In this episode of The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach Podcast, we’re diving into a conversation that goes far beyond personal recovery. This isn’t just about what you do for yourself—it's about how the choices you make today can shape the health and wellness of your entire family for generations to come.

We’re exploring the powerful concept of generational wellness—how the way you care for your body, mind, and spirit after breast cancer doesn’t just stop with you. It creates ripples that reach your loved ones, inspiring them to embrace healthier habits and make choices that could change the trajectory of their own lives.

We’ll touch on the wisdom our ancestors held, the healing power of connecting with whole foods, and how simple lifestyle shifts can have a profound impact, not just on your health but on your family’s health too.

As breast cancer survivors, you’ve been on a journey of transformation, and it’s one that doesn’t end with your recovery. Your story, your actions, and your commitment to living a healthier, more connected life set an example that can empower your children, your partner, and even your grandchildren. You have the unique opportunity to become a role model of resilience, self-care, and wellness in ways that go beyond any diagnosis.

If you’ve ever wondered how your personal journey can make a bigger impact, or if you’re looking for ways to inspire those around you without forcing changes, this episode is for you. Tune in, get inspired, and discover how your path to recovery can be a beacon of hope and a blueprint for a healthier future—not just for you but for everyone you love. This is your chance to take what you’ve learned and turn it into a powerful legacy of health that extends far beyond yourself.

Referred to in this episode:
Metabolic Health Coaching - Buy one get one half off for someone 18 or younger.

Register for Metabolic Health Day

American Health & Nutrition: A Second Opinion 

Books:
Good Energy

The Anxious Generation

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hey there, friends, welcome to episode 379

0:37
of better than before breast cancer. With me. Laura lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach. So before we get even, even get started today, I want to tell you about some links you're going to find in the show notes for this episode that are very, very important, and I'm going to go into them even more in this show. One of them is a link to register for free for the National metabolic health day that is sponsored by the metabolic terrain Institute of Health. This is the second annual metabolic health day. I am a very, very proud sponsor of metabolic health day, and I'm going to tell you why shortly. But what you get from registering for metabolic health day is it's a virtual event. There's going to be amazing speakers. Naisha Winters is going to be leading the charge. Dr Naisha winters, she's absolutely brilliant and amazing, and we're going to be just learning so much about the power and the tools that we have to improve the terrain of our health, to support our body's ability to get to an optimally healthy state, whatever that means for your individual body, and for whatever that means for the individual circumstances you're going through, which you can do to support yourself. So the link to register for the free spot in that metabolic health day you're going to find in the show notes where you're either listening to this on any podcast platform or watching it on YouTube, so please click on that and grab a free spot. Is going to be absolutely amazing. And the second link is to a special hearing that happened here in the United States just a couple of days ago. And it was a special Senate hearing, and it's called American health and nutrition a second opinion. And I'm linking to it because if you haven't heard about it, I want you to be able to listen to it. Such incredible information, great data, great speakers as such an important topic. And I'll tell you, it's all the madness that's going on here in the US right now, there's one thing I can get behind, and that one thing is a slogan, make America healthy again. I can get behind that all day long. And so let me connect that back to an experience I had this weekend and in a couple of weeks here previous so this past weekend, I hosted my first live retreat. I talked about it on a previous episode. It was absolutely amazing, these women coming together, who have been in a coaching group for years together, transforming their lives, supporting the healing of their bodies, going through treatments and surgeries and recoveries and family issues and work issues and all these things, supporting each other all these years, finally coming together and meeting each other in person, and the energy of that, that, in and of itself, the joy from that, we left, we cried, we danced, we went on boats, we made amazing food. The food all weekend long, was low carb, high flavor, delicious food that we didn't have to have a weekend together and go home and detoxify from a delicious menu of food to support our health, to support our body's ability to heal and to go home, not only not feeling guilty for going off the rails for the whole weekend, but going home with new and wonderful recipes to continue to support them and their families. And here's the thing, when we were at this retreat, we talked a lot about nutrition, genomics, we talked a lot about health. We talked a lot about doing things to better support all of our bodies and our ability to heal and be strong and have long, healthy lives. Now, over the past few weeks, I have coached some young people that are family members for clients of mine, and I loved it so much. I love being able to educate young people on how their body works, to give them information like this code to their body, like keys to a long healthy life, or keys to improving your chances of having a long healthy life. I love it so much. So I was really thrilled as we spent time together, as we talked about healing ourselves, the to hear people say, like, I want you to work with my child too, and. So this whole thing comes together for me, like I'm just so excited about metabolic health day, about addressing metabolic wellness on a national level, about this becoming a conversation that people are really starting to pay attention to, because for us as people who've had a diagnosis of breast cancer, this is our power to change and support our metabolic health, to improve the chance of us having better outcomes from our treatment, to reduce the risk of us having breast cancer recurrence, to improve the performance of the standard of care treatments that we do and make them even more effective when it comes to managing this disease and supporting our body's ability to heal from it, our powers on what we can do to support our wellness. Our power is what we can do to change the way we think about food being a deprivation, junk food, highly processed food, colored, colorized, odorized, flavorized foods being fun foods or treat foods. Metabolic wellness and the focus on all of the tools available to us through food, through exercise, through connection, through joy, through following your passions in life, through all the things, stress management, you know, that's actually what this whole podcast is about. I want us to understand that one generational wellness is going to start with us. Right? Generations ago, our grandma, whose lifestyle and genetics had an influence on what we're experiencing in our bodies, here in our lifetime, and between my grandma's lifetime and mine, I can tell you that a tremendous amount has changed when it comes to how we treat our bodies and how we nourish our bodies. So now that we see that that change has led to an epidemic of obesity, incredibly increasing rates in diabetes, cancer, childhood diseases. Can we be a part of generational wellness and start to turn that tide? You know, I want to talk about three really important things when it comes to thinking about generational wellness, about supporting our bodies and teaching the people we love that supporting their bodies can be fun. Can be an opportunity to connect to each other, can be an opportunity. You know, environmental causes are a really big deal, but nourishing our body in the right way requires us to nourish our planet in the right way as well. So all of this is connected, and all of it supports our ability to have some power and play a very powerful role into supporting our own wellness. When I work with women who want to make dietary and lifestyle changes, they often struggle with the idea that they want to do these things, but they feel challenged by the fact that their family likes to eat a certain way, and that way more often than not, is very unhealthy. That way more often than not, is filled with processed food, colored food, fast food. And when I say colored food, colors, fake, artificial colors in food, artificial flavors in food. And we have this really wild idea in our head that that's fun food, good food, like changing people's mentality about that, or getting that out of your house would be a deprivation, when it's actually like a life saving act of love for yourself and for the people that you love. So can we step into generational wellness, step into metabolic health and understand what that really means? So I'm going to touch on three important topics. But before I do that, I want to tell you that there's one more link. So you're going to find a link to metabolic health day. You're going to find a link to the hearing where you can listen to some amazing information. But you're also going to find a link to a new offer I created after working with these young people, after spending time with my clients and hearing their passion about supporting their own wellness, their improvements they've seen in their lives and their lifestyle and the way they feel because of changes they've made. I made a decision to give even more to generational wellness by saying that any adult that does their metabolic health coaching with me, gets a nutrition genome or 3x four genetics that any adult who does that can get coaching from me and that advice from me for half off for anyone in their family. And I don't care if it's a grandkid or a kid or just a next door neighbor child that you love and want to support, but. Anyone else under the age of 18 for half off. Now, let me be very clear on what half off means. You have to buy the genetic kit. That is something that doesn't go through me, and I have no influence over the price of that. So you go to 3x four genetics. If you live in the United States, or if you're in Europe or Canada or any other country, other than the United States, you go to nutrition genome and you get the nutrition genomics report through them. Either way, that report is priced separately. What I am giving the discount on to work with people you love is my coaching. So the time I spend interpreting those genetic reports and coaching and giving you the supportive documentation to help to make lifestyle adjustments. Okay, so I just feel like that's really important, and I want to put it out there starting now through the end of October, because October is not just metabolic health day, the second annual metabolic health day, but October is a four year anniversary from when I was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer, when I was diagnosed with widespread disease, and thinking I wasn't gonna live to see the end of the year. You know, wondering it was october 11, would I be here come January 1? And here I am, here four years later, with a lot less cancer, one active lymph node that has cancer in it when it was throughout so much of my body, and I attribute that to my wonderful standard of care oncologist, and to the metabolic approach to health and metabolic approach to cancer, which has taught me so much about the things I could do to support my health and to support the treatments that I go through. All of that, I'm not discounting anything. All of that has been a very important part in getting me here. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could start to turn the tide of generational wellness by teaching our young people how their bodies work while they're young, educating them and helping them understand this is how your body works and what you put into it, how you think about it, how you engage with the outside world, all of this affects your health. Wouldn't it be great if we start putting more focus on prevention through promoting health, rather than just putting our attention into early detection, which is very, very important. Early detection is very important. But what if we never had to detect it? What if we could start to decrease the amount of detection that we are seeing now and the rising numbers? Wouldn't that be amazing? You know, I'm reading this book that's called the anxious generation, and it is. It's pretty remarkable. I'll link to that book in the show notes here if you're interested in reading it. But as I read it and I read about what's going on in the minds of our youngest generations, I cannot help but think about how our metabolic health is impacting that because I know that the food that you put in changes the health of your gut, and the health of your gut changes and impacts the way your brain functions. I know this. We know this. This is science. This is nutritional psychology. It's all of those things. And so when we see rising rates of disease for adults and for children, and we see this huge change in the way we feed our bodies, and we know we've gotten so far away from the way our human body is supposed to be fed, I have to wonder, would we have less anxious future generations if we started to focus more on generational wellness. And, you know, I think it's important to point out that it's, it's not only diet, right lifestyle goes way beyond diet, but one thing when it does come to diet, isn't just looking should it be keto? Should it be paleo? Should it be vegan? Should it be vegetarian? But really connecting? You know, when I studied Ayurveda, I just thought one of the most beautiful things was the mindful eating process and the connection to the food, to our world, to the earth that brings us food, the honoring and even considering, when you're looking at food on your plate, where how that food got to you, you know, what hands touched it, what people put effort into bringing it to you? And I have to tell you that it's been shocking to me when I hear young children who don't even understand the Carrots grow under the ground. You know, so part of generational wellness, I believe, is reconnecting to that wisdom of our body and its connection to the earth we have. It's so important for us to realize that generation. Patients before us, they had lots of issues with infectious disease, but their bodies were nourished for generations with whole, unprocessed foods, and yes, we developed busier lives and many conveniences came up and rose out of that, but now we're seeing the impact on what has happened from moving away from our natural whole food diets, and I hope to be a part of shifting that, and I invite you to be a part of that with me, because I know that for my clients, for the people who come to me, you know, we love our family, we love our loved ones. I mean, that's just like a silly thing to say out loud. But why do we have thoughts that teaching them to eat and live in a way that you're learning to eat and live to support your health, your longevity and your healing? Why wouldn't we teach them that that's impactful for them? Now, why would we say that the food you're eating to support that path for you isn't the most important thing for the people you love as well, and that we can all come and work on sharing that together and going through what can be a challenging path together. Making lifestyle changes is challenging, right? But returning to this positive outlook when it comes to cooking for ourselves and nourishing ourselves and eating ourselves and looking at that as something that's fun and wonderful, rather than a deprivation, and thinking of processed high sugar foods and foods that do not support our health or healing as being fun or treats, that's a really interesting thought to explore. But more than that, we have to think about the holistic lives we live. A Life is about so much more than food, like I love I worked with a 14 year old young woman who, weeks after I got a message that said from her mom that shared with me how impressed her mom was, because her daughter has been calling her and saying, You know what, Mom, I can tell that I'm too tired. I need to not do this thing. Right? She's she's one of those people who's just an overachiever, and she's starting to learn how her body works and understand that she has control over how much fatigue she's experiencing at 14, and it really sunk in, and she's making lifestyle changes at 14. How amazing is that? So we have to move beyond just the idea of diet, and we have to really embrace we look at, I think, a lot of young generations, and we're like, oh, they're young. They can they're resilient, they'll get over it, but what we do to ourselves while we're young puts us in the positions we're in when we're older, right? It doesn't just go away. Life is not in a silo. It's holistic. What we do when we're young affects us when we're older, what our grandma did affects us. That's pretty powerful, right? So coming back to really looking at, how do we sleep? How do we manage time? How do we teach our children to hold space for themselves, to have time for themselves, to really and truly enjoy life. That's also a part of coming back and looking at this lens of generational wellness. How do we support that? How do we create healthier generations, and how do we make it fun, right? How do we make this fun for our families? I had a mom recently, and she said to me, she has a couple of young children, and she said to me, I don't even know where to begin. How do I how do I even start shopping for this kind of food for my family? How do I even start preparing it. And what a wonderful journey to take with your family, right? What an interesting thing to learn how to cook whole foods together to make it fun. Like I love cooking with my granddaughter and I cooked with all of my children as they were growing up. I let them choose different dinners and things they'd like to make. I love cookbooks, right? And now we have so much access to so many more things, like the food channel, I think, is one of the most popular channels there is. So how can you make it fun by incorporating and bringing the family in? This young woman that I was coaching, she said to me, you know, I'm a very picky eater, and I don't like a lot of things, and we worked on just changing that thought. And I said, Would you be open to maybe not saying that anymore? Would you be open to maybe stop identifying yourself as a picky eater? And I I coach a lot of adults who also call themselves picky eaters. Would we be willing to drop that mindset and say, you know, I am now open to trying new things. I'm open to exploring new food, and can we start to just shift the mindset? And this young woman was I asked her, Would you be willing to do that? And she said, Yeah. And I said, Tell me three things you might be willing to try. Let's just start there. You know, it doesn't have to be crazy, like you don't have to go start eating jackfruits or something like that. But what three things? Would you be willing to change or willing to try? We could start really, really small with our family. We don't have to throw out everything all at once. We don't have to shock everybody. We don't have to devastate everybody. You know, we work and take small steps on changing our mindset, on changing our lifestyle, and supporting the people we love and coming along with us, right? It's not judgment, it's not condemnation. It's all about can we return to love and nourishment? Can we return to connection, to connecting to each other, to slowing things down a little bit, to asking ourselves, do we really need to be doing all the things we tell ourselves we need to be doing, or can we create some more space to come together? And food is a great way to do that, right? So can we start the generational wellness by bringing people in, bringing your spouse in to cook with you, to try out new recipes. Maybe they don't like to cook, maybe they'll be your taste tester, whatever it is, right? But looking for fun ways to just shift the way that food happens in your home, and if you're the only person, then to shift the way of looking at food from that's a lot of work. I don't want to do it to, how can this be simple? How can this be fun? How can this be easy? And let me tell you, there's lots of tools and techniques out there for making fast easy food at home. And I don't mean fast food like cheeseburgers when I say fast easy food, but I often look for recipes, and I say 15 minutes or less. Prep in 15 minutes or less, because there are times when I want to cook and I want to take a lot of time just enjoying the process in the kitchen, and there are times when I have a busy day and I just want to get it done right. So when we think about this super important topic of shifting generational illness that we're seeing now to generational wellness, it's not only good for the people you love, but good for you, because how much easier will your life be when people start to come along with you, when people start to see how much better your complexion looks, right, how much more energy you have, and they start to say, what are you doing? I have an adult daughter who is in her early 30s, and there's been multiple points where I've said to her, you are too young to be as tired as you are, what is happening? It's time to make some changes. And it's not only okay to be honest about that, but it's imperative, right? When we're talking about our family and the people we love, it's okay to say, wow, it's not normal to feel this way. It's not normal to be wake up tired. It's not normal to be constipated and go to the bathroom once or twice a week. This is not normal. When we see this, it's our bodies sending a sign that says, hey, this is a red flag. Let's address it before it becomes something that is irreversible or life threatening, right? Let's start to see those signs early and find a way to be joyful about it, find a way to have fun with it. Because, in my opinion, if it isn't fun, it's not going to last, right? If we have to do anything based on discipline or scarcity or willpower, is only going to be temporary all the time. I love these questions, how can this be fun and how can it be easier? Right? I was my second husband would tell me that his dad would say, you were so lazy, right? You're a lazy kid. And his dad, at one point, said, but you know what? There's a benefit to being lazy, because you find ways to simplify how you do things. You find ways to make things easier, because you don't want to put so much energy into it. And I always thought that was a really cool way of looking at things. So when we look at our busy lives, and we think about what we want our lives to look like, and we think about how we want to feed ourselves, and we ask ourselves, How could this be easier? And we just play with that idea, how could it be simple? How could I do this differently? And when we're open to that, instead of adopting the mindset of, I'm too busy. It takes too much time. It's too hard. I don't have time when we tell ourselves that we shut ourselves down, and there's no open space to even think about what we could create, right? So can we adopt those questions? Could this be fun? How could it be fun? And how can I make this easy on myself? Right? Doesn't have to be a big deal. And I think that when we start to inform ourselves, become aware, get all the information you need and and do it in a way that works for our lifestyle, that's when we start to see things stick for a long time, right? For long periods of time, and that's when we start to see things shift. So I invite you to become a part of that shift in your life, with your family, with me, go to a free metabolic health day event. See what you learn for. That see what awareness it creates, and let's start shifting the way that you think about wellness and lifestyle and food and nutrition, little bits at a time. Doesn't have to be special diets if you want help with that, you know you can find me at the breast cancer recovery coach.com I do private coaching. I have all kinds of nutrition information and coaching and support in my better than before breast cancer life coaching membership, and I do metabolic health coaching on a private basis as well. So if you're ready to become a part of this movement of shifting metabolic health and taking power back over your health, I invite you to explore all of that, and I'd love to hear your feedback. I'd love to hear your thoughts. So find me on Facebook and Instagram as the breast cancer recovery coach. Send me a message. Join my better than before. Breast cancer free Facebook group. Have a discussion about what comes up for you when you think about this, and maybe we can all support each other in more wellness. All right, I will talk to you again next week, and until then, take good care of yourself.