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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama. com and this episode is all about if you’ve ever had that feeling that you’ve never been quite the same since you had kids. As I delve into chronic symptoms, specifically in moms with Dr. Brandi Cummings, who is not your typical nutritionist.
She’s a former blackjack dealer. Who routinely chooses steak over quinoa, roasted veggies over kale chips, and most importantly, she understands at a deep level the things we’re going to be talking about today. Her passion for root cause nutrition comes from her own struggles. And her now her approach, we really get into this today and how to kind of find and identify and work with your own kind of root factors of chronic illness.
She’s definitely a wealth of knowledge and I’m excited to learn from her. So let’s jump in now.
Brandy: Thank you, Katie, for having me. I’m very excited for this conversation.
Katie: Me too. And I’m excited to learn from you in our first episode together, specific to, kind of chronic symptoms in moms, especially, and why often there’s kind of this experience of not feeling the same after having kids and how there’s a lot of being told that’s normal, especially by the medical industry.
Before we get to jump into the nitty gritty of that, though, I have a note from your bio that you are afraid of whales, and I would love to hear why. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone be specifically afraid of whales, so I’d love to hear about that.
Brandy: They’re just so big. They’re so big and they freak me out. I remember reading a stat one time I don’t even know if this is true, but I didn’t even have to fact check it, this is all I needed to know but there was this fact that you could like swim through their arteries. And I was like, no, I can’t even wrap my head around that. And when I was little, my dad took me to go see Kiko, which was the whale that played like Free Willy. And, and so I was just, I was little and I’m looking at him in this tank and I just, that was it for me. They’re just too big.
Katie: That’s funny. I could totally see that, though, and I didn’t know that stat either about the, we could essentially, I know some of the bigger ones fit in their arteries, but that makes sense that that would be possible and wild to think about. Well, I’m really excited, like I said, to learn from you specific to chronic symptoms in moms, especially because a lot of the people listening are moms.
And I would guess anybody listening who isn’t a mom either for sure has one or knows moms in their lives. And it seems like this is a very common experience that often can get seemingly convoluted by a lot of other things that happen with the changes in motherhood. So for instance, for me, I of course had all the normal changes in motherhood and unbeknownst to me at the time, was also in the beginning stages of hashimotos, which it took me years to figure out because I kept being told like, oh, that’s normal postpartum.
That’s normal if you’re a mom, et cetera, et cetera. So I know this is a really broad topic and that there’s going to be a lot of nuance and personalization and that each woman is different, but it seems like there also maybe are some common experience points here. So can you kind of broadly walk us into this topic?
The idea of often women not feeling the same after having kids.
Brandy: Sure, yeah, so when I started my practice, I was really heavily focused in the fertility space and like preconception prep arena. And then as time went on, I had my own kids and then I started working with moms who already had kids. And this was just a sentence that I just kept hearing over and over like things were never the same since I gave birth and since I had my kids and, you know, as functional providers that timeline of when did things last feel good is really important because it helps us pinpoint the different changes in the body. And so I really started paying attention to that one sentence that I just kept hearing over and over. And actually I pivoted my whole practice really to just focus on moms who kind of have that experience.
And so what’s happening is a combination of so many things, but it’s all of these things together that create this situation. So we’re, of course, we’re having massive hormonal shifts after birth. And then our sleep schedule is radically changing overnight, literally. And we don’t have a village anymore, like we are meant to. So a lot of women aren’t having that support. A lot of women are going back to work at six weeks. And we also have the expectation based on our modern culture and society that we live in, we have this expectation to continue to maintain all the things we were maintaining before we had kids. And, oh, and now, by the way, you have to like keep this tiny human alive and do all the things involved with that. And then the other thing that can happen is, you know, thinking about your story with Hashimoto’s, postpartum autoimmunity is something that a lot of women are not being screened for, and a lot of providers are not looking out for, and it can be because of that rapid hormonal shift that I mentioned, but it can also be because of something called microchimerism, which is like a mixing of blood in between mom and baby.
And there’s more of that happening in a C section birth, but certainly it happens in all births and sometimes that can launch an immune response in the body. So that could be contributing to what’s driving that autoimmune picture. And then the other thing that can happen is that the body has microbes and pathogens in it.
And a lot of times it doesn’t cause any problems. But when we have a big triggering event, the body can, or these microbes can undergo something called polymorphism, where they’re essentially like changing shape and now they can cause issues where maybe they were not causing issues before. So we can see reactivation of certain of certain viruses or now all of a sudden people are having issues with mold or now they have Lyme symptoms and it can just kind of snowball.
from there.
Katie: That’s so fascinating. And you brought up a couple of things that I feel like are probably not that well understood. It might be new concepts for people, especially that, what did you call it? Microchimerism when the blood can kind of meld between mom and baby?
Brandy: Yeah, microchimerism. Yeah.
Katie Wells : And I would guess if that happens in most or all births, like ideally our body knows sort of how to handle this, but maybe that can kind of, like, get interrupted or go wrong. Like, is this a thing mom’s bodies are meant to be able to handle? And then we have, like, sort of factors in the modern world that are sort of intensifying this?
Or is this actually a normal part of the physiology that we can kind of expect with motherhood?
Brandy: The body is amazing. The body is so much smarter than we will ever be able to understand. And the body, in a lot of women, the body is meant to handle this and it’s not an issue. It’s not a negative thing. It’s just something that happens as a normal process of birth. But what is interesting to me is that, like I said, there’s more of this happening, this kind of mixing of blood that can happen in a C section birth. And yet moms who give birth via C section aren’t really told about this or they’re not having additional screening or additional testing to keep an eye out for an immune response or autoimmune markers. And so that’s a big piece of it as well.
Katie: And it seems like this also logically is very much a kind of multifactorial issue based on all the things that you just said of like, certainly there can be very much physical things that are happening. And I think it’s really an important point that you brought up. There is this whole, I mean, logistical shift in lifestyle and priorities when we now have this baby to take care of.
And I feel like what started to be talked about, but I feel like we haven’t maybe solved is that issue of expectations that you brought up of how women often already have a career, already have a very busy life and then now have this baby that they need, of course, to keep alive and to help thrive.
And often we know statistically still a lot of home related labor still falls on women and moms as well. And obviously it doesn’t seem like there’s a perfect answer to this, but I’m curious if you have any strategies for women and for making that kind of that adjustment in life because it’s such a big one.
Brandy: Yeah. One of the things I did when I was working a lot more in the fertility space is I had this handout that I had created and it was called where’s your village. And we would pull it out and we would fill it out together before baby came. And it was kind of like a mind map kind of a format.
It had you in the middle and then all of these spokes coming off of it where we were really identifying, who do we have in your circle? What’s their availability and what are they willing to do? Like, what are the specific tasks we can ask them to do? Because it’s very easy for somebody to say, congratulations, and let me know if you need anything.
No! Mom’s in that space it’s too late. Like, we don’t know how to articulate what we need in that moment. And so by doing this before baby comes and kind of pre framing this and talking to these people beforehand, that really, really makes all the difference in the world because then your circle has an understanding, right?
Like, if you’re gonna come over, you need to bring something. Bring me diapers, bring me food, or do something. Or you need to take something away. Take out the garbage, you know, knock down that pile of laundry, rotate things. Or you need to do something while you’re there, like rotating the laundry or starting the dishwasher or whatever it is. And then when people have that understanding, they jump right into action. And I can’t tell you what a game changer that is for moms.
Katie: Absolutely. And I guess kind of on a large scale, gone are the days when we lived in more tight knit communities and had sort of multi generations in one place. And I can certainly now having six kids myself, see the wisdom in that. And I am grateful, my parents do live close enough that we see them often, but like to your point, we now almost have to be much more intentional about creating that community, especially that support network postpartum, because it’s just, it’s not organically there necessarily like it used to be probably in previous generations. And I feel like another really important kind of point to tease apart about this is that idea of expectations, both the ones that are placed on moms and the ones often moms place on themselves. I know that was definitely a thing for me and that I think in many areas of life, often our source of suffering is our expectations in some form.
But in the US at least, it often seems like we’re kind of given this perception that by six weeks postpartum, when we have that followup visit, we’re supposed to be sort of back to normal, look normal, feel normal, have energy, and have figured out how to integrate this new baby into our life seamlessly.
And it seems like that is a very not beneficial expectation for women largely.
Brandy: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, I remember my six month appointment was essentially just like, what’s your plan for birth control? Okay, you’re cleared to have sex again. And like, that was it. And I was like, wait a minute, that is the farthest thing on my mind right now. So many other things that are more pressing right now.
Katie: Agreed. And I wonder if it’s like a thought experiment, since at the very least that feels like maybe for me it felt like, okay, maybe life, I’m starting to come back online a little bit at six weeks. Not that I’ve like fully figured this all out and I’m seamlessly back to normal. But it seems like maybe that would actually be a good point for women to, based on this conversation, start thinking about like analyzing, checking for, keeping a pulse on, if any of these sort of chronic things are occurring so they could be identified early.
Versus like for me with the autoimmunity, it took years actually to get a diagnosis and seemingly I could have maybe had a much gentler path had I figured out some of those things earlier. So since unfortunately this isn’t part of the mainstream experience, maybe and doctors aren’t necessarily just automatically helping women navigate this, what can we as women think through at that sort of six week mark or at any particular point of like, okay, these are things I could check into to be aware of, or just like keep a pulse on.
Brandy: One of the biggest things I think is that we have to give ourselves grace, number one, you know, which really is kind of the opposite of that expectation piece that we’re talking about. And then also, if you can keep a journal of your symptoms, that is so helpful because especially if your babies are young, you’re going to forget. You’re going to forget what you were feeling. And when I think back to being immediately postpartum, it’s such a blur and it will be a blur and so actually one of my favorite baby shower gifts to give is like a basket that has a water bottle and a journal and a pen and some chapstick and some snacks that has handles on it that you could literally just carry around with you all around your house because that’s what you’re doing.
You’re just, you’re nursing on the couch and then you’re taking a nap in the bed, like you’re just, you have your key areas of your house and you’re just kind of living there for those early weeks. But if you can journal your symptoms, that is so helpful to approach this a little bit more objectively. And we can notice like, okay, around, you know, six weeks, this was happening. Around 12 weeks, I was feeling this, or I was, feeling especially anxious this particular night and we can start drawing connections between the triggers and what’s actually going on because there are normal symptoms, especially in those early postpartum days and weeks that we can expect.
We’re going to expect a certain level of maybe pain or discomfort as our body is healing and shifting. We’re going to expect a certain level of hormonal shifts and the symptoms that can come with that. So there is some normal symptoms, but we need to be able to tease out where It crosses that line and is no longer normal.
And if you can journal that versus just telling yourself, you’re going to remember and you’ll just talk to your doctor about it at your appointment, it doesn’t work that way. And then once we can identify those symptoms that have crossed that line and are no longer normal, really feeling empowered about that and really advocating for yourself, making sure you’re getting the proper testing done, making sure you’re having people on your team that can help navigate that.
Because one of the biggest takeaways that I have for the moms that I work with now and the moms I work with now are not necessarily in the super early postpartum stage, but I want moms to know that they don’t have to settle. If you’re being told that this is just part of motherhood, that this is just how it is. I want to invite you to really question that because you don’t have to settle and you can find answers. And just because you haven’t found answers doesn’t mean that there are not answers. We just have to find them and they’re there and your journey of how you thought motherhood could, would, is gonna go doesn’t have to be a subversion of what you thought it would be.
Katie: I love that. And that’s a brilliant tip on journaling. I feel like that can actually be really helpful for anyone, but especially for moms, just to kind of keep a pulse of just those things that you mentioned. Like for me, I’ll even still do that, even though I don’t have new babies, but just kind of keep track of some metrics going on in my life because I noticed patterns in a way.
And to your point, even without newborns, I don’t remember all of those things. And in fact, this was a lesson I learned the hard way, but I think this is valuable across the board, not even just in health. But for moms, especially, is anything that we can take sort of out of our head, like managing in our head and put in the concrete on paper or where someone else can see it.
It also helps with that sort of emotional responsibility loop and us feeling the burden. At least what I noticed at one point was I was feeling really stressed at home, but I wasn’t feeling as stressed in work. And I kind of felt this friction and at one point even almost considered stopping Wellness Mama because I felt like I can’t keep up with business and home.
But what I realized in that was, I’m not stressed at work, but I am at home. Why is that? What’s the difference? And I realized at work there were systems and structure for everything. And to your point, I had a team, I had community. I wasn’t trying to manage everything in my head and do it all alone, but at home I was trying to cook and clean, and meal plan and manage the emotional lives and schedule of eight people all in my head.
And so I thought like, well, what if I could put some of that on paper? What if there were prearranged and figured out meal plans? What if there was preplanned times for all these things to happen within the home that wasn’t just managed in my head. And so I love that tip of journaling and I feel like for moms, it’s just a valuable idea to think of like what can I get out of my mental load and on to paper even if you’re still gonna do it. Taking it out of the open loop of your mind seemingly is also a great way to kind of help with the stress of that
Brandy: A hundred percent.
Katie: And i’m curious also like are there any preventative sort of proactive things that women can do either postpartum or just in general to kind of ward off some of these more chronic things that tend to develop?
Brandy: Yeah, so if we are getting ready to have a new baby and we’re pregnant, of course, you know, we need to make sure that we’re eating nutritious food. Of course, we need to make sure that we are sleeping well, that we’re moving our body, you know, that we’re getting our village mapped out and who that is. But one of the biggest things that I find is so helpful, not just for pregnant women and early postpartum, but we’re talking your kids are now like 5, 10, 15 years old. One of the best things that can really move the needle that is so accessible and easy to implement into your already normal schedule, whether it’s chaotic or not with kids, it usually leans towards that chaotic side, is really focusing on everything that you can do to sync up your circadian rhythm.
You know, I’m trained in nutrition. I have a doctorate degree in nutrition. I had the message of that food is medicine has been drilled into my head for over a decade now and I think that that’s true. And also the more we can sync up our circadian rhythm, honestly, I find the less the food matters, it kind of self corrects itself. And so what I’m talking about when I’m talking about syncing your circadian rhythm, I’m talking about really, you know, we have clock genes in our brain, we have photo receptors on our skin and in our eyes and on our digestive tract. And the more that we can tell those receptors and those genes what time of day it is, the easier everything downstream gets. It positively impacts our hormones and our neurotransmitters and our mental health and our digestion, everything downstream then becomes easier. And so getting that early morning sunlight when infrared light is the highest, you know, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes, If you’re going to be in front of a lot of screens and artificial blue light using protection against that. The sunset is also high in infrared and so if you can get outside again during that time of day. Putting your house into dark mode after the sun goes down. All of these things are essentially free or very low cost. They’re very accessible, and I mean, the sun is just right outside and all of these things that we can do to sync up our circadian rhythm.
And it’s not just exposure to light. It’s also timing of our food. It’s also eating locally and seasonally, because that food has the same light imprint that you do and you know, in your zip code in your area. But the more we can do around that, everything downstream just becomes easier and people are shocked at how fast it can move the needle.
Katie: I am so glad you brought that up. I think this is absolutely key, and it was a factor I did not get right for a really long time. I feel like I was a slow learner when it came to circadian health and emotional health. And I think for women, especially those two factors actually can often be our biggest needle movers, but they’re not always brought up in the mainstream conversation to your point.
Like we’re taught, we understand conceptually about food. We’re taught about that. We pay attention to food or supplements or whatever it may be, but I feel like these actually can be much bigger needle movers, especially that circadian aspect. And especially for moms, because I feel like sleep can be elusive, especially if you have little ones like that, you can’t always get perfect sleep, but you can do these things during the day to help support your circadian health, even when you are in those sort of less sleep phases of motherhood.
And what I noticed as I learned this, I think with my third child, I started really paying attention to this is the more I did those things because I had my kids in tow when I did these things. They also tended to sync up, their circadian rhythms got better. They slept better at night. So I think this is one that like has very positive ripples for the whole family, especially when the mom starts this trend, it like really does ripple through the whole house and can improve everybody’s sleep and everybody’s health.
And with like you, I agree I think light can be one of the biggest factors when it comes to health. And sadly, we sort of got the message over the past few decades to avoid the sun entirely. And I think it’s very much, there’s so much nuance to understand below that, that we’re missing out on these really valuable spectrums of light that are sort of actual messages for our cellular health because we’re afraid of the sun.
And to your point, all that, you know, red lights that we pay all this money to buy and have inside our house. That same spectrum of light is available outside all day, but especially sunrise and sunset and it’s free. And we can take our kids out there with us and just get that morning sunlight without having to buy any expensive supplements or biohacks or complicated things.
It’s nature is there. And I’m not going to remember the exact statistics, but the camping study looked at this, I think, and found that even just one week of being fully immersed in nature in the rhythms of natural light and without artificial light and screens that there were drastic changes in hormone health and in circadian rhythm.
And in fact, many sleep related issues resolved in the span of just a week when people became very attuned and in line with nature. And so not that we all need to go live in the woods for a week, but I think that really just sort of illustrates how much of a impact this can make when we sort of adopt this like light first, or at least aware of light patterns in our lives.
Brandy: Oh my gosh, it’s such a game changer. And it’s something that we can do. Like I love when there’s things that are so accessible and especially moms that are home with their kids where you have full control over your light environment where if you’re not in a workplace. Another thing is like matching your light to where the position of the sun is. And so if the sun is overhead, great. You know, have your overhead lights on. As the sun starts to change position and go down, it’s a good time to turn off those overhead lights and use peripheral lamps and lighting so that we match that positioning of the sun because our body is always trying to understand what time it is because that impacts really everything else downstream.
Katie: Yeah, agreed. And, I’m curious if there are any other factors that come up for you, or common things that can be supportive once people kind of dial in these sort of foundational things that we just talked about? Like, are there common, for instance, deficiencies that you see nutritionally in women after pregnancy?
Or are there other lifestyle factors that we can shift that are kind of in that category of high impact, but lower cost things?
Brandy: Yes. So in moms specifically, I see generally lower in B vitamins. Specifically B6 and B2 and also B1 as well. B2 is very crucial for cellular mitochondrial health. It’s a key component in that electron transport chain, which is how our bodies produce ATP and energy. And also, on that point, you know, everybody likes to talk about ATP and ATP gets all of the love and attention.
But during this process, we’re also producing water and that water that our cells make is a very special type of water. It has a special structure to it, and it’s able to increase our resilience so that we’re not as susceptible to bacteria, fungus, parasites, viruses, et cetera. And so all the things that are involved in supporting that electron transport chain are really important so that we can make sure that we’re getting those end products of ATP and water. And so B2 is really important in that process. Other nutrients, I would say, zinc, you know, trace minerals in general, omega 3s. And honestly in moms, it’s even just an increased need for just the macronutrients. You know, we like to talk about minerals, we like to talk about vitamins and micronutrients, but are you getting enough protein?
Are you getting enough fat? Or are you just eating the crust off of your kids leftover sandwich and calling it good, you know? And so a general like macro nourishment need across the board.
Katie: I think that’s another super valuable point. It seems like, especially in early motherhood, it’s easy to sort of undernourish yourself without realizing it. And this was actually another factor for me that took me a long time to really figure out. And then even once I figured it out, it took me a while to sort of deprogram what I had learned around it because postpartum I was trying to lose weight, so I was eating less.
And I realized over time that I had been under nourishing myself for so long that I was essentially sending constant stress signals to my body by not giving it enough nutrients. And as I started to understand this I kind of developed this theory of like nutrients and protein especially, but protein and micronutrients really being safety signals for the nervous system and that for women, especially it seems like we have a more narrow safety range than men for instance might and that if we are below or above that our body can feel stressed pretty easily. And so for me, it was like experimenting and learning to dial in actually nourishing my body enough and then trusting myself over time that I wasn’t going to gain weight by actually just eating the biologically appropriate amount of minimum nourishment that my body needed after years of undernourishing.
But I would love your take on that as well, like kind of how we can shift our mindset and or from a practical perspective, how do we best nourish ourselves in that postpartum period, especially when a lot of women are trying to lose weight as well, but our body even probably has an increased nutritional demand to recover from pregnancy.
Brandy: Yeah, so in the early postpartum period, I’m a big fan of outsourcing this if at all possible. And so maybe that looks like family members bringing over meals that are nourishing. Maybe that looks like a meal delivery service. Maybe that just looks like an app that will plan your meals for you. And you know, all you have to do is like put the shopping list into Instacart and have it delivered at your door. Anything that we can take off the mental load, I’m a huge fan of. And if, you know, paying for outsourcing for those type of tools is not an option, outsource it to your husband to your partner to your family members, have them take some of that burden off of you. That mental load, just take it off your plate because it’s like even just talking about it and thinking about doing this, it’s like I can feel my body being like, oh, how lovely to have somebody else handle that for me because we do, we just try to manage so many details in our head as moms. And so I’m a huge fan of delegation and outsourcing and not being afraid to ask. And just really, just getting that off your plate and not feeling guilty about it for one millisecond, you know, and then other things, practical things we can do.
Again, it goes back to like this reconnection with nature and the circadian rhythm piece, you know, while you’re outside getting that morning sun, if it’s not 10 degrees like it is at my house right now, if you could go out without your shoes on. We get electrons from the earth and electrons are what we use in that electron transport chain that I was just talking about. People like to think that we can only get electrons from food and that’s not true. We can get them from the earth, we can get them from our water. And so this is part of the explanation on why people can live, when they’re doing really extended fasts, because there’s other ways the body can get electrons. And so again, syncing up to that circadian rhythm, getting that energy from the earth can be hugely important as well. Now I’m not saying that we should be fasting and just going outside and calling it good when we’re caring for a newborn. I think that we’ll have a lot of opinions about fasting, but that’s another conversation.
But, anything that we can do also to increase nutrient density without necessarily having to increase volume. Because that’s the other thing, sometimes with hormonal shifts, maybe our appetite is changing. Maybe we don’t have time to sit down to a nice, lovely, like big bowl of of whatever nourishing foods we could put in there. And so what can we do that is in small amounts where we’re kind of like micro dosing these really important minerals and nutrients. So, you know, organ meat is very nutrient dense. You know there’s organ meat seasonings that you can get that are so easy. Just like if you’re going to have eggs, shake it on there and you’re just getting these little micro doses throughout the day that are truly amplifying the overall nutrient density of your meals that doesn’t take any extra time or effort or really, I mean, it’s a no brainer. It’s so easy to do now.
Katie: Such good tips. I’ve been putting lots of notes in the show notes for you guys listening on the go. That’s at wellnessmama. com. And I know we’re running out of time for this episode, but I know we’re going to get to also do a follow up episode that goes deep on what I feel like are some really trending topics right now that I’m excited to get your take on.
Which is things like the toxic burden of mold and metals and parasites, especially I’ve seen those all over social media right now. So you guys make sure to stay tuned for our next episode on that. But Brandy for today, thank you so much. We got into such important topics and I love your perspective on this.
Thank you so much for being here
Brandy: Thank you, Katie, for having me. This was a pleasure.
Katie: and thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the wellness mama podcast.
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