We had the chance to interview Suzanne Buchanan from Karat Internatural and Karat Communications. She is an expert in communications that helps businesses with their image in the community and is creating a business around health and nutrition to help people with chronic diseases. Knowing this area well is necessary as she has a rare chronic blood disease herself.
Life experiences leading to Health Wisdom
In her life experience, Suzanne has to deal with several challenges, and works hard to find natural solutions that help her live with her condition. She got to this after traditional medicine didn’t give her any hopes of living for long.
This is a common scenario with rare diseases that don’t attract investment from research and development in the health sector. There are too few people in the world afflicted with them to pay for treatment. In Suzanne’s case, there are only around 200 people in the world right now with the same condition as her.
We all know that natural solutions exist. Good nutrition is key to overcome many diseases, as most of them can be traced to what we feed our body with.
Processed food, artificial fertilizers, agro toxins, loads of hormones and even microplastic are hard to avoid today. Having good, natural nutrition that actually supports our bodies with what they need and helps them fight illnesses can be a life-saving change in anyone’s eating habits.
Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel to catch up with this conversation we had with Suzanne Buchanan. Below we’ll cover the main topics that we talked about in this interview. If you are interested in health and fitness and are on a journey of discovering this path yourself, enjoy.
What works on Fitness for Suzanne’s Health
Strategy is very important and then we go to back these strategies with experiences. Everybody is different and is unique. Experiment, pass through your “trials by fire” as Suzanne said. You go into a journey of self-awareness that will help understand what works for your body.
Don’t fall for solutions that are a good fit for everybody. There are things that are generally good, like honey is healthy and propolis is great to fight bacteria and fungi. You may react differently to each solution and something that might not give results to one person might be useful for you.
Conditions that a person has might impact your body in different ways, and it is important to understand your challenges and focus on overcoming them. Nutrition is important, and it is just one aspect of the overall picture that we take care of.
Where does fitness play in?
When we are talking about fitness we are not just talking about health for now but about longevity. It is important to analyze if in our rush to achieve results, are we damaging our bodies with too much pressure? Be intentional and have a vision for the future that we are pursuing. This has less to do with being thin, and more with cultivating habits that will maintain our body healthy in the long term. Suzanne refers to this as lifestyle engineering, and Michael calls being a self-actualized person.
Be mindful of routines and build little, simple, silly things designed in life to help be more fit and enjoy this journey. Suzanne, for example, commits to doing a few squats every time she goes to the fridge to get water. It is a simple commitment, and she ends up doing several squats during the day. People might see it and ask “What is going on there?” When you are aware of your purpose, of your vision, you remember that this habit. Habits compound the effect that will affect your health and bring longevity to your life.
Our goals can be our drivers for better Health
Going to the gym might not be your thing, yet we can find other enjoyments in this practice that will drive us. Meeting interesting people, being part of a community, having nice conversations that distract you from your routine. All this can help you to stick to these habits until they become something natural to your body.
Your goal can always be a drive, and usually, it is. Either way, it might be complicated to attach present time effort to long-term benefits. It is not easy to have a vision for the future and be emotionally attached to it enough for it to motivate you in the present. We crave immediate satisfaction, while fitness and nutrition rarely give us that.
This leads us to the conversation about grit. Cultivating health is not usually fun. Committing to any fitness goal can be very challenging and our body might not feel like it. Knowing when to pull back and when to commit all in is important. We need to be mindful and learn when our body needs some rest, some time to recover, and when it is time to go the extra mile.
After exercising these practices a while, we get to understand when our body needs this extra push and when it needs to rest. Doing the basics and learning to be consistent with it, you start to notice that things are very simple. Maintaining a healthy fitness routine and nutrition is not that difficult.
Places like Twitter can be great environments to find people that give tips on nutrition and fitness. Engage with a community that can motivate you into maintaining these habits. You will see meaningful results that will feed your motivation and excitement about these practices.
Simple best practices
Some simple guidelines we can all use in our nutrition is to maintain a diet of low carbs, low sugar, high protein, and high fat. By high fat, we mean natural fat. Nothing saturated, polyunsaturated, and no processed foods. Things like avocado fat, olive oil, coconut fat, butter, and other natural fats are actually healthy for you and will be important elements to our diets.
It is important to understand that there is nothing that fits everyone. Some people do well on an all plants diet, and others do not. Many even feel better from very different styles of diets like the carnivore diet that can help some individuals with autoimmune diseases. Again, it is a matter of exploring and finding the solution that best fits yourself.
We all have a complex biome going on in our bodies. Between the dozens of trillions of cells, each an individual organism that learned to live together. They each are programmed to act on different functions. Not only that, we have tons of bacteria and viruses that actually help us with the maintenance of our bodies.
Processed Foods
Processed foods that our body didn’t evolve to digest, and antibiotics, might greatly damage the healthy bacteria that we need in our bodies. This breaks the balance in our bodies and creates radical shifts around the food that our body needs to rebalance.
Our bodies do not feed on what we eat. It feeds on the product that is created after the bacteria in our guts digests the food we eat. What is left after these bacteria feed themselves are the proteins and enzymes that our body needs to absorb to survive. So if we damage this internal biome we have in us, we damage our capacity to absorb the nutrients necessary to maintain our bodies.
It might be beneficial to fast and give a break to our body to recover and renew this biome. For some there are benefits of resetting the balance we need to have proper digestion.
Your feedback
Listen to the full conversation with Suzanne, on our YouTube Channel. Thank you for reading this.
Feel free to share with us in the comments below the experiences. Have you had wins or challenges with health and fitness? What you have learned in your journey? We love to hear from you.
