Podcast Episode #218: All About Gut Health with Christa Orecchio

Get details on Christa's Gut Thrive in 5 program here! 

Special note! Christa is offering Balanced Bites Podcast listeners $200 off the program and $100+ off supplements now through November 30th! Use code BALANCEDBITES when you check out to get this amazing deal!

Topics:
1. What’s new for you from Diane [1:49] 2. Introducing our guest, Christa Orecchio [3:19] 3. Step 1 gut healing: slash inflammation [9:41] 4. Time-frame for healing the gut [17:14] 5. Step 2 gut healing: The pathogen purge [20:36] 6. Supplementation information for step 2 [25:40] 7. Step 3 gut healing: reseeding with probiotics [32:49] 8. Step 4 gut healing: HCl production [40:09] 9. Step 5 gut healing: 80/20 maintenance [45:42] 10. How do you know that you’re at the end? [48:32] [smart_track_player url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/balancedbites/21820final.mp3″ title=”#218: All About Gut Health with Christa Orecchio ” artist=”Diane Sanfilippo & Liz Wolfe ” color=”00AEEF” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ]

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Balance Bites: Episode #218: Gut Health with Christa Orecchio

You’re listening to the Balanced Bites podcast episode 218.

Welcome to the Balanced Bites podcast with Diane Sanfilippo and Liz Wolfe. Diane is a certified nutrition consultant, and the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Paleo, The 21-Day Sugar Detox, and co-author of Mediterranean Paleo Cooking. Liz is a nutritional therapy practitioner, and the best-selling author of Eat the Yolks and The Purely Primal Skincare Guide. Together, Diane and Liz answer your questions, interview leading health and wellness experts, and share their take on modern paleo living with their friendly and balanced approach. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only, and are not to be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Diane Sanfilippo: Welcome back to the show everyone! Today I’m really excited to bring back a special guest; Christa Orecchio. She has been on the show before, and you guys absolutely loved her, and I love chatting with her, so I can’t wait to get into my interview with her today. Before we do that, let’s hear a word from one of our sponsors.

Liz Wolfe: We love having Paleo Treats as a podcast sponsor. Not only are the founders, Nick and Lee, some of the original pioneers of the modern paleo movement, but Paleo Treats is also one of the FedEx top 10 small businesses in the US; and, they’ve got a high bar for taste. Paleo Treats make great gifts. We love the Mustang bar, the Bandito bar, and of course, the Cacao Now, Brownie Bomb, and the Mac Attack. Right now they’ll give you free shipping with any $99 order. Check them out http://www.paleotreats.com/.

1. What’s new for you from Diane [1:49]

Diane Sanfilippo: A few quick updates for you guys this week. I wanted to remind you that we have a special Instagram account for the podcast. It’s @BalancedBitespodcast. We wanted to make sure you guys had little tips from the week, quotes to inspire you throughout the week, a heads up on what’s coming next, a little flashback in case you missed one of our episodes and we talked about something you would love to hear about; head over to Instagram and follow us @BalancedBitespodcast.

Also, a couple of quick notes here. The new website for DianeSanfilippo.com, BalancedBites.com, however you want to access it, it is live. It’s probably about 98% good to go, so if you guys are surfing over there, check things out. If you find a link that’s broken, if you see something that’s not working, feel free to shoot an email to [email protected], let us know. But I would love for you guys to check out the new website, search through recipes, and Practical Paleo Quick and Easy is available right from the home page. You can click “yes send it to me” and we will send you Practical Paleo Quick and Easy. That’s totally free.

I also have Practical Paleo Holiday for $4.99 if you go to BalancedBites.com/ebooks, you can grab that as a PDF for $4.99. It will get you through Thanksgiving and Christmas. Or you can grab it for $2.99 on kindle; obviously that one is not printable, but whatever format you like best we have that for you. So check it out.

2. Introducing our guest, Christa Orecchio [3:19]

dcDiane Sanfilippo: Ok, my guest today is Christa Orecchio. Christa is a clinical and holistic nutritionist, and founder of the Whole Journey, a private nutrition practice and informational website established to help people live healthier, happier, and more energetic lives through whole food nutrition, quality supplementation, and healthy lifestyle guidance. Her goal is to holistically heal chronic health conditions from the root cause, in lieu of addressing individual symptoms. She also focuses on elements that nourish other than food including honest and open relationships, a meaningful spiritual practice, a career or creative outlet that inspires, and physical activity that is enjoyable.

Christa is also the creator of Gut Thrive in Five, a powerful gut and immune healing program that over 3,500 people have gone through in the last 12 months. That is amazing. Christa also has a TEDx video, which we’ll link you guys to in the show notes where you could search her name through TEDx, I’m sure on YouTube and their website. But welcome back to the show, I’m so excited to chat with you today!

Christa Orecchio: I always love chatting with you, Diane! Thanks for having me.

Diane Sanfilippo: Fellow New Jersey native, right?

Christa Orecchio: Uh-huh, yep.

Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}

Christa Orecchio: Jersey girls!

Diane Sanfilippo: With our crazy long last names.

Christa Orecchio: {laughs} I know. I know.

Diane Sanfilippo: So, welcome back to the show. I know you want to talk today about Gut Thrive in Five and your 5 steps that you have for folks to learn about gut health. We have so many questions, and I know you and I were just talking before the show, as you talk about this process that you’re going to explain to people, you’ll probably be answering a huge number of the questions that we got submitted, so we’ll try and dabble back and forth as we go through some of these steps, and address some of the questions that people had. But I would love for you to just start talking about it, and start teaching away.

Christa Orecchio: Yeah, exactly! So I think that’s why, if we go through these 5 steps it’s really going to pull an entire picture together, because I want your listeners to understand gut health and healing, whole body healing really from a totally different perspective. And then we can feed in the questions and you can see how they were answered.

But what we’re talking about today, Diane, is this is an approach to gut healing that I’ve developed really in the last 18 months, and it’s to heal from a genetic perspective. And there are 5 steps, but before I actually get into those, I just kind of want to define the gut. Because we hear about that all the time, and we’re used to either dealing with a bug, like in our world, the natural world we hear about Candida, right? You and I have talked a lot about that. Or we hear about H. pylori or we hear about a bug that’s responsible for an issue, or we hear about leaky gut, we hear about diseases and disorders. In western medicine, we have labels, like IBS and Crohn’s.

So what I want to do is kind of remove everything you’ve ever heard before about that, and even removing the symptoms, and we’re going to approach the gut from a genetic perspective, from what’s called the microbiome. So that’s the world inside of your gut, and we define it as the collective genetic material of all the organisms, good, bad, indifferent. Whether they be protozoa, parasites, yeast, bacteria, all the microorganisms within a certain area; so the combined genetic material.

So what I’m going to talk you through are 5 steps to take that combined genetic material and flip it to be super positive in a way that it contributes to your health for decades to come, because it reinforces the immune system and reeducates the immune system, so you become like Fort Knox from the inside out? Does that make sense?

Diane Sanfilippo: I love that. That’s awesome. Yes!

Christa Orecchio: That’s like really power we’re doing; like Gut Thrive in Five, I have been eating, sleeping, breathing this stuff for the last year, taking so many people with a lot of chronic problems through this program. So what we want to do, most people, let’s say they’re 70-80% “bad guys” right, and then the rest of it is good, and we really need to flip that so that we have 80% really good positive microorganisms, symbiotic microorganisms that are there for your highest good, and the rest of them, they can be pathogenic because they’ll challenge and inform your immune system, and keep it strong and on its toes.

So if we can do that; if we can heal what’s called the gut microbiome, that’s the foundation of human health, and that from everything else starts to heal from there. Because we have 6 other microbiomes within the body; the skin, a lot of questions coming in on Instagram. If you heal the gut will that help eczema, will that help psoriasis, will that help dandruff? If you heal the gut, then the body is smart enough to take that genetic code and replicate it to the other microbiomes. So that’s why when you heal the gut, skin issues go away. Or when you heal the gut, chronic sinus problems go away. Chronic asthma or lung conditions go away. You heal the gut, vaginal yeast infections go away for the long term, because now the body says, oh thanks, I get this whole new operating system and I can apply it everywhere else, and that’s why this is such an important topic, because it is literally reversing disease and symptoms that people have lived with forever left and right.

Diane Sanfilippo: I feel like you’re just about to blow everybody’s minds right now, because this is just a huge different way of looking at things. We’ve been looking at things from simply an inflammatory perspective for a long time, and this is kind of the foundation of; so many people are like, well how come this person can eat that food and have no problems and this person can’t?

Christa Orecchio: Yeah!

Diane Sanfilippo: You know, like what is it that… we’re all human, we all have the same; we’re all made of the same stuff, sort of, and then what you’re saying is this whole area of our being, this basically bacterial balance, or these colonies in us are where we’re so different, and that’s happened. I think a lot of that has changed in the last 30-50 years that we’ve all become so different in the way that our bodies handle all the different things that we take in, whether it’s food, medication, or whatnot.

3. Step 1 gut healing: slash inflammation [9:41]

Diane Sanfilippo: So I would love to hear what the 5 steps are, and also kind of along the way, if you think of things that are just hot topics that are out there, like people are asking questions about FODMAP sensitivities, or as you mentioned skin issues, or hormonal issues. Just kind of touching on how this reaches to all these different things so we can address a lot of those questions just balled up in the explanation.

Christa Orecchio: 100%. I see a lot of FODMAP, SIBO questions, and that was really 30-35% of our Gut Thrivers, so I’m really familiar with that. And you’re 100% right that in the 30 years, this has changed so much. Because stress affects your gut bacteria dramatically. GMOs affect your gut bacteria dramatically. Things have changed so much; EMFs, all that stuff. So we really, this is a new model for cellular healing that we’re working with now.

So, the first step to healing the gut is to slash inflammation, which you mentioned, and we do that with diet and we do that with the right supplements. Right? Because so many people that come to both you and I, they’ve got raging food sensitivities. They’ve got a lot of questions about what can they eat, or they’re almost painted into a corner, where even if they’re eating paleo autoimmune, there are still foods that aren’t working for them, or they’re developing new sensitivities on the regular. So we have to take the fuel off the fire, and that’s definitely step one.

The way that we do that, it’s almost like taking a vacuum cleaner to a very inflamed; if you think of the small intestine that’s inflamed, we want to take a vacuum cleaner and start cleaning it up. Start getting rid of the loose pebbles and things like that, and get to where we can. So we remove the 5 most common food sensitivities, which are gluten, dairy, corn, soy, and some people can handle eggs if they’re pasture raised, so that’s kind of, a lot of people can handle those.

Obviously we’re getting all sugar out, we’re mitigating caffeine, we’re eliminating alcohol, things that thin the lining of the gut. Keep in mind, this is a 10-week healing process that contributes to a different genetic code going forward, so it’s worth it to take a break from these things for this amount of time, as you start to heal. And then we’re adding in the most powerful anti-inflammatories, and I like to use food as medicine wherever possible. So I’m using things like cumin, coriander, and fennel tea, because what we want to do is, you have this inflamed state.

Now you look at your digestive anatomy, so to speak, and they’re tired, and they’re sore, and they need a break. We need to send them on vacation, right? So we’re talking about the liver and the gallbladder and the parietal cells within the stomach. We want to give the pancreas a break, so we basically send them all to Hawaii, say we’ll take over your job for a while, get restored and when you come back to work, everything works much better. That’s the goal when we start off with slashing inflammation.

So we’re using food based ways to give enzymes. Cumin will train the pancreas to start producing more of its own enzymes, for example. And we’re also using digestive enzymes to cover all those bases and support all of those organs and all of the cells, all of the enterocytes within the stomach lining, so that the body doesn’t have to do it. We want it to come back full throttle.

And then we add in things, like turmeric; I have a turmeric ginger lemonade with a pinch of black pepper that everyone is having throughout. If it’s cold weather they’re drinking it hot, if it’s warm weather they’re drinking it cold. We are slashing information really every step of the way throughout our meal plans, and then they start to change, and we add healthy fats and oils, only pasture raised proteins, the right types of vegetables. The right type of fiber; when we talk about SIBO and FODMAPs, a lot of people can’t handle any fiber because they bloat up like a balloon, so it has to be healing fibers that we add in to cut inflammation.

But then the supplements are also super important, because not only are we using digestive enzymes to give the liver, and the pancreas, and the stomach a break, we’re also using something called proteolytic enzymes, which I know that you’ve heard of and probably have used before. Proteolytic enzymes are whole body enzymes, so they work outside of the digestive system. Because if you have leaky gut, things are leaking out of the lining of the small intestine, directly into the bloodstream, most of the time going directly to the brain. So we need to go in; and your body is tired. We have to clean up the blood. And proteolytic enzymes are going to digest foreign proteins that are in your body where they don’t belong. They’re a pretty magical part of the cleaning process.

And then we also use something called hydrolytic enzymes, and that’s just a fancy word for an enzyme that uses water to break apart a chemical bond. So now that we’ve talked about all of these organisms that are in the gut, we know, and like you were saying Diane, science has evolved a lot. In the last 10-15 years, we were absolutely certain that we were wrong before. We thought that bacteria and these organisms did not have the ability to form colonies, and now we know that couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re a lot like humans; they want to live together, they want to form communities, they want to feel safe, they want to build a house.

So you’ve got bacteria living together with a heavy metal, living together with a protozoa, and they build a house or a fort called a biofilm. So in the beginning, when we slash inflammation, we have to gently start to take away the fort that they’ve built. Because we want to make the environment inhospitable for them to stay in, so that eventually our goal is that they leave on their own. This program is the most gentle thing out there because of our approach, but it also makes it super powerful.

So we use those enzymes, and we really start to get it going with diet, but I always like to prepare my people in the first week of getting started to really lift up and build their liver, their adrenals, and their thyroid so that they have the wherewithal for the journey ahead. So I’m using things like desiccated liver, along with the protocol, and we’re really giving things like triphala that nourish and support the lining of the intestine to kind of set them up well for the journey ahead. So that’s step one in a nutshell.

Diane Sanfilippo: That’s definitely a big step, and I think even leading into what you’re talking about with this step 1, because obviously there are going to be folks who are listening who, they know they need to tackle your program because they’re in it, and this is the answer for them. But even for people who are like, ok I’m not sure if I need to go that far, it sounds like there are a lot of things that people can honestly start doing to find out if they’re going to feel better from some of these changes or even to just get themselves kicked off, maybe if they’re curious about the program before they get into it, eliminating the foods that you talked about or maybe adding in some of the things that you mentioned nutritionally to just start supporting the body to move in that direction.

Christa Orecchio: Absolutely. Any of your listeners could sit with a pen and a pad and listen to this, and come up with 50 recommendations they could take immediately into their life after listening, and see if really they wanted to put it all together comprehensively.

4. Time-frame for healing the gut [17:14]

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, and we do have some questions too, I know what you’re talking about with your program is a 10-week program, but people are curious too, how long does it take for the gut to heal, or is it something that it totally varies and depends on each person. I remember back in nutrition school years ago that it takes about 2 weeks for sometimes the cells of the gut to regenerate, something to that effect, but is this something that does really take a certain amount of time, or can it take longer than 10 weeks; what’s the story there?

Christa Orecchio: Yeah, the answer is it depends. And it’s based upon the level of nutrition, the level of health, the level of the strength that you come to the program or you come to gut healing from. Rome wasn’t built nor destroyed in a day; neither was our gut health, so has this been building for 10 or 20 years? How far down the autoimmune cascade is someone? Most of the time, if you have one autoimmune disease, you probably have two or three, and so the answer is it depends.

Most of the people coming to us, they get dramatic healing within 10 weeks, but it’s the equivalent of; let’s say having a cast and taking it off. You shouldn’t go run a marathon when you take the cast off of your leg. So probably another 4 months or so you’re going to be doing something, which I’m going to talk about, which is terraforming, which is the equivalent of physical therapy to get the gut back really strong to create, like I said, Fort Knox from the inside out. At this point, you’ve done your reading, you’ve planted your seeds, you’ve laid the garden, and then you’ve got to give it time to really let those seeds bloom and turn into flowers.

So yeah, you should get dramatic effects. If you come in as a generally healthy person, you’ll feel like superhuman, right?

Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}

Christa Orecchio: But if you’re coming in and you’ve got this long history, you’ve got to give it time. Not to say you won’t feel 50% better, right, after 10 weeks. We’ve got so many of those people, but I’m saying, until you really hit that; I believe the body is built to adapt and survive. It’s much stronger than we get it credit for, and to hit that stride it usually takes, you know, 4-6 months in total.

Diane Sanfilippo: I think that’s good information to have in the sense that I think so many times people think that everything can heal in such a short amount of time. We have so many; you know, I have a 21-Day Sugar Detox, so people think 21 days, and it will be the end of my everlasting struggling with sugar.

Christa Orecchio: {laughs}

Diane Sanfilippo: Which is not always the case, same thing with any 30-day challenge, or whatever we might have out there. It’s not to say that the amount of time we put people through a program is the end all, be all of their journey and their healing, but also I think it’s honestly great to tell people that it can take that long, and you do need to give your body sort of an amount of gentle care after this healing process. And hearing 4 months, or whatever the amount of time might be after healing to kind of ease yourself back into some things; I think people really need to hear that, because everybody is always trying to hear about a quick fix and understanding that we need to nourish ourselves, and be kind, and take the time to get back to whatever healthy place we’re going to be, I just think that’s really important to hear.

5. Step 2 gut healing: The pathogen purge [20:36]

Diane Sanfilippo: So, ok; what’s step 2?

Christa Orecchio: Absolutely. Step two is the pathogen purge. {laughs} because now we’ve got all these organisms, right, and we have to get them out of the body. And Diane, this is the pathogen purge of all pathogen purges.

Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} So nerdy.

Christa Orecchio: {laughs} I know, it’s like the coolest thing. You’re going to geek out on this just as much as I do, because it’s so powerful. First of all, I want to backtrack, because you did read, when you were reading my bio, health is not just about the physical for me. It’s about the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual. And really, how do we have peace from within. That’s what really is going to help to change the world, and your relationships and what you do in your life.

We have 10 times more microbial cells than we do human cells, and so the idea is up until, I would even say 2000, we’ve had this war. It’s been open warfare in the microbiome. It’s been open warfare against bugs, but what about a new approach? What about creating harmony between the human world and the microbial world. I’ll tell you, you create that type of harmony, you have peace within, you have peace without, because they’re really running the show, not us.

So, that being said, pathogens, they have the ability to form colonies, and now we know we can’t just hit them. The traditional way is, let’s bomb them with antibiotics. But also in a lot of ways, a lot of the naturopathic way or even the functional medicine way can be to hit them really hard with botanicals and antipathogenics, so it’s that kill, kill, kill mentality, right?

And we know that during war times, if you’re going to bomb, then you’re going to kill innocent civilians, and in this case you’re going to kill that good gut bacteria that’s been with you for a really long time that knows you, that can contribute to your lasting health. And just the way bombs destroy the land, you’re going to make that leaky gut or intestinal permeability worse. And so even just one full spectrum round of antibiotics, or really, really heavy on the botanicals for a while, that can do that. And we kind of want to end the war and work with these guys instead of against them.

So now we know that pathogens have the most intricate communication system, they’re more advanced than we are because they talk through basically cell phone technology. So if you were to call me on my cell phone, I don’t have to answer the phone, I just looked and say your name, I knew everything that you wanted to tell me and everything you felt about it. It’s like a USB port from your head to mine, right? That’s how pathogens can communicate. So what we go in and do is we go in and take away their cell phones and we clip the cell phone towers, basically, the wires so they can no longer communicate. If they can no longer communicate, they can no longer share their genetic code and replicate to keep you sick. So we start tipping the terrain.

And then we use a lot of different really powerful botanicals that work off of different parts of whether it’s protozoa formulas, whether it’s parasite, whether it’s yeast, fungus, mold, bacteria, all the different types of bacteria, and we keep it all under the threshold so we don’t do that bombing attack, right? We just go in and we interrupt the way they communicate, we gently chase them back. We’ve already started to create an environment in step one that they really don’t want to be in anymore. It’s like when you gentrify a neighborhood, and then all of a sudden things just start to shift on their own.

So that’s the power of this pathogen purge, because you cannot just address one thing, you have to address everything. Where there’s a yeast, there’s a heavy metal. Where there’s a bacteria with SIBO, a lot of times I’ve found there’s a protozoan infection that’s underneath the SIBO. You treat the SIBO until the cows come home, and then it just comes back because you haven’t taken care of the underlying protozoan infection. So these are the things where we’re really addressing it all at once.

We have our people fill out an assessment; it took us 2 years in clinical trials to make this assessment as accurate as lab work to where they’re getting put into one of four buckets towards what their heaviest pathogenic bent is within their unique body.

So that’s the power of the pathogen purge; we are doing this in the most gentle way possible, and 85% of our 3500 people who have gone through this only experienced mild die-off. Because this is scary to go through this, especially if you’ve been sick. Especially if you’ve had autoimmune diseases or genetic mutations where you can’t detox, and then all of a sudden you take a little bit and you go down for a week. We know people still have to take care of their kids, or go to work, or run their businesses. So it’s just really a new way of, honestly, respecting the bugs. It’s like, go live somewhere else, this isn’t the place for you anymore.

Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} The slow steady push out.

Christa Orecchio: Right!

6. Supplementation information for step 2 [25:40]

Diane Sanfilippo: So I know you mentioned in step 1, just to give people some of the insight and tips that they can get takeaways from this episode, you mentioned in step 1 that it’s a lot about changing nutrition, removing certain things, and then adding some powerful things in. And then in step 2, what are some of the things that they might come in contact with, or they might start learning about in terms of the antimicrobials and all of that? I know you’ve talked in the past about oregano and olive leaf and all that good stuff. What are some of the things that are involved in this stage that people are pretty familiar with or that they can do some research on their own, as well, to get information about?

Christa Orecchio: Absolutely. So based upon, you know I’m all about food is medicine, right? So the meal plans are changing for each step based upon what we’re working on. So everyone in this step is doing my cleansing cilantro-oregano pesto, which is powerful food as medicine. Antimicrobial, antifungal, antiviral, and then the cilantro is the single best food to help start to get heavy metals out of the body.

Let’s say people who are put on our plan P, for parasites and protozoa, they are doing a lot of raw sprouted pumpkin seeds, pomegranate seeds, and papaya, the things to help purge worms from the system. No one is really doing fermented foods until we get to step 3 or 4; that’s where I differ from a lot of other perspectives. So we’re adding in all the different types of dietary antipathogenics. So where some people are making their garlic paste, some people are using rosemary and thyme.

We also do a 4 day bone broth fast during the pathogen purge to starve those sugar-producing bacteria, and we have 3 different variations, especially for those who have histamine intolerance. While they’re still healing, maybe broth isn’t the best thing for them. So we’re have different variations or vegan variations, but it’s really those 4 days to really hit it hard to starve that bacteria so that you have a leg up and you can get rid of them much quicker as you move into the next couple of weeks of the purge.

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Diane Sanfilippo: You’re like a gut encyclopedia over here.

Christa Orecchio: {laughs} It’s so fascinating to me, it really is. You just see people change, you know. It’s like a plant that’s been watered when they go through a process. It’s like, you know, I’ve been doing this work for 10 years. The steps have to be sequential, they have to build upon each other to be permanent. Just seeing this all kind of fall into place like a puzzle piece has been really exciting for me over the last 12-18 months.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.

Christa Orecchio: We can really shift health care with this idea, we really can.

Diane Sanfilippo: I think also so many people end up; and we’ll get to step 3 in a second, I don’t want to lose our place, but so many people end up trying things kind of willy-nilly, or trying something for a week or two weeks or even a month, just trying something, or feeling so frustrated that they’re going to a practitioner and kind of doing a million types of tests and trying to figure everything out in a super expensive route one on one at the practitioner.

I feel like the real upside of being able to create programs that can help a lot of people at once is that after helping people individually when you notice patterns like this, and I know a lot of practitioners who are kind of this far into their careers, we both know a lot of them who create programs because they’ve worked with so many people, and they’re like, this is what I see working 99 if not 100% of the time, and I can categorize people and say this is what’s going to help each of them.

Like you just said, putting people into 4 different buckets with the pathogen purge. It’s like, after so much time you don’t need to be holding people’s hand one at a time, and also having it cost them that much to work with you. It’s like, we can do this on a broader scale. I mean that’s why even putting out books that people can follow because we know this kind of information can help people, they can help themselves, and I don’t know. I love that. I think that’s one of the most exciting things about the combination of where natural health and functional medicine is going in combination with internet based information that we can reach and help so many people that are ready to help themselves, and provide this kind of foundation that is just not really out there in medicine or in nutrition yet.

Christa Orecchio: Yeah. I could not agree with you more. And it’s like, we’ve had people in Australia say; thank god for this program, my functional medicine doctor doesn’t even understand this way of practice, or doesn’t have this. And it’s an alternative thing. And you’re right, when you’ve been practicing for a long time, and the one on one feels like putting a piece of bubblegum in a sinking ship. It’s like, this needs to get out and these people can get helped. How could you create something that saves people the one on one and the lab work? It’s challenging but I think we’ve got it.

We had 92% of our group surveyed said it was better or as effective as working with a private practitioner, and then our customer service team can help customize along the way. And that’s the thing; when you create online programs you don’t want people to just sign up. You want it to change their lives. How do you keep them engaged and customizing based upon how they’re reacting along the way. I think that’s really important in the online world.

Diane Sanfilippo: I love that. I think at some point I’m going to make you come onto my business podcast so we can talk about all of that, as well, from the business side of things. Because people who are working to create programs need to hear how important the support is, and building that into what you’re doing and not having it be such an afterthought that many people might have, knowing how critical it is to fully support people through anything that you’re going to present to them, you know?

Christa Orecchio: Oh yeah, they need to know they can reach out, and there’s a live person there, and it’s going to direct them the right way.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, especially in the health field. I mean, our health is such a delicate topic, and being there to support people is such an emotional boost and just a security.

7. Step 3 gut healing: reseeding with probiotics [32:49]

Diane Sanfilippo: Alright, what’s step 3 in the process?

Christa Orecchio: Ok, so now we have done slashing inflammation, we’ve pulled out the weeds so to speak with the pathogen purge, and now the strategy shifts, and now we have to do what’s called the reseeding, which is where probiotics come in, and healing of the leaky gut.

So what we do here is we use anywhere from 11 to 13 different strains of very specific probiotics to start to take care of the gut healing process, but a lot of people think; oh, I only did a pathogen purge for 3 or 4 weeks, I’m not done purging; and yeah, that’s right, you’re not, but now the strategy shifts, because the good bacteria can go to bat and they can start to convert the bad bacteria.

Because here’s the thing; we hear a lot about good bacteria, symbiotic, or we hear a lot about bad, pathogenic. What we don’t hear a lot about are the neutral guys; the commensal bacteria. Commensal bacteria, they’re taking up space. And if they’re taking up space, they had better contribute to the greater good, right? So we look at these guys. They’re like impressionable teenagers, and they’re going to take the shape, or they’re going to take the qualities of whatever influence is exerted upon them. So we use these really superstar probiotics in different strains to exert positive influence; make them good pillars of society to stay and contribute to lasting gut health. And that’s the problem; the longer you don’t take care of this, the more the bad guys influence them, right, and turn them on the wrong path.

So we kind of use it like a starter log. And just like we’re giving under the threshold botanicals in the pathogen purge to allow your body to say hey, I like this one genetically, I like that one, and it will use one, two, three, five more than it will use the others. In this way, we use a low dose of these probiotics and then work up because based upon where we’re originally from genetically; Asia, Africa, you and I Italy, right? We have anywhere from 150 to 500 strains of bacteria, of probiotics, that are inherent to our microbial makeup that can keep us healthy.

Science, nutrition, we can never recreate those strains, ever, if we tried. So what we do is we use different strains of lactobacillus, different strains of bifidobacterium, different strains of bacillus based upon what plan people are in and how they’re reacting along the way as a starter log, and then start to train their body as they’re healing the gut through this idea of terraforming as they heal to learn, be so smart, now you go make those extra 100, 2, 3, 500 strains of bacteria that you need to be superhuman from the air that you breathe and the water you drink, and the food that you eat. That’s why you and I, Diane, can have the same meal and maybe I make completely different strains of bacteria out of mine than you do. So this is the customization along the way.

I don’t know, do you want me to kind of go into the probiotic strategy of what does what?

Diane Sanfilippo: I think that would be really awesome for people to hear, because I feel like people get really confused about probiotics. Do they need every type, do they need something that has 10 different types of different bacteria, do they need to really just focus on one? Yeah, I think people are super confused about that and would love to hear a little more detail on it.

Christa Orecchio: Good. It’s so overwhelming right now. I’m looking at somebody, like a comment here on the Balanced Bites podcast about probiotics cause bloating. Sometimes you’re not sure if you’re ready for them, or sometimes you have to have them be done in soil versus another way. So, good, let’s do it!

I’m going to go back to the military analogy because it works so well with probiotics. We need to have 2 to 3 different strains of the lactobacillus. We’ve all heard of acidophilus, and whenever you’re having fermented veggies, the raw sauerkraut, thinks like that, that’s what you’re getting. You’re getting lactobacillus. And because we want to get rid of fermentation in replace of oxygen in the GI tract before we add in the fermented foods, we’re using probiotics first to see how the body does before we add in fermented foods.

So lactobacillus, if this were a military analogy, they’re like the soldiers, and their job is to shepherd out bad bacteria from the body. Kind of escort them out, right. One by one, so to speak, get them out of the body which is why it’s really important that eventually in the long term we’re consuming these fermented vegetables to continue that process. The other thing they do, and this is how they can inform the immune system, is let’s say they’re shepherding out a bad bacteria, and it’s kind of questionable; it could be commensal, almost, that’s just now taking a bad influence. Then we can kind of, it’s like taking a prisoner of war, a POW, that’s been turned or converted. So it will take that bacteria, it will show it to the immune system, and it will say; here, this is what my country is planning, right? It will say here, this is my genetic code, so now you know what we’re planning, so now you can develop whatever antibodies you need to keep your people safe. It’s the coolest thing in the world. So that’s the lactobacillus strain.

Then you have the bifidobacterium, and they’re kind of like the army corps of engineers. They’re the guys with the boots on the ground. They’re going to go patch up the lining of the small intestine and help heal leaky gut and contribute to long term gut health. It’s like, if the lining of your intestine is a brick wall, your small intestine, and the mortar is missing because you have leaky gut, they’re going in there with mortar and they’re going to patch it up. You really need two to three strains of bifidobacterium.

And then we have the heavy hitters; we use either one or two different strains of bacillus and bacillus is really powerful. It’s like a navy seal or an army ranger or like a sniper, you know. Those guys, it’s like a different species of human. They are not concerned with their own safety, with their own comfort, in any way, shape, or form. So bacillus can live with or without air, it’s like it can withstand the harsh stomach acid, and it’s going to be there to kick out any of the bad guys or any virulent pathogens that it’s going to fight, bacillus is going to be really important. Especially important for those who, if you’ve been exposed to a food sensitivity that you’ve eaten when you’ve eaten out, that and HCl are going to be your best defense to make sure you don’t get Montezuma’s revenge, or you don’t get a parasite, or anything like that.

So those are the three specific strains, but there are a lot of different types of those strains, if that makes sense.

Diane Sanfilippo: Totally. That is an awesome way of explaining it, and I feel like now people will look at the labels on their probiotics totally differently.

Christa Orecchio: Yeah. Yeah, and knowledge is power. We’re in the age of the internet, we have to become our own best doctor, and this is the body you were born inside of, so you need to know these things before you put things in your body, I think it’s fantastic.

Diane Sanfilippo: Awesome. I think that will answer a lot of the questions we had about probiotics and why some things work for some people and not for others, as well as the question about fermented foods. Because we had a lot of similar questions, and I think that really covers it.

8. Step 4 gut healing: HCl production [40:09]

Diane Sanfilippo: So why don’t we talk about what step 4 is?

Christa Orecchio: Yeah. Real quick, because there are so many SIBO/FODMAPs questions.

Diane Sanfilippo: Oh yeah, yep.

Christa Orecchio: This is, does the groundhog see it’s shadow, type of a step for these people. Are you ready? Because you have too much bad bacteria, you’re in the habit of converting good bacteria to bad bacteria, so what we’re really doing is making sure that the body is ready and you’ve done enough healing in step 2 to be able to proceed to step 3, and that’s really important. The things that we do, we’re really careful with the carbohydrates that we’re giving, like I said, and the fibers, and our people are doing salt flushes for especially SIBO to keep all the bacteria moving down and out. Because we know that it starts to pop back up when we have SIBO issues. So that’s something that’s really important, you go slow, and that is highly customized as you go. So that just needed to be said, because you don’t want to undo the good work you did by adding in too many probiotics too soon.

Step 4 is the HCl evaluation and terraforming. Like we were talking about Diane, in the beginning of my practice, I took a lot of people through step 1, 2, and 3, and I never even thought to take them through step 4, so they weren’t safeguarded for the future. So the saying, good fences make good neighbors, and hydrochloric acid is the best defense against pathogens, especially bacteria like H. pylori or parasites coming into our body and staying in our body to kill it right away.

So the vast majority of people, if you have rosacea, you have skin issues, you have constant bloating, you have brain fog, you’re not producing enough HCl. The vast majority of the people I see questions here about acid reflux and GERD, they actually have low stomach acid, and then they’re on proton pump inhibitors to further try to get rid of acid, and it’s actually making the problem worse. So what we do here is we evaluate the amount of HCl our Gut Thrivers are producing. And you guys can do this with something called the HCl challenge, where you take a Betaine HCl pill 20 minutes before your heaviest meal, and you wait to see if you get a burning sensation. If you get a burning sensation, that means you’re already producing enough HCl, and you’re good to go.

The vast majority of people are not going to get a burn, they’re going to have to work up; two, three, four, five. We’ve had people go all the way up to 19 HCl pills until they get a burn, which says they were virtually not producing it at all. And then you continually train your body about the amount it needs to produce, and you consistently back off on HCl by one a meal, and you kind of follow the burn down until it goes away, and the body is trained. That’s one technique we have.

Sometimes HCl for people who have had ulcers or gastroparesis, that’s just going to be too harsh, and we do a lot of food as medicine with building HCl with raw apple cider vinegar, and we make what’s called a ginger pickle where we use fresh ginger root with the juice of a lemon and Himalayan pink salt, and we pickle it, and then have them take that before meals in certain amounts to train and tonify the body to make its own HCl. Sometimes that’s the game changing step for people.

Now, the parietal cells are the cells in the stomach that product hydrochloric acid. They also produce something called intrinsic factor, which is responsible for us absorbing our vitamin B12. If you’re not absorbing your vitamin B12, you have energy issues, adrenal issues, neurological problems. This is when people think; oh, the brain fog is starting to go away. It’s the really cool aspect, is to get the HCl online.

Diane Sanfilippo: Pete’s Paleo is a friend of the Balanced Bites podcast. They’re bacon is insanely delicious, and sugar free, and their premade paleo meals make your life so much easier when everything is getting busy and getting real food on the table is still a top priority, as it should be. Pete’s Paleo is now offering a 30-day gut healing kit containing bone broth, gelatin gummies, instant organic soup packs, and an E-cookbook. It’s the perfect complement to any anti-inflammatory diet. Get yours today at www.guthealingkit.com. Use code GRABACUPPABROTH to get $25 off; that’s an amazing deal. It’s GRABACUPPABROTH, C-U-P-P-A. And you can grab that code any time at www.BalancedBites.com to just read and make sure you’re typing it in right. You can also use code BALANCEDBITES to get $5 off any of their regular meal plans. Check out www.PetesPaleo.com today. Pete’s Paleo; bringing fine dining to your cave.

Diane Sanfilippo: I love that. I think a lot of people are totally unsure of how to figure out if their stomach acid is sufficient, or how to figure out how to get it working again. And I think people get nervous about supplementing, because they think if they supplement then they’ll always be reliant on the supplements, and I think that’s a great way to teach them how to supplement, but also how to scale back from it as well.

Christa Orecchio: Yeah, everything about this process; my work in general, and Gut Thrive, is to create that self sufficiency so you don’t need supplements really after this. You don’t have to rely on them, because now your gut bacteria is working for you. It’s producing the majority of your B-vitamins, some fatty acids, vitamin K2. You know, you’re really this kind of self supporting system where you don’t need supplements anymore.

9. Step 5 gut healing: 80/20 maintenance [45:42]

Diane Sanfilippo: Alright, so I think we’re onto step 5.

Christa Orecchio: So yeah, that last part of step 4 and then step 5. Step 4 finishing it is that terraforming process that I told you about; which it comes from Star Trek, {laughs}, and you’re taking a barren planet so to speak and you’re making it habitable and sustainable to life. So that’s where we start working with fermented foods; once we know they’re safe, and we get gut motility going again for a lot of people, back to SIBO and FODMAPs, we work a lot with the brain/gut connection as well as the gut/brain connection, with neurological exercises and things like that.

So once we know that’s flowing; now, again, we don’t want to rely on supplements, so now we find the right type and amount of fermented foods to keep that process going, and the right fibers or prebiotics to now feed and water the garden, so it becomes this self sustaining system that you don’t have to be relying on or even really thinking too much about. And then that rolls you into step 5, which is the 80/20 maintenance, because we believe the body is hardwired to adapt and survive, and if you have a little bit of junk every now and then, you shouldn’t have to have a big long recovery process from that.

A lot of us, we think the cleaner we are, the harder we fall. I don’t think that needs to be the case. You want to get a really strong, healthy mucosal lining, which we’re doing as we heal leaky gut and the lining of the gut, and then the body knows how to keep you balanced, so you really find the lifestyle, just like you said with the 21-Day Sugar Detox and with the 30-day cleanse, you’re just trying to shift that whirlpool of biochemistry in a positive direction. But now everything has changed; mind, body, really the way you view life and food all together, so it should be pretty easy to maintain that 80/20 balance. And that’s where we go into meal plans and really teach people; ok, if you have a tether that you know you need to get back to when you get a little far from it, at least it can be your lighthouse to come back to so that you can sustain this for years to come.

The problem is when people don’t have that lighthouse, they don’t have that tether that they get too far out, and it could take them 5 years to want to shift their life after that.

Diane Sanfilippo: So step 5 is really just what that 80/20 maintenance is going to be going forward?

Christa Orecchio: Yeah, it’s the, how do you transition out.

Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm.

Christa Orecchio: How do you step down? What do you do with vitamins and supplements, because now it’s a step down approach. The strategy shifts towards total self-sufficiency, and so that’s the; ok, how do you continue to build that garden and have it grow, but do it mostly through diet and let your food be your medicine and then titrate off of supplements, and then you’re kind of like; the training wheels are off and now you can run a marathon!

10. How do you know that you’re at the end? [48:32]

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, I think that’s what people need to know, what to be looking for. How do they know when they’re done? I think that’s one of the questions we got here. How does somebody know they’ve really done it, and they can start dipping their toe in that 20% and getting to the 1%, 2%, moving on to get it so they have this different balance where it’s not just hard core, I’m in gut healing mode, I can’t do this, I can’t do that because it’s limiting their lifestyle, you know. How do they know when they get there?

Christa Orecchio: Well of course you can test if you wanted to test. Like, at the end of this program you should test your food sensitivities, and they should be dramatically less than what they were. But when we think about an infant, like as an infant learning to eat, you have to give it a food 5-7 times. A lot of times it spits up, the body doesn’t know what to do with it; you give it again, you give it again in small amounts and it starts to be like, ok now I can use this for nourishment. So this process is really no different, in that you’re working through your transition supplements, and then let’s say there’s foods that you couldn’t eat before, like garlic, or onions, or asparagus or oranges, and that’s when you will add them in.

You will add in one new food a week, and you’ll keep these foods 5 days apart, and you get them on a rotating schedule to add them in, and it’s just like that infant analogy where now you’re training the body that this actually isn’t a harmful food. This is really how we reverse autoimmunity; the body is no longer confused, things are working for it, the immune system now understands how to operate, and a lot of these foods that were once sensitivities now become life supporting foods.

Diane Sanfilippo: I think also a lot of questions that people have are surrounding, they’re dealing with multiple issues and they’re just confused, what to start with, where they should go. I think it’s pretty clear after understanding how all this stuff works together to support the body that; like this one question from Brooke; if you’re suffering from multiple issues, should you complete a gut-healing protocol first, since most of these issues are cultivated in the gut, I think it makes the most sense that since we’re dealing with 60-80% of our immunity coming from our gut that if we don’t know what to do, if we have all of these things that we feel are afflicting us and we just don’t know what to tackle first, it makes the most sense to heal the gut first.

Christa Orecchio: And it’s nothing new. Hippocrates, you know the father of natural medicine 3000 years ago.

Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} Mm-hmm.

Christa Orecchio: He said all disease begins in the gut. And we make it so complicated; we’re looking at our immune markers, we’re looking at our inflammatory markers, we’re going to all these doctors, trying all these pills and potions and things. If you start with the gut, it is the foundation of human healing. For your hormones to be able to balance, you know. Almost anything else that we do before healing the gut is going to be a Band-Aid. And great, maybe you’ll feel fine for 2 or 3 or 6 months, but if the foundation isn’t solid, it’s going to go back, and you’re going to keep yourself on this merry-go-round.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. Do you think people just haven’t done this for lack of a great program and information? Do you think a lot of people are intimidated by how long it might take, and how it might affect their everyday lives? What do you think gets in the way for a lot of people saying, alright it makes sense, this is what I need to do, and then setting out to do it?

Christa Orecchio: I think it’s a combination of things. A lot of times, they say when the pain outweighs the fear, we make the change. A lot of us know what we need to do for a long time, but it’s like, you’ve got to be in the middle of the night, like; ugh! I don’t want to live like this anymore, there has to be another way. Fine, I’ll just commit. Sometimes we have to reach that breaking point.

Other people, it’s just they haven’t found anything that works for them. It’s been part whatever for whatever their journey is, and they haven’t found the right steps in the right order, or a way to truly address the root. But then if you do, you do. And sure, none of us want to; we have excuses. The holidays, and this, and that. You don’t want to not drink, or you don’t have the time to start to prep your meals. That’s one that we hear a lot.

So really, a lot of it just boils down to commitment, right, and making that choice and making that decision, and in terms of finances, it’s something that’s a lot less expensive than going the other traditional route. So yeah, we have a lot of different subconscious sabotage things that we do for ourselves to prevent us from getting what we really want.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, I think a lot of our listeners who follow me over on Periscope; I’m doing these daily videos right now, so we’re in the middle of that. That won’t be so timely if folks listen to this on a replay years down the line, but I’ve been doing a 12-week meal plan, and I’m on day 12 right now, out of 80-something or 90-days, so it’s a longer timeframe than even the gut healing plan, and it is intimidating at first. But also, I was at a point where I was like, this is what I need to do because I know it’s the right thing to do and I’m ready to commit.

And I know how to write meal plans, I’ve known how to do this stuff for so long, that sometimes you do just want to turn over a portion of the responsibility. We take 90% of the responsibility because we’re doing the work, but that 10% of turning it over to someone else; like you, like the person who I’m being coached by right now, to say I trust you and I know that you know what you’re doing, and I’m going to do the work, but I’m going to trust this process and be in it and really commit to it. Because it doesn’t change in a week; it doesn’t change in 2 weeks. It doesn’t even change in 8 or 10 weeks. The process is long, but we just have to be in that place I think where we’re ready to say, enough is enough. I don’t want to be where I’m at, and if I want to get somewhere else, I have to do something different, right?

Christa Orecchio: Absolutely, yeah. Einstein. You can’t solve the same level of thinking that created it. And it’s true, especially women, we all need support. Someone to lean into, and be like, just tell me what to do and when to do it. And I think that’s essentially, because you’re right; it’s hard doing it on your own. And then also knowing; I think the benefit of the online is that there are literally, you know we break our forums based upon which plan you’re on. There are literally at any given point in time hundreds of people from around the world in the same situation, so that’s your culture, right? Because as you change your diet, you want to be around people who are doing the same thing.

To your point, Diane, I think sometimes there’s so much freedom. We’re afraid our freedom is going to be taken away by jumping into a plan, but then 3, 5, 10 days into it, you realize you have way more freedom than you ever thought because of the way you feel and because of how you’re affirming yourself than you would before. And that happened actually; one of our customer service reps, finally. She was like, I didn’t want to do Gut Thrive, but I’m finally doing it. I was too tired to do it, is what she said.

Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}

Christa Orecchio: Time, and three kids, and she’s like, I can’t believe that 8 days into the program, and I have more energy. It feels like there’s more time in the day, and it’s like, sometimes it’s just getting started that sounds so overwhelming and we have to take that first step without looking at the entire picture. Just one step at a time.

Diane Sanfilippo: That’s true. It’s one day at a time, and you can’t know. I think people scare themselves away from doing things like gut healing because it seems like such a long process, but you do have to take it one day at a time. Nothing happens; nothing mounts itself in one day. It’s always a long history of little by little chipping away at things. But I do think having the support and having the community and other folks to rely on to go through with it. It actually makes it fun to do these super weird nerdy healing whatever protocols.

I’m excited about this; I’m hoping that our listeners get a lot from this conversation, whether they’re in a place where they need to take on gut healing in a formal way with a program like Gut Thrive in Five or if they just want to take some notes from what we’ve talked about today. You are an amazing wealth of information, I absolutely love every time you come on the show and teach people. It’s like they get a free class for an hour to learn about; last time we talked about Candida, which if you guys have not heard that episode, please go listen to that one, it is an awesome, awesome interview.

But Christa, what else do you want to tell people about anything? About the program, anything we may have left out, any little notes or anything else that folks need to know?

Christa Orecchio: I just wanted to kind of piggyback off the last thing that you said, is that sometimes when we’re having trouble moving forward or making a decision in our lives. I think we have to be our own best friend and build the bridge to the other side of what would your life be like if you didn’t have insomnia, or diabetes, or bloating all the time, or brain fog; infertility. This is like the single best thing you can do if you’re struggling to get pregnant. That’s the other side, and if you can kind of feel what your life would be like, and what it would feel like, a lot of times that becomes the bridge to move towards any action that you want to take in your life.

Diane Sanfilippo: It’s a huge emotional aspect, and I think, like you said, the fear and apprehension about the process is so big I almost think people need to {laughs} maybe ignore it, you know?

Christa Orecchio: {laughs} Yeah!

Diane Sanfilippo: Punch it in the face, and be like, step aside, I’m taking this on. Day 1, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to take it one day at a time. Things can’t be worse on the other side; they have to be better.

Christa Orecchio: Yeah.

Diane Sanfilippo: I honestly think part of it, also, part of what brings the health and the improvement just overall in the way people feel is honestly the decision and commitment to do something better for yourself. You can’t help but feel better every day emotionally for that.

Christa Orecchio: Yeah.

Diane Sanfilippo: You’ve decided to put yourself as a priority, whatever that means, whatever kind of change that means. I’m experiencing that right now. I feel so proud of myself for deciding that my health and whatever I am going to do with myself is the most important thing. That’s really hard, I think especially for women, to make that decision.

Christa Orecchio: Yeah! This sounds so silly, but it’s like, yeah, the Rocky theme song plays in your head, and you’re like, I did it!

Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}

Christa Orecchio: I’m doing it! Yeah! {laughs}

Diane Sanfilippo: Totally.

Christa Orecchio: Good for you for doing that. That’s awesome.

Diane Sanfilippo: Alright, we will make sure that we link people to the program. Is there, I don’t even know how it works, do they have, if they’re curious about it, if they want to check it out, are we going to have a special link for them, how are we setting them up?

Christa Orecchio: Yes. So you’ll have a special link to Gut Thrive in Five; you’ll have a special link there, and then we’re offering a $200 discount off of the program, and about $100 off the supplements for the month of November only, as we kind of do our big relaunch. And it’s an anytime enrollment; so you can enroll in November, but you can do the program in January with a friend or in the spring. So from the link you provide, you guys will be able to go, you’ll be able to watch a webinar and go through the entire Gut Thrive in Five experience, so you know exactly what you’ll be going through so you can see if it’s something that’s right for you.

Diane Sanfilippo: Alright, that’s it for this week. If you guys are curious about the program, want to get more information, or if you want to enroll, I know that the landing page has a ton of information that Christa did talk about today. You can go to GutThrivein5.com. If you want to use our discount code that will be available for the rest of November, it’s just BalancedBites. You could also get the link right from the show notes at BalancedBites.com, the show notes for this episode which is episode 218.

Don’t forget, you can find out more about Liz at http://realfoodliz.com/, and me, Diane, at http://dianesanfilippo.com. Don’t forget to join our email lists for free goodies and updates you don’t find anywhere else on our websites or on the podcast. While you’re on the internet, please leave us a review in iTunes. We would absolutely love, love, love to see a bunch of new reviews coming in. I know we have tons of new listeners. Don’t forget, you can follow us @BalancedBitespodcast on Instagram. We’ll see you next week.