margaret floyd comfort food or sweet misery how sugar ... · how sugar controls your mood and how...

Comfort Food or Sweet Misery? How Sugar Controls Your Mood and How To Get it Out of Your Diet, with Margaret Floyd www.theAnxietySummit.com June 9-22, 2014

© 2014 Trudy Scott All Rights Reserved of 28

Comfort Food or Sweet Misery? How Sugar Controls Your Mood and How to Get it Out of Your Diet,

with Margaret Floyd

§ Why sugar is so harmful to our mood, where it hides in the diet and how to get it out

§ Why protein is so important and why we shouldn’t be afraid of fat § The challenges of gluten, soy, and other food toxins § Other important aspects of real whole food eating

Trudy Scott: Comfort food or sweet misery? Yes, you're in the right place, this

is The Anxiety Summit and welcome back. Today we're going to talk about how sugar controls your mood and how to get it out of your diet. I'm your host, Trudy Scott, food mood expert, certified nutritionist and author of The Antianxiety Food Solution. Our speaker today is Margaret Floyd, nutritional therapist, writer, real food advocate and author of Eat Naked. Margaret, it's a real pleasure to have you here today, a very big welcome.

Margaret Floyd: Thank you so much, Trudy, it's a real honor to be part of your

summit. Trudy Scott: Well, thank you. I actually started following your work, when I

first saw the cover of your wonderful book, Eat Naked, and it's certainly eye catching. If you haven’t seen it, you need to see it, and if you haven’t got it, you need to buy it, because it's absolutely



fabulous. The title certainly wakes you up and the image of you, Margaret, on the cover is just so super, and of course the subtitle, unprocessed – Eat Naked: Unprocessed, Unpolluted and Undressed Eating for a Healthier, Sexy You is just fantastic [laughter].

Margaret Floyd: Thank you. Trudy Scott: We actually met at the Weston A. Price Conference in 2012, I

think that's when we first met, and then saw each other again at the Nutritional Therapy Association Conference, and it's quite funny, as I do these introductions, I'm realizing how many amazing colleagues I've met at nutrition and health related conferences, and for those of you that are interested in learning more about some of these amazing things that we're talking about on The Anxiety Summit, the Weston A. Price Conference is fabulous. It's held annually usually in November timeframe, in various parts of the country, and I know they have regional conferences, as well, and then the Nutritional Therapy Association Conference is earlier in the year. What month of the year is that, Margaret?

Margaret Floyd: That's typically in mid-March. Trudy Scott: Mid-March, and that's the school that you went to. Margaret Floyd: I'm a huge fan of that school and they do a great conference every

year that's really great for both practitioners as well as just the lay person who's interested in these topics and diving a bit deeper, highly recommend it.

Trudy Scott: Absolutely, and then the Weston A. Price is great for laypeople

and consumers and practitioners, as well. And both of them have the most incredible food, don’t they? I remember the hydroponic salad bar at the NTA conference. You go for dinner and there's this salad that's growing, it's still growing, and you get to pick it from the hydroponic salad bar, wasn’t that just amazing?

Margaret Floyd: Yeah, it was incredible [laughter]. Trudy Scott: Really great. So I wanted to just say why I invited Margaret to

The Anxiety Summit, and it's because when I discovered her book and I read it and did a review of it, I just felt that it meshed absolutely perfectly with the eating message in the first chapter of my book, The Antianxiety Food Solution. I had one chapter on food and then the rest was on the amino acids and digestion and a



whole chapter on gluten and pyroluria and I only had enough space for one chapter on food, but Margaret took everything that I wrote about in one chapter and she's written a whole book on it, which was just absolutely perfect, and I just feel that it's adding so much more to what I have in my book and it's giving people who don’t know anything about real, whole food, obviously, the foundation, and if you are familiar with my work and yet you want more detail and more meat, no pun intended, this book is just absolutely fabulous. So we're going to talk about it in the context of comfort food and sugar.

Margaret Floyd: Yes. Trudy Scott: Which is a big problem with so many people and I know it's an

area that you do a lot of work in, so I'm just really pleased that we're using this as the focus to help people get the sugar out of their diets.

Margaret Floyd: Absolutely. Trudy Scott: I want to just give a quick plug for New Harbinger, that's my

publisher and Margaret's – both her books, the Eat Naked book and the companion recipe book were both published by New Harbinger, so I just wanted to mention that, as well, and we both had good experiences working for them. So let me go ahead and read Margaret's bio, and then we will get right into our topic. So the topic is “Comfort Food or Sweet Misery?: How sugar controls your mood and how to get it out of your diet,” and Margaret Floyd is a nutritional therapist, writer and real food advocate. She has been on the pursuit of the ideal nutritious and delicious way of eating for the better part of her adult life.

Trudy Scott: Margaret received her nutritional therapy practitioner certification

from the Nutritional Therapy Association and was certified as a holistic health counselor by the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. She is also a certified GAPS practitioner, a certified healing foods specialist as certified by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners and has a thriving private practice in Los Angeles, California, through which she supports clients throughout North America and Europe to achieve true health and vitality through diet and lifestyle changes. Margaret is the author of Eat Naked: Unprocessed, Unpolluted and Undressed Eating for a Healthy – Healthier, Sexy You, published by New Harbinger Publications in 2011. She's also the co-author, with Chef James Berry, who happens to be her husband, of the follow up cookbook, The Naked Foods Cookbook, released in May 2012. She currently blogs at



EatNakedNow.com, as well as several other health related websites. So let's get right into our topic, “Comfort Food or Sweet Misery?: How sugar controls your mood and how to get it out of your diet.” I'd love to just start with what is the big deal with a little sugar rush when it comes to mood?

Margaret Floyd: Well, so sugar, what we have to remember when we talk about

sugar is that historically, sugar was very scarce in our diets, and so our bodies are not adapted to having lots of it, and when you start reading labels and you start looking at what you're eating on a daily basis, it's kind of amazing to find out how much sugar sneaks into just about everything you're eating, and so we have a situation where we are eating way, way, way more sugar than we have ever consumed as humans, as a species, on this planet. Within the last 100 years, it has increased about 100 fold. I mean, it's really quite amazing how much sugar we're having, and our bodies are simply not adapted to it.

I'm just going to give a little bit of basic body chemistry here,

because I think it's really important to understand how our bodies work. So one of our body's main priorities is to maintain a steady level of blood sugar and it's a fairly narrow range. Anything too high or too low outside of I call it the blood sugar happy zone, anything outside of that is a state of emergency for our bodies, and so that innocuous little dessert that we think we're having, that little treat, is actually going to put our body into a state of emergency, it's going to give us that sugar high, which it might feel kind of good, but from a biochemical level it's actually very taxing on the system. It's forcing your whole endocrine system, so all your hormones, to go into overdrive as your pancreas is pumping out the hormone insulin, which is basically taking all that excess sugar out of your blood, trying to bring your blood sugar levels back into that happy zone.

And what happens is, if we have a sugar spike, what we end up

having is an equal or opposite reaction where we now have a blood sugar crash. And so we're out of the happy zone from the upper end when we have too much sugar and then that insulin does such a good job of pulling all that extra sugar out of our blood and into our – it goes into our muscle cells and into our liver for storage and also it goes into fat, that's one of the main places it's stored, and now we have an equal and opposite reaction where we have a blood sugar crash, and we all know that that really doesn’t feel good, and again, it puts our endocrine system into a big state of emergency and in fact this actually requires our adrenal glands to get involved, and that's our fight or flight organs. These little guys



shouldn’t be getting involved to this degree more than on a very occasional basis, and this is something that we're doing on a daily basis over and over, and what ends up happening is when we have these crashes on a regular basis, we're really depleting our bodies and that affects every single system and one of the most common things when you have a blood sugar crash is to feel cranky, anxious, almost a little panicky about where is my next meal coming from.

I know I have an intimate relationship with this. I used to have

really, really horrible blood sugar handling and I didn’t realize that pretty much everything I was eating was converting to sugar in my blood really quickly, so it wasn’t just the obvious things like the chocolate and the latte with three spoonfuls of sugar. Of course those were contributing, but pretty much everything else, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Pretty much everything else I was eating was also converting to sugar in my blood way too quickly, and if I had a stash of chocolate in my desk and I was known to – and this is long before I got into the nutrition field, and I was in a fairly high powered corporate job and I'd be in a meeting, I'd be all on and then all of a sudden I'd just kind of space out and I'd feel myself getting anxious and it was like I couldn’t remember what I was talking about and then one of my colleagues would recognize this and kind of slide a piece of chocolate in front of me [laughter] and I would eat it and continue on my day. But all to say that blood sugar handling and our mood, they go hand in hand.

Trudy Scott: And I can totally relate to that low blood sugar feeling and

everything just feels overwhelming and you're desperate. I have so many of my clients just say, "I'm desperate and my husband said you've got to have something to eat, I can see you're going to have a crash, you're going to have a problem if you don’t do something," and you’ve got to catch it before you get into that situation, and then, as you say, not have the sugar so you're not going to get into that situation.

Margaret Floyd: Exactly. Trudy Scott: And it can look like full blown anxiety and a full blown panic

attack if you are prone to really low blood sugar swings, correct? Margaret Floyd: Absolutely. I mean, it is a real state of emergency for your body

and one of the things that happens is those little adrenal glands, think about it, they're really designed to kick in high gear when you're doing something like running from a wooly mammoth, right? And ideally, you wouldn’t be doing that multiple times a



day, every single day, it's very, very depleting for your body. But a blood sugar crash is actually as much of a state of emergency for your body as running from that wooly mammoth, and so it has to mount those same kind of resources which is incredibly taxing, and we never give our adrenals nearly enough time to recover and as a result, they get really depleted, and so we lose our body's ability to pull us out of that crisis, which is even more anxiety creating. So it is a state of emergency for the body. Now, this is happening and you do a great job of explaining in your book, this is really happening biochemically. It's not just sort of quote-unquote “in our heads”, there's really physiological responses that are driving a lot of this and the great news is so much of this is in our control in terms of being able to change diet and lifestyle habits.

Trudy Scott: Absolutely, and I'm glad you mentioned the adrenals because the

more you do it, the harder the adrenals are working and the more cortisol they're producing and then they just get pooped out and then you’ve got adrenal fatigue going on and then it's even harder to control the blood sugar, so it's just this vicious cycle that you have to actually break.

Margaret Floyd: Exactly. Trudy Scott: So sugar is everywhere. Tell us where it's hiding in the diet.

There's some obvious things, you've mentioned the chocolate, you’ve mentioned the latte with the sugar and we're going to have to talk about the coffee in a little bit later because I really want to touch on that, but the sugar is just everywhere, so let's talk about where it's hiding and how do we find it.

Margaret Floyd: Absolutely, so it's obviously in desserts, it's obviously in any sugar

or sweetener you put in your coffee. I want to say sugar is sugar is sugar. We hear a lot about natural alternatives, you know, I mean, raw honey, yes, it has some health benefits, but it's still sugar [laughter]. So we need to keep all of these, no matter how, quote-unquote, natural and healthy they are, when we talk about sugars, that’s all still sugar, it just means that there are more other nutrients going on and part of that as opposed to simply refined sugar, which is simply just the sugar. So that's an important consideration. But that's still fairly obvious. Other things are starches. So we hear about carbohydrates and there are different types, there's starchy and non-starchy carbohydrates, and starchy carbohydrates are ones that convert to sugar quite quickly in your blood, and so these are things like grains and potatoes, and actually fruit would also fall into this category. So we don’t tend to think about this as sugar, but it is.



Now, I remember being in like, grade seven or eight and our teacher was teaching us the concept of carbohydrates and she got us to each take a bite of bread and we were instructed to chew it and chew it and chew it and chew it and chew it and not swallow it, and after chewing that bread for not even all that long, it became really sweet in our mouths, and it was her basically demonstrating what I now realizing is just how quickly these foods break down into sugar and that's happening in our blood very quickly, it's really interesting, actually. Oh gosh, I'm forgetting his name, but the author of Wheat Belly talks about how a slice of whole wheat bread actually has a higher glycemic load than a spoonful of sugar.

Margaret Floyd: Totally fascinating. Trudy Scott: Dr. Perlmutter? Margaret Floyd: Yes, Dr. Perlmutter, exactly. Trudy Scott: So he talked about a whole wheat bread Margaret Floyd: A piece of whole wheat bread actually has a higher glycemic index

than a spoonful of sugar, which is kind of amazing. Trudy Scott: It is quite amazing, and let's just mention his book again because

it's a new book and it's a really good book if you're interested in learning more about gluten.

Margaret Floyd: It's a fantastic book, it's called Wheat Belly. Trudy Scott: Great, and I love your teacher's example, I've never heard that

before and I think that's fantastic, I'm not going to be able to try it because I don’t eat bread [laughter] but it's a great way – great thing to test out, isn't it so interesting, and I'm really glad you mentioned the natural sweeteners. Can we go back to that one for a second?

Margaret Floyd: Sure. Trudy Scott: Because a lot of people are saying I don’t eat white sugar and I

don’t have any sugar in the foods that I eat and I think we'll – we're going to talk about that in a second where it's hiding, because it's often hiding, but they are now looking for the – what's a “healthy sweetener”, and I say quote-unquote. Whenever I do my talks, I always get this question, what is a “healthy” alternative to sugar, and it's, as you said, still sugar. It's still a problem. Can you share



a few more other natural sweeteners or healthy sweeteners that people kind of gravitate towards that may not be such a good idea.

Margaret Floyd: You bet. I have a couple of pet peeves. One in particular is

agave, which is touted as low glycemic and it's wonderful alternative to sugar, and the thing with agave is that it is extremely high in fructose, which, we all know high fructose corn syrup is not very good for you, well, high fructose corn syrup has, I think it's like 55 percent fructose, it's actually not that high. I mean, it's much higher than you would find naturally, but agave, oh gosh, is it what, like 75 percent fructose, maybe even 80 percent fructose. I mean, it's truly high fructose if you want to talk high fructose, and fructose is actually even more damaging and hard on a system because it's basically on the fast track to fat storage in your body. It gets metabolized differently from glucose and sucrose and is on this fast track to fat, so it's not a better alternative at all.

My other things – so raw honey we hear about, and it has benefits

from the perspective of it is truly raw, there are going to be some good vitamins and some good enzymes in there, but still it's sugar. So other examples, let me see, we don’t do a lot of sugar here, coconut sugar, that might be the one we use the most if we're going to be baking a sweet treat, but this is still not something that you consume on a daily basis. I think any of these sweeteners are things that you want to think about as the exception, as you know that, not the rule.

Trudy Scott: Right, and not replacing the refined sugar with equal amounts of

honey and eating it in copious amounts just as you say, because that's too much.

Margaret Floyd: It's way too much. Trudy Scott: I'd love your opinion on dried fruit because I have a few clients

who are just not eating sugar, but they are eating, for example, a lot of dates.

Margaret Floyd: Yes, well again, so fruit, even before it's dry, fruit overall is very

high in sugar as well, and I recommend to clients that they do more than one or two pieces of fruit a day, and ideally, those fruits that are not quite as sweet, the things like berries and a green apple or something like this, but when we dry fruit, that sweetness is condensed and we tend to eat more of it because it's smaller, just physically smaller. For example, an apricot, would you go through and eat a dozen whole, fresh apricots? Probably not. Maybe if they're crazy in season and you're at the farmer's market and you



just can't stop yourself, but normally no, you'll have one or two. But dried apricots, that's a whole different story. So they can become kind of a domino food where it's one of these things where one or two just isn't enough and you need more and more and the dried fruit does not have any less sugar than the whole fruit, by any means, it just has less water, in many ways. I'm not sure, does it actually increase the sugar content? I encourage people to avoid it pretty much at all costs.

Trudy Scott: Yes, because you're going to eat so many. As you say, you can sit

down and eat a whole bag of dried fruit and it's a lot of pieces of fruit [laughter].

Margaret Floyd: Exactly. Well, think about raisins, too. We can eat massive

handfuls of raisins. You would never eat that many grapes in one sitting.

Trudy Scott: Right, good point. Well, my client who loves her dates, I was

talking about the addictive nature of sugar, and she says, "Well, I'm addicted to dates, it's my crack. I need something sweet and I go for the dates," so you’ve got to be careful replacing the white sugars with these other things, really good point. Can we touch on artificial sweeteners briefly?

Margaret Floyd: Oh yes. Oh boy, that's a whole other world. I mean, basically

they're so filled with chemicals and cytotoxins that they're very, very toxic to your body and your brain in particular. So I would stay away from them completely, and interestingly, from a sugar perspective, they’ve actually found, and there's conflicting research on this, but some studies have shown that even the taste of sweet on the tongue, whether or not it actually contains sugar, causes a spike in insulin. And so as I said, the research on that is conflicting. So there are some studies that show this, there are other studies that have disproven that.

What I take from that, is having the taste of sugar on your tongue,

regardless of whether it's going to affect insulin levels or not and regardless of whether it is caloric or not, all it's doing is it's feeding that sugar craving and feeding that sugar addiction and let's not kid ourselves, sugar is incredibly, incredibly addictive. It's one of the main ways it gives us that kind of boost in serotonin, short term, but long term it depletes it, and serotonin is that like, feel good hormone, and so you eat a little sugar, we get a short term boost in serotonin and then next time we need to eat a little more to get the same boost and then next time we need to get a little more, and it's this vicious cycle where you can actually really deplete your



body's reserves, but that's one of the reasons why we just have such a thing about sugar.

Also, just since I'm on that topic, I talked about the sugar spike and

crash, well, what the body going to do? One of your top priorities chemically is to maintain your blood sugar levels, so the easiest way to raise that blood sugar level is to eat more sugar, so you have a blood sugar crash and your body's going to go instantly into craving sugar. It's appropriate response, but giving into that craving just perpetuates the cycle, and ideally, we want to set up a situation where you don’t have the sugar spike to even create the crash, which would then create the craving. We want to get it right at that root cause and not even create the spike to begin with.

Trudy Scott: Excellent, and that – as you say, it's a survival mechanism. The

body is – the brain is crying out for some fuel and it has to get something, so it's a survival mechanism but we're doing the wrong thing by continuing to eat the sugar because it's a problem.

Margaret Floyd: Exactly. Trudy Scott: And you're going to say how to get rid of it in a second, but I want

to just touch on one more thing in the where's the sugar hiding, because we do need to just mention the processed foods.

Margaret Floyd: Oh yes, it's everywhere. It is everywhere. I lead a sugar detox

program and I've never had anybody go through that program who is not absolutely floored when they are required to take out anything and everything that converts to sugar quickly in their blood, required to take that out for a couple of weeks and they start reading labels and they realize that all of these things that they thought were good for them have sugar in them. It is almost impossible, just give one example, salad dressing. It is almost impossible to find a commercially made salad dressing that does not contain some form of sugar, even the quote-unquote, natural, organic, et cetera, et cetera. It is so difficult to find one that does not contain some form of sugar. It might not be sugar, but maybe it's a little bit of fruit juice or maybe – sugar hides. There are so many different names for sugar, too. Anything that ends in O-S-E, like maltose, dextrose, anything O-S-E, that's a sugar, that's definitely a sugar, fructose. Any kind of juice, anything that comes from a fruit, that's going to be sugar, especially if it's an added ingredient to something. Corn products, as well, corn – any kind of syrup, corn syrup, even things like beet juice concentrate, that can also – that's sugar. So when you start reading labels, it's actually quite depressing. I mean, it's in things like meatballs for



goodness sake, I mean, it's in everything. So this is one of the reasons why I wrote the book Eat Naked is because once you start learning about the ingredients that go into processed foods, it's utterly crazy making to try to buy something pre-made that's actually good for you, it almost doesn’t exist. And the far easier solution is to just take that control back into your hands and make stuff at home. So processed foods, basically across the board, with very, very few exceptions, almost all contain some form of added sugar.

Trudy Scott: I'm glad you mentioned the fruit juice, too, because you'll see a lot

of healthy foods that contain fruit juice instead of sugar, implying that it's a healthier option, but it's not, and then the other thing related to the juice is actually drinking juice, that's not a good idea, either, is it?

Margaret Floyd: Oh gosh no. Juice, I'm really not into juice. It's kind of like the

dry fruits, just in this different example, so you have a glass of orange juice, for example, depending on the size of the glass of orange juice, it's about eight oranges worth of juice in there, and you would never sit down and eat eight oranges worth of juice, and if you did, at least you'd be getting the benefit of the fiber to slow that down a little bit, slow that sugar absorption down a little bit. But as soon as you juice something, first of all, the nutritional value starts to plummet from the moment it has been juiced.

Secondly, you're getting all of the sugar and none of the fiber, and

thirdly, most of the time, unless someone juices it quite literally right in front of you or you're buying it from one of those cold pressed juiceries, it is going to be pasteurized, which means they have flash heated it and basically destroyed most of the nutritional value. From a sugar perspective, you're getting as much fructose as you would if you were to drink a soda.

So it's no better and I strongly encourage people to stay away from

juice. If you like juice, for example, let's say you love your orange juice in the morning, have a glass of water and take a half orange and squeeze the juice from that half orange to flavor that glass of water. That's a much more appropriate way to – and much less sugar than the eight-plus oranges that are typically also over ripe that go into your standard glass of orange juice.

Trudy Scott: Beautiful, I love that idea. It's simple and effective and you're

getting that little bit of flavor without all that sugar. Margaret Floyd: Exactly.



Trudy Scott: Anything else in the sugar front or are we ready to talk about how

we can get it out of our diets? Margaret Floyd: Oh, one other thing, alcohol. We don’t think of alcohol as sugar,

but it is. And I know a lot of people say oh, I've had clients say this, I don’t go for dessert but I'll have that extra glass or two or three of wine, and it's interesting because the vitamins that are depleted by alcohol consumption are the same vitamins that are depleted by sugar consumption, and so those two things go hand in hand, yet again. And really, cravings for alcohol are cravings for sugar, just a different form, so that would be another piece to pay attention to if you're sitting here thinking, I don’t eat too many grains and I don’t eat potatoes and I'm not big fruit and I don't like my dessert, I'm fine, but I love my martini at the end of the day. Well, that's another place to investigate.

Trudy Scott: Excellent, and a lot of people with anxiety will go for some kind of

alcohol in the evening because it can be very relaxing. It's a way to self medicate, it's a way to feel calmer, and in actual fact, you're doing yourself a disservice because you are depleting yourself of these nutrients, you're affecting your blood sugar levels, so it's better to get to the root cause of why you're anxious in the first place, address that and then you're not going to need to self medicate and you're not going to get addicted. Just like you can get addicted to alcohol, as Margaret's saying, you can get addicted to sugar and it's a big problem, but there are ways that you can change your diet, so you're not going to be craving it as much. So let's talk about some of those.

Margaret Floyd: So I'm a believer very much in listening to your body, and I

believe that all cravings are telling us something, and one of the things, though, is that what the craving is for is not necessarily what your body needs. So a sugar craving is a great example of that. If you're craving sugar, that is a very loud signal from your body that there is dysregulation there, and so my strategy for this is I'm actually pretty ruthless with the whole sugar thing, because sugar is very powerful, I like to go full on and take out anything and everything that converts quickly to sugar in the blood for a good two weeks, that's the essence of our sugar detox. So I'm talking about things like all grains, like we talked about, potatoes, certainly fruit, definitely no juices, all of the added sweeteners including the obvious ones like refined sugar, but the natural sweeteners as well, and even the things that taste sweet on the tongue and alcohol and be strict about that for two weeks, and what this does is we talked about that sugar spike and crash and



what this does is it takes your body – basically you're not doing anything to feed that spike because that spike could come from your innocent breakfast of a bowl of cereal with a banana cut up in it and skim milk in the morning. That might sound healthy because maybe it's an organic, natural cereal and banana is organic and you’ve maybe put your organic skim milk in there, but you know what, every single one of those things is converting to sugar quickly in your blood.

So we focus more on eating really good quality proteins and good

fat and a whole ton of vegetables, and pretty much any vegetable you like except for those potatoes, I also put corn in there, people think of corn as a vegetable, it's actually a grain, and what this does is it's kind of like a chiropractic adjustment for your blood sugar handling and it means that you're not having that spike, which means you're not having the crash.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that the first week of this is fun.

It's not. It's not really fun at all [laughter]. In fact, it can totally suck, so let's just be honest, but on the other side of that, what I've found is being aggressive with it like this, and I know that this is not everyone's approach, but in my practice and my experience, I've found that being aggressive with it like this can on the other side have just amazing results, where if you stick with it through those two weeks, and by the second week it's usually pretty easy, and you're eating those good quality proteins and fats and we'll talk about why that's important in a moment, basically, you're switching your body's primary source of fuel, because your body has two options in terms of fuel sources, it has carbohydrates and fats, and if you think about it like the analogy of a fire, you might’ve heard this analogy before, I love it, the carbohydrates, especially the starchy carbohydrates are like the kindling and the fats are like the logs, and if you think about it, you would never want to stoke a fire all day long with just kindling. It would burn hot and die out, burn hot, die out, burn hot, die out, which is basically what we're doing with our blood sugar, right? Spikes, crashes, spikes, crashes, and what you want is to maybe have a little bit of that spike to kind of – or not full spike, but a little bit of that kindling to just get the fire going but then you want to be really having your primary fuel source as those logs, because that's the beautiful, slow, steady, sustained energy that will carry you through the day.

And so what's happening on this detox is when you really get

aggressive with sugar like this is that it kind of – it's like a chiropractic adjustment for your blood sugar handling system and



you're switched out of this kindling-dependent mode and moved into a fat burning mode, which is where we all want to fundamentally be, is using fat as fuel, not just storing it on our bodies. And when we get to that place, so you think about that blood sugar range, our blood sugar happy zone, when you get into this place, what happens is when you eat a meal, instead of that blood sugar spiking up past the upper limit, now it just does this nice gradual incline, and as you get towards that upper limit, your pancreas sends out some insulin and a little bit of the extra sugar gets stored as glycogen in your muscle cells and in your liver and you go through a day and you're using energy and your blood sugar levels start to dip and now there's another hormone that we almost never hear about that's got just as important a role as insulin, it's called glucagon, and it's kind of like insulin's opposite. Its job is to take that glycogen that we stored, so that stored sugar, and put it back into our blood for energy when we have these little dips.

So we never get a crash because glucagon can come in and

mobilize that glycogen back into our blood and now it kind of keeps us through and then we have our lunch and it's just this nice, gentle ebb and flow, and you in your body actually don’t feel anything but good [laughter]. You don’t have that kind of manic feeling of kind of manicky, panicky of too much sugar and then the subsequent crash and panic of blood sugar crash. You just feel – it's this nice, steady, smooth, even energy and there's points in my life where I did not know it was possible to go through an afternoon without feeling like I needed either a two hour long nap or a massive cup of coffee with something sweet. I just didn’t think that that could happen. I didn’t know it was possible, I thought this is just how the world was because I felt like that and everyone else was around me felt like that, I mean, that's just what you did, and honestly, I think it's kind of funny.

We have whole social structures built around managing our sugar

crashes with our coffee breaks, so basically, because we all have bad blood sugar handling. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, when you get on the other side of this and you're using that fat as a fuel, you can actually go for really long periods without needing to eat. This idea of needing to eat every two to three hours, definitely if you've got blood sugar handling issues, you want to be doing that, but over time, when you're body is much more accustomed to using fat as a fuel source, you don’t actually need that and you can go for a while without eating, and then when you're hungry, it's not a panic, it's just oh, I'm a little hungry, it's not an urgent state of affair, you don’t sort of turn into this cranky,



horrible, scary person, which I know I used to turn into and I've definitely seen other people turn into that as well. So that's our approach is to basically cut that spike out of the program and kind of force the body into this gentle ebb and flow, and of course there's some supplements that can help with that and everyone having handled this is a little bit different, but that's the essence of it.

Trudy Scott: Excellent, I love it, and it's very powerful when you start to feel

that and you start to realize that the way you were feeling before is not normal. Because I think what you said is very true, a lot of people have felt the way they feel for so long, they don’t realize that it's not the way they should be feeling and that they can actually feel good and they don’t need that cookie in the afternoon or they don’t need that soda or the coffee or whatever it is to give them that energy, and I love the way you call it nice, even energy and it also creates a nice, even mood.

Margaret Floyd: You bet, exactly, and all sorts of things start to improve when

you're not on that sugar rollercoaster, things like your sleep improves, your overall – it's not taxing your endocrine system, your hormone system, just basically you're not stressing your system but just making sure your blood sugar levels are in check, and so that actually has a whole ripple effect throughout all of your hormones so there's a lot of benefits from that. Exactly as you said, very, very intimate relationship with your mood and it's really fascinating, actually, all sorts of mysterious little health things have resolved when we take out the sugar handling issues, like funny skin conditions or digestive stuff. I mean, there's a lot of things that actually can be attributed back to your blood sugar handling and so it's a very, very powerful tool.

Trudy Scott: Isn't it, and isn't it amazing that we can fix our bodies and fix

problems by making food changes? The power of real, whole food to actually change our hormones and to change while we sleep, and to change our moods, it's so, so powerful.

Margaret Floyd: Yeah, it really – it never ceases to amaze me. Trudy Scott: Really is amazing and I find a lot of people are able to make the

changes that you're suggesting, the two weeks, get rid of all of that and reset themselves, I love that example of using like, a chiropractic adjustment, that's really, really good. It is resetting and it's changing your taste buds, your taste buds are expecting something sweet when you're eating a lot of sweet and when you take it out, then it's not expecting it anymore, and I find many



people are able to do that. I do want to just add that there are some people that I find, and I'd love your opinion on this, that the addictive nature of those carbs or the grains or the gluten or the sugar is just so strong. It's strong as a drug addiction and they just don’t have enough willpower or they may be making the changes that you're suggesting and they feel deprived, so there's something missing. There's that brain chemistry imbalance, and I find that using the amino acids are very helpful to make that – at breaking that addiction and getting going and we heard from Julia Ross, she's a pioneer in the use of the amino acids, and then Hyla Cass actually, on the summit, talked about the addictive nature of foods and alcohol and other things. So, I'd just love your thoughts on that and if you're finding that people are able to do it just by making the diet changes.

Margaret Floyd: You're absolutely right. There are a lot of people who are able to

make it just by through the dietary changes, and by the end, as you say, the taste buds have changed and something that tasted good before will taste sickly sweet and almost nauseating, which is wonderful, it's very helpful to maintain this way of living over the longer term. But yes, absolutely, there's some people for whom it is just such a deep addiction that getting into supplemental support and really kind of giving the body that additional boost to get it through the transition is absolutely critical, and in my practice, that's something that's very individual. I work with the clients to figure out what is the missing piece for them and then help them with supplements geared to their specific situation. But I absolutely agree.

Trudy Scott: Great, and you're right, everyone's unique. Some people can do it

easier, some need additional support and you've got to figure out what's going to work for you, but focus on the food first, because as nutritionists, I know we both think about food first, focus on that, you don't want to try and do it with just supplements, you’ve got to make the food changes, as well, really, really important.

Margaret Floyd: Absolutely, and there's one other piece to this. Food, of course, it

would be foolish to not acknowledge the emotional component of our eating. In that moment when we're standing in front of the freezer eating a tub of ice cream at 3:00 in the morning, it's not necessarily, might be partly about blood sugar levels, but it's not necessarily entirely about that, and so one of the things that I have all of my clients do is when they're in that moment, when they're really craving something, I get them to do just a little exercise of checking in, of asking themselves what is it that I really need right now? Because sometimes it's distraction. Sometimes it's comfort.



Sometimes it is a way to tune out. It is any number of things that food can be for us, and until we bring that to our awareness, then it can have a really amazing power over us, but once we are aware of where we are self soothing, using food, that gives you a choice in that moment, because then you say okay, well, what I'm needing right now is comfort and I'm going for the bag of M&Ms but I could also have a bath or I could go talk to my partner and have a hug and maybe he'll rub my shoulders. Or sometimes there's other ways to give ourselves what we are seeking when we reach for the sweet treat, and the only way to figure that out is to start really paying close attention.

So that would be another piece that anyone who's listening to this,

if you find that you are compulsively going for something, take that moment to check in and ask yourself what is it that you really need. And you have to get kind of tough with yourself and kind of get really in there and be honest with yourself, too, and this isn't the easy work at all, but it's important, and once you can name it and then you have the ability to start looking at other ways to fill that need so that you don’t have to use the food, and so that can at least be one piece of the puzzle that's resolving.

Trudy Scott: Excellent, I love that. I love looking for something else that can

give it to you, and I love the idea of a hug or going and finding something to laugh at or something that's going to raise your endorphins, or maybe exercise, which is going to raise your endorphins and help with that comfort eating, and of course, with the amino acids, the one that I would think about when someone has this moment where they're needing that comfort, if what Margaret's suggesting is not enough and doesn’t do it, you may need to look at boosting your endorphins and there's an amazing amino acid called a d-phenylalanine, which can help to do that and support you while you're making all the food changes, while you're doing some of these exercises and getting hugs and all these other wonderful things. So you don’t have to just try and do it on your own. You can look for the support that you need that's going to work for you because each person is very different.

Margaret Floyd: Agree completely. Trudy Scott: Great. So we've talked about some proteins and we've talked about

healthy fats, can we just touch on what that actually means? If someone is completely new to the world of real, whole foods, some examples of good protein and what do we need to look at when we're buying protein?



Margaret Floyd: So when it comes to protein, it's really critical to talk about quality. I am a believer that animal protein is the ideal source of protein. It doesn’t mean that you have to actually eat flesh, you can eat egg and some dairy product, but quality is really, really important because the health of that animal is going to determine the quality of that protein, and if you think about it, we spend a lot of time thinking about eating organic greens and such, well, that cow, for example, has been spending an entire life eating something, and toxins accumulate in protein and fat, which is what we're going to be getting, so you really want to make sure that you are getting quality food. So eggs that come from chickens who have been raised on pasture, and I'm giving you the extreme examples, I'm giving you the ideal scenarios, sometimes these are not available. I would say organic at a minimum for all – anything that comes from an animal. That's sort of my baseline. But ideally eggs that come from chickens who've been out on pasture and often, you can find these from farmers, farmer's markets, there's a couple of brands like Vital Farms, I really like that brand, it's available at Whole Foods. Any wild fish, poultry, ideally, again, from chickens and turkeys that have been out on pasture eating – pecking at the dirt and eating grubs and doing things that they do. And grass-fed beef, ideally grass-fed, grass finished, because all cows start on grass, but conventional cows are what we call finished on grains, mostly corn and soy, which is very, very difficult on their digestive systems, these are very sick animals.

So we want to be eating the meats and any dairy products from

cows that have actually been raised on grass their entire lives, and that actually changes the nutrient profile of the meat quite significantly, it's very high in the omega-3 fatty acids, which we're very deficient in convenient our diets, including one called CLA which has been shown to be protective in cancer and all sorts of things, and it's also very hard to get in our diet. And it's interesting because grass-fed beef actually has a fatty acid profile that's kind of similar to wild salmon, which is interesting, because everyone kind of knows that wild salmon is good for you, but there can be a lot of fear and confusion around any red meat, thinking that that's really bad for you and what's most important is actually the health of the animal and what they were eating in their life. Pastured pork, so pork that's from pigs that have been allowed out to do what they do, and lamb. It's interesting because lamb actually, to my knowledge, there's actually no such thing as a lamb feed lot, so they're typically always out on some kind of pasture. Same kind of thing with bison. If you're getting wild game, that's a great way to go, and depending on where you live, there's a grocery store that



actually I'm quite liking, it's called Sprouts, and they have a whole section of wild game, which is great.

And then dairy, that's a bit of a tricky one. Dairy, it's a very

individual thing. Some people just don’t do well with dairy, and if you're one of these people, then trust that and don’t worry about it. If you can tolerate dairy, then I would say at a minimum it should be organic, ideally it should be coming from grass-fed animals, and I'm actually a proponent of raw milk, raw cheese, raw kefir, and the reasons for that is that you – especially if you're able – I live here in California, so I'm very fortunate in that, I can buy it at the store and it's very tightly regulated and there's very high quality controls and such, but the thing with pasteurization is it doesn’t actually create clean milk, it basically just kills dirty milk, the simplest way to put it. And so you're eating – basically, once you’ve pasteurized it, it's now a processed food, it's important to realize that. And certainly if you're going to have dairy, do full fat. This skim milk thing, that's all sugar, skim milk is all lactose, little bit of protein in there, but it's mostly the lactose. So certainly encourage people to do full fat dairy if they're going to do dairy and to try to seek out raw dairy if at all possible. So those are the basics in terms of protein. Have I missed any that you would add to that list, Trudy?

Trudy Scott: No, that's great, and I love that you mentioned the omega-3s and

grass-fed red meat and people aren't aware of that and I actually interviewed Dr. Felice Jacka, she's a researcher from Australia, and she said the highest correlate to good mood, the lower risk of anxiety and depression in the diets of these women that she studied in Australia was grass-fed red meat. So she's going to do further studies, obviously the omega-3s are a big part of it, but obviously all the amino acids are beneficial and the zinc and the iron, it's such a wonderful, wonderful source of nutrients.

Margaret Floyd: It really is, and for any of those on the call who are wondering

about plant proteins, well, the thing with plant proteins is we're talking mostly about legumes and they're so loaded with starch, to get the equivalent – I don’t have my numbers right in front of me but if you were to have four ounces of chicken, to get the equivalent amount of protein from let's say, chickpeas, you'd need like, two cups or something like that. I mean, it's an incredible amount and I can get you the exact statistics if you want, I just don’t have them in front of me, but you would just never eat that much at one sitting of chickpeas, and you're getting pure protein and some good fats and other great nutrients with the chicken, but



with the chickpeas you're getting so much starch and that's sugar [laughter]. So it's not a great option, it's really not a great option.

Trudy Scott: I'm glad you made that distinction and certainly with the clients

that I work with, with anxiety and mood issues and emotional eating problems, they definitely do better on animal protein and it's a tough thing for some people but it's a fact, it really is a fact that we do need that animal protein and certainly, as Margaret's saying, you're getting so much more carbs in the beans, the legumes, so that can be a problem. And then I just wanted to ask something else. I know you mentioned the certified humane label in your book. Can you just touch on that for people who may be concerned about animal cruelty?

Margaret Floyd: You bet. So the certified humane label is basically certifying that

these animals were raised in truly humane conditions. We read things that there's all these different types of labels like cage free on your box of eggs or vegetarian fed or even free range, and these things sound good, even organic, it doesn’t actually guarantee, in any way, shape or form, that these animals are being treated in a way that would make you feel good about consuming products that come from them. And the certified humane label was created as a way to help consumers identify those companies and those farmers and those egg producers who are going the extra mile and really treating their animals with a great level of care. It was a joint project by the Humane Society and another government organization, the name of which I'm forgetting right at this moment, but I actually know personally a couple of the people who were involved in creating the requirements and creating that whole program and when you see that certified humane label, you can feel good about what you're buying.

Trudy Scott: That's wonderful, and I was a vegetarian and no one could’ve

convinced me to eat meat when I was a vegetarian and it didn’t work for me and knowing that animals can be treated humanely I think is an important thing for many, many people.

Margaret Floyd: It really is. I was a vegetarian for a long time, vegan for part of

that time, and it really did not work for me physically at all, and it was devastating to me when I realized that I needed to start eating animal protein, and I was always caught in this feeling of I would eat it and I would feel physically so good and I would feel emotionally so guilty and like I was this horrible person and I have done a lot of research on this area and I get a lot of people who are in this same situation in my practice, and it's interesting, I go through this in my book, but all the arguments against eating meat,



when you actually step out and look at the bigger picture, none of those arguments are based on the premise that meat means that you are eating meat from a factory farm. So, the environmental argument, the ethical arguments, the nutritional arguments, all of that holds completely true when we're talking about industrial meat.

But when we're talking about meat that comes from a smaller

scale operation, which these operations are now popping up everywhere because these issues are becoming a lot more mainstream. If there's not local farmers in your area, then there are farmers that will ship meat to you, frozen meat via the mail. There's actually a great website called FarmMatch.com and it will help you connect with farmers that are close to you that are providing whatever it is that you're looking for, I mean, truly, if I want ostrich eggs, then they tell you where your closest farmer is that provides that.

So FarmMatch.com is a great resource if you're concerned about

these things and we (my husband and myself) actually know the farmers that produce most of our meat, we buy almost exclusively from the farmer's market and from farmers – many of whom we've actually visited their farm and seen firsthand how they're doing things, and even if you don't want to go to that effort, if you are somewhere where you're able to talk to the farmer, this is one of the reasons why I love farmer's markets so much, you start asking questions and you even ask if you could come for a tour. You can tell a lot by their response, even if you have no intention of ever actually traveling to their farm, if they're excited and really keen to have you come and check out what they're doing, you can be quite confident that they're doing a good job. If they are in any way leery or they kind of start evading your questions and not really answering you directly or looking you in the eye, that tells you also a lot about what they're doing. So just having the conversations can give you a lot of information about the quality of your food.

Trudy Scott: Brilliant, great, and I'm glad you talked about the arguments

against it and there's such a big difference between grass-fed, good quality meat and animal products versus the feed lot, which has a horrible nutrient profile and the animals are not treated well and the research looking at, for example, cancer and the other harmful effects, they're not taking into account the quality, so it's really important to take that into account.

Margaret Floyd: Yeah, and that's just such a good point, all of the research, and I'm

not aware of any research that has ever been done that vilifies meat



that has actually been done taking quality into account. And it's just not the same food at all. The nutrient profile is completely different. So it's just such an important piece.

Trudy Scott: There is actually one study that I found when I was doing the

research for my book and it's in my book but of course, I can't remember the name of it, so I'm going to share some resources after each presentation and I'll share a link to that one, as well, because they actually looked at grass fed and they found that it didn’t impact heart disease or cancer, so I thought that was very important to be aware of, and I would love to see a study comparing grass fed versus feed lots and actually see the difference, but I don't think it would be very ethical to study that in humans [laughter].

Margaret Floyd: No, I know. Trudy Scott: So I've got two more questions for you. One is I'd love to touch

on briefly what are healthy fats, just can you give us some examples?

Margaret Floyd: Absolutely. Again, it comes down to quality, and a lot of people

are afraid of saturated fats. A fat is saturated, that's simply the chemical structure of the fat, it's not a good nor a bad thing, the quality of that fat, what has happened to it, where it came from and what has been done to it between its harvesting and your dinner plate is what is most important. And so just because this is a big topic we could spend the whole hour on, just a quickie, quick and dirty, saturated fats are quite stable and thus, they are ideal options for cooking. So good quality fats for cooking would be coconut oil, good old fashioned butter, ghee, which is clarified butter, so it's butter with the proteins that have been boiled off, essentially, and if you're brave, rendered animal fat, tallow, lard, duck – rendered duck fat, those are actually great cooking options because they are very stable and you have to remember that the saturated piece of it is not a bad thing. What it refers to is it's a molecular structure of that fatty acid and it actually makes that fat very stable, and in many ways, saturated fats are actually the preferred fuel source for your heart. So that's a whole other topic, but important one.

Unsaturated fatty acids are kind of broken into two categories,

there's monounsaturated and polyunsaturated, and basically the number of unsaturated bonds, and so monounsaturated, it's a single bond that is – the two carbon atoms are connected to each other that – rather than two saturated with hydrogen, so to speak, and a great example of that is olive oil, it's sort of a classic



monounsaturated fatty acid, and the way to know if a fat is monounsaturated is it is solid if you put in the fridge but it's liquid at room temperature, and actually a saturated fat is going to be solid at room temperature, that's actually how you know it's saturated, unless you are experiencing a heat wave and it's over 80 degrees and pretty much everything will melt. So a monounsaturated fat is solid when you put it in the refrigerator.

Margaret Floyd: And it's good to be used either very, very low temperature cooking

or just used on things that have already been cooked, used cold, and then the other type is unsaturated oils and – or polyunsaturated and these are very, very delicate, and most vegetable, nut and seed oils fall into that category and we should never be cooking with them at all and in fact, in most cases, I suggest people stay away from them. The good ones are the oils you find in fish, the omega-3 fatty acids, and you can find some really good quality like, flax seed or hemp seed or walnut oil, but with these, they are very, very unstable, and so you never want them to be exposed to heat and that's not just you cooking, that's also in any kind of refinement that has happened from the time they harvested that seed to it getting into the bottle and into your kitchen. So, I steer clear of the sunflower oils, canola oils, that big section in the supermarket of all the oil, anything that comes in a clear plastic bottle, guaranteed it's rancid, you want to be throwing that out, so you want to make sure that it's good quality, especially if it's any of the unsaturated oils, you want it to be ideally in a dark either glass or a tin, some kind of container that prevents light from affecting the oil, and ideally cold pressed and minimally refined. And those oils you would use in dressings and in sauces that are applied to food after they’ve been cooked, you never cook in them.

Trudy Scott: Great. So the two best fats for cooking are coconut oil and butter. Margaret Floyd: Coconut oil and butter, I actually am a big fan of ghee, because the

butter can burn a little bit, those proteins can burn, so I'm a fan of ghee. Coconut oil and butter or ghee would be great.

Trudy Scott: Okay, great, and I loved your dedication at the front of your book.

It says yes, grandma, butter is good. Something like that, is that correct?

Margaret Floyd: Yeah, you were right, grandma, butter is better. We used to have

long conversations because she loved her butter so much. Trudy Scott: Aw, that's great.



Margaret Floyd: When I wasn’t studying nutrition but I was taking in everything I heard from food marketers and I was trying to convince her to eat margarine and she wisely ignored me and lived to the age of 98 years old, so there you go [laughter].

Trudy Scott: Yeah, we've got to go back to basics and eat like our grandparents,

that's what we've got to do, and this is what you're sharing here today, which is wonderful. So one final question, and that was really fantastic giving that little synopsis. Two more questions, I said one more but I've got two more. One is we didn’t talk about produce and it definitely needs to be good quality organic so I don't think there's a question around that, you would agree with that.

Margaret Floyd: I would agree with that, but I would also say if you really have to

make tough decisions around your food budget, that the most important place to prioritize your spending is anything that comes from an animal. So if you have to make a tough choice and you aren't able to eat everything organic, then I would prioritize your meats, your egg, your dairy and do your best when it comes to the produce, just because of the concentration and the level of toxicity.

Trudy Scott: Great, and then I'm sure you refer people to the Environmental

Working Group Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen, so you'll be able to find the fruits and vegetables that are sprayed with the highest levels of pesticides and those that are less sprayed and that's the EWG.org, Environmental Working Group.

Margaret Floyd: Yep, exactly. Trudy Scott: And then tying exactly into that is money, a lot of people will say

how on earth am I going to spend – how am I going to survive eating like this, it's way too expensive, and I get this talk – I get this question all the time when I'm doing talks and I say that if you're giving up the fast food and the coffee and the sugar and the sodas, you're going to have more money to spend on food. You mentioned farmer's markets, which is a beautiful way to get connected with the community, support the community and then buy affordable produce and meat and then maybe grow a garden, maybe be part of a community garden, I've seen these rooftop gardens or you could grow on your deck, any comments about this cost issue that people often raise?

Margaret Floyd: Absolutely. Well, there's two pieces that I want to add in addition

to what you’ve just mentioned. First of all is that the nutritional density of a food is going to dictate to a great degree how much of



it you need and how much do you need to eat. So my classic example is an apple versus a bag of potato chips. So when you eat an apple, you're kind of done with apple. You don’t feel this compulsive need to eat more and more and more and that’s part of the reason for that is, there's actually nutrients in there. It's not just calories. There's a lot of other stuff, you're getting some good fiber and you're getting vitamins, you're getting some great antioxidants and but that bag of potato chips, what do the ads say, you can't just eat one and it's true. I mean, even though from a caloric perspective. You would think well, it only takes a very small handful of potato chips to get to the caloric equivalent of that apple and yet, how is it that you just can't stop and need to go through that entire bag and probably by the time you're done with the bag now you're ready for something sweet to cut all that salt and a big piece of that is there's just nothing there. Your body – when you're eating, it's not just about energy in, energy out. That is one very small part of the puzzle. Your body is looking for nutrition. It's looking for all the building blocks to actually fuel and build and heal and I mean, there's so many things that your body needs to be doing.

Look at your hands. Every single piece of skin, every sinew, every

tendon, every – the bones, the muscles, everything in there was once food and so when you start to eat, you're telling your body that you're going to nourish it, not just – you're going to feed it, not just fill it from a space perspective. So when you're eating real food, you actually need to eat far less and that will be reflected in your – in the cost. That's my first point.

The second point is that you need to take the context of your diet

into a bigger picture, because it is the absolute foundation of health, as I just said. There's not a cell in your body that was not once food, so both the function and the form of your body is entirely dependent on what you are feeding yourself. We kind of forget that when we eat, we do have very amazing digestive systems that it's almost shocking what they're able to extract from the foods that we give it.

Trudy Scott: Isn't it amazing that some people can survive on terrible stuff. Margaret Floyd: It really is, but let's make no mistake, that is depleting us on every

single level and it will inevitably turn into health issues and health issues are just chronic. I mean, everybody is sick, pretty much. It is so rare – when I go to the doctor and they say, "Oh my gosh, you're not taking any medications," I'm only 40, and they're shocked that I'm not taking anything [laughter], because it's so



rare, and being sick is not cheap. So we have to look at it from the bigger picture. It's not just about what's on your dinner table. It's the fact that what's on your dinner table is going to set your body up for either health or disease. There is no neutral. Every single thing you put in your mouth is either taking you towards health, it's helping your body to build and to perform its functions, or it's hurting you. I do not believe that there is something that is neutral that is going to just kind of slide through you and have no impact. So yes, the food that is going to help you, sadly, it costs more. And that's a big systemic issue that is bigger than we have time to talk about today. But in the big picture, you spend that extra money there and then I promise you the medical bills, the over the counter meds, the missed days at work, the missed time with your family because you had that headache or you had that whatever it is, that is – that's priceless, truly, in my opinion, and you will save a lot of money that way.

Trudy Scott: Brilliant. Could not have said it better, that's just brilliant, and the

other thing is we are spending less on food now that we did 50 years ago, so our priorities are different but all of this is something that we really need to pay heed to and it affects your body and it affects your brain. A lot of people don’t realize this very powerful connection between what we put in our mouths and how it affects our brain, as well, and our moods. We sort of separate physical health from mental health and we need those beautiful, nourishing, nutrient-dense foods to help both. So that's really important.

Margaret Floyd: Yeah, absolutely. Trudy Scott: Great, this has been so fantastic and I want to just share that you've

got a wonderful, ten week dietary program available on your website, it's called Get Naked with the Ten Week Dietary Program and you can go to EatNakedNow.com and sign up for that and then stay connected with Margaret so you can learn more wonderful stuff about eating beautiful food, this has been so fantastic, Margaret. Any final words? Although I think with that last conclusion, you just summed it up beautifully [laughter].

Margaret Floyd: Yeah, I think I'm going to leave it at that. Just to say that you

really have the power even to have a lot more control over your health than you probably realize, and taking this step that we've talked about today and all the suggestions and the countless suggestions that I'm sure you're receiving through this summit overall that are really, really important first steps and they're totally possible. So, this stuff is very much in your hands, which is – it's a very empowering thing to know.



Trudy Scott: Great. So today's talk was “Comfort Food or Sweet Misery: How

sugar controls your mood and how to get it out of your diet,” and I knew when I invited you, Margaret, I would get much more than just the sugar aspect. We got so much more with all these nourishing, nutrient dense foods, so thank you so much for coming and sharing your work with us and thanks so much for the work that you do and your wonderful books.

Margaret Floyd: Thank you so, so much for having me, it has been so much fun.

Love chatting about this stuff, I could talk about it all night. Trudy Scott: I know, good, well now you can go and see little Sia because she's

missing her mommy [laughter] and thanks again for being on and thank you everyone for joining yet another great interview on The Anxiety Summit. Be sure to listen in to all the other great interviews and this is Trudy Scott signing off.

Here is The Anxiety Summit blog post for this speaker. It has additional information and useful links: http://www.everywomanover29.com/blog/anxiety-summit-comfort-food-or-sweet-misery-how-sugar-controls-your-mood/ Margaret Floyd, Nutritional Therapist, Writer, Real Food Advocate and author of Eat Naked

Margaret Floyd is a nutritional therapist, writer, and real food advocate. She’s has been on the pursuit of the ideal, nutritious, and delicious way of eating for the better part of her adult life. Margaret received her Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) certification from the Nutritional Therapy Association and was certified as a Holistic Health Counselor by the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. She is also a Certified GAPS Practitioner, a Certified



Healing Foods Specialist, is certified by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, and has a thriving private practice in Los Angeles, California through which she supports clients throughout North America and Europe to achieve true health and vitality through diet and lifestyle changes. Margaret is the author of Eat Naked: Unprocessed, Unpolluted, and Undressed Eating for a Healthier, Sexier You published by New Harbinger Publications in 2011. She is also the coauthor with Chef James Barry of the follow-up cookbook, The Naked Foods Cookbook, released May, 2012. She currently blogs at eatnakednow.com as well as several other health-related websites.

Trudy Scott, CN, host of the Anxiety Summit, Food Mood expert and author of The Antianxiety Food Solution

Food Mood Expert Trudy Scott is a certified nutritionist on a mission to educate and empower women worldwide about natural solutions for anxiety, stress and emotional eating. Trudy works with women one-on-one and in groups, serving as a catalyst in bringing about life enhancing transformations that start with the healing powers of eating real whole food, using individually targeted supplementation and making simple lifestyle changes. She also presents nationally to nutrition and mental health professionals on food and mood, sharing all the recent research and how-to steps so they too can educate and empower their clients and patients.

Trudy is past president of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. She was recipient of the 2012 Impact Award and currently serves as a Special Advisor to the Board of Directors. She is a member of Alliance for Addiction Solutions and Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Trudy is the author of The Antianxiety Food Solution: How the Foods You Eat Can Help You Calm Your Anxious Mind, Improve Your Mood and End Cravings (New Harbinger 2011).

The information provided in The Anxiety Summit via the interviews, the blog posts, the website, the audio files and transcripts, the comments and all other means is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for advice from your physician or other health care professional. You should consult with a healthcare professional before starting any diet, exercise, or supplementation program, before taking or stopping any medication, or if you have or suspect you may have a health problem.

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