Ella Magers:

Record. Lauren, it’s so great to have you here.

Lauren Plunkett:

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here, Ella, this is exciting. Long time coming.

Ella Magers:

Yes, and I am, I’m so impressed by you and I love how the messages you put out there, they’re incredibly empowering and that’s like one of my themes, right? And valuable not only though for people with a diabetes diagnosis, but really for everyone who eats. So in other words, everyone, right? So thank you for being here. I have been really looking forward to this conversation.

Lauren Plunkett:

That’s really exciting. I can’t wait to hear what you ask and to dive in. And that’s definitely the thing with diabetes, there’s over 500 million people on the planet with diabetes and everybody in between is an eater and might be family or they might be a provider, they might be on the healthcare side and it touches everyone. So yeah, let’s talk about food and everything else coming over the next hour.

Ella Magers:

Let’s do that. And curious if you’re up for a lightning round with just a few fun questions. It was sort of fun. Some of them are fun.

Lauren Plunkett:

Okay, sure. All

Ella Magers:

Right. Okay. All right, so I have five questions. One is, what are your three daily habits that help keep you holistically healthy?

Lauren Plunkett:

Oh, the first thing that came to mind was cat therapy.

Ella Magers:

Love that one.

Lauren Plunkett:

I’ve got three and I need them and I wake up with them. I go to bed with them. They are super important to me is just keeping, they’re funny and I enjoy that. So yeah, having that animal, I mean, my tops got horses all over it. It’s like animals close to my heart. It’s a big stress reliever. I exercise almost every single day and by exercise I mean some kind of movement where I’m either just getting outside and breathing heavier, picked up yoga again after having a shoulder injury for a long time. And so that’s super important to me because I know the positive effects of it mentally for me more than almost anything. And then I guess really simply put is I make it a point to eat, to just to eat well, the fueling component of eating regularly, starting off my day with some nutrition, thinking it through and being sure that I am also getting that variety of food going in throughout my day means really that simple. It’s eat, exercise and enjoy the cats.

Ella Magers:

Well, mine is not far off. I have to just tell you today I was just had such a busy morning and just on the screen right on the computer screen, which just gets me really stressed and I went, I am a boxer. I know you do all sorts of different things, but you’re also a cycling instructor and I want to talk about that. Boxing and tie boxing is one of my things. And just on the way there, I, I already felt better just knowing that I was going to have that 45 minutes or an hour where I was so connected to my body, to other people, to movement, to sweating. Oh God, it’s so good mentally as well.

Lauren Plunkett:

Do you that do it on your own all the time or is there a community aspect to that for you? Because for me, when I had to teach my cycling classes, these people are my friends. I enjoy the heck out of ’em. Sometimes they heckle me in class, they flip me off, they say all sorts of awful things and I say, keep it coming guys, because I’m going to get you back. I just love

Ella Magers:

It. Oh, I love that you have that type of relationship with your students in class and Yes, for me, I’ve definitely grown and it’s evolved for me into really that importance of that community aspect is so much more now that I don’t go out and I don’t go out and party and go to the bars and do other things. Like my yoga community, I’ve got a amazing yoga studio I’ll go to and then I’ve got my boxing community and yes, that social aspect is just like what you said is so important.

Lauren Plunkett:

I think group fitness will never die in person. We lost it for a few years and I really hope people keep coming back because it’s back and it’s better than ever I think.

Ella Magers:

Agreed. All right. Number two, name a quirk or fun fact about yourself.

Lauren Plunkett:

Oh gosh. Okay. I is for as serious as I can be and for all these things, diabetes and healthcare and all these things that I can go on about and be super passionate about, I’m kind of a goofball. I really mean like stupid jokes. I get a 14 year old voice sense of humor. Really who I am is just in laughing and sending friends of mine just obnoxious videos. I think that’s really telling for the type of personality that is just kind of buried in really heavy things that the other side of that, for me, there has to be the release and the reminder that who I am is actually is more like that.

Ella Magers:

And I think that’s so important for holistic health, having that humor, having that playful side

Lauren Plunkett:

And how it’s very difficult, or should I say challenging for I think vegans in particular to, to lay into that happy side when you’re constantly aware of the wider world that is, we’re so sensitive to

Ella Magers:

A thousand percent. I think that’s definitely one of my challenges. Having connected with that, suffering at such a young age, having it’s hard. It is hard. How do you manage to have that balance? I mean, we have to put up a little bit of a wall, right? We can’t connect to that suffering all the time, or we’ll be sad all the time. Do you find yourself, does that take practice for you? How do you do that?

Lauren Plunkett:

Yeah, being conscious is, it’s a gift and a curse. It’s a responsibility and it is a heavy load to bear. And I think that is also the thing to remember is being self-aware. For me, I embrace when I’m angry, I know it’s going to happen. I know I’m going to get pissed off and yell at the TV because I mean, I could yell at the TV every single day. If I subject myself to a crap that is always on the tv, what they’re talking about, what they’re not talking about, I can easily look at a menu around town here, having searched 45 different restaurants to go and try to get something vegan that’s not just crappy. It’s actually vegetables. And I can start to get mad over that. And so the awareness of, am I letting too much of this into my day today? Have I gotten ticked off at all?

Am I nothing but ticked off today? And those are those moments when I remind myself, hold on, what do I need here? And I’ll have you friends even ask me, when do you teach spin again? Because you need to go. You’re get getting a little hot. I have doctors that drive me crazy. I’ve got these things come out of everywhere. I’ll see a headline in the diabetes world that I’m just, honestly, another one like this. I’ll see these things get under my skin. And knowing that you have to go radically self-care yourself right now, or you’re only going to stay in the position that you are in. My husband too, he can’t stand it when I’m angry and he feels bad and he feels like you can’t do anything about it. So he’s kind of a good check. Checking in point for me when he says, even kind of running hot lately is you need to go for a walk. And sometimes that’ll do it. And also again, going back into the funny, do you have podcasts loaded that are about just humor, just obnoxious funny stuff. Get that stuff in your ears and check back in to your bubble, even though we don’t always want to stay in the bubble, but that’s a safe space. So safe space it.

Ella Magers:

So good. So good. Okay. This one might be a little tough, something that was painful at the time, but looking back, you’re grateful that it happened.

Lauren Plunkett:

Oh, painful at the ti. Well, I mean the obvious one is being diagnosed with type one diabetes never described it as painful, but throughout the years there were plenty of painful moments that were more emotionally painful than physically painful. But looking back, it has had everything to do with who I am today.

Ella Magers:

Yes, put a pin in that. We’re going to come right back to that. You get one song to cycle two for the next year.

Lauren Plunkett:

Yes.

Ella Magers:

What song do you choose?

Lauren Plunkett:

It is The Lion the Beast, and the Beat. Oh my gosh, Grace Potter. Oh, this is my, I don’t know, this one. My, oh, it’s like my, I actually, there’s two. There’s two that Ivo, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Iver. She is from the Pharaoh Islands. She is this amazing, magnificent Nordic goddess who yes, who just does these. She’s so talented and she’s got some titles of songs I can’t pronounce that she does in several different languages. But anytime she starts beating on that drum, something happens to me and I can’t wait to share that with my participants.

Ella Magers:

Okay. I cannot wait. I’m always looking for different music that I’m not familiar with, so that’s a very self selfish question that I just asked, but

Lauren Plunkett:

Look that up. Ooh, tribal. It’s so great. Yeah, I’ll share it with you for sure. Sweet.

Ella Magers:

All right. Last one. What message would you put on a billboard? Four thousands or even millions of people to see every day

Lauren Plunkett:

Eat like you love yourself? If I sat down and had to write down five, I could probably do that, but I think Eat You Love Yourself is thought provoking and that’s really where is, it’s a good place to start is to be thought-provoking about food. Whether that is a trigger in a way where we ask questions or it triggers self-examination or it makes us wonder, why would someone say that to me? Do I not already? So yeah, it’s an interesting idea. Eat you, love yourself. I think that a lot of people when they really think about it for a second, they eat for punishment. They eat because they’re sad for emotional reasons. And if we examine that a little bit further, really unpack the how do you eat? How do you treat yourself, how do you talk to yourself so much that branches from that simple question.

Ella Magers:

Yes. Oh, and this is why I was so excited to have you on, because two themes I’m especially interested in leaning into our conversation today are our relationship with food. So not just the food and the nutrition, but our relationship with the food and the importance of examining the language used in reference to chronic disease, which I know you are very passionate about. So I think your backstory is really, really an important place to start for those listeners who don’t know it. So way back when you were a kid and experiencing these symptoms and landed in the hospital, can you start there and then I want to weave these themes into your story.

Lauren Plunkett:

Yeah, for sure. I will summarize, there’s great, there’s great information on our website to read through that gives you kind of the idea of what my attitude around it is because I’m a bit different when it comes to what it’s like or I feel different compared to what I typically see in the chronic care world is I was diagnosed with type one diabetes when I was 11. I was withering away. I wasn’t holding onto my nutri. This is really what it is when they’re diagnosed with type one is you’re not holding nutrition anymore. Insulin is this really important hormone that helps us absorb nutrition. So I was not doing that because my body was no longer producing insulin. So off to the hospital, you go and you start to get that insulin intravenously and you are in the hospital for a few days learning how to deal with the insulin that you’re going to have to give yourself when you eat.

And so there’s a short acting insulin and a long acting. We’ve always got insulin in the background working all the time. You can think of it as a slow drip, drip, drip and my body’s not really going to do that. So there are calculations involved and it really focuses on nutrition. And I grew up to not understand my body because clearly there were some things internally going on that are bigger than just checking blood sugar and balancing insulin with nutrition. We’ve got stressed, we’ve got other hormones going on, so I describe that as the hormonal apocalypse of what that’s like being diagnosed at 11. And then I’ve only got a few years before capo, so all of that began to go on and I wanted to be an athlete and I wanted to not think about diabetes all the time. But you really have to think about how it will affect things several steps ahead.

Insulin now is faster acting. There are so many great tools now that we can use to take care of ourselves that I didn’t quite have. I’m coming up on my 30th year of having type one complication free and that was the idea of diabetes is learn how to survive, but the teaching isn’t exactly learn how to thrive, learn how to be that athlete, learn how to be an exceptional person. It was just try not to kill yourself with insulin really is part of that. So having a good family behind you, my parents were really great, so it was helpful, but I took this on my own. I knew that I had to, I was just super intuitive as a kid. I already knew I need to embrace this. I’m going to have it forever. I need to embrace each day at a time. But that also set my anger off because I thought I was doing what needed to be done, but yet I wasn’t getting the outcomes that I was clinically expecting.

Do this because the dietician told you to count these carbohydrates, take this much insulin and you should have a healthy a1c. That never really happened. That never really happened until I describe it as getting old enough to learn how to save myself. And that meant I was going to have a crash and I was going to have a several awakenings going on after high school. I was going to have a fork in the road where I had to decide either Lauren, you’re going to get healthy, or there was no in between with type one diabetes. Either you’re going to do this or thing or you’re a little bit of an all or nothing thinking. But I had a lot to learn and it wasn’t going to happen overnight. But yet I grew up in the healthcare system. I grew up in the system. So you can imagine, and to listeners imagine how fun does that sound every three months having to go in, get weighed, obviously seeing that my body was changing and I was gaining weight super fast and it was just so difficult to feel like how am I ever going to have any control over my body when I’m being judged by it constantly based on the values of my A1C and my blood sugars.

Talk about building an unhealthy relationship with food in pretty much everything else. If you didn’t get this perfect idea of what you were supposed to be like by following the clinical rules. So the day came where I realized I need to start learning about nutrition in a different way and that’s when the big light started to shine.

Ella Magers:

Wow, this yes, this no wonder mean. And we talk about the challenges for just women. It’s usually women we talk about with struggling with disordered eating and distorted body image and all of those challenges that people carry with them. Not even really understanding that there’s a better way out there. And then here you are in the medical system since you’re 11 being weighed and wow, I just can’t even imagine. I mean you’re like a firecracker. I mean for you to take that on and it’s really extraordinary, honestly. Thank

Lauren Plunkett:

You. Thank you. It it’s been so it was about 15 years of going through the motions of I have diabetes, here we go. This isn’t going great to realizing I do have the power to change this, but where am I going to go from here? And I’ve been plant-based for I think about 12, 13 years now. So when I gradually started to go into this, I wasn’t vegan at the beginning. A lot of people kind of growing into how part of eating more plants, but the setting off point here that I hope resonates with people was that I didn’t know that the research existed. That is what’s so messed up about the teaching and diabetes care. And this isn’t a knock on. I’ve got colleagues finally in the last really year and a half, I’ve met more like-minded colleagues that are super excited about plant-based nutrition because they also didn’t realize that the research was there on high fiber nutrition.

What really helps to reverse insulin resistance. That’s really the core of my teaching too, because insulin resistance reaches so many people, 500 million people on the planet if they have diagnosed diabetes, we’ve got even more people with pre-diabetes. We’ve got women with polycystic ovarian syndrome being told to go low carb and if you’re going low carb, you’re probably eating more protein and fat cause of the only other macronutrients we’re looking at. And if you’re doing it in meat and cheese, then we’re aggravating your system causing more of an inflammatory condition in your body that’s only going to exacerbate the diagnosis already. And I got into, so lemme back up here as I’m already getting passionate is that when I realized that this research existed, I had already just made the decisions I was going to eat more greens, eat more plants. These things are just generally healthy.

It’s not a diabetes thing. This is a eat to have a healthy body thing. That’s also where the language comes in is I never use the word diabetic and I wish everyone would just erase this word completely as it’s directed towards a human. There is no disease that we identify someone as being you are cancer, you are a thyroiditis. It is so unfair you are diabetic. And what it did to me as a kid is I was listed in writing as a non-compliant non-adherent diabetic. Wow. 16 years old, I didn’t care. But now as I’ve been on the other side of the curtain so to speak, and I’ve read thousands of notes from different providers, doctors all over the country, from endocrinologists to primary care and places that I’ve worked, and I am amazed at how people with diabetes are treated like numbers and not human beings.

I know it’s just in the medical record, but it matters because it moves to the care team so that everyone around you is now using this language to identify someone and that becomes their self-talk. That becomes their expression. So I grew up thinking I’m diabetic, what else am I? So when I started to change the way I was eating, I became the, what else? I became more than diabetic and then I started to kick that word out of my vocabulary and now we have research on language saying this really is a big deal when we start to identify people like this, it’s hurtful. And when I started collecting stories, it’s so limiting and I mean it’s

Ella Magers:

Like you’re cut off from even having goals and being an athlete, that’s not even possible because you’re a diabetic.

Lauren Plunkett:

Some people get through it, right? Some people will see you past this and be like, it’s fine, I don’t care. But there’re there we are different people and at different stages of diagnosis being diagnosed. I’ve got friends that were diagnosed when they were five and they’re older than me, so you couldn’t imagine having diabetes for this long. So when I started to change my nutrition, I became more heightened this of the awareness of these things that kind of hurt me growing up and put me in a box and what do I do with all of these things now that I’m more aware of them? And then I decided I’m going to take this further. I’m going to try to understand the science. And I went to school and then finally decided I think maybe I can handle this dietician thing. And that was a whole nother can of beans.

That became an enormous awakening in realizing this is how we have been teaching people. I saw it now once I got into that level of understanding of clinical care, and that blew my mind now, I knew the evidence has been here, I never knew it. And we’re still teaching people with diabetes to just focus on blood sugar when the whole body is at risk here of something. Why aren’t we eating to treat the whole system? It said we’re just focusing on blood sugar all the time. There’s so much more to the story. And as my body got used to eating more plants, I became super insulin sensitive. I had more energy than I knew how to do with, I thought I was a study of one. My endocrinologist was like, just keep doing what you’re doing. I’m not real clear on this. And there really to this day, there is not really a lot of research in exactly what plant-based nutrition and type one what’s going in that inter interaction.

But this is where my frustration with research comes in. I’m like, okay, we have to just with research, we have to look for everything so specifically all the time. But what if we just looked at ourselves as trying to live in a healthy body period, looking at the studies in plant-based nutrition. There’s so much with type two diabetes that if it’s helping to reverse insulin resistance, imagine what that could do for someone with type one whose life is between nature and manual entry. This can be the thing that helps us understand our bodies. And that’s what it did for me. And it took years to really get it. What exactly is happening here and why am I healthier to this day because of that? It wasn’t just the food, it was the way I talked to myself. It was my perception of the medical system. It was my attitude and how I knew that if I get angry I don’t feel as healthy. But that’s when I turned to exercise to really come full circle on personal and clinical and then how to self-care myself to being healthier.

Ella Magers:

Okay. So let’s talk about the system for a moment. Are things moving at least in the right direction? I mean I’m just so confused as to, well I’m confused and maybe I’m not confused as to why the research has been there. It’s out there. Are doctors not still being taught it? Is this still a thing about the big industries, the protein animal agriculture? Is that it? Like what is going on that the research is there and there’s proof and evidence and yet the system, I mean you tell me because it doesn’t seem to be changing very quickly.

Lauren Plunkett:

It’s a great question. I’ll try to summarize this in a sense. I developed a presentation for professionals called a History of Nutrition and diabetes, what we can learn from the past to Nourish in the present. I love this. This is my signature presentation. I get so excited when I give this thing. And the reason why is if we look at what we’ve done over the last 100 years, so insulin was discovered about a hundred years ago where we started to inject it, meaning people with type one diabetes have been surviving type one for only 100 years. The research and type one diabetes and nutrition goes back a bit further and actually way back further to when this was first being looked at. But ultimately the teaching began with pulling all the carbohydrates out of the body, get all the glucose producing foods out of the system.

And this has carried through even though we’ve got research and guidelines stating, let’s take an individual individualized approach. Let’s liberalize these carbohydrates, keep it fiber rich. It exists, but it is hard to change a gigantic system like this. We have doctors that have been practicing the same way for a very long time. We also have the primary care system that doesn’t even have a care team. These people out in rural America and beyond globally, they may not have access to a dietician who understands plant-based nutrition because they weren’t trained or taught that way, which is also a huge opportunity in the university system. But also if we’ve got doctors who don’t have anyone to refer to, it’s not in their wheelhouse to be teaching nutrition period. That’s why it’s quicker to write a prescription than to say, I’ve got a diabetes educator for you who can change this whole thing.

And I really learned what was going on in this space in the last three years or so. I’ve worked in primary care and started to absorb the stories from people all over the country and talk about boundaries. Like the more I absorbed this pain that other people were going through, the more I had to back off and take my own time away from it. I was shocked at what I was hearing people that had expressed to their doctors that they wanted to learn about nutrition and the doctor just says, eat low carb. I’ll just see you in a few months. Just cut all the carbs. I mean stuff like that that’s going on. And my answer to that is if you think that worked, do you think that we’d be in the position that we are in today with the trajectory of unhealthiness in this country has gone straight north along with prescription medications, the overproduction of animals, of animal products has gone straight north and so have fast food restaurants.

So if cause and effect and we look at the history of what’s been going on here, it is screamingly evident where we’ve gone wrong and where we have incredibly disservice patients also. But just to cap this is I do want to continue to slow, go back to the fact that there are very lifestyle forward medical professionals out there trying to change this. And I’m really excited about being part of that. And sitting here as someone that says, I’ve done it. I’m not just speaking from a white paper. This changed. I probably would not be alive today talking to you if I had not become more aware and then said, I am not listening to this stuff anymore because it’s not helping me and I am going to change my life today. And that’s what didn’t.

Ella Magers:

Okay, so I’m somebody who’s been diagnosed with type one diabetes and I’m open, I’m ready to, I’m not, but I’m just, oh my gosh. I was like,

Lauren Plunkett:

You got me there.

Ella Magers:

Ok.

Ella Magers:

No, I

Lauren Plunkett:

Was like, I’m a plan right now. I’ll be there and I’ll be there in four hours.

Ella Magers:

Sorry, sorry. Yes. Hypothetically, my point is I’d love to know how you kind of approach somebody maybe gone the traditional path and is ready and open to hear what’s different. Who’s open to changing their nutrition, how do you go about explaining when they’re somebody who’s maybe done it away, got it down, I mean it’s happening, it’s okay, but they’re ready to do it different. How do you start that conversation and how do you explain to them that what they’ve been doing is not the best way and how do you help them? Yeah,

Lauren Plunkett:

That’s a great question. If we’re talking about type one specifically and even type two, what I think is actually really amazing are the similarities between type one and type two. And I know a lot of people type one wish the diagnosis had a little bit of a different name. But I’ll tell you, I really enjoy working with people who have type two diabetes because I learn a lot from them and it helps me, helps ’em feel closer to them once I hear their story because the story is such a big deal. So no matter that’s where I start to ask them, can you tell me a bit about your relationship with food and what you’ve been through? Just want to get some understanding of where you’ve been and what the beauty I have found in questions like this. And I call it pulling threads because I’m going to start going deeper and deeper and deeper once you start giving me a little bit is I can tell even if it’s just over the phone and I can’t see someone if I’m starting to strike a nerve, if I’m asking questions that they have not been asked before.

So they haven’t really been given an opportunity to express this potentially traumatic existence that’s gone on for a very long time, or they don’t really know how much it’s hurt them or been in their hearts or stopped them from doing things that they love. So when I begin with just that question, I’m prepared for that to go in a lot of different directions. So we may not even talk about food until I know what position you are in as an eater, as someone that takes insulin, what’s your relationship with exercise will come along too. There’s a lot of fear with exercise. It has to do with hypoglycemia. So that’s another barrier. So as I’m listening, I’m listening to the barriers. I’m listening also to where do you want your health to go? What direction are we going in? What do you ultimately want? And I also am paying attention to are they shooting really low, really low bar here because that’s certainly where I was.

I didn’t know that I could ever teach a 90 minute cycling class where there’s no downhill, there’s really barely any breaks. I mean we’re running on adrenaline in there, but yet it’s a heart rate training type of a class. All these things I’ve learned along the way. I never knew that having diabetes would put me in that position. Diabetes did that to me. Diabetes made me understand metabolism. And so I’ve got that bigger picture. So I’m like, okay, where are you right now? And am I hearing potentially that you could be so much more, so much more? So my goal is to get them excited about that. I hope to teach you that you’ll learn more from your body having type one than you have ever had the opportunity to learn otherwise. So through diabetes, through diabetes, we can become the healthiest people that we can imagine ever even imagine that we are with living through disease. And it’s not suffering. It’s not suffering as a word I don’t like using with diabetes. It is an opportunity to learn more about your body than you ever would have and then do something with it.

Ella Magers:

That’s powerful. All right. And then when it comes to the actual eating, can you talk about, and maybe in type one, type two I, I’d love to kind of cover both. How do you help guide people once they’ve kind of opened up about their relationship with food and you’ve kind of explored that and helped them bring to light some of the trauma maybe that dictates their decisions on a daily basis. And because if they don’t have control over their own decisions because of trauma, then nothing else really matters. Right?

Lauren Plunkett:

I’m glad you put it that way because I do have to start slow and kind of gauge where someone is with carbohydrates. It may just be add a sweet potato this week because of fear that potatoes are high carb, which is just beyond unfair to what people think high carb means. So we do look at the labels here like labeling food. What do you think is high carb? Because that is constant language in the type one world is thinking that eating 30 grams of carbohydrates at one meal is high, but yet they don’t actually know how many carbohydrates they need in one day. So there’s a perspective that I try to put carbohydrates in. So essentially what I do with people is I teach them how to eat carbohydrates and thrive off of that by removing a lot of these labels around low carbo, high carb, it’s smart carb and it’s high fiber.

And high fiber doesn’t mean low carb or high carb, it means high nutrient value. So we change the language, we change how we talk about food and how we identify it. And a lot of times it just begins with a grocery list. I just want you to circle the foods that you’ll like. What would you eat here? What if you not eat in a while? Do you know what So noodles are, they’re really high fiber versus just your selina spaghettis. There’s some differences in food that we can dig even deeper. So someone’s heritage comes into play. I want to know what foods did you grow up with? So many people have told me they grew up with fruit trees in their backyard and they were diagnosed with type two for example, or pre-diabetes. And some doctor told them that fruit was bad or a family member.

It comes from somewhere. And fruit being, I mean taking fruit out of the equation when it’s something that reminds you of playing in your parents’ backyard when you were a kid or reminds you of good times can imagine how let’s bring that food back into your life. You have stress reduction from that. It’s a good memory of that food. And not only is it bringing you all these bionutrients and antioxidants and vitamins and minerals that you’re not going to get from meat and dairy and eggs, you are now reconnecting with foods that made you happy once upon a time. It’s a huge wider world. And this is still related to diabetes. It’s a huge wider world of nutrition. So that’s where the food comes in. It’s the grocery list. It’s identifying what you love that you haven’t been having. And let’s just talk about abundance versus restriction.

Bring some of this back into your life. Just grocery store it. We’re just going to hit the grocery store. I have something on my website that people can get for free. It’s called my favorite F word fi. It’s a grocery list. The F favorite F word is fiber. And I say this in front of clinical audiences after I give a talk and I’m like, what’s your favorite? And I’ve got a whole bunch of dieticians and diabetes educators in there. They’re like my bird. So much fun to just make food fun again and talk about it like this versus give everybody a low carb list and free foods and all this language around. Just eat stuff that’s not going to raise your blood sugar. We’ve got to change that.

Ella Magers:

Well, the car phobia thing is everyone like, oh my goodness, bringing people into my own coaching programs. It’s like that’s one of the number one things we have to address is that they’re scared to eat anything. They would consider a carb. And I’m like, oh my God, what do you say? And I mean for the people listening, I know at least half of them right now are like, I’m sorry, scared of carbs too. What can you say about carbs and how do you help people get over that

Lauren Plunkett:

In general? Yeah, the way you put that too, the first thing that popped in my mind was like, look at how powerful the agriculture industry is. Look at how powerful they are because they’re in our guidelines, they’re in our healthy guidelines for Americans. This is the thing with the F D A and the S D A, they have to promote healthy food. They pretty much, they support the guidelines for Americans, which aren’t wrong. It’s the basis of how dieticians practice. We need to know how much of all the vitamins and minerals in macronutrients, what’s a baseline for everyone. It’s super important to have that. But they’re also charged with supporting the industries that are feeding us. So they’re on both sides of the coin here, our government in supporting Americans, but providing the business of the agriculture industry. So it’s what we have as human beings is the power of choice.

That’s it. The power of choice. But we’ve got billboards, radio, family podcasts at advertisements everywhere telling us to go to Arby’s or eat eggs all the time. And we’ve got dieticians doing stuff like this that are teaching things to people. So journalists too, journalists should absolutely be put in their place about some of the stuff they write and their headlines that drag people into the diet world. And it’s so unfair to cherry pick research like this and pin this on people. Time magazine, eat butter. Okay, so when obviously heart disease goes up, are you guys going to be held accountable for this? But you’re going to say it’s everybody’s fault individually, it’s their fault they’re not eating. So all this stuff that brings on shame is absolutely worth talking about with everyone that if you’re in a coaching position, and I know coaches everywhere are probably astonished with the shame that people feel about food.

So if we talk about carbohydrates, we can get down to the basic science of it depending on what kind of a group that you’re talking to, you know can get real science. You as some people really love it. Others just need to know that they have permission to eat the potato, oatmeal, fruit. But what are carbohydrates, fruits and veggies and our beans and our whole grains and some nuts have carbohydrates in them. So if we ask people and very openly, do these foods sound wrong? Do they sound bad because it’s good carb versus bad carb, those two words to label food. And then if you eat a bad carb, you feel like a bad person like that in our soul when we do things like this because we we’re shaming ourselves so bad. So if you just get a response from people in that sense of do these sound like healthy foods? Well yeah, okay, now we’ve got something to talk about. And you start to reframe the language around nutrition and individually people take baby steps one by one, and that’s where the great coaching comes in at that point.

Ella Magers:

Yes. And I want to shift gears just a little bit and ask you about, I mean, you’re an animal lover. At what point, at what point did the whole plant-based versus vegan and how do you fulfill that side of yourself, that part of yourself that loves animals? And are you able to talk about that? Are you very careful not to talk about that? How do you introduce that in what’s just that whole side from a holistic health standpoint? I feel like filling our cup in that way of the things that we’re passionate about and ways we want to change the world, you’re doing it through helping people make new choices and there’s the animal piece.

Lauren Plunkett:

Yeah, I guess personally there’s really no greater joy for me than to feel like I’m contributing to the solution and not the problem. And I’ve spent enough time at sanctuaries. I grew up around horses. I feel really sensitive to horses and I really love donkeys. I was at a sanctuary in San Diego and found myself squished this sandwich between two donkeys. I was scratching one butt over here and I had the head over here and I just loved it. I mean, it was like they knew I needed a donkey sandwich. It was a Lauren sandwich. It was like they knew it and the sanctuary owner came out and she’s like, they know. Oh, they know. And people that spend a lot of time around animals, they know this. They feel close to them. I was another sanctuary a few weeks ago, and there was a family that was new to the sanctuary and the dad had said, well, I’m a cat guy, I really love cats.

And I’ll tell you within minutes the barn cat came running out of the house and went straight to him. I couldn’t believe, I thought, well, I’m the cat person, the black and white cat’s going to come straight over to me, made an absolute beeline to this guy. And I just kind of sat and observed and saw what was going on. And that’s a great thing for me to do. When I travel, I try to find a sanctuary to see if I can go, if I can. I always say, I’m a professional pooper scooper. I will throw you money. I will put my boots on. I will work. And that’s fulfilling. I think a lot of us like to have dirt under our fingernails and we feel healthier and talk about if we want to get in a microbiome, just go to a sanctuary and start breathing it in.

That’s simply put. And on a professional way, the way I’ve been able to tie this together, I often say I try to make friends with all kinds of eaters. It’s really important as a nutrition professional, can you make friends with all kinds of eaters even though morally you are screamingly vegan like I am. But on a professional level, I want to find out where people are and not scare them away from the fact that I’m going to introduce high fiber nutrition. And through doing that, that’s a way of expressing confession, is that respecting the boundary of that person has no idea that you’re about to hit ’em with plant-based nutrition. Talk to a lot of people like that that don’t know me upfront, they just know I’m going to give ’em a call when I worked clinically that way outside of private practice. And that’s the art I think of communication and language around behavior and introducing something respectfully, knowing that they were probably not born or brought up vegan or vegetarian. So many of us are. So how do you introduce the fact that eating very differently is probably going to save their life? And even though that’s a fact, it’s still can be so hard to change and embrace that change.

Ella Magers:

So well, well said. Meeting people where they are is just the most effective way to open doors, I think.

Lauren Plunkett:

Yeah. Do you think sometimes it’s hard to find where they are? That’s kind of a tricky

Ella Magers:

It is. And 97% of people are not vegan, so at least we know that. Yeah, they’re not there. And we do know that most people care about their own health. There are a few little assumptions I think we can make and then easing our way in through little bits and pieces and coming at it like you’re saying, from a place of curiosity. And I think as long as we’re open and curious as opposed to talking at people asking questions and letting them talk.

Lauren Plunkett:

Right. Yeah. Yeah, reigning. Reigning in the compassion is kind of part of it too, right? Yeah. Because I think it’s so easy for a lot of us to just get right in there and be like, did you see that video on stones? And there’s no leading with petita, just don’t lead with is. Yeah. People. What I found is really interesting is once this spark happens with someone, either they really enjoy, well, I haven’t eaten meal like this in a long time. I made this really great, very simple beans and rice and broccoli and salsa and avocado. That’s one thing I recommend to people all the time. Throw these things in a bowl. You can’t not like it. And if you don’t, let’s play with it. And we’ll figure out ways that we can adjust these flavors because not everyone that that’s been eating a lot of saturated fats for a long time, their palate is different.

It’s going to take a little bit of an introduction into some of these things to feel psychologically different about food because you’ve been running on such high fat sugar for so long. So it takes a little while to get there. And what happens when I see that spark is I kind of just get to sit back and watch at that point and see them do. I mean, you’ve probably seen this too. It’s the same thing with athletics. You see people that you might be training, and at first they’re struggling, but they’re not going to give up. And your job is to prevent the give up. And then once they’ve got it, you just sit and watch. And I had a gal at one point, I introduced plant-based nutrition to her. She was like, well, okay, I’m here. I hear you. And she kind of vanished for a year.

She came back and she said, I am back because I have a coworker that went and got on Stein’s plan or something and lost a hundred pounds and now I’m pissed. So I’m back and I’m ready for you to help me. And I said, you’ve got all the resources in your folder already. I have uploaded all the magic. Start with that grocery list and hit it girl. And she did. And she lost 25 pounds within a couple of months or something. And she had felt different and she had the proof that she needed. And then she went and took, I think a Forks Over Knives cooking class or something, and that was her spark. And I identify with anger, so I get it. She was ticked and I said, don’t be mad at yourself. We’re done with that stuff. There’s no getting mad at you. There’s at this point, you care about yourself. You eat, you love yourself. This is your road forward is this forgiveness of whatever missed opportunities that you think you have now. You own it. This is your time. Do it. And she was just like, okay, I’ll call you in a week.

And I really enjoyed things like that. I want them to make me laugh and I want them to show me that they don’t need me.

Ella Magers:

Yes. Best feeling in the world.

Lauren Plunkett:

Yeah, you got it. Now, go teach your family. Go teach your friends. Go teach your coworkers spread. Spread this kindness.

Ella Magers:

Yes. Talk about spark and resources. Tell our audience about your book and they can find it on your website and who do you work with. And yeah, tell us some of that good stuff.

Lauren Plunkett:

Yes. Cool. Yeah, I published a book called Type one Determination. I have taken it really slowly to introduce this book to the world because I wanted to have some understanding about how it would be received by people with type one family members of someone with type one. And as you said in the very beginning, it’s really not just about diabetes. It will hit a nerve with a lot of people that don’t have diabetes, but they have had difficult relationships with food. So I really focus on the mindset shift in myself and the nutrition and the exercise methodologies that really turned me into a better human being. But the beginning of the book is pretty humorous. It’s me kind of in my childhood voice being really angry and not understanding all these things going on in my body and then using my professional voice to weave in some teachings into those frustrations.

There’s sort of a double narration that goes on throughout most of the book. And in fact, I won an award that was Best New Voice by the Independent Book Publishers Association. So the books won a bunch of awards, literary, and I am shocked about that. So they’re really excited about the fact that the literary world thinks this book is cool. I really, that’s amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. And I really want to get it into clinician’s hands. I want them to see what happened to me just because of the way that we have been talking and introducing nutrition to people who have a disease, that nutrition would help if we just turn this dial a little bit. We just adjust this language. I think we could change the world. I mean, not like that, but one clinic at a time, one community at a time. It’s not an all or nothing approach, but if plant-based nutrition is introduced in this friendly, here’s what you’re not getting in your body.

Get more of this in your system. And in fact, here are the foods that are kind of causing the problem when you do it this way. People go, but I’ve been told to do all of the meat and the cheese because it doesn’t raise blood sugar. So we’ve got to change this concept. We’re close. There are doctors doing it, but we’ve got to go for far and wide. And my book is, I’m hoping to help do that on the individual level just like it had helped me. So Lauren flunk it.com, just my name, my website, you can find me on there. And then I have something on there specific for type one diabetes called Exercise Protocol, where it’s one of the most unique documents I think out there. There’s not a lot of there. There’s really great research in exercise and type one diabetes, but it’s not always reaching the people that need it.

Because that’s the thing with research up here. It’s up here with the research and researchers and the universities and scientists, and it’s not always interpreted down to something useful for the person to enable this plan. So I took some of the great research and what it helped me and molded this, it’s like a 40 page document that people can start to work on their own. So it’s not this big, huge, busy thing. They can start working on it on their own. And when they get a couple weeks in, they get to work with me one-on-one to start to perfect and hone in how they exercise their blood sugars and the nutrition and all of those things are working together. So I think of it as a puzzle, and we’ve got to start dropping in the edge pieces and then we can fill everything in and then you’re going to take it and run, get into that marathon, start lifting heavier, whatever you want to do.

We focus on that. And then if people want to work with me one-on-one a little bit in development right now, but email, just send me an email, just Instagram. My Instagram is mostly cats. It’s like kind of a funny place. To me. That’s what Instagram should be about. It should be happy, funny, nothing stressful. And I’m so sorry that it’s completely the opposite for a lot of people, but I guarantee you on my Instagram, it’s just going to be goofy, thin, fun stuff with always an open-ended place for nutrition questions too. So I want to be available to people as much as possible. That’s why I speak so much around the country and I love it. So that’s another thing too. If anyone wants me to come and speak to their group virtually or in person, I am game. I love it.

Ella Magers:

You’re amazing. Thank you so much, Lauren. This has been a super valuable conversation. You’re fun and so wise, and I really appreciate you taking the time to

Lauren Plunkett:

Oh, Ella, that’s so sweet. Anytime. I would talk to you anytime, anything. So let’s do it again if you want. I want to come ’em work out with you. Yes. That would be so fun.

Ella Magers:

Oh my gosh. I just created a new class that’s an animal inspired strength and mobility class that is pretty badass. And I think you should come to Miami number one. Just

Lauren Plunkett:

I absolutely would do that. And it would probably be a blooper to, even if you’re going to film something, oh my God, I can’t imagine.

Ella Magers:

Let’s do it.

Lauren Plunkett:

It’d be so much fun. Okay, do that, get that, keep going. And just invite the vegans that need to get something out of their system and I’ll come down.

Ella Magers:

All right. We’ll make it happen. Thanks.

Lauren Plunkett:

Thank you.