20: Feed Your Health: Reclaim Wellness with Denise Sultenfuss
Denise Sultenfuss owns and operates a health-wellness coaching practice in Maryland, where she offers in-person and virtual sessions. She also incorporates her passion for writing and research as a freelance health-wellness writer. Denise helps her clients repair health that's broken, build resiliency, and cultivate a sustainable, long-term healthy lifestyle.
She provides insight into the most important steps to restoring health. From modifying one's eating habits to reducing potentially harmful health habits, Denise provides a roadmap to better health.
Through her free 45-minute health coaching sessions, she also provides individuals with a support system to help them reach their health goals.
Join Denise as she discusses her journey to health and provides tips to help you on your journey!
In this episode we cover:
What is the difference between acute and chronic disease?
How to restore health through diet and habits
Learn the basics of healthy eating and how to address problematic health habits.
Summary:
Restoring health is no easy task, especially when faced with chronic illness, limited time, and money. Fortunately, an expert in the field of health and wellness, Denise Sultenfuss, has provided some insight into how to effectively restore health.
Chronic illnesses are defined as conditions that last longer than six months and can be difficult to diagnose. In the U.S., 7 out of 10 deaths are related to chronic disease, with diet, stress, and problematic health habits being the main causes. As such, it is important to focus on the most important steps in restoring health.
According to Denise, the first step in restoring health is to modify or alter one's eating life. This includes eliminating processed foods, dairy, and trigger foods, and replacing them with plant-based, protein-packed, and unprocessed carbohydrates. She emphasizes that this is the most basic and fundamental practice that we do as human beings, as we eat multiple times throughout the day and it is important to make it count.
In addition to modifying one's diet, Denise also recommends addressing problematic health habits. This can include sugar dependency, smoking, caffeine, alcohol, and stress. 70-80% of all visits to physicians are related to stress, so it is important to take steps to reduce and manage stress levels.
Denise Sultenfuss provides free 45-minute health and wellness coaching consultations, either virtual or in person. She suggests that this can help individuals focus on the most important steps in restoring their health, and that it can provide an extra layer of support and accountability to help individuals reach their health goals.
For those interested in learning more about restoring health, Denise Sultenfuss can be found on her website below. With her help, individuals can take the necessary steps to restore their health and lead a healthier and happier life.
Mentioned In This Episode
Where you can find Denise: Website
Denise's gift: A free 45-minute health-wellness coaching session
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Transcript:
[0:00:02] Dr. Destini Copp: And my special guest today is Denise Sultenfuss. Denise is a certified health and wellness coach and she has a coaching practice in Maryland where she offers in person and virtual sessions. She also incorporates her passion for writing and research. As a freelance health and wellness rider, denise helps her clients repair health that's broken, build, resiliency, and cultivate a sustainable, long term healthy lifestyle. Denise, thank you so much for joining me. I am super excited to chat with you today. We're going to be talking about how to navigate a health crisis or chronic disease with limited time and money. And before I begin, I have a lot of questions for you. Before I begin, can you tell the good audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?
[0:00:59] Denise Sultenfuss: Well, let's see. I launched my business based on so I am a Lyme disease warrior and that means that I've eradicated overcome chronic Lyme disease. So I've walked that path of having a chronic disease personally and so I can really empathize and have compassion for people who endure and combat chronic disease. So that sort of launched my curiosity and just interest in chronic disease. And then I became a certified health and wellness coach where I can sort of collaborate and co create health and wellness plans with people who have chronic disease. And so I live on a farm and I love my farm, I love gardening. We run a sustainable farm in Maryland, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, which is exactly the place where I contracted Lyme disease. So yeah, so anyway, that is I love the outdoors. And so once I combatted my chronic disease, then I felt like, you know what, I have enough knowledge, information and personal experience that I think that I can share this and impart my experience and wisdom and education with other people, particularly women, because it affects women quite differently than men.
[0:02:30] Dr. Destini Copp: So I know there's a lot of people out here who suffer from chronic disease. You have experienced it personally. Can you first walk us through what is the difference between acute and chronic disease?
[0:02:47] Denise Sultenfuss: So acute pain or acute disease can often be identified and it's typically short term. If you go to your doctor or your practitioner with an issue in your joints or an acute pain or disease, it can often be remedied right away, whereas chronic disease lasts greater than six months. So you, you're going to have pain, you're going to have side effects for longer than six months. And oftentimes they're very intense after long treatments, like a course of long treatment of pain management, sometimes chronic disease just continues. And so that really is the major difference between acute and chronic disease. One can be identified, one really confound the medical community, which is chronic pain, chronic disease.
[0:03:50] Dr. Destini Copp: So with chronic disease, do they often not know exactly what you have so they can't treat it? Is that what it's referring to?
[0:03:58] Denise Sultenfuss: Yeah, so you go in and let's say, for example, you are suffering from joint issues, so they're going to treat the joint issues. But then a couple of months later, you might come in with headaches, like chronic headaches or migraines. So you keep having these side effects. And so what happens is with chronic pain or chronic disease, you're getting all of these systemic side effects and it's lasting a long time. And the pain is like if you use the pain scale from zero to 100 being no pain, ten being a lot of pain, it's going to be on the seven to ten with chronic pain, chronic disease. And so, yeah, it's confounding. So what's going to happen is you're going to go through a series or a period of your practitioner just treating each individual side effect as opposed to doing the detective work, of finding out what's causing, what's causing these sudden side effects that seem to be they sort of are like tentacles. They just keep developing. So, yeah, so that's sort of the detective work. That's what happens. You need to do detective work.
[0:05:20] Dr. Destini Copp: And I can certainly relate to the chronic pain with migraines because I have suffered with them for over ten years, so definitely can relate to that. So let me ask you this. What would be the first step somebody should take when they say they're experiencing chronic health and like migraines? I think a lot of people out there do that.
[0:05:45] Denise Sultenfuss: Absolutely.
[0:05:46] Dr. Destini Copp: What are some of the first steps that they should do to kind of treat that and go about it, to restoring their health and where they want to be?
[0:05:58] Denise Sultenfuss: Yeah, so one of the very first, most significant, powerful steps that you can take while you're waiting for labor to come in, while you're perhaps waiting to see another provider or specialist, the very most powerful step you can take is modifying or altering your eating life. Because food is very fundamental. And everything that we eat, whether it's good or negative, positive or negative, affects our body. And oftentimes we don't think of food as bad. When we are eating food, we typically are just satisfying a craving or we're satisfying sometimes it's the emotional issue whether we're eating not necessarily because we're hungry, but food is fundamental. It's going to satisfy something, whether it's a craving or if it's an emotional need. And so one of the very first steps in restoring your health is to really alter your eating life. And I don't use the word diet in my practice because diet has a trigger, particularly for women. We call it an eating life because we want it to cultivate into a lifestyle and be long term and sustainable. I would say if you have any hint whatsoever for you, for example, there are eating plants that you can use for migraines. And I would say let's do some detective work and see if we can be disease specific or chronic disease specific and eat to nourish your body to help restore your health based on this particular disease that you might be combating if you don't know which disease, it hasn't been diagnosed. There are just some basic, fundamental nutritional habits that you can begin to cultivate in your eating life.
[0:07:59] Dr. Destini Copp: So that makes sense. I've never really been able to define what the triggers of the migraines are, so that's always been a mystery. But it sounds like that based on the steps that you take people through when you're working with folks on this, that you can kind of maybe narrow down on what some of those triggers may be.
[0:08:22] Denise Sultenfuss: Yeah. For example, if we don't have a diagnosis, if my client doesn't have a diagnosis yet, what we would do is we would do an eating life inventory. What does your eating life look like? How often do you eat fast foods? Do you have any food sensitivities? And I would offer my client a symptom log once they are on a clean eating eating plan. And I provide eating plans for my clients. And so that would be like eliminating processed foods, eliminating dairy, just trigger foods, foods that are going to trigger systemic things in your body. And so that's one of the ways to it's a process of elimination. You start with the big ones, like sugar, obviously, dairy, gluten, those types of things. And we just start doing the detective work. And all of my clients keep a symptom log. And so once they start their eating life, their new eating life or their eating plan, then they keep the symptom log and they find out, okay, am I getting headaches more frequently, less frequently? Are they lasting longer or are they the same? So you sort of start really becoming attuned to your body and how is the food having an effect on your side effects or your symptoms?
[0:09:54] Denise Sultenfuss: And so that's really sort of where we start very basic. The most powerful eating plan, according to the latest research, is fill your plate with mostly plants, add some protein and unprocessed carbohydrates. So we would start with something very basic like that until we got, until my client got a diagnosis. And then we would come back and we will get very specific with food.
[0:10:22] Dr. Destini Copp: So let me ask you this. Can you define a problematic health habit and how that affects someone's process or progress in restoring their health?
[0:10:33] Denise Sultenfuss: Yeah, so if a client, or when a client comes in, we have a conversation and I learned about their eating life and their stress, their sleeping life, which we call sleep hygiene, their exercise. There's like twelve areas of health and wellness that we have a conversation about. And so a prior problematic health habit would be sugar dependency. You know, any kind of practice or choice that has a negative impact on your health and wellness, whether it's smoking. And of course, there's no judgment, it's non judgmental, it's empathetic but we need to find out what these health habits are so that we can change them. We can prune away the negative health habits and replace them with positive health habits. Is it caffeine? Is caffeine an issue? How many cups of coffee are you having? Is it too much alcohol or process? We just go down the list. So stress can be a problematic health habit, not getting enough sleep. There's a long list of problematic health habits that we would have a conversation about together.
[0:11:55] Dr. Destini Copp: We've talked about kind of the first step in restoring health, but what are some other ones? Especially when we might have limited time and money. And I'm sure a lot of people out there, they might not have tons and tons of money to kind of work through some of these issues. So what would you say about that?
[0:12:17] Denise Sultenfuss: So you're right. I always take that into consideration with clients when they come in because this can try to find out what is happening to your body. You want to restore your health. Not only do you want to restore your health, you want to maintain it once it's restored. So we want to do this in the most efficient way possible as far as time is concerned. And then not only that, we want to do it in the most effective way. Fiscally, we want to save money. And so once we go through food because we have to eat multiple times throughout the day, we would that would be the first step. As I mentioned before, the second step would be stress because stress, this latest statistic is that 80% of all vis 70, 70% to 80% of all visits to physicians are related to stress. So the next step would be stress. And we would talk about areas of stress because stress affects hormones, it affects all body systems. So we would look at stress, create a stress management plan, then we would look at sleep because in America we underestimate the value of sleep and we forget that sleep is restorative when we don't get enough sleep. It affects our hormones and other body systems. So we would look at sleep, our sleep hygiene and create a sleep routine or a bedtime routine. I usually leave supplements later until a client has a diagnosis because there are also typical supplements, like if you have a blood test and you're vitamin D deficient.
[0:14:07] Denise Sultenfuss: So that you can also use supplements as a part of your protocol to restore your health. Another one would be obviously would be exercise or movement. And I always remind clients when I say exercise, it doesn't mean you go out and join a gym. All it means is that we're going to write a plan for exercise or movement that is going to challenge you but yet is going to be easily attained. It's going to be relevant to you and your lifestyle. It's going to be something that you enjoy, but it's going to challenge you. You're going to get exercise and movement. And sometimes when we join a gym, it sort of doesn't work because we haven't cultivated that lifestyle of exercise. And then another one is community. It's really important, particularly if you have a specific disease, that you join a community that empathizes with your health situation or your health condition. And so community and finding support is another valuable one. Spiritual your spiritual life is another very valuable because that's the way that we created mind, body, and spirit. So we would talk about one's spiritual life. Detoxification is another method. Oftentimes there are areas in our life where we have been exposed to mold, perhaps or chemicals or even body care products that our body is sending us bread signals that we need to detoxify from a particular it's no different than if you're allergic to gluten.
[0:15:54] Denise Sultenfuss: So we would look at detoxification. Yeah, so those are pretty much the major ones that we would look at.
[0:16:03] Dr. Destini Copp: The statistic that you gave earlier, which was 70% to 80% of physicians visits are related to stress was mind blowing to me.
[0:16:14] Denise Sultenfuss: Yes, and then the other latest statistic that's a little bit mind blowing is seven out of ten deaths in the US. Are related to chronic disease. But when they look at those chronic diseases, like what caused those chronic diseases, then they really kind of realized number one was diet, food related, and then stress and then problematic health habits like smoking, excessive drinking, those types, excessive alcohol, those types of things. So yes, stress is really up there right now in the US.
[0:16:56] Dr. Destini Copp: Wow, that is just mind blowing to me. So one key takeaway I have for this is make sure we are reducing our stress. For sure. Any last minute tips, Denise, for the audience?
[0:17:13] Denise Sultenfuss: I would say that never underestimate the power of food. And I find that particularly with women, food is a trigger. We often use food as a weapon as opposed to a tool. And if we learn to use food as a tool for our bodies to nourish and nurture our bodies, oftentimes we see that particularly when we're sick and we're combating a chronic disease, we find that we can see changes, more significant changes with just I don't say just with changing our eating life. And so I really emphasize to clients, let's start with food because it's the most basic fundamental practice that we do as human beings because we eat multiple times throughout the day. So let's make it count. Let's make it work for our body. And so really, that would be the least expensive. And you notice I didn't say the word organic. A lot of people think, oh, I had to switch to organic. I didn't even mention the word organic. I'm saying we even have to go more basic than that. Let's just start with eliminating processed foods, filling our plate with 70% of plants. Then those types of things incorporating some really nutrient dense foods, foods that can eliminate help you eliminate stress or adapt to stress, those types of things. So, yeah, I would say if you have limited time and a limited budget, which most of us have, start with food.
[0:19:00] Dr. Destini Copp: I love that. That's such great advice. And I know that especially here in the US, we eat so many processed foods, we don't even realize how many we're eating every day in our life. So, Denise, can you tell folks where to find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.
[0:19:21] Denise Sultenfuss: Yes, you can find me@denisealtonfest.com and I show up on Instagram a lot with recipes tips. I love doing recipes on Instagram. And so I'm, Denise Sultan fuss at denise Sultan fuss on instagram. And Denise Salton fuss on Facebook as well. And my free gift is a 45 minutes free health and wellness coaching consultation, which is really exciting because I love working one on one with clients. And it can be virtual or in person, but typically virtual when I'm doing a podcast because it reaches far and wide. And so, yeah, so it's a free 45 minutes session and we can get a lot done in 45 minutes.
[0:20:08] Dr. Destini Copp: Well, and that is so valuable. And thank you so much for offering that to the audience here. And we will make sure, Denise, that all of those links are in the show notes so they can find you on your website and Instagram and sign up for your free 45 minutes wellness coaching session. And Denise, thank you so much for joining us today.
[0:20:29] Denise Sultenfuss: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.