycare centre.

Dorte Bladt: That sounds fun.

Anna Campbell: It’s full of toys, full of mats, and we spend the whole time on the floor.  We use as minimal assistive equipment as I can because I really am trying to help the kids learn where their body is in space - we have a word for that called proprioception, but basically that is helping a child learn where their hands are, where their legs are, where their feet are, and the only way we can do that is having as little equipment or as little assistance as possible and to move their bodies in space.  

Basically, we’ll start a session on the floor. Our warm-ups are usually depending on the child but we might play something like the forest game where we pretend that the child or the mum or me, we take it in turns, have to pick an animal and then we have to pretend to walk or crawl like that animal. So it might be a crab or it might be a giraffe or it might be a bear, depending on the mobility of the child.  

For kids that are at the stage of sitting but are unable to crawl or walk yet, we might pretend to sit up tall like a giraffe or put our hands up tall like a tree, wave our hands around. For the kids that are moving, we may go into a crawl and pretend that we’re puppies. We may wag our tails like puppies, sit down on our backsides like puppies and get up and run around - those type of movements for a warm-up.

Then we get into the more specifics and basically, our exercises or our sessions - I have goals, usually three goals for the session; that might be that we need to work on leg strength; we may work on to allow for standing or coming up to standing. We may be working on upper-body strength to allow that child to pull up to standing and we may be working on balance, for instance.  

So I have those three things in mind and then I usually say to the kids, “okay, what are we going to play today?”

Normally they will lead and they will say, “okay, I want to play drawing on the chalkboard.”  

So, with that in mind, I'll quickly think on my feet, “okay, great, we’ll start in a kneeling position. We’ll transition into the pull-up phase with the chalkboard, using the chalkboard to pull up, into standing or assist them in standing, and we’ll encourage the child to draw big clouds in the sky”, for instance, so in those, in just that movement we’re working on transitioning from our sitting up to standing and then transitioning to arms up torso. We’re using a core stability proprioception. All that type of thing.

Dorte Bladt: So, what I hear you saying is that you are mimicking the movements that a baby will go through in a normal developmental continuation. So, a normal baby will learn to lift their head up - a normal baby will learn to roll. A normal baby will learn to sit and then they'll pull to standing and they’ll learn to do whatever.

Anna Campbell: Absolutely.

Dorte Bladt: So, basically you are taking them back to the level they're at mentally and physically and try to play around that level. Is that what…

Anna Campbell: Absolutely. We all generally have an idea of the milestones that a child is supposed to go through. We go from laying there unable to do too much then we get some head stability and then we start rolling, we start sitting, we start crawling, we start moving. Most parents have that idea. Basically, they're the milestones that we’re working towards with all the kids.  

Some of the kids have conditions that won’t ever allow them to move through those milestones. However, we will assist them in moving their bodies through those milestones because, as the guys here at Family Chiro will let you know, that’s very important for the neurological development of the brain and the body to move through those milestones and there's things called primitive reflexes that we need to inhibit sometimes to help the children move through those and that can then assist them with their schooling, their reading, their writing and, eventually, their independence and quality of life down the track. I see it as my job to get the kids basically as independent as possible and our goals of the programs are always working towards that.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent. What if you have a normally-developing child that refuses to learn to crawl? So they bum shuffle or they might do a bear walk or they might insist on commando crawling, so they not necessarily have cerebral palsy or any sort of… not that it’s measurable at this particular time anyway, but it doesn’t look as if they have got any issues. Can you help a child like that? Is it worth looking at?

Anna Campbell: Absolutely. Lots of the kids that I see that would prefer to bum shuffle, usually there is something going on. Not serious necessarily when I say there's something going on. It might just be a little bit of hyper mobility. The body will always choose the easy way out and it will always use its strongest muscles first. Basically, it’s about looking at that child and seeing why it is that they're choosing to bum shuffle.  Then individually seeking out opportunities to pop them into the position that we’re trying, such as the crawler crawlies, predominantly the position that most children hate to do because it is so taxing on the body.

Dorte Bladt: It’s hard.

Anna Campbell: And it requires so much coordination, so much going on in the brain, so much going on in the body. I can totally understand why kids want to skip that phase because bum shuffling is a hell of a lot easier. So, how do we in the clinic encourage kids to do it? We basically meet them where they're at. That means that they would prefer to bum shuffle so then we break down the tasks. I won’t go into the details specifically about how many tasks are involved in crawling because it’s a huge number.

Dorte Bladt: You will be there for a while.

Anna Campbell: Yes, but for those that are listening - just know that it’s a lot. Basically, we’ll meet them where they're at. They'll be bum shuffling around the clinic and we might say to the child - if they're a one-year-old child - we might pop toys in front of them and encourage them to put their hands down in front. We call it ‘bunny hands’ or ‘puppy-dog hands’ so they're getting the feeling of their hands on the floor in front of them, so they could gain that trust that their hands will support them and they have the strength in their upper body because, often, that is a big thing. They don’t trust that they're strong enough to put their hands in front of them and then we encourage them to start reaching with another hand. So one hand is supporting them then reaching for a toy out in front, or food. Food is always a good one.

Dorte Bladt: Nothing wrong with a bit of bribery.

Anna Campbell: I know. Then encouraging them to come up onto their knees and then it might be that we have to assist them with the movement, with the cross-patterning movement we call it where we do left arm-right leg because the brain actually hasn’t realised that that’s the best way to move in that position. So, I might assist them in that movement by just popping my hands under their tummy and moving their hand to reach and just a little pop of the right leg as a movement. Like, you sort of got to see it done a couple of times so that you can do it at home.  

Generally, the kids will resist and pop straight back onto their bottom because that movement is a little bit scary to start with. Then again, it comes back to that proprioception or awareness of where their body is. I tell parents it’s a little bit like us spinning you around ten times and then back the other way and then telling me where north is. It’s really a bit scary feeling for kids to learn a new movement like that.  

So, it takes a lot of patience and a lot of practice, and that’s what I would say to parents is don’t rush it. A lot of patience, a lot of practice and try and integrate it throughout the day regularly so it becomes a norm. You'll be amazed that just one day you'll walk out of the room and you'll come back and you'll see them moving around…

Dorte Bladt: Practicing.

Anna Campbell: Yes, practicing because they feel safe in that movement, so it’s about feeling safe in that movement.

Dorte Bladt: A challenge that I feel parents have is that whole thing of, “well, he doesn’t like it.” What’s your advice to parents for, yes, I realise I’m feeling a bit unstable. Shouldn’t we just let him bum shuffle because he will end up walking?

Anna Campbell: I know. Well, he feels he doesn’t like it so there's reasons why he doesn’t like it. We need to provide the opportunities for him or her to come to like it.  

So, we’re really starving the child of the opportunity to develop and develop those neurological pathways when we don’t spend the time in trying to get them to crawl.  So, it really is important. I don't want to say that you need to spend half the day with your child screaming and you’re trying to push them into crawling, but certainly a little bit of uncomfortable feelings is where the learning happens.  

Certainly don’t be too afraid to do things that kids don’t like. Of course, we all try and make them fun; we try and encourage them to do them themselves, we meet them where they're at, all those types of things. But often, in the clinic, we are popping kids into positions that feel scary for them and we just need to reassure them that, “You're safe. All is okay, darling. Look, we’re going to have a little play in this position for a little while.” The more often you do it, the less resistance there is because that feeling becomes safe.

Dorte Bladt: Because we’re normal and the growth, I think, for all of us in all the areas of our lives is in that uncomfortable zone. If you're always there in the comfort zone, you are never going to get fitter, you're never going to get smarter because we always avoid things that are unknown. So, I think it’s very important to provide that safe space and that acknowledgement that you doing something that’s not comfortable will be over here for a short time.

Anna Campbell: Yes, absolutely. The parents often laugh at us in the clinic - before the child gets good at something, we’re often moving to the next thing because I'll allow them to practice in their own time. My job is to get them into those uncomfortable states to practice it and always be ahead of the next of the current milestones. So, I’m not wanting them to just stay and crawl. Once they’re crawling or almost crawling I’m already looking towards the next milestone. So, my day consists of popping kids into uncomfortable positions.

Dorte Bladt: I love you, Anna.

Anna Campbell: Please, just know that those kids love and trust me and still, to this day, even though they come and see me every week, twice a week and often are getting into positions that they are resistive of, but they know that they trust me as they would trust their parent.

Dorte Bladt: You mentioned the primitive reflexes. I read a study about normal adults and the amount of reflexes that were actually present in normal adults. I guess I’m going back to that whole thing of skipping the crawling phase or skipping the rolling phase and we often think it’s no big deal. He’ll walk anyway, but we don’t necessarily understand the long-term neurological repercussions. I’m not saying that these adults don’t have the reflexes weren’t functioning well. I’m just saying that it is more common that these people like that that we know and that it means that there is a weak link somewhere in the brain.

Anna Campbell: Absolutely. You do see it. I've got a couple of friends actually who I interviewed because they were fully functioning, very successful people, but they reported to me that they never crawled so I found that quite interesting in the work that I was doing. So I thought, well, do I need to be ensuring that these kids definitely crawl when they are resisting the crawling phase?  

So I really started chatting with them, digging around what were you like as a child?  Did you find it easy to read at school? Things like that that research tells us that if you have some of the reflexes still there that it makes it difficult in lots of areas, sports, reading and things like that at school. Often it came up that they found anything that where you're moving across the body, so for instance your hand going across to the other side of the body, from right-to-left for instance, they found things difficult.  

So I would say, “Did you enjoy a sport?”  

“Not so much. I was particularly bad at tennis.”

Dorte Bladt: That was the one I was thinking of. Squash.

Anna Campbell: They can’t for the life of them hit a tennis ball or a squash ball. As an adult now they find that quite funny, but as a child who has to do tennis for sport, I would imagine that would have been quite frustrating and quite embarrassing and those types of things. As I say, it’s not the end of the world because they've grown up as very capable adults but there are things that they are particularly not good at.  They're not good at understanding where their body is. So if you spun them around or if they're in a city that they're not aware of, they find it very hard to find their way back. Things like that. Both of these people that I interviewed there were very strong similarities between them.

Dorte Bladt: Interesting.

Anna Campbell: Yes. So as a kid, they're all things that we would prefer for them to have developed. Certainly it’s not the end of the world but it’s at least a very important part of our development.

Dorte Bladt: And it’s never too late to pick up and say, “okay, well, I didn’t crawl so I will now,” so you're still creating the neurological pathways even though you are eight years old or 48 years old.

Anna Campbell: That’s right. So, as an adult, physically… I assessed them both physically as well, these adults have very poor core stability generally, because they didn’t spend all those hours in the crawling position, which is in quadrupedal or all fours which is very important for a stabilising our core. So, therefore, they do tend to end up with a lot of cervical injuries or pain due to poor posture because their core is not nice and strong.  

We can go into numerous things as to what they have going on but, as an adult, you certainly can work on being in quadruped, as silly as it sounds, crawling around on the floor, doing bear crawls, regular quadruped crawls, doing what they call “Supermans” where one arm, left arm is out in front, right leg is out in the back while in quadruped - those type of things. Anything that you see a baby doing in crawling position we need to do with adults, too - assist in that primitive reflex and gaining the strength that they didn’t gain in those early years.  

Dorte Bladt: My brain is going all over. It’s just so exciting. When I recently did my course, I did a certificate in neurobehavioral disorders with a PhD in America, so he works with kids that have all sorts of learning challenges and you're saying - it’s really interesting - the push that we have to help kids that are maybe overweight and just spend too much time on their iPads or iPods, or whatever they're doing and to push them to start walking. Whatever you do, just start walking. What he was saying was that it’s actually totally, totally, totally wrong, because we start too high in the hierarchy of neurological development. He was saying we need to go back to - not necessarily rolling, but going back to the core stability, because if you don’t have the core stability you don’t get the proper walk and then you're really just setting yourself up for injury.

Anna Campbell: Absolutely. So, so important. I always say to the families that are worried about their child not meeting the milestone as quickly as other parents should or the parents sort of gloating that their child walked, “didn’t even bother to crawl, just went straight to walking and then running, isn’t that great?” I often find myself saying to the parents whose child is supposedly, in inverted commas, “behind”, those kids are the smart kids. They're the ones spending huge amounts of time on the floor strengthening their bodies, doing the hard work. So when they're older they will not end up with all these injuries that are caused through not strengthening the body in the way it should be, before the body is up on two limbs and compressed by gravity and running. So absolutely, for the parents out there worried that your child still isn’t walking in 15 months, just keep them crawling. They will get up. They're just doing the hard work in their early years.

Dorte Bladt: That’s good. Do you have any advice for - not necessarily the kids with delays, but just something that you can tell to the parents of the kids that we see at Family Chiropractic, something you'd say this is what I would focus on?

Anna Campbell: First and foremost, any type of activity is better than none. So don’t think that you need to enrol your child in a particular type of sport. Of course, unless they really enjoy being involved in sport, and they’re probably not the parents who would be necessarily listening or need to worry about or have that thought, “ah, my child’s not doing enough activity. They prefer to sit and watch the TV or their iPad and everyone tells me they're watching too much screen time,” really worried. So for those parents out there who want to get their kids more active I would say that - first and foremost, being over-scheduled as a parent yourself and being in a hurry and not having time to play with the kids is probably the worst case scenario because kids they want to do things with you, they want you to be involved with them - and I’m talking kids that are 12 and under. Of course, once they start getting older than that they prefer to do things with their friends, I guess, but for those kids that are younger they want to hang out with you, they want you to be involved in things that they're interested in.  

So meet them where they're at. Look - maybe it’s about finding something on their iPad that they're interested in. I actually don't know what’s cool on iPads these days, but maybe there's a game on there that you can play with them in real life. So maybe they're watching Paw Patrol or Superman or things like that, so maybe it’s about, “how about you turn that off and we’ll act out these in real life?”

Then if it’s Superman it’s, “let’s go to the park and swing from the bars and let’s roll”  and maybe mum may not be fit or well enough to be rolling, doing tumbles at the park, but you can certainly jump and move and pretend that you're the baddie and shoot spider webs and all those type of things. So, the first thing is find out what they're interested in and see if you can mimic that in real life through movement.  

And again think, I guess, going back to the start where I have those three goals in mind about what I want to do, so if you find that in your child probably could do with a little bit extra upper body strength, for instance, because they're slumping in their chairs or having trouble holding their pen writing, maybe the swing from the bars would be an excellent thing to do as Superman or maybe it’s like, “how many push-ups can you do, Superman?” 

Just think on your feet and just become involved in the play. Let them lead the play but have the goals in mind about what you're trying to achieve out of it.  

Dorte Bladt: That’s excellent advice. I love that involvement of parents because it’s easier just to delegate but…

Anna Campbell: Absolutely.  

Dorte Bladt: We have kids for a reason. We want to have fun with them.

Anna Campbell: Absolutely. Be involved. They will keep you fit and kids will always mimic what they see. If all else is lost, get up and start doing a few exercises yourself and things like that and talk about how well it makes you feel and how great you feel.

Dorte Bladt: So don’t be irritated that they're jumping on you but use that opportunity to play.

Anna Campbell: Play with them, yes. Absolutely, because they mimic everything you do and everything that you do they take it in.  

Dorte Bladt: That’s great. So tell us again: who are you, where can people find you?

Anna Campbell: Sure. So our business name is HealtheCo. We’re in Lake Macquarie.  You can find us at www.healtheco.com.au and all the contact details are on there. You can also click on there and follow us on Facebook, which is great. You can see what we call the HealtheCo Kids are up to. We've got some quite funny little snippets of what they're doing in all the sessions on there and all their progress, so jump on and check it out and become part of the little community we've got going on.

Dorte Bladt: Sounds wonderful. Thank you so much for coming in this morning, Anna.

Anna Campbell:  No worries. Thank you.  

Outro: The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host. Brought to you by Family Chiropractic Centre Charlestown, serving the families in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Charlestown.

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by Family Chiropractic

FF 12: Felicity's beautiful birth story

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dorte Bladt, the Switched On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt: We're going to do something really different today. We've got our own super mum, Felicity Cook, on the podcast today. Instead of asking your experience with work, we're actually going to have a little bit of a chat about birth. Now, birth is a very personal experience - a good birth, a not so good birth, some are challenging - but I think many of us get scared... we sort of attract the bad stories. So we're just here just to have a chat about a happy birth story.

Felicity Cook: Yeah. Exciting!

Dorte Bladt: Yes, so introduce us to the birth.

Felicity Cook: So little Ivy was born back in March. We did, we actually were quite lucky. We worked hard on it but we were lucky to have a nice, straightforward birth. So a nice positive birth story, so we're lucky.

Dorte Bladt: That's good. What were the things that - you obviously had a little bit of an idea of what you wanted. I think we all have an idea. What was your vision? What was it that you were looking to achieve?

Felicity Cook: Well, for me, I wanted to make sure that I had the best birth that could allow my child to have the best darn life. That was kind of my aim. So at the end of the day, if I had to make choices that meant that her safety was paramount then I would do that, but I wanted to also make sure I can have close to natural delivery as possible. So that was my ideal and so was Ivy’s, as you can hear. So really, I wanted it to be intervention-free, if possible, and work towards that.

Dorte Bladt: So that was your vision. What sort of action steps to take? What plans did you put in place to try to achieve that?

Felicity Cook: Well, I made sure that I had the best support I could. Initially, when it came out to it, I wanted to make sure I had the care providers that would support that vision and who understood that vision - so I did. I went and actually met with a couple of obstetricians and then I also met with the midwives and I came away from that feeling like the midwifery quality of care was intuitively what I needed to do for me and I felt amazingly supported in that. That was great and also then having the support team around me too, so knowing that my partner was on board and he was happy with that too. Then making choices towards the end that enabled that all were on board with that too, so antenatal education and books and those kinds of things that helped along with it.

Dorte Bladt: So what sort of antenatal team did you have?

Felicity Cook: Well, I had my amazing midwives, my primary midwife, and she was there pretty much throughout the whole care for me. So from when I booked in at 20 weeks with the hospital and with the birth centre. I had some really good antenatal that was privately arranged and then I also had my chiropractor. That was a big part for me for lots of reasons and I had that all the way through from basically prior to conception, so I thank you.  

Dorte Bladt: Anytime.

Felicity Cook: Towards the end, I also did some acupuncture as well, too. That was my support team.

Dorte Bladt: And when you were looking for support, what sort of support were you interested in?

Felicity Cook: I knew to have the birth that I wanted to have, I knew that I had to have the options of being active for as long as possible. So I wanted somebody who would support the idea of active birth if I needed it and also that could give me techniques and measures that could avoid intervention, so being able to move, being in the right headspace. So having the right mindset around that was really important and just people who are on board and understood the vision that I had.

Dorte Bladt: What is your understanding of an active birth?

Felicity Cook: There is the true active birth. For me, I just wanted to be able to move, if I could. I didn’t really want any restrictions if possible. So early stages of labour for me, I did go for a walk because I thought that that would be a nice way to either bring it or slow it down and a good way to tell that you're in labour or you're not. The night before I went into truly serious labour, I thought I might have been on the verge of it, so I went for a big long beach walk with my dogs and, yes, I could actually start off be like that, be as active as I could and then have that available to me throughout the labour - if I needed to be active, I could. If I wanted to walk around, I could. I didn’t have those restrictions.

Dorte Bladt: And that was because you were in a birthing centre, you feel? Or was it more your team that provided you with that?

Felicity Cook: I think the birth centre ideal is that you try and go as intervention-free as possible, generally, not that they explicitly say that but you don’t have the availabilities of things like pain relief or epidural so they want you to be as active as possible, so that was a big part of it. But also for me, I enjoy movement and I feel movement, and I figured if I could move well through the labour, I'd be able to move well afterwards and I wouldn’t be restricted in my recovery from that delivery either.

Dorte Bladt: Good. You were talking about the education that you had going through the pregnancy itself. What tools do you feel that was useful to learn, that was helpful for the birth process itself?

Felicity Cook: For me, the mental preparation that comes with that. So a lot of the meditations and the visualisations are really good. The breathing - because that actually gives you something to focus on, too. The program that I did, there was a big focus on different types of breath for different stages of labour and having a partner who could do that.

Dorte Bladt: So it was a two-people education. It wasn’t just this is what you need to do.

Felicity Cook:  Yes and that was important, too - having a partner who kind of had an idea of what was expected of him at the time. He knew a bit about what to suggest or where to be. So he knew all the breathing and the mindfulness exercises. He was also given some tools about acupressure points to release and we talked about different muscle releases he could do or ways he could help support my hips if I needed it. So he had stuff to do. I think as a male partner, I think sometimes boys like having things to do, so that's great he had those tools.

Dorte Bladt: To make them active.

Felicity Cook: Yeah, so that was useful for me too because I knew that he didn’t need my direction. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t have to tell him. He knew what was expected of him and he could act accordingly.

Dorte Bladt: So this is basically some discussions that you had both as a couple but also with the antenatal educator?

Felicity Cook: Yeah. The antenatal education that I did - which was She Births - really did promote that.

Dorte Bladt: You mentioned that you were also doing your own... research may be a strong word, but you were reading some books.

Felicity Cook: Yeah, so I think there's lots of information out there and I think that can also be a bit of a downfall sometimes, too. I'm very lucky having worked with pregnant women for a long time that I kind of knew what was out there and I had also heard my fair share of stories where things didn’t go very well, either. So I had looked at, in the past, the resources that women had told me about that were quite useful. I went, "okay, this is what I want to suggest to some women". So then I looked at how that had helped women through the practice as well, too. The books I found particularly helpful were Juju Sundin’s Birth Skills because that's a lot of movement-based stuff. So a really good way of pain management or pain distraction which you don’t need the whole... you can't use the whole way through labour, because otherwise, you get too tired but it's good for crucial times, so I really like that book.

I do really like Sarah Buckley’s Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering because it gives you the information that you need. Then the two other things that I had were Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery which is just a bunch of stories. Another, Guide to Childbirth, which is just a bunch of good birth stories. They're not all positive like they're not all perfect vaginal births. They're all different types of births that's really good... and then I had this one video that I watched that was actually the kind of ideal birth. So I just kept that and I watched that a couple of times towards the end. So that was the visualisation.

Dorte Bladt: I think just realising that I think we all have a plan. We go into birth time thinking this is what I want, this is what my plan is. I guess the important thing with this is that there's no judgement when things go wrong. Things may change and we don’t have any control, but one thing is what happens, another thing is how we react to what happens - like what you're talking about in that book - not all the stories were great but how did the people still end up with a baby.

Felicity Cook: Yeah, and the knowledge around that too. You can't always control what happens on the day and things that I thought I would do in the birth suite, I didn’t do, but you can't control it, you prepare for it, I guess. So you can inform yourself with those things and know the whole situation, like you know that epidurals do tend to lead to more interventions. That's what the research tells us, anyway. It's not everybody’s outcome but knowing that that for me was like, "okay, well, maybe I don’t want to be offered an epidural the moment I step into the birth suite".  If I choose, I came on the way that's likely to be the option then I'm less likely to have that intervention.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah. What was your experience once Ivy actually was born?

Felicity Cook: Immediately after? It's amazing. You think, "wow, my body's amazing!" It's just done. Then it's like "yes, yes, thank you! It's over!" Because it is a long time there. But my recovery was quite good because I didn’t have the interventions that some people need or have. I had delivered placenta very easily and basically, I could just walk out of there. That's what a lot of people were surprised at. I had her and then three hours later I'm walking out of there and going home.

Dorte Bladt: Did you have that whole experience of the baby crawling up your tummy, the skin-to-skin and all that that a lot of midwives are talking about as a really good bonding time?

Felicity Cook: Yeah, we did. We had delayed cord clamping, so it meant we just basically could stay where we were for a little while and have lots of skin-to-skin. So the moment that she - that first hour, she was pretty much on me, which is what we wanted. We made sure we left all that vernix on there for as long as we could. Then for that little time where I just had to go and have a shower and sort of...

Dorte Bladt: …Make yourself decent.

Felicity Cook: Yeah! Then our option was then our second best option, which was have skin-to-skin with her dad. So she wasn’t really off us at all for the next 48 hours. She was on us the whole time as much as she could be.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent and how do you feel that this experience of having such a beautiful birth and really positive experience - how does that place you for coming back into practice which you have done for the last four weeks you've been back?

Felicity Cook: It gets me more and more excited to work with pregnancy. I've always been excited about working with pregnant women, but I'm getting more excited because I've obviously got a little bit more knowledge about it too, and if there's anything that I can bring my experience to help other women have that experience, then that's exciting too because I think a lot of women don’t realise they have choices, or what choices are available to them. Obviously, I knew that I had choices and I have done a lot of research about what those choices are in our area, too, so I have lots of knowledge around it. I'm happy to share that, but also for the health of our kids at the end of the day. If we can facilitate a nice experience then it means you bond so much better, you recover so much better.  I mean, physically, in our job, if I hadn’t had the birth experience that I had, I don’t think I would be back at work this early. So there's all of those kinds of things.  The bonding happens and how you can get back into your everyday life, too.

Dorte Bladt: Now, you mentioned - you were talking about the videos that you watched for visualisation and the meditations. Are there specific meditations that you can do for birth?

Felicity Cook: There are, there definitely are and I didn’t actually - I listened to them in the early stages and then I just had a track of mine, so there's music playing in the end that I could just focus on because I knew that I had to focus on, I had to get something else to clear the chatter in my head. I listened to those meditations too many times so I could actually almost tell what they were - I needed a distraction. I just needed to focus on something that wasn’t that. So, I feel sorry for anybody else in that birth suite with me because that played - the same track played - for the three hours I was in there, pretty much. Luckily, it wasn’t a drawn-out labour where I was there for hours and hours. They probably would have gone crazy. But for me, it was literally just an app with my phone as music in the background and then the visualisations and the meditations from the program that I did with She Births.

Dorte Bladt: Okay, so it wasn’t something that you necessarily found on the internet that people could download.

Felicity Cook: There are plenty out there. She Births just gave them to us, so we had them available to us and they're quite good. They're great. I mean, She Births is a really well-thought-out program. So it's them and you can do that, but the one, the mindfulness track that I had was literally from Mindspace. It was an app that I just downloaded and just decided halfway through that I just needed that track.

Dorte Bladt: And you had for a moment because I thought you were also working with a doula for a while?

Felicity Cook: Yes, I did. We had that support because all three of us had the support of a doula.

Dorte Bladt: What is a doula?

Felicity Cook: So a doula is a birth assistant or a birth companion. There are lots, actually, that say that they have doulas who come into delivery and are actively there. There are doulas who just do prenatal, doulas who just do postnatal stuff too. So we had one who had done a little bit of our pre-birthing with us and she was going to be there with us on the day, but we called her and told her that things were happening and then we just kind of got so in the moment that we didn’t end up having to call her back. So we called her after Ivy was already here. She came when I was in the birth suite afterwards, which the benefit for us was knowing we had a backup if we needed her.

Dorte Bladt: So a doula’s job would be to guard the hospital, to be helpful or to actually do the massages themselves?

Felicity Cook: Yeah. It's really what you choose it to be. For us, it was having that third person, so that if Cameron became fatigued and needed to step out, he could, and I was okay with that as long as I had somebody familiar with me. I think mentally I understand that you're sitting on the sidelines for however many hours and you don’t know how long it's going to be. It can be quite tiring, so if he needed a moment to step out and even to have some food then I wouldn’t be completely on my own - which I wouldn’t have been because I had those midwives there who were very supportive and familiar to me - I didn’t actually need the doula in the end, we didn’t because we had this team of really supportive people with us already.  

Dorte Bladt: So you went through Belmont. They have a set amount of midwives that you get introduced to and it will be one of them? Or how does the team work from the midwife perspective?

Felicity Cook: Well, for me, I was really lucky in that I had the complete continuity of care that every visit for me was done by the same midwife, except for my booking appointment. I got to meet... because they're such a great little community out there, I did get to meet other ones along the way, even just those of us waiting for an appointment they would come in and have a chat. Then the backup midwife - who we didn’t actually meet until that day - she was great. She was amazing. You knew that they all talked and they are all on a similar page. Sometimes they just drop in when you're there for an appointment and say "hi", so you knew that that would possibly be somebody you’d meet. So there's only a certain number of people who are going to be there.

Dorte Bladt: Do you know how many people are... I think is it one man? Mainly women in the team?

Felicity Cook: Yeah. I think it's grown a little bit. They're a great option, I found. A great, great option so it's nice that they're growing - but I think there's maybe 10 or 12 that are rotating.

Dorte Bladt: So if you show up, would you potentially be exposed to all 10 or are they in smaller groups? So you’d say it's one of these three that you will be with?

Felicity Cook: I think it's more like that. We had a rough idea that the backup was going to be one of two people, depending on which rotation, which week you went into labour. We were lucky. They were great. Then I met the two others on my prenatal appointment.

Dorte Bladt: So you had met them, all of them there.

Felicity Cook: Yeah. Met enough to know that I was comfortable with whoever it was.

Dorte Bladt: That's good. Any advice that you have for mums that might be listening to our little podcast?

Felicity Cook: Trust your intuition. I knew that when I had looked to other care providers that they just weren’t right for me. I'd actually been initially told that I probably wouldn’t meet the criteria for Belmont, but I just decided to call them anyway because I knew that's how I wanted to go. So trust your intuition. Trust what feels right, because that turned out beautifully. Inform yourself and actually feel comfortable with that because sometimes I think women feel a bit disempowered, or they feel like they don’t have... they just have to follow all the instructions that they're given, but you don’t necessarily have to. The care providers are great. Lots are giving advice from a very experienced and informed place, but there are usually more alternatives out there than you realise.  

Dorte Bladt: Yeah and sometimes all the advice, like you said, you try to follow it all and you end up getting totally confused, which is probably not the best place to come from when you're going through such a life-changing experience.  

Felicity Cook:  Yeah, because I think... this is not my saying but one of another chiropractor that we know very well, has said that sometimes in pregnancy it's almost like you have to prove that you're not sick or you're not unhealthy. I found that very true. So you have to then trust your body and go, “you know, I'm strong and I can do this. I'm meaning to do this.” If that's what works for you, choose the team that's going to support that.

Dorte Bladt: That sounds great. One thing I was confused up here, but I just remember you talking about strength and the amount of physical work you also did. One thing was walking, but you actually did a fair bit of strength work through your pregnancy as well to prepare you... well, probably to stay fit but also to prepare yourself for the birth.

Felicity Cook: Yeah. Definitely not doing as much now time-wise, but I was still going to the gym and still doing weights and things even to the day. So I had her on a Sunday morning and I went to the gym on Friday morning.

Dorte Bladt: Were you guided by someone?

Felicity Cook: Yes.  Definitely by somebody who’s very skilled. Towards the end, it was all one-to-one because, earlier in the pregnancy, I had been dealing with some issues, too, with just being uncomfortable. A lot of women do get back pain in pregnancy. I didn’t think I would and I didn’t. I got pelvic pain instead and so I had to deal with that. I wanted to make sure I was as strong as I could be for the delivery but also my recovery, and so I would have that mobility. So I made sure I could do that for as long as I could. I was going to the gym as often as I could, doing Pilates to make sure my pelvic floor was happy. So doing all the prep work that I could do physically so I could be as mobile as I could but also recover as well as I could too.  

Dorte Bladt: What did you do with regards to... we’ve talked physical and we've talked emotional. We might as well talk about the chemical side as well. What did you do to prepare your body nutritionally?

Felicity Cook: Yes. Pregnancy is hard in that sometimes you can have the best intentions and that will get out the window. Be careful, you can't. A little bit intuitively - like I love coffee and I do love the smell of it, love making it, and my body just went "you can't have this". I still haven’t had any so it's been a long time without coffee. So it's about listening to that a little bit too, but also then pushing through some of the days where all you feel like is just eating pasta. Making sure you get vegetables and those kinds of things. So plenty of the good stuff, plenty of the green stuff, and plenty of balance in that too. So making sure that you... for me, I did like sugar. That was probably my stimulant of choice when I was tired. I just tried to make it as healthy as possible. So dates and nut butters and those kinds of things.

Dorte Bladt: And did you take any particular supplements?

Felicity Cook: I did. I took a very carefully-selected antenatal multivitamin throughout for a couple of reasons. You're tired in the beginning, particularly you don’t always feel like having the green smoothie even though we made it and it's there. And you go...

Dorte Bladt: Yuck.

Felicity Cook: Exactly. So that made sure I was really well-balanced. Then towards the end, I did need to also then supplement with some iron. But again, I didn’t want the average iron because I know that can be hard for the body to absorb, so I went to the compounding chemist instead talked to them about what the best options were.

Dorte Bladt: So again, you used your support people.

Felicity Cook: Yes.  

Dorte Bladt: Because reading whatever magazine we tend to have lying around doesn’t necessarily give us the best advice for something like that.  It might be more a question of who has paid for the ad.

Felicity Cook: So true. Actually, that's very true. Also because they can just be a bit of a scattergun approach. You may not actually need all that.

Dorte Bladt: One last question. My brain is just…. Seriously, talking about scatter: the abdominal separation. Did you have any issues with where the two sides of the stomach muscles are pulling apart? Did you have any issues with that?

Felicity Cook: I did. Every woman has a little of it and that's just how functional it is and how strong you are with it. But for me, I had a hernia when I was younger as a child and I had surgery with that so that actually popped up about halfway through my pregnancy - like literally popped up.

Dorte Bladt: Great. Welcome home.

Felicity Cook: Yes. So I had to deal with the diastasis a little, bit but could still be functional. That's the thing. It didn’t stop because I had these issues. I was just dealing with it and working around it in the best possible way.

Dorte Bladt: Right. Just tell me a little bit about now Ivy is five months old, almost. She's been here for a long time. So what are you actually doing now to take care of your body?

Felicity Cook: Well, yes. I’m not back where I would like to be or where I thought I would be by this stage. I haven't been back to the gym yet but I’m going to go and so I've been more gentle than I thought I would. My body had different needs then, feeding, sitting, breastfeeding can be hard work actually. I did say I prefer to give birth any day than feeding initially.

Dorte Bladt: Are you serious?

Felicity Cook: Because it’s hard work. It’s hard work on your body and I think a lot of mums - a lot of attention goes into bub at that time, but I needed attention. My body needed attention too. So I saw the chiropractor and I also went and saw a therapist to make sure everything is recovering from my lower body, who was good. Getting posture happy. I’m working on those things. So I had a bit of attention that time too. You needed it to make it a successful journey there. And then Pilates, yoga. Initially, I was really keen to get back into exercise really quickly and then I kind of slid off a little bit, and then now back into working at it again. So back to the gym - next week I’m going.

Dorte Bladt: Yay. Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your story. It’s a beautiful story. I look forward to hearing lots of good feedback.

Felicity Cook:  Thanks, Dorte.

Dorte Bladt: Thank you.

Outro: The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host.  

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by Family Chiropractic

FF 11: 'It's all about the gut' with naturopath Jasmine Polley

Want to learn about baby gut health? In this episode of Flourishing Families, Dorte Bladt talks to Charlestown Naturopath, Jasmine Polley, about a healthy gut for kids.

Jasmine Polley shares her professional insights about the connection between a healthy gut and a healthy body and brain. You will understand the importance of feeding your gut bacteria to help them thrive and the intricacies of pre and probiotics. Enjoy!

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dorte Bladt, the Switched On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt: Welcome, Jasmin Polley. We've got Jasmin - she is a local Charlestown naturopath. I'm really excited to have a chat to you.

Jasmin Polley: Hi, Dorte. Thanks for inviting me on to your podcast.

Dorte Bladt: My pleasure! So tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? What do you do?

Jasmin Polley: Well, I am a biomedical naturopath. I started about 15 years ago and I'm currently still studying. I think I've always studied, but moving more into the functional medicine side of things as well. So I specialise quite heavily in gut and digestive health as well as hormone and thyroid imbalances.

Dorte Bladt: Interesting. Can I just be - because I'm not the smartest person in the world - what's the difference between a naturopath and a biomedical, whatever you said you were, practitioner, and functional medicine?

Jasmin Polley: Well, there's a lot of overlap there because my view on things has been always looking at the underlying cause and having a good framework where to investigate that in each person that comes in. Functional medicine provides more of a framework around that. So, it's very evidence-based and it gives us a really good way of digging deeper and finding those Achilles’ heels that people might have that's their imbalance and where some of their health issues may come from.

Dorte Bladt: So does that mean different testing?

Jasmin Polley: Yes.

Dorte Bladt: How would naturopath testing compare to a functional medicine? I mean, I know it's different from person to person.

Jasmin Polley: Well, it is very different from person-to-person so it's a difficult thing to say. I do use quite a lot of normal pathology. Not so much with kids, though, because I don’t like to put kids through unnecessary blood tests.

Dorte Bladt: They hate them.

Jasmin Polley: Yes, but as well as other functional medicine tests. Then obviously a big part of it is a really good case history taking, so really digging deeper, finding out when did their actual health imbalance start, because I see a lot of these symptoms as being an imbalance in what the body wants to restore to normal. So, if we can adjust that, then the body has got an amazing ability to be able to heal itself.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah, it's amazing, isn’t it? So, just fill me in a little bit about... you said, so you like, if we're looking at kids anyway.

Jasmin Polley: Yeah, sure.

Dorte Bladt: Looking at their guts. What does gut health have to do with the health of a person?

Jasmin Polley: I think gut health is paramount because our gut is where we're receiving the nutrients into our body. It's also where our immune system is trained. So, most of our immune system hangs out in the gut, especially when it comes to kids - their immune system is developing and this is happening in utero and through the breast milk as well. There's a big priming of that immune system that's happening in the early years. If we can really look after kids and their gut health in those times, then we show that there's a much-reduced expression of chronic disease later in life.

Dorte Bladt: So what does a good gut consist of?

Jasmin Polley: A good gut symptom-wise, you mean?

Dorte Bladt: No. Just what does it look like? When you assess a person and you say, “oh, my goodness.  You've got a great gut!”

Jasmin Polley: Well, a lot of that, first off, would come back from the symptoms. So people saying that they're breaking their bowel motions. A lot of them have got lovely Bristol stool charts. Everybody gets to see that and show me what sort of stool they're having each day because that's really important to see if they're going frequently, the right form and things.  

The other thing is no bloating, indigestion, burping. All of those kinds of things. Now, there's a lot of testing that we can do. So, usually, that will either be something that could be initially people coming in for gut health complaints. Otherwise, people want to usually address their current concerns and then I move them towards gut health with pretty much every client, because I see it's so important. That's where we can do testing for their microbiome, so we can actually do genetic testing to see what levels of bacteria they have. Then we can also test food sensitivities if there are any issues with them reacting to things. It should be healthy foods in their diet but it's not healthy for them. Also that their nutrition is correct, because if they've got nutritional deficiencies then that could come from them having either gut inflammation or a lack of enzymes or ability to digest.  

Dorte Bladt: So what would kids be present with that would have a gut issue?

Jasmin Polley: They can present with a lot of different things. So, obviously, gut symptoms would be a big one. So, constipation or diarrhoea. I get a lot of parents coming in where the child might only go once every second or third day and a lot of people have the assumption that that's normal because that's the way it's always been. I don’t see that as normal and that can usually be corrected quite quickly with just being able to tweak their diet for what's suitable for them and address any food sensitivities that they may have. Other things can be chronic sinusitis or ear infections, often to do with gut health as well. That's where the immune system is reacting to other foods or environmental stimuli that it shouldn’t be, so it's overreacting. And other ones would be a lot of the allergies, so like eczema, dermatitis reactions, as well as even things like asthma and hay fever symptoms would be a lot to do with gut health and the harming of the immune system as well.

Dorte Bladt: Okay. You have mentioned food sensitivities a couple of times and the fact that certain healthy foods or that we perceive as healthy may not be healthy for a person. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit about how does that work in a little child?

Jasmin Polley: Absolutely. So say, for instance, if the child doesn’t react well to the dairy protein. That doesn’t necessarily mean it's... a lot of people think of lactose intolerance but what we often see with food sensitivities is more about the casein and, in some cases, the whey, which are the protein components of the milk and that, in turn, in grains could be the gluten from your oats or your wheat products. So with those sorts of foods, they're seen as an intruder to the body. That means that the child’s immune system can actually start attacking those components that are coming in and cause inflammation through the system. Now, if there's inflammation in the system, depending on where those inflammatory compounds settle out in the body is where you can get symptoms. So they could settle out in the skin causing eczema; they could settle out in the joints causing joint pains;  obviously, some of them can pass through the blood-brain barrier and cause moods, like anxiety or poor concentration or even autism and ADHD symptoms. They're linked in with those as well.

Dorte Bladt: Oh, and we see so much of that. What’s your theory as to why have the inflammatory numbers... I suppose when I say inflammatory I'm thinking about the things you just mentioned. You know, when I go back and think of being young, I don’t remember anyone having bloating or eczema or ADHD, and I'm sure it's just because I had a small number of friends, but why do you think things have changed over the last many years?

Jasmin Polley: I think a lot has to do with the way that we produce our foods. There's so much... like in a lot of foods, there's less fibre in those foods, there are more chemical residues in those foods and we know from kids’ bodies, they've got a smaller liver and their smaller weight ratio so they're affected by pesticides and chemicals in our foods much more than adults are. So I think that that's a big part and then just the way that we breed our foods, with the different hybrids. For instance, with wheat, it contains huge or much larger amount of gluten than it used to, and then we've got the glyphosate which can make kids more, and people in general, more reactive to the gluten as well.

Dorte Bladt: So what is glyphosate?

Jasmin Polley: Glyphosate is like your Roundup.

Dorte Bladt: Oh, really? Sorry, I misunderstood you.

Jasmin Polley: I was just reading a paper the other day actually showing that it forms complexes with the gluten that the immune system can then not be able to recognise well. The other components tend to be able to break down the gluten properly.

Dorte Bladt: So, it is coming back to being more inflammatory for the body.

Jasmin Polley: Yes. It brings back the argument for people who don’t have celiac disease, are they reacting to the gluten because they're actually intolerant to the gluten or is it because of these chemicals and pesticides that are on the gluten?

Dorte Bladt: So the first point of advice from there would that be to try to eat more organic, less processed?

Jasmin Polley: If people can. Now, I know that it's sometimes picking the battles and I think for parents listening out there, they might be just thinking, “well, that's great, but I can't afford that”. So yes, if you think your child is reactive to gluten then potentially if you're going to give them bread, try them on an organic type bread if you're not keen on going gluten-free. But really, I guess I look at if maybe taking the gluten out initially - if that's doable for the parent. See if everything settles down because sometimes they can be more sensitive to even just the one. If things don’t settle down then sometimes we need to go a little bit further and then see if we can bring that back and if we're going to bring it back, bringing back the organic form of it first would be a good way of testing that theory, I guess.

Dorte Bladt: Do you have ways of testing - I guess what I'm hearing is that you're saying try to eliminate different products. Are there ways, knowing that kids have sometimes very selective palates, are there ways of maybe helping a family go through that so they don’t have to just eliminate everything?

Jasmin Polley: Yeah, absolutely. I try to keep it as simple as I can. If we do the food intolerance test then that actually helps to see what the main culprits are and then I'd focus more on the moderate to severe intolerances with that. Otherwise, it's about helping people go through eliminating the major ones which often are your wheat or gluten, dairy and eggs.  So they're pretty much the three that I see come up the most. Obviously, nuts, seafood, yeast, and others that can be there, but those three tend to form most of the intolerances. Some kids will be reactive to just one of those. Unfortunately, some kids will be reactive to more. If I see a lot of reactions there then I'm definitely considering more of a leaky gut or an intestinal permeability point of view, so they could have had their intestine - some sort of infection, perhaps - that they've had that's led to some increased leakiness that's going to make them more reactive to other foods as well. So sometimes when we correct their gut health, these food intolerances can go away in some cases.

Dorte Bladt: Okay, so, I've got lots of questions for you. I can't remember them all. So with regards to the food intolerance test, is that the proper blood test that you would get normally when you go for an intolerance test?

Jasmin Polley: No. With kids, we usually do just one that's a little finger prick. I'm pretty good at doing that now. We hardly ever get any tears.  

Dorte Bladt: Oh, very good!

Jasmin Polley: I know! Quite quick! And that tests for 46 different foods. Now, it's an IgG reaction test so it's not a true allergy test. If I do suspect allergies then that's when I still would refer them to an immunologist to get the skin prick test because that's the most accurate way. Although, I do see some people go through with the blood tests and I don’t always find that that's an accurate way to test allergies.  

Dorte Bladt: Can you just explain - because I think sometimes people get a little bit confused about that whole allergy intolerance scenario - how come they're not the same?

Jasmin Polley: It's actually a different immune effect in the body. So, with an allergy, you're getting histamine released from mast cells, so it's quite a fast onset and it can be quite severe. So that can be often with asthma or airway issues, but it can also be around sinus and eczema in some cases, whereas an intolerance - sometimes that can take up to three days to set in. It can be an accumulative effect in some people. Some kids - they might be okay having a bit of dairy, but when they have too much, all of a sudden they get a flare-up of their symptoms. That can be really difficult as a parent because you'll be thinking about what they've had. They've been having dairy and then they've had this new food which may not be related at all but it can just confound the mothers. A lot of parents are just really confused with what's setting off their kids in the first place.

Dorte Bladt: Well, fair enough - but is it a combination of this or is it a combination of that? Then you end up not being able to eat much of anything.

Jasmin Polley: Absolutely and I think that that's the really sad thing - there's a lot of kids that end up on quite restrictive diets that I see. My aim is to try to prevent that as much as possible because the more that you restrict the diet back then you're going to actually cause damage to the gut microbiome or the bacteria that live in our gut that have to actually keep our immune system modulated.

Dorte Bladt: So because you have a restrictive diet, I'm just trying to extrapolate on what you're saying, does it mean that the gut bacteria live on different types of foods?

Jasmin Polley: They do indeed, yes. A lot of them, especially anybody that comes and sees me knows that I'm very passionate about a rainbow food diet, so trying to get as many different plant pigments from as many different variety of plants, so rather than sticking to the same type of apple or the same type of carrot, experimenting and trying different colours of food, different colours of grasses, different coloured beans. All of those things can feed different varieties of our gut microbiome and when we're thinking about our gut bacteria, we can have over a thousand different species in there. Some of those might be only fringe dwellers, so they might only be very small numbers, but if we put the right foods in there they can grow up and really cause massive effects in our own immune balance.

Dorte Bladt: So how long does it take to change the gut microbiome?

Jasmin Polley: It does depend. If there is really imbalances there then sometimes it can take a little bit of time to be able to, I guess, restore balance in the gut. So with kids that have been on quite a restrictive diet, we can't go too fast because then we'll get bloating if we bring in foods too quickly. However, when we're looking at the actual growth of bacteria, we can radically change what bacteria are growing in our gut in only four days.

Dorte Bladt: Oh, my goodness. That's quick, isn’t it?

Jasmin Polley: Really quick, but saying that, yes, sometimes it does take a lot longer than that just to prevent symptoms coming on in the first place. Make slow and steady adjustments so that the kids aren’t getting flares in their symptoms.

Dorte Bladt: I suppose when you say it only takes four days to make a change, then it probably also means it takes less than four days to make a negative change, if you're unwell or if you're taking too many days of not particularly supportive foods.

Jasmin Polley: Absolutely and I think a lot of people might know that after coming back from holidays and maybe feeling good on holidays for a period of time and then getting back and going, “oh, I really upset the balance of that”.

Dorte Bladt: "Oh, back to normal". Okay, so if we find that a child has some sensitivities - let's just say it's gluten - does that mean, "okay, we've done a blood test, we see it's gluten, we're taking it off". Are they off gluten forever?

Jasmin Polley: Well, that's a really tricky one because there's a big difference between something like celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition where they're actually attacking that gluten and is causing a lot of gut damage compared to someone who maybe has an IgG reaction to gluten or to wheat or something like that. So if they've been diagnosed as celiac disease - which the unfortunate thing about that it can be quite difficult to diagnose because they need to be eating quite a lot of gluten - then there's a blood draw or test that's taken. If they've got high levels of antibodies there then they usually send for a biopsy to confirm that. So that's the celiac side of things but if somebody is reactive, say on an IgG test, and we don’t believe it's celiac disease then what I would be focusing at first of would be settling down their symptoms, healing their gut, so you know, trying to make sure that they don’t have any leaky gut and that their immune system back to balance and then we can start with some of the gluten and grains back into their diet and see if that flares things up.

Dorte Bladt: To see how they react.

Jasmin Polley: Unfortunately, there is a little bit of guesswork there because the testing in Australia for gluten is still a little bit behind.

Dorte Bladt: So what's your experience with the amount of time that it takes to heal? You said that you can make a change in the gut over four days and, chances are, that's not what's going to happen if you've been having 12 years of gluten intolerance, or whatever. What sort of time frame do you tell the parents? Do you say, "okay, we're going to do this for, I don’t know, six months, and then we'll do a test"? Or are you going to say "we'll do it in three weeks and then we'll do a test"? Or what's your sense?

Jasmin Polley: Well, once again it depends on the situation as well. So, like, if I've got kids coming in that have got diagnosed celiac disease then we know that it's going to take about 6 months before their intestine is absorbing food in the right manner to curb some of their nutrient deficiencies and obviously, they're going to be staying off gluten for life. However, for a child who maybe has eczema and is reactive with that, they should start seeing results with taking those foods out within the first week or two. But you would be waiting at least the 3 to 6 months before you wanted to start bringing those foods in and that's when we'll be doing the gut healing. Now, to know the exact time frame of how long that takes, it depends if we did the testing. With most of the parents, we'll just go off the symptoms more so than doing the testing. However, there is leaky gut testing that we can do. I always offer the testing but there's no pressure either way. We can work in a range of budgets and that sort of thing with people.

Dorte Bladt: There are a lot of different people talking about - obviously - the state of the gut microbiome and suggesting kombucha and kefir and kimchi and sauerkraut. How do you feel about from not a supplement point of view but from having those things in your diet? What effect does it have in the gut?

Jasmin Polley: Well, a lot of those probiotics that you get in those forms - and the same also with your supplement forms - they're transients. That means they don’t set up house in the gut but they come through and they can actually help re-establish balance in our own gut bacteria. So our gut bacteria are generally set at quite a young age, around three years old. They say that our gut microbiome is set and that it's not going to change too much. Obviously, we could kill off species in that time but we're not going to be able to add too many at current thinking anyway. So what we're doing with putting some of these fermented foods in, though, is actually some of these bacteria that are coming in can help potentially have a settling effect on the immune system as well as acting a little bit like police, I say. So, getting some of the gut bacteria that may be messing up to straighten up some of their habits. So, that’s where we use probiotics as well. Some of the probiotics that I use are ones that have been consistently shown to be useful, say for instance some are beneficial for diarrhoea, some for constipation, some for allergies, and knowing their specific strains that would do that job.

Dorte Bladt: So it's not just necessarily going to the chemist and say, “oh, I'll just have that one.”

Jasmin Polley: Absolutely. There's a lot out there that have got 50 billion of ten different strains and really they're doing nothing because they're not using strains that have got any efficacy in the body. Saying that, though, I still definitely encourage the fermented foods and I'm a big fan of encouraging prebiotics.

Dorte Bladt: That was my next question. What's a prebiotic compared to a probiotic?

Jasmin Polley: A prebiotic is the food for the probiotics, like them taking their packed lunch when you're taking a probiotic, or if you think about your own gut bacteria which the number of bacteria that we have in our gut outnumber our own cells ten to one.

Dorte Bladt: Wild, isn’t it?

Jasmin Polley: I know. That still gets me. So if we're actually nourishing them through feeding them the right types of food - that can make a massive difference. When we're looking at prebiotic, some of the things like your inulin or FOS, for instance, has been shown to increase levels of your lactobacilli and bifidobacteria and decrease levels of a lot of your harmful bacteria. So that's something that's great in there and it’s also a really great one for kids because it's great for their immune balance.

Dorte Bladt: Okay. Is that a supplement or is that something you find in foods?

Jasmin Polley: Both, actually. So it comes actually in a lot of your FODMAP foods. I don’t know if many people have heard of the Low FODMAP Diet. The Low FODMAP Diet is a diet that restricts different carbohydrates because it can settle down bloating and a lot of gut symptoms. The problem is a lot of people can get stuck on this diet for too long and they can actually not be feeding their gut microbiome. So foods like leeks, shallots, artichokes, most of your greens, like broccoli and things like that are actually providing some of these fermentable carbohydrates, so will actually be encouraging good bacterial growth.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent.  

Jasmin Polley: Yes. Sometimes you need to look at an underlying cause if you're sure they got a bacterial overgrowth, but then bringing those foods back and trying to nourish the good bacteria.

Dorte Bladt: So it doesn’t just feed - whatever - one-cell in your body, it also feeds the ten cells in your gut.

Jasmin Polley: Yeah, absolutely. I think just reminding people of when they're eating they're not just eating for themselves, but they're also eating for their gut bacteria.

Dorte Bladt: For their family. Someone told me once that if you - because we were talking kids, but, you know, antibiotics - it supposedly kills out a significant number of your gut bacteria as well as whatever else it's targeted for. How long does it take or is it possible to bring it back to normal levels?

Jasmin Polley: Yeah, it depends on the type of antibiotic and how long you've been on it. Your general penicillin or amoxicillin, they're generally pretty good at being able to bring the gut back from that. If they had been on triple broad-spectrum antibiotics then it can definitely a little bit trickier. Some of those gut microbes species may be killed out with that, so that means that they’ll unfortunately never come back without a faecal transfer or microbial transfer as far as we know unless - technology might catch up and we might be able to buy some of these gut strains in pills in the years to come - but when somebody has just had antibiotics, it does vary, once again, but you're probably looking at at least a month to six months depending on the antibiotics.

Dorte Bladt: Okay, so people actually mentioned kimchi and kombucha is all very good, but I take it that people like that actually need a supplement.

Jasmin Polley: Yeah, I do use probiotics in that case and I use prebiotics to really boost that back and making sure that they're taking probiotics during the time that they're taking the antibiotics. A lot of people wait. They think "oh, it's really no good" when it can actually definitely prevent more damage with them doing that. Just obviously taking them at a different time of the antibiotic and some, there's different probiotics that are actually transient yeasts that are not killed by the antibiotics so we can use them at the same time to prevent some of the antibiotic-associated symptoms, like diarrhoea and things like that.  

Dorte Bladt: It's so important, isn’t it? That means then that a family with a kid with infections or whatever, they have their antibiotics but they really should take the probiotics then for six months?

Jasmin Polley: Well, if they can do that then yes, that would be good. The other thing is even starting off with a high-strength probiotic and then really looking at the prebiotic side with that, because the prebiotics you can actually buy things, like your GOS and your FOS, which are different types of prebiotics at higher levels and you can be supplementing that which works out more cost-effectively as well.

Dorte Bladt: Okay. So what do the average parent that is listening, can they go to the health food store and say, “okay, well, we have just had antibiotics prescribed for ear infections. I need probiotics. What do I need?” Can they go there? Is it something over the counter? How does that work?

Jasmin Polley: Yes, they can. It depends on the staff that they get, obviously, and how much they know about that. Can I mention brands or anything like that on here?

Dorte Bladt: I think you can. I want to say, yeah, we do one of those and we offend anyone, but, yes, you go ahead.

Jasmin Polley: I just think that the Ethical Nutrients brand is one that's pretty easy to get - that would be the Inner Health. If it's still damaged by the antibiotics then it's a good one for re-establishing balance. They do do a brand that I think is called Candex that has that yeast in there, so that they can take it at the same time. So that will be a place to start if they at least want to make sure that they're doing something at the same time and then just really trying to keep their child’s diet as broad as they can, really thinking about those rainbow foods so that they're nourishing the child at the same time.

Dorte Bladt: I'm going to throw you a curve ball here. I know you have two children.

Jasmin Polley: Yes, I do.

Dorte Bladt: So what does their lunchbox look like?

Jasmin Polley: Well, that fruit and vegetables for the Fruit Breaks. Usually, they got a little container with some chopped up apples or some berries or something in it and another one where I usually put some carrot, cucumber, that type of thing.

Dorte Bladt: Okay, so we've got red, orange and green.

Jasmin Polley: Yes. So I've got a rainbow in there. My son - he’s loving his fried rice at the moment, so I think with winter - bringing that into the lunchbox. I usually got to mix the veggies in there and we use brown basmati rice so that's a little bit of a slower GI release. That's a good thing with that. My daughter often likes wraps - so a wrap with a salad and some protein on there. Then it depends on what I've got - sometimes I do get lazy and I'll just get a packet of popcorn or something like that, but ideally, I like to be cooking them a little mini quiche or things like that that can be as their recess kind of options.  

Dorte Bladt: Good. Well, you passed the test.

Jasmin Polley: I was right.

Dorte Bladt: Absolutely. One last thing - do you have a particular passion? Do you have some advice that you think is incredibly important for our listeners to have? Something they can use in their everyday life?

Jasmin Polley: So I'm known to go back, I think my number one thing that I really want people to know is that food can be your medicine and don’t underestimate the power of a healthy diet and what you can actually heal from just eating well. The most of our nutrients can come through our foods. Now, it is true that our foods may not contain as many nutrients as they did in the days gone by, however, if you start there, at the very least trying to eat as broad a diet as possible, at least the kids are getting a broad range of tastes then as well. So a lot of kids they don’t know what they don’t like or what they will like until they've had it quite a few times. So, you know, really sticking with that. You know what's best for them as a parent. Just getting them to try little bits and experiment with the foods that they're eating can make a big difference for not only their health now but how broad their thinking is when they get older.

Dorte Bladt: That's good advice. I'm just going to tell you a silly story. A couple of years ago, my son was travelling around the world and he was in Canada living with a couple of boys. As the typical mother, I'm thinking "he's out of home... I wonder whether he lives on McDonalds and stuff". So I just had a very quick sneak peek in the cupboard to see what he had in there - what I found really interesting was that all the hard yards - he is living away, he's out of home and mother isn’t going to tell him what he needs to eat any more - but his cupboard was full of lentils and brown rice and fruit and vegetables. There was nothing prepackaged. I was so proud of him. One thing was being proud of him and another thing will also be a little bit proud of me, but knowing that it is when they're young that they pick up the habits. If we can instil a healthy habit, it will be with them for their health for a lifetime.  

Jasmin Polley: Absolutely and I think kids are little sponges so we really can educate them now so that they can understand that they're growing a healthy body and that starts early on when they're putting all those foundations in, so the more that we can get them eating healthy and if they do eat bad, they're feeling sick, actually questioning them, “oh, what do you think may have caused that?” And linking it back to maybe the unhealthy food that they just had before or something.  

Dorte Bladt: That blue vomit, child, may be because of the sponge cake. Sorry, that was disgusting! Thank you so much for joining us, Jasmin. If you could just again just fill us in, where are you? Who are you? Just so people know where to contact you if they feel they can get some benefit from having a chat to you.

Jasmin Polley: Sure. Thank you so much, Dorte, for having me on. I'm actually just pretty much around the corner from you in Charlestown. My website is https://www.wellnessvision.com.au, so you can find out more about me there if you're interested.

Dorte Bladt: And your name again?

Jasmin Polley: Jasmin Polley.

Dorte Bladt: And your business?

Jasmin Polley: Wellness Vision.

Dorte Bladt: Perfect. Thank you.

Outro: The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host. Brought to you by Family Chiropractic Centre Charlestown, serving the families in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Charlestown.

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by Family Chiropractic

FF 10: 'Tone up for health' with Katrina Morton

Our own Super Chiropractic Angel Katrina is her usual inspiring self as she shares how Pilates can help us get the most out of chiropractic care. She describes the what, where and how of Pilates and the connection between movement, exercises and the breath.

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dr. Dorte Bladt, the Switched On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt: So you've got Family Chiropractic’s dynamo at the podcast today. Super duper matriarch, Katrina Morton. Welcome, Katrina.

Katrina Morton: Thanks, Dorte.

Dorte Bladt: Basically, just to start with, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Katrina Morton: I have been at Family Chiro now for 15 years.

Dorte Bladt: 15! I haven’t managed to get rid of you yet.

Katrina Morton: No, no. And I have got four grown-up children. I've got three grandchildren with one on the way in February, so we're all very excited about number four. I have worked here and seen so much go on through chiro so, over the years, I've done Pilates and so I thought I'd like to be a bit more involved with Family Chiro instead of just being on the front desk. So a few years ago I became a Pilates instructor and between chiro and now Pilates, it's giving our patients a great opportunity to really have a good future with their supported spines.

Dorte Bladt: Very good. So just tell us, what is Pilates?

Katrina Morton: Pilates is a series of exercises that are performed on a mat. You can do it on a reformer that I do mat Pilates and it strengthens the whole entire body with supporting the muscles around the back, the core, your bottom and your hip. So with chiropractic aligning the spine and now with Pilates strengthening these muscles around the spine, you end up having very good posture and a lot stronger body.

Dorte Bladt: That's good. So how does Pilates differ from - I don't know - maybe doing weights at the gym, which would also, I suppose, strengthen the body and the spine?

Katrina Morton: Yeah, it does, but with Pilates, you actually are not relying on weights to strengthen you. You actually are relying on your own body weight to do it. So as we strengthen each muscle, instead of workout at the gym you might be doing weights and you strengthen the bicep, with Pilates it's all slow and controlled. Say you were working on your arms, you're actually strengthening the entire arm muscles, so it's not just focusing on one muscle. You're actually learning to focus on all your muscles and so you will strengthen all the muscles.

Dorte Bladt: Also while you're strengthening your biceps, you're working through the core, working through other muscles there.

Katrina Morton: Yeah, because of the breathing. You see, the more you breathe - the deep breaths, it gives you better lung capacity which then, in turn, helps strengthen your core muscles which then help all the stabilising muscles. So you’ll end up not just having a strength workout, you are actually doing a bit more of a mind-body workout as well.  That's a big difference from other exercises. They just do a physical side whereas with Pilates you actually do pretty well mind, body and soul.

Dorte Bladt: I have many years of doing Pilates but I always remember that rib and hip connection. Can you explain what it is that a Pilates instructor would mean by saying that?

Katrina Morton: When people lie down... so do this at home, everyone. Lie down on a mat and just lay there and you'll notice your ribs are popped up. So as you breathe, you just breathe through your tummy and it pops your ribs up but in Pilates, we want you to breathe within your lungs, not using your abdominal muscles. So with your rib and hips, you bring it all down together and you tighten your lower tummy muscles. So between your chest and your pubic bone, you want all your muscles to be tight and contracted and flat. So if you imagine you're on the floor and you're drawing your muscles - all of your muscles - down towards the spine. That's the rib-hip connection, keeping your torso tight. Imagine Glad Wrap being wrapped around your torso, that's how you should feel.

Dorte Bladt: Basically, when people are lying on the floor and they're lying flat, and you say the ribs are popping up, what they want to do is bring the ribs not necessarily towards the spine but down towards the hips but also towards the spine.

Katrina Morton: Yes, correct.

Dorte Bladt: Now, if you're in this position, and I always wondered about that when I first started Pilates and people will say, “now, bring both your arms up above your head without letting the ribs flare.” I remember thinking "that is the best tummy exercise" when you're bringing your arms straight up above your head and down again because you want to automatically flare that chest. And you look down and you think, oh, "I didn’t know I had my... Where did those ribs come from?" But when you do the contraction that you're talking about, you're doing very little movement elsewhere but you're really contracting through the stabilising muscles.

Katrina Morton: Yes, because Pilates is all about slow and controlled. So if you wanted to try anything at home, lie on the floor, take your hands to the ceiling, take your legs up to the ceiling, draw down on all your tummy muscles towards the ground and feel your tummy contract.

Dorte Bladt: Okay. I feel like a dead bug.

Katrina Morton: That's exactly how you look.

Dorte Bladt: Great. Thank you.

Katrina Morton: But it's a very, very, very good exercise.

Dorte Bladt: So what inspired you? What is it? Five years ago? What inspired you to start doing the teaching of Pilates? I know you've been doing it for a long time.

Katrina Morton: Well, yeah, I have been doing Pilates. You know, I started in my 40s when children were all grown up and I thought it was time for me to do something. So I had a taste of Pilates and I just loved it because I didn’t have to bounce around the gym. I didn’t have to walk into and have 50, 60 people in the class. Then a few years into it, working here at Family Chiro with everyone wanting doing their best to get the spine and the hips and the shoulders and neck all working, I thought what better way than to help the patients as well is to become a Pilates instructor, which I've absolutely loved every minute of. Now, I feel like I'm also helping the patients. It's not just about the girls being chiropractic. I can help as well to heal these people and make them stronger and now the years have ticked by and I've got a great following of people who come to my classes and they even inspire me because Pilates isn’t about an age thing. You can be a senior, you can be a young mum, you can be whoever you want and you can start doing Pilates. I've got 65-year-old women in my class and they inspire me because they are so super strong.  It's amazing to see the results in the few years of doing it. I also get great pleasure of watching my pupils become super strong.

Dorte Bladt: Super strong and that determination of people just like "that's what I'm doing. I'm going to get better."

Katrina Morton: Yes. They love a challenge. I find that the mature aged women actually are probably better than the young ones because they really do love a challenge.

Dorte Bladt: So what is the biggest win you have experienced with your classes?

Katrina Morton: I think just watching them grow, watching them strengthen. Even themselves, they sit back and think about when they first joined the class and how weak and pathetic their abdominal muscles were and they couldn’t do anything. Now they can plank and they can push up and they're super strong. They can go and play with their grandchildren on the weekend and nothing bothers them. They can crouch down. They can jump up. I think it's just inspiring watching the pupils just come in and...

Dorte Bladt: Is there one particular person that stands out that you would say, "wow, this person has really outdone themselves."

Katrina Morton: Yeah, I would actually. She is a little woman but she is my 65-year-old. She's the one that inspires me. She has just become so super strong that I think if there was a competition of planks I think she would win. She's better than me.

Dorte Bladt: That's amazing.

Katrina Morton: She is super, super strong so it's wonderful to watch.

Dorte Bladt: I realise that this is not a class and we can't really do this. But if you were to, say, give some suggestions or some advice to people that are listening, are there some things that they can do?  I mean, one thing is obviously showing up to your class, but if they've got little kids at home and it's too difficult to find time, is there something that you would advise for them to do that would make a difference?

Katrina Morton: Absolutely. There's so much you can do at home. Everyone has a lounge so all you have to do is stand in front of that lounge, even if you've got a baby - put the baby up in front so you're carrying it. That will give you a few little extra kilos to carry and you crouch down, so your legs are just a little bit wider than your hips, and your feet are just slightly turned out, and then all you do is go down and just tap your bottom on the lounge, and then stand up, squeeze your bottom, do it again. Do that squat maybe, if you can, 25 times and build yourself up to 50 times.

If you've got a doorframe, which we all have, take your hands on that doorframe and stand up on your toes, squeeze your bottom, use your calves and then just come back down flatfooted and then repeat that 25 times. Build that up to 50 times. You can do pushups on a wall. Just stand there a little bit out from the wall. Have your hands at chest high and just push up and down. If you feel like that's too easy, get on the floor and do some pushups. Everyone knows how to do a plank. Again, it's one of those things you just tighten that tummy if you're on your knees or your toes.  Just do it for a few seconds or a few minutes, whatever you can manage, but everyone can do something at home.

Dorte Bladt: I'm just going to go back to “so everyone knows a plank”. They might all know it...

Katrina Morton: But we don’t really know.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah, we don’t. So if you were to describe it again. It's much easier when you're actually watching it, but the arms would be where?

Katrina Morton: Your elbows are directly under your shoulders.

Dorte Bladt: So you lie down on the floor.

Katrina Morton: Yes. Lie down on the floor and be on your tummy. Then put your hands together and place your elbows under your shoulders and lift your body up and you're on your toes.  So your bottom has to stay flat and you've got that complete plank.

Dorte Bladt: So you're straight.

Katrina Morton: Yes, nice and straight.

Dorte Bladt: Nice even line from your feet to your shoulders.

Katrina Morton: Yes.

Dorte Bladt: I suppose the thing to remember with this is - don’t look at your hands and don’t look at your bellybutton.

Katrina Morton: Yes, don’t look at anything. Again, it's what I said before. It's about drawing that bellybutton in towards the spine. So as you're in that plank series... and you can be on your knees. You don’t have to actually be on your toes. So you can still be on your knees, but it's about drawing up your tummy towards your spine and breathe. Don’t hold your breath.

Dorte Bladt: Breathe... slowly but controlled.

Katrina Morton: Yes.

Dorte Bladt: So with these exercises that you're talking about, the one thing that I have experienced as a difference... over the last 25 years or 30 years, however long it is I have been a chiropractor... a long time, the change in people’s postural control with the fact that we're sitting so much more. This is not just in the last little while. This obviously has been going on for a hundred years, but that thing with Pilates that I really like is the potential to focus on the pelvic floor. I think we're forgetting the pelvic floor because it's not a muscle that you can do bicep curls with, but doing - like you were talking about the pushup on the wall or planking or whether you were doing a squat. If you're saying holding your tummy in, one thing is holding your tummy to the spine.  Another thing is drawing up, so contracting the pelvic floor. Do you agree with that visualisation?

Katrina Morton: Absolutely. We all do forget about pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is just, as Dorte said, pulling up those muscles as tight as you can and contracting them. It's something you can do sitting. You could be in the car and at the red light. That's something you do. You can pull in your pelvic floor. This is for men and women. It's not just for men. It's for the women and the men as well. So you draw it up. You hold it as long as you can. You tighten those low tummy muscles and you can get a super, super strong pelvic floor by just doing that every day.

Dorte Bladt: I guess it's not even just that whole pelvic floor thing. It's remembering that the pelvic floor is connected to your breathing. It's remembering that the pelvic floor is connected to your bottom muscles and to the lower abdominal muscles. We just forget that we don’t have separate bicep muscles. It's all connected and it all works and it all stabilises.

Katrina Morton: That's why I think I love Pilates so much is because when you are in the class, you are working every single muscle you own, and that includes the pelvic floor. So the people who do Pilates would actually have a super strong pelvic floor. That's the one really big bonus about Pilates, especially post-baby, that would be a wonderful exercise class to go to would be Pilates.

Dorte Bladt: So how soon after having a baby can you do Pilates?

Katrina Morton: As long as you get that clearance from your doctor after that 6 to 8 weeks and you feel you're ready for it. Yeah, you have to get that medical clearance from your doctor, but yes, you can start, because Pilates is something that can always be modified. Whether you've got an injury or you're doing rehabilitation - there are thousands of exercises in Pilates and so it can always be modified for your personal need.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah. When you were talking about modification, I remember reading years ago about how Pilates actually started.

Katrina Morton: Yeah. Joseph Pilates started it back in 1920. He was actually doing it for the First World War. He was starting to bring in - for the injuries and the poor soldiers that had injured themselves in battle - so he started these exercises to help rehabilitate the men back to some sort of strength and good health, but then he started to realise that these exercises that he was doing actually ended up... well, after the war, he then started his own studios and he started to help people to prevent injuries and that's another reason why it's good to do Pilates. I found out here, with chiropractic, they help stabilise everything, and then with Pilates, we're also doing the same thing because one of the biggest benefits of Pilates is to help stabilise the spine. So with chiropractic, getting the nervous system working properly and all your organs working properly, then in Pilates we're also trying to strengthen every muscle so that we're stabilising what the chiros are doing and so it's a perfect marriage.

Dorte Bladt: You talked about reformer and that's not what you do, but am I right in that this particular person that started it, he was taking springs from beds and doing resistance training?

Katrina Morton: Yes

Dorte Bladt: That's fantastic! But that's a good thing about Pilates. You don’t actually need equipment.

Katrina Morton: No. Exactly. That's why it's good to do anything at home. You don’t actually need any equipment to actually strengthen yourself. Use your own bodyweight, or you young moms out there with babies, use your babies. Use your babies as a weight.

Dorte Bladt: So when we have this young mum with a six-week-old baby, it's okay. She can come to Pilates, but how do you manage having a class with a mum with a little one?

Katrina Morton: Oh, it is quite amusing. The other women in the class love it because the little ones are very, very cute, but they are funny, because I've got a little toddler in one of my classes now and mom just gets a super workout because he's over sitting on her head or sitting on her legs or sitting on her abs and so she has to work twice as hard as anybody else, because that little toddler is about 12kg and it's hilarious. He thinks it's hilarious and gives us all the giggles. So it is beautiful to see the moms bring the children to Pilates because they can actually use the child in Pilates too. So it's fun to use them as a weight.

Dorte Bladt: I was going to say, yeah, it's a tough dumbbell to hold on to.

Katrina Morton: Yes. Moving a lot.

Dorte Bladt: So you would be okay with mums bringing in little ones?

Katrina Morton: I think it's a fabulous way for mum. I know how hard it is. You have a child and you're at home. How do you get to classes without your children and you haven’t got a babysitter? That's why I will always encourage my mums to bring the babies. I don’t call them a mums-and-bubs class. It's all about the mums. The babies are more than happy to play with toys or lay on the floor or whatever, but I think it's a wonderful opportunity for a young mum to get her body back into shape, get her muscles nicely tightened again after giving birth and having her baby with her.

Dorte Bladt: Let's just say that a mum comes in and she has a young one. She’s never been in before, she's never done Pilates before. How do you work with someone that you potentially could have something to do, so some stuff going on but you don’t necessarily know?

Katrina Morton: I often - you know, particularly if it's a chiropractic patient - I will always discuss everything with the chiro first and see what the background of this person is, but if it's just a young mum who’s decided to come to a Pilates class, I usually get them in 10 minutes earlier than anybody else so I can give them that one-on-one time of literally explaining how Pilates works, how today don’t push yourself too far, let me know if you're feeling anything a little bit odd and I'll really keep an eye on that particular pupil for the day, but it's one of those -I only have small classes. I think it's better to have a small class and then you can all get those one-on-one techniques right. Often you can go to a big gym.

That's another difference between Pilates and a gym. You might have 50 people in the class. How can a gym instructor really keep their eye on you? Whereas I like to keep my classes very personal. I really get to know how that person’s body is reacting to all my exercises. If they're good, I start to intensify them and if they need a little bit extra rehab, then I can modify it just for that particular person. That's what I like about Pilates. You can just always fit everybody into your class.

Dorte Bladt: So you can always make each exercise easier or harder.

Katrina Morton: Absolutely.

Dorte Bladt: That would be a challenge if you're teaching in a big class because I have often... I like going to the gym, as you know, but looking around then they say, “now, do this particular exercise,” and I'm looking at people thinking, “oh, my goodness, I should give you my card because you will be hurting very soon.”  Because we do a particular abdominal exercise that is just beyond the strength and capacity of that particular person.

Katrina Morton: Exactly.

Dorte Bladt: Injury will tend to happen, I think.

Katrina Morton: Oh, I look at the gyms and think that, too. I've got friends that will go, “oh, I'm going to the gym for the very first time.” And then they can't walk or breathe or do anything for the next five days because they haven’t had that personal, I suppose, first lesson of "take it easy, let's work out what you can and can't do." That's what I like about my classes or any Pilates classes I've been to as well. They give you that personal touch.

Dorte Bladt: What about pregnancy?

Katrina Morton: I believe... sorry, I didn’t have the opportunities, like the young mums of today have got opportunities to do any class they want to do. I would have loved to have had Pilates in my life pre-conception, pregnancy and then post. I didn’t really discover it until I was in my 40s but I love the fact these mums today can do whatever they want. So I would definitely suggest - get into it now. Definitely keep it going. There are proper pregnancy Pilates classes out there. I personally don’t do them but I know there is a lot in Newcastle that you can do and it really does help with the pregnancy.

Dorte Bladt: Could people come? I realise it's not a pregnancy class but could they be part of your class or would you suggest they go to someone that specialises in it?

Katrina Morton: No, I have had a few pregnant girls in my classes. Once again, you just modify what you do. You might bring a big ball in, you might bring different equipment in for a pregnant girl, because of course, they can't lie on their backs like everyone else can, so you just modify it and they can still do a very good workout even though they're pregnant.

Dorte Bladt: Can't quite protect the stomach just the same way.

Katrina Morton: I can't quite do that.

Dorte Bladt: Right. So what else do I need to know?

Katrina Morton: Well, there's so many benefits of Pilates. If you’d like me to tell you what some of the benefits are, we could really run through a couple of those.

Dorte Bladt: Absolutely.

Katrina Morton: Because it is amazing how Pilates can actually benefit the body. It definitely improves flexibility. It increases all the strength in your abdomen and your bottom and hips and it improves your posture outside. The most important, it improves the stabilisation of your spine and also, I love it because it will always help to prevent injuries because your muscles are so lovely and strong that it automatically will already start to prevent... so if you're into sport, you should actually be doing Pilates so that you can enhance your sport performance.

It's just such a good thing because it increases your lung capacity, your blood circulation - so you got your heart pumping and also too, it's just once you get into Pilates and you really get the breathing down pat, it's so good. It's relaxation for the neck, the shoulders, and the upper back as well. So it just takes care of the whole body. It just works for everyone, men, women to do Pilates.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent. I remember talking to a colleague of yours a few years ago and she was working I think as a Pilates and yoga instructor for a professional sports team around here.  Big blokes, strong blokes. She was saying it was hilarious to get them to do Pilates and yoga in that 1) they had absolutely no idea and 2) they couldn’t believe how weak they were in their core because they are so strong! They use their muscles in certain ways and - supposedly, this is just what she told me - she said the benefit was just amazing because they increased their flexibility, they increased their core strength, they increased their stabilising strength for the strong muscles.

Katrina Morton: Absolutely. Well, I have men in my classes and some of the men have come because they're losing their core strength and they want to surf, and they want to continue surfing until they're old.  So they have found the improvement is just unbelievable in their core strengths to actually jump on a board. I was given an opportunity through a friend that she owns a big CrossFit gym.  So these are big, strong, superwomen in my eyes. They can lift weights. And she said, “could you please come and do a Pilates class with these group of women?”

I think they looked at me and thought, “She's in her 50s.  This won't be hard.”

It was hilarious because those girls could not believe how hard Pilates is. I was so much better and stronger, even though physically they looked so much stronger than I am. They actually do not have glute strength. Their abdominal under muscles are just so weak. So their core is so weak, their bum is so weak, and yet they are so super strong, but it's the internal muscles...

Dorte Bladt: They use the active ones.

Katrina Morton: Yeah, they use all the external muscles - your six-pack muscles, if you want to say it, but they have no inner strength. So that was hilarious. It was an eye-opener for them.  They realised then they need Pilates to actually become super CrossFit people.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah, to get the whole health. So how do people find you?

Katrina Morton: Well, because most people do know me through Family Chiro because I have been here for so long now, so if you really do want to find me, I am at Family Chiro at Charlestown. So please look me up and please come and join me in one of my classes. I think you will really love it and you will get so many benefits from it. I just couldn’t live without it.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent and just to go through your name and your business name?

Katrina Morton: My business name is Tone Up Pilates and my name is Katrina. Just give me a ring here at Family Chiro and I'm sure I can fit you into one of my classes. It would be lovely to have you in one of my classes because I'd love to see you get the benefits that I've had.

Dorte Bladt: Excellent. Thanks for your time, Katrina.

Katrina Morton: Thanks for having me, Dorte.

Outro: The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host.

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by Family Chiropractic

FF 09: 'Balancing a busy family life' with naturopath Melinda Carbis-Reilly

Mums often struggle to balance Mum-life with everyday life. In this podcast, Dorte Bladt discusses finding a healthier balance with Newcastle Naturopath, Melinda Carbis-Reilly.

Melinda, a local dynamo, mother of 5, gym owner and naturopath talks to us about how she helps busy Mums and families get a healthier balance in their lives.

Intro: Flourishing Families with Dr. Dorte Bladt, the Switched-On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive.

Dorte Bladt:  I'd like to welcome Melinda Carbis-Reilly to our podcast today. Thank you for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Thanks for having me. I am the owner of Redhead Wellness Sanctuary - I’m a naturopath there. I’m also a fitness and Pilates instructor. My latest babies are my books. I've written a book called The Natural Path and that one is aimed for families. It’s more of a reference guide to keep it up in your medicine cupboard and when your kid has an earache or you have a tummy bug, you get it out, you flip to that page and there's some nice home remedies there for you to get stuck into so you don’t have to race off to the doctors at midnight if it’s not necessary. Sometimes it is.

Dorte Bladt:  That sounds good.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: The other book I wrote was Diggin’ Your Dark Side. That one is more to help people that are a bit challenged with stress, mental health issues, like depression and anxiety, or possibly suffering from addictions as well. So that book is based on my life when I went through a bit of a depressive state when I set up my business, ironically, in wellness is when I hit my absolute bottom with adrenal fatigue and things, so I just shared all the tools I learnt from that in there.

Dorte Bladt:  Wow. That sounds like it’s built on experience. That’s always interesting to read.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly:  Oh, makes a complete difference to textbooks when you actually experience it.

Dorte Bladt:  Totally. And you remember it for a lifetime.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yes.

Dorte Bladt:  So you say that you are a fitness instructor.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yes.

Dorte Bladt: Yes. What sort of fitness are you looking at?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I do love my classes. That’s what I've stuck to now. I used to do a lot of rehabilitation and physical therapy back when I first started in the industry, especially with my Pilates. I was very much into that. But now I really like the group fitness because everyone is happy when they walk in the room. They’re ready to go hard and then go home. So I do love my strength and cardio and spins, probably one of my favourites as well.

Dorte Bladt:  You also have your naturopathy side of things. What do you specialise in? What’s your favourite?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: My favourite is probably gut health, I must say. I do love working with the gut because, as a typical naturopath, we believe that's where it all starts. But I also love helping Mums and kids. That is a big passion and that's where most of my clients lie. I find that a lot of kiddies come in that have immune problems and they have gut problems as well. I'm seeing a lot of kids with anxiety which is quite concerning, really, and the Mums are stressed. Mums are worried. Mums are busy so I like to help them get on top of that and their stress levels.

Dorte Bladt:  If you have a child with anxiety that comes into your office, what would you look at? How would you address that kid?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: We really as naturopaths like to look at it quite holistically, so we will look at from the ground up. We’ll look at their physical health; we’ll want to know how they're going and if they're doing any exercise. We want to know what their diet is like.

We’ll do some iridology and I like to look in their eye. The eye doesn’t give you a full picture but it gives you something to lead with, so we like to use those tools. I personally like to use those tools to have a look at what's going on physically. Then we like to look at their lifestyle and socially what's going on for them as well, so we can paint a really big picture and not just blame it on one thing... And then we can start to tweak the lifestyle choices and the diet.

And help Mums, as well, understand because sometimes it can be quite confusing.  There are so many different messages out there about what is healthy and they can think they're doing something amazing for their child but their child in particular is quite sensitive to that supplement or that food choice and it's taking them down a different path. So it's nice to help the parents with that knowledge too.

Dorte Bladt:  Totally. How would you assess what a child may be sensitive to from a food perspective?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: From a food perspective, a lot of Mums go down the food intolerance testing path. I've done quite a lot of those on little kiddies and it gives me a nice understanding.  There are 46 different foods that we can test in this 45-minute process where we mix the blood chemicals and by the end of it, we can give the parents a bit of an overview of foods that the child might be sensitive to. We also look at other things, like is your child coming up with rashes and hives and are they having difficulty breathing, because it can help us point, particularly with dairy and gluten. They're very obvious symptoms that they come up with. So it's good to have those scientific processes in place but also having that good, solid conversation about what's going on at home as well.

Dorte Bladt: What would you say, if you're doing a blood test? My understanding is the test that you're doing is a finger prick type test.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yeah, it is.

Dorte Bladt: It's not too invasive, not painful or anything?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: No.

Dorte Bladt: So you would go in and see, okay, you're sensitive to, let’s just say, gluten. What are the symptoms that could be related not just to gluten sensitivity but to food sensitivity?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: There is quite often a lot of issues with... anxiety is a big one. Rashes is another big one that we tend to see. Bowel issues. So sometimes they can't have movements and sometimes the movements are quite loose. Sometimes it's alternating as well, so sometimes the child could go for days constipated and then their movements are very loose.

Gas is also a big symptom. Headaches are another one and then looking at their minerals as well. So if their minerals seem to be out of balance then we can do like a quick Zinc Tally test. We get them to have a little drink. It's 10 ml of zinc and that will tell us how their zinc levels are going. So we can have a look at their mineral balance as well because if they're eating foods they're intolerant to, they’ve inflamed their gut. They now have impaired their gut lining and they're normally not absorbing the nutrients from their food because of that. So if we can have a look at that.

Dorte Bladt: Basically, I guess what I'm trying to get out of you is that there is a link between what you see in the blood and the gut health.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Absolutely.

Dorte Bladt: So what you're really doing is you can't stick your nose in their gut but you can definitely have a look at how the gut digests the foods that we eat and then the outcome that that has in the rest of our systems.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yes, definitely.

Dorte Bladt: You were talking about the stressed Mums. How would you look at them?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Stressed Mums. I think a modern day issue is that us women try and do it all. We're not just staying at home as frequently as Mums used to and we're trying to juggle still being a great Mum and an attentive parent as well as having a working life, and then we need time for ourselves as well. So I think parents, particularly Mums, are really pushing their limits with what their body can cope with and I think that's the difference. Our mind is able to do more than our body can as a general rule, as a very general rule. The body starts to fill quite rundown when the mind wants to keep pushing and taking on all these projects.

So with Mums, a lot of it is about helping them identify that. To identify that they don’t have to be everything to everyone and it's okay to say no. I guess there's a bit of counselling involved. I actually heard on a podcast I was listening to yesterday, a beautiful quote and this lady said, “If you're saying yes to someone, you're actually saying no to someone else.” I thought that was beautiful, because if you're investing your time and energy into a project that you could have possibly said no to, you're really saying no to your family and your loved ones or something that might have...

Dorte Bladt:  So true.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yeah, so that really resonated. I think we do that a lot and then we feel guilty so we try and make up for it and we're just in this vicious cycle of never-ending work. So Mums that are quite rundown, what's going on on a physical level is we're trying to push our bodies to the limit and when we stop working from a loving, calm place, we put ourselves into our sympathetic nervous system. So we're in that fight-and-flight where our stress hormones are being released constantly in our body. We don’t have to work from that place. We can actually work much more effectively when we're not, but we tend to go there because we're trying to achieve too much.

When we run out of those hormones or we're overproducing them, we have what we call adrenal glands and they sit like little hats on top of our kidneys and as they're secreting these hormones, they actually begin to burn out and we end up with what we call adrenal fatigue. So the adrenals have just said, “I am done. You are demanding way too much from me. I am shutting up shop.”  So we've gone from a point where we're just stressed and wigged out and switched on all the time to absolutely flat and finding it hard to get motivation and inspiration because our hormones have just said, “I'm over this.”

Then it affects our sleep because it's a big part of our circadian rhythm. So it's a really important thing that we have cortisol. I think cortisol has had a really bad rap because we relate it to stress but we actually need stress. We particularly need cortisol first thing in the morning. When the sun comes up, cortisol levels rise in our body and that helps us feel ready for our day, feel zesty.  But we've gotten into this practice as a general rule that we don’t rely on that anymore. We wake up groggy and cranky until we have our first injection of caffeine.

Dorte Bladt: Right. That should get you going for the day.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yes. So I think we've gotten into a habit of expecting that external energy.

Dorte Bladt: How do you help a Mum that comes in like that? Obviously, there's the counselling part. It's so easy to say, “just say no.” Not so easy to do. But what would you potentially do physically for a Mum like that?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: So once we've had that little chat of the things they need to start learning to do for themselves to help themselves, we need to assess how far gone they are. That's really important.

At some point, sometimes, we do need to do some blood tests. We’ll send them away for pathology just to see if we're really feeling this has gone quite far because it affects your thyroid, it affects your gut health, it affects everything. So we need to see how far it's gone sometimes. That might be the first thing we do if it's quite extreme. If it's not, we can just start looking at boosting the adrenals if they’ve gotten fatigued. So things like licorice root are amazing, Rehmannia. I'm talking about herbs here. We've got some beautiful herbs that help. If it's not too far gone, just a herbal tea remedy is enough. Sometimes it feels nice to just sit down and have that cup of tea. There's more therapy in that than some of the chemical constituents that are actually in the tea, because we're getting them to chill out and have three cups a day.

Dorte Bladt: Sit down. Like sit down, shut up and enjoy yourself.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly:  Exactly. Gingko biloba is another beautiful one that works on circulation, just to get the body moving again. It really helps with cognition and clearing the head because once we've been firing constantly, the thoughts become so powerful that we can't really dim them out anymore. We're very much run by our mind, so having things that can help bring us clarity again and help our cognition expand instead of it being a big muddled mess is really important as well. So ginkgo biloba is another beautiful remedy. But then there's things lifestyle-wise that we strongly encourage and that's things like meditation. If you don’t feel connected to meditation then you could just do breathing exercises. Yoga is essential for your nervous system especially very restorative practices and to help those adrenals calm down. They're probably the main things we would do for people.

Dorte Bladt: That's very good. Now, I'm not a coffee drinker but I just hooked on to the way you said that people use that as a pick-me-up in the morning. Do you have any dietary things that you would suggest maybe to do before the coffee? Other certain foods that might be better to get into your system to maybe get your cortisol to a level where you can maintain sanity.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yeah. The best thing we suggest to people that are trying to come off coffee, number one is just I don’t want to take coffee away. I'm the same as you. I've never even tasted it. So I don’t get the addiction but I understand it's there because some people they look at me with not love in their eyes when I start messing with their coffee, but if they just moved that morning coffee, that first-thing-in-the-morning coffee to 11:00am, that straightaway makes a huge difference to their body because they're not waiting for that caffeine injection. The body says, “ah, okay. I've got to do this job myself.” So it gives it that wakeup call. Then the next thing you can do, because you don’t want to just take something away that never works, you've always got to replace it. So replace that morning kick with something like a dandelion root coffee. That's a beautiful way to start your day. A lot of people find that an easy transition, especially if you're an instant coffee drinker, because it comes in a tin. You make it like coffee. It looks like coffee so it gives them the mental...

Dorte Bladt: Does it taste like coffee?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: It doesn’t quite taste like coffee, apparently, but people are finding if they just add a dash of raw honey or a bit of cinnamon or something to give it some flavour, it's enough like coffee to get them going.

Dorte Bladt: Very good.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yeah, that's a good way to do it. Green tea as well. If you just, like you said, you want to still give them a little bit of caffeine and not take them off straightaway, green tea with jasmine or something like that is a beautiful replacement as well.

Dorte Bladt: Also very relaxing and an excuse for sitting down. Coffee is often, my understanding is that it's often something you have on the run. Almost with a cup of tea, you can't have it on the run.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: No.

Dorte Bladt: I can't. I have to sit down.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: You've got to infuse, you've got to wait for it, the aromas.

Dorte Bladt: If people find it hard to get to the yoga class, now you said breathing - that's great. Can you think of any apps or websites you might have come across where people can find a way to chill, meditation?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Definitely.

Dorte Bladt: Something for two minutes or five minutes?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: There are two apps that are amazing. One is called Headspace and I strongly recommend Headspace for people who are completely new to meditation because it's progressive. It shows you this cool little cartoon of what your mind looks like. A bit of an analogy with the road. It's nice, it's engaging. So you get engaged with, "ah, this is why I'm doing this."  Then it takes you into a really simple quick meditation so you're not there for too long. Then next step, and you kind of graduate at the end of the process so it's quite nice for people who are totally new. If you have a little bit of experience with meditation but you haven’t quite got there to make it a regular thing, there's another app called Insight Timer and that one is my favourite.

Dorte Bladt: Why?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Because it's so broad. You can get on there, say you're at work and you're really stressed and you can feel yourself getting anxious and flighty. You're not productive when you're in that state so you need to bring yourself down and clear your head, but you've only got three minutes. In Insight Timer, you can just type in "I have three minutes" and it will find a meditation for you.

Dorte Bladt: Wow, fantastic. That's very good.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I know, or if you have fifteen minutes, you type in "fifteen". You can also type in "I'm having trouble with sleep" so you type in "sleep" and it will bring up all the meditations that help you sleep... So you can choose the topic that you need help with, as well as morning, there's a beautiful morning gratitude ritual on there. So it's very vast.

Dorte Bladt: And would you be able to put kids in that?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yes.

Dorte Bladt: I understand, going back to the anxious kids, to get them onto meditation is easier said than done. It's great when there are some tools to help them, but can you type that in?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yes, definitely. I've got many kids using Insight Timer and they love it. It's like the oils. When I get kids to start using their oils, do TERRA oils or any essential oil, and getting them to do the app, it's almost like they take ownership of their health because it's something that they can have by their bed, their oil or their iPad, and they have control of it and they feel quite good clicking it on or putting their oil on before they go to bed. So as a general rule, they do enjoy doing them.

Dorte Bladt: That's great. Now, you talk about kids and you have a couple yourself?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I have a couple, yes. I do. I've given birth to three. My eldest passed away and my husband has three, so we have a blended family with five little cherubs in our house.

Dorte Bladt: How old are your little cherubs?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: They range from eight to fourteen... fifteen, sorry. Sorry, Flynn.

Dorte Bladt: How the heck do you manage to run a business, doing your naturopathy, doing your wellness sanctuary, and a family of... let me just count. Seven. Do you have a dog? Eight.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: We've got two dogs actually and sixteen chooks.

Dorte Bladt: Right. This is a big family.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: It's a big family.

Dorte Bladt: Do you see yourself as being chronic fatigued? Do you have adrenal fatigue? How are you coping?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I certainly went through it. That was the basis of the book is I was trying to do it all, and I guess I still do if I'm honest. I do still try and do it all, but it's about finding that balance and listening to my body. I'm much better at that now. I used to just keep trying to push through but now, because I've been to that darkest place and that lowest place, I can feel it when, okay, you've taken on too much. Just either pass that onto someone else or pause that one and it's time to go run a bath.

Dorte Bladt: Yeah. So just create that little bit of space in your day.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yeah.

Dorte Bladt: So with having five children, how are they going with interacting with the meditations? How are they going with their roles? How are they going with the food suggestions that you would have as a naturopath? I imagine that you would have an idea of what a family diet should be like.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: It's very interesting as they grow older because when they were younger it was so easy. My kids just they woke up and they had vital greens every morning. Green spirulina, barley grass, all those things grounded down. They would just wake up and have that because that's what they knew and they would have their little gummy bear vitamins and we had tofu and we had fish. We’d go to the shop and I’d say to them, “if you're good, I'll get you a banana,” and they honestly thought that was a treat. It wasn’t until they went to school and they went to a party and they go, “Mum, what have you been doing to us? All this stuff!”

Dorte Bladt: It's a secret.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I started to lose that control but you just have to go with the flow. My philosophy is if it's not in the pantry, they can't eat it. So you can't say I can't stop my kids from eating junk food. If you don’t have it in your home, then it's not available to them as much as what it would be if it was there. They can only get it when they go to a friend’s house, they go to their grandparents’ house, they go to a party. Or, like my kids, they're now earning their own money and they’ll go to the shop and they will buy themselves things that I don’t like them having, but I've decided to take the approach of you know what? I've brought you up so far to have a good understanding of what nutrition is and I will continue to remind you when you tell me you've got a sick tummy or you're running around the house like a crazy person. I'm going to remind you that you just had a can of Coke.

So I do take a bit more of a laid back approach to it now that they're older, that I've sown the seed. I'll keep having only healthy foods in my pantry. If you happen to make choices other than that then you will need to go through that... you called it "rebellion" when we had that little private chat before. I believe, like your children have, they will come back to me because they know what it feels like to be healthy.

Dorte Bladt: Yes, very much. So we've had a private talk before. My kids are adults and are on their own and I have, as a mother, secretly checked their cupboards and they look so clean. I am so impressed. What's interesting that what you're saying with having... we tried to control what the kids eat, we tried to control how much time they spend on the screen, we tried to control the fact that they're taking time out and doing the right thing, and I feel personally that we're very, very good as parents, and I will take total ownership of this, very good at telling other people what to do but we're not necessarily doing it ourselves, and having the cupboards... if you don’t buy it, you are usually the one, you or your partner are the one that's doing the shopping. Don’t go shopping when you're hungry. Only buy what you know that you are happy for the rest of the family to eat. Don’t buy it for yourself. Don’t spend all your spare time on the screen unless you want your kids to think that that's the way they have to live. So it does come back to you being the role model for their future family life, I think.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I agree and we do tend to do that sometimes, don’t we? I catch my husband out and, if I'm honest, he does for me too, just constantly on the phone checking emails.  I'm like, “honey, you complain about the kids. Look at you.” And we do have to catch ourselves because that's where our work is.  That's where everything is, isn’t it? It's on our phone.

Dorte Bladt: Absolutely. There was a study, I put it on my website probably six months ago, maybe a year ago. They were surveying children and asked them what they thought of their parents’ screen habits. There was something like 46% of children thought that their parents spend too much time on screens and were choosing the screens over their children’s company. So it is quite significant. It's not something you necessarily can verbalise as a young person, but the older you get and the smarter you get, the more I think you realise that you're actually losing out on connection because you're looking at something that's...

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yeah, that's not even really there. It's sad, isn’t it? I read about this in my book. I was busy writing an email, sat at the dining table, because, you know, I give myself credit because I pick my kids up from school.  But sometimes if I pick them up from school and they just go off in their own direction, I’d straightaway get the computer and I'll start working.  You've really got to catch yourself but I sat there typing an email and I was engrossed with what I was writing and Oscar was talking to me and was saying, “Mum, can I go to my friend’s house?” I just wasn’t really listening. “Mum? Can I go to my friend’s house?” I didn’t hear him again because I was just engrossed.

Then he said to me, “Mum, can I go play on the street?” And I just went, “yeah, no worries.” I wasn’t actually listening and he’s like, “Mum! I just said could I go play on the street. You totally don’t listen to me.” And it was the biggest wakeup call for myself.

So we introduced at our home, maybe this is helpful for parents listening, we introduced the elbow grab. So my kids know now if they can see that I'm really engrossed and just by talking to me they're not going to get my attention, they actually come up and grab my elbow. As soon as they do that, that's my key that I just step back straightaway, okay, and I can look them in their eyes and step away from what I was doing because I know they need me. It's quite extreme when you go to those. So the elbow grab, if that's relevant for anyone else.

Dorte Bladt: It is about having those, isn’t it? Because we do have to do everything we have agreed to do and deadlines and stuff but, yes, our family comes first.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: They do. They definitely do.

Dorte Bladt: Do you have an interesting funny experience that you can share with our parents that are listening to the podcast today?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I do actually. I've got a couple just on the line of my kids because we're talking about it already. It just reminded me of another little funny thing that happened because I'm a blended family and we never had cow’s milk in our home. We just had almond and rice milk. Then when my husband and his kids moved in from a family that has lots of chocolate and they're used to cereals, which is interesting because their Mum is a dietician, but everyone has a different approach. The kids were used to having cow’s milk so my step daughter created a PowerPoint slide for me as to why we should have - she was eight at the time - why we should have cow’s milk in our home to present to me, so I had to give in.

Dorte Bladt: Oh, it's because you can't argue with that one.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I can't. I mean, I certainly played back and sent her a video why we shouldn’t but I still gave in. I thought that was pretty funny and another time when Oscar got home from school, he had a headache and so immediately I'm running the water, hot water on the floor, put his feet in and I'm putting lavender oil on his head and I'm massaging the pressure point between his thumb and his pointer finger and he just looked at me and he said, “can't you just give me Panadol like a normal Mum?”

Dorte Bladt: No.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Yeah, the answer was no, but I just thought that was quite funny.

Dorte Bladt: And here I am loving you with all my heart.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I know. It would have been easy just to flick you Panadol but I'm actually trying to care for you... but that was his response.

Dorte Bladt: Well, he’s obviously a clever boy. Any final tips or advice for families that may be listening?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I think the biggest advice I can give is chill out. I think we stress way too much. Like you said, it's control, control, control. We're always trying to control everything about our kids. I think sometimes it's just to make the simple choices, like I said the pantry. Do things, lead by example. Let them see you meditate or let them see you nurturing yourself.  Let them see you hold hands with your husband.  Let them see you laugh and be joyful and playful. Throw the bubbles out of the sink at your kids. Have a messy kitchen. Don’t sweat the small stuff.  Let them see that life is supposed to be joyful and fun. I think leading by example will just help them relax. I think that's the biggest problem in our health today is that we're so uptight and stressed about everything that our bodies are just reacting. So I think that would be my number one tip.

Dorte Bladt: That's very good. I'm taking that on. I'm taking the day off.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Awesome. Straight after this.

Dorte Bladt: Absolutely. Again, just tell us who are you and how can people find you?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: I'm Melinda Carbis-Reilly and you can find me most of the time at Redhead Wellness Sanctuary. That's where I do most of my stuff.

Dorte Bladt: Do you have a website or anything that people can look up?

Melinda Carbis-Reilly:  Yeah, we do. Go to https://www.redheadwellness.com and at that site, you’ll find a lot about the centre. Then there's also http://melindareilly.com.au and that one has more about naturopathy and there's a lot of articles. There's also a free ebook there too called The Happy Diet. It's a book that I wrote to a company, my other book, but this one is completely free. Just download it and it's got lots of tasty recipes on there that are amazing for happiness, promoting good, neurotransmitter health.

Dorte Bladt: That's perfect. I'll go and do that on my day off. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Melinda Carbis-Reilly: Thanks for having me.

Outro: The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Family Chiropractic or the host. Brought to you by Family Chiropractic Centre Charlestown, serving the families in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Charlestown.

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by Family Chiropractic