On this week's episode of the podcast, Carolina sat down with Ava Nouri, registered dietitian + the host of Thought On Thriving podcast. The girls dove into so many wellness topics; Ava's relationship to health and wellness, plant based vs animal based diets and how to be conscious about your limiting beliefs.
ava's inner growth journey
Ava starts by describing her wellness journey, which she believes kick started her entire inner growth journey. She got into nutrition at a very young age, she didn't eat very healthy growing up and that caught up to her, she wasn't feeling very well and realized that something had to change. She began eating more fruits + veggies, making smoothies, and incorporated more healthy foods into her life. She started to see the effects of eating healthier in the way her body looked and realized it was something she could begin to control. This feeling became a bit addictive to her and she began to control more and more aspects of her eating, which ended up leading to an eating disorder. However, she didn't even realize that she had an eating disorder, until one of her friends sat her down and told her she felt that she had disorder eating habits. This led to some major changes in her life. One of those changes was what she experienced throughout college. She had a spiritual awakening. She has a very spiritual mom and was always involved in the spiritual world so she was familiar with the experience she was having. It started with healing her eating disorder. She never actually sought out help for her eating disorder and actually healed herself with the books she was reading, journaling, and using daily affirmations. She was already working on improving the relationship she had with herself, but during lockdown had her actual spiritual awakening and was able to connect with her body + soul. Another thing she attributes to her spirituality is the beginning of dating her boyfriend. He and his family are very spiritual and he helped to guide her along the process, but also gave her the room to grow and go through the process on her own time. Her boyfriend recommended she see an energy healer and that really kickstarted her entire process of healing and gave her tools to help herself daily. One thing she took away from his teaches was to release and forgive everything at the end of the day. Any judgement or negativity, she releases at the end of the night so she can start the next day with a fresh mindset. This is such an amazing tool. Sometimes we don't even realize the negativity we take in from our day. By speaking to yourself before your day ends with a nice voice and forgive anything that might not have gone the way you wanted it to, you learn to talk to yourself with a kinder voice + can go to bed with a clean heart and mind.
Mindset shift
This moment was a huge realization for her, and she began getting into the actual science of nutrition. She absolutely fell in love with nutrition and released how important it was to actually fuel your body. Ava thought she was being healthy by only eating healthy foods + restricting her calories but she was actually harming herself. She wasn't giving her body the proper macronutrients that her body was begging for. She realized that if she actually wanted to be healthy this was not the way to do it.
Plant based vs animal based diet
In high school Ava decided to write a research paper on the controversial topic of plant based diets. The research that she did for this paper, actually is what led her to become vegan. At the time there were so many documentaries and papers coming out talking about the benefits of plant based diets. There were so many people following the vegan diet, Ava thought that with all this backing, it must have been the healthier option. Carolina also connected with Ava on this topic. She decided to be vegan/plant based mainly due to her restrictive mindset. She began adding in animal based products slowly into their lifestyle for health and hormone reasons. Carolina talked about how she has seen so many differences in her skin, energy and overall health from adding in animal meats. For Ava, she was vegan for almost 8 years. Almost a year ago she decided to make the switch. She found that veganism did help to heal her at the time, she didn't fear eating and felt pretty good for a really long time. But, her body began to give her hints that it wasn't working anymore. She had gut issues and her bone density got really low (which could have also been her eating disorder at the time). This was one of the main reasons why she switched back to eating meat, she is on a mission to get her bone density back. She needed to get in more essential protein and knew she wasn't going to get this from a plant based diet. The protein amino acids are just not as bioavailable in plant protein for muscle and bone building as they are in meat products. Everything that you do requires protein, so if you want to build muscle, and optimize your bodies functioning you need bioavailable protein. Coming from a purely nutritional aspect, Ava recommends that if you feel amazing eating plant based, that's awesome, but really listen to your body and do whatever is necessary for your health. If your body is craving nutrition and nutrients then you have to honor what it is asking for. You have to allow yourself what it wants!
limiting beliefs
A lot of the inner work Ava does is to be mindful of her limiting beliefs and be conscious in the moment of what she can grow from. She wants to learn more and more now that she is able to look inward. She loves to live by the quote, out of god comes all things. She also loves, we create, we promote and we allow everything in our lives. She believes that we allow everything to happen in our lives, and if we want to change our current life, we can! It's all about how we react and respond to everything around us. We need to take responsibility and not allow certain things into our space that aren't serving us.
This was such an amazing conversation that I took so much away from! If you want to listen to the full episode or even watch the convo, click below!!
xo Michaela
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