Transcript: EP 269 – Eat (Mostly) and Live (Mainly) Clean with Gin Stephens

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Dr. Taz Bhatia: Welcome back, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Super Woman Wellness, where we are determined to bring you back to your superpower self. Joining me today is Gin Stephens. She is here to talk about food, what we need to be doing, what we shouldn’t be doing. Her book is, Clean(ish): Eat (Mostly) Clean, Live (Mainly) Clean, and Unlock Your Body’s Natural Ability to Self-Clean.

Let me tell you a little bit about Gin. She’s a New York Times bestselling author of, Fast. Feast. Repeat and Delay, Don’t Deny, and has been living the intermittent fasting lifestyle since 2014. Since then, she’s lost over 80 pounds and launched her intermittent fasting website, four online support groups, four self-published books, and two top ranked podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. She’s a graduate of the Institute of Integrative Nutrition’s health coach training program. She earned a doctor of education degree in gifted and talented education master’s degree in natural sciences and a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. She taught elementary school for 28 years and has worked with adult learners in a number of settings. She splits her time between Augusta, Georgia and Myrtle beach, South Carolina, where she lives with her husband and their are four cats. She’s also a mother to two adult sons. Welcome to the show.

Gin Stephens: Well, Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah. We are excited to talk about this. For your first book, we were talking about before you jumped on here, was a New York Times’s bestseller all about intermittent fasting. Did that kind of segue into this book, which is, Clean(ish): Eat (Mostly) Clean, Live (Mostly) Clean, and Unlock Your Body’s Ability to Self-Clean. We’ve got to talk about that title as well.

Gin Stephens: Oh yeah, it really did. It all started, I was obese, I was 210 pounds, I needed to lose weight. All the things I tried, I just kept yo-yoing up and down for years. Finally, intermittent fasting got me to the healthy body that I’m in now. I lost over 80 pounds, as you said, that was 2014 to 2015. I’ve been able to maintain it ever since. An interesting thing happens when you are feeling good in your body and your body starts directing you to other things that make you feel good. I gradually began wanting better food, eating more nutritious food. The better I ate, the better I felt and the better I felt, the better I wanted to feel.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gin Stephens: That just really sent me down the path of, really just cleaning up really every area aspect of my life, just really every aspect from what I eat to what I put on my body and what I use in my home. When it was time to write a new book, how publishers are you, you’re a writer, and once you write a book, especially if it’s a New York Times’s bestseller, they’re like, “All right, what’s your next intermittent fasting book going to be?” I’m like, “You know what? I don’t want to write another intermittent fasting book. I want to take people further along the journey.” It’s not just a weight loss journey.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: It’s very much a health journey. I want to live a long and healthy life. By choosing foods that nourish my body and basically decreasing the number of toxins I’m putting in and on my body and helping my body work on the toxins that are coming-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: … in, helping my body’s natural self cleaning processes, that’s just really powerful for health and longevity. That’s where the idea of Clean(ish) was really born. The ish, Clean(ish), and then the Eat (Mostly) Clean, that’s in parentheses and Live (Mainly) Clean, because we’ve all been down the road of perfection before, right?

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: Trying to, “Well, I’m going to eat clean. That means I can never have a Doritos again for the rest of my life.” We live in the real world and there are times when you’re going to be more ish, but overall, we’re looking for that lifestyle that helps us to be healthy, happy, and not overstressed and overburdened with perfection.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Well, that’s wonderful. Looking back, and then we’ll move on to this idea of being cleanish, what were some of the main principles that resonated so strongly in the first book, Fast. Feast-

Gin Stephens: Fast. Feast. Repeat.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: … Repeat and Delay.

Gin Stephens: Well, my first book was actually, Delay, Don’t Deny, and that one I wrote in 2016 and it was self-published.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Okay.

Gin Stephens: In, Delay, Don’t Deny, basically, it all started by accident. I mentioned I’m a teacher, or you mentioned that I taught for 28 years. Teachers, we like to teach people things, and we like to help people with anything they’re struggling with. I started a very small intermittent fasting support group on Facebook in 2015. It started to grow. People came in that I didn’t know, and they all wanted to know about fasting. In 2016, Dr. Jason Fun wrote, The Obesity Code. Are you familiar with The Obesity Code?

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yes.

Gin Stephens: Have you read it? It’s a great book. We all were so looking forward to that coming out, and it was indeed a fabulous book, but it didn’t really tell you what to do or how to approach intermittent fasting. People would start and come to my community every day and they’re like, “what do I need to do?” I’m like, “You know? I just need to write a book,” something short, sweet, and to the point that’ll teach people how to live an intermittent fasting lifestyle with a little bit of science. If they want more, they can go read The Obesity Code.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: That was really the start of my first book. It was really just for people when they asked me, “How do I start?” I’m like, “Go read, Delay, Don’t Deny.” That turned into a very great selling book over the years. It sold thousands and thousands of copies. That led me to writing, Fast. Feast. Repeat. When I wrote, Fast. Feast. Repeat, it was several years later and I’d been leading those support groups that had gotten bigger and bigger. We knew more. There was more research that had come out and we knew more about what advice people really needed when they were starting with an intermittent fasting lifestyle. That’s where Fast. Feast. Repeat came from, and it’s got this really thick, frequently asked question section, for example, on the back, because we had so many new fasters joining our groups every day and they all had the same exact questions.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Wow.

Gin Stephens: Basically, it’s a resource for anyone who’s ready to start intermittent fasting. It’ll tell you exactly how to get started with flexibility, just because we’re also very different when it comes to what approach works best for you as an individual.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Gotcha. Okay. Let’s jump to Clean(ish).

Gin Stephens: All right.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Really focusing less on weight, more on a health journey.

Gin Stephens: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Taz Bhatia: How do you define clean, I think would be the first question. What are sort of the implications for the body of our toxic load? I talk a lot about our toxic load and try to understand it and try to put our head around it. What are the implications of sort of not really getting the cleanest things in us?

Gin Stephens: Well, that’s a big, big question.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Big question.

Gin Stephens: Has a lot to it. Our bodies are amazing machines, you know this. We are designed to be able to handle what’s coming into our bodies and also metabolic toxins. It’s part of the metabolic processes. Your kidneys are supposed to be able to take care of those things and flush them out of you. We are just overburdened in today’s society because there are chemicals in our foods, chemicals in our personal care products, chemicals in the air that we breathe, in our water, and more and more things are coming in. Our bodies are really having a hard time keeping up. That’s our body burden, our overall toxic load. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I had a son, and I talked about this in Clean(ish). Well, I still have a son, he is 22 now, but when he was a toddler, he had chemical sensitivities. I didn’t know. I’d been teaching for a while, but I had no idea that what you eat could really make such a difference with certain parts of your body. For example, he had behavioral issues that would crop up when he ate something that was full of chemicals or when he was exposed to chemicals through his environment. It just was all new to me. We changed his diet. We changed what we were using around the house, and it made such a dramatic impact on him. That really just opened my eyes to the idea of our toxic load and our body burden. I read a book at the time when I was dealing with it and it talked about the bucket effect. I’m sure you’re familiar with this analogy. Our bodies are a bucket and we can hold this much-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: … in our body. Eventually if your bucket starts to overflow, that’s when you start having the symptoms. It could be so many things. It could be from the behavior problems that my son was having. It could be allergies.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: It could be so many different, different issues that we’re facing. Can go right back to our overflowing, toxic load buckets.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gin Stephens: We lowered the level of his toxic load or his bucket, by putting fewer toxins in through what he ate and what was in his environment.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: What were some of those foods that you started to take out? I think many parents noticed that, they noticed the connection to behavior, all that other stuff. Tell me, what are some of the foods that you were able to take out where you started to see a payoff?

Gin Stephens: I’m glad to, and every child is going to be different. I had two boys at the time, I still have two sons like I said, but they were both little. The one that was having the major problems and it actually started with a comment from his teacher. She said, “Could it be what he is eating?” That day, he had had this Cat in The Hat cereal that was full of red dye. I told her what he had for breakfast. She said, “Well, a lot of kids have problems with red dye.” I’m like, “What?” You would think I should have known all about that, but I didn’t.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: I went home, this is in the early two thousands, and I started researching. Sure enough, I found my way to, really the Feingold Association really helped me a lot. Dr. Benjamin Feingold, he was, I think a pediatrician in California. He started noticing in his patients, the patients with ADHD were really affected by things in their diets. It’s the artificial flavors, artificial colors, the preservative, and even a class of foods called salicylates.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yep. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gin Stephens: The salicylates, for people who are like, “What’s that,” that’s the aspirin. Aspirin is in the salicylate family for example. Those are really great plant foods like apples and grapes that we think, “Wow, we should all eat more of those foods,” but they have high levels of salicylate. Just like aspirin, in the salicylate family, we all have heard of someone with an aspirin allergy, but it’s a similar kind of a thing in your body. You maybe can’t tolerate the salicylate.

Will was unable to eat any foods with salicylates. He could have pairs, but not apples. We really relied heavily on the Feingold Association. They had food lists of products that were certified to not have those types of things in them, artificial colors, artificial flavors. We found that really pretty much anything that you wanted to have, you could find a substitution.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gin Stephens: It was something that was free of those additives. It was just life changing for us.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Wow.

Gin Stephens: When he would get a hold of something that he wasn’t supposed to have, it was like a light switch was flipped. The Feingold Association is still around now. They still provide support to parents who are dealing with this because, as I said, I was an elementary teacher for 28 years and I saw kids change. I started teaching in 1990.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: The behavior problems just got worse and worse over time. Trying to pinpoint exactly why that is, but kids are eating differently, pretty much everything they’re eating. If you go into an elementary cafeteria, all their lunch boxes are full of foods with so many different, packaged products full of those additives.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Wow. Yeah. It’s something we continue to see even today with kids really having sensory issues, having chemical sensitivity, focus issues, all of this connected to their toxic loads.

Gin Stephens: Right.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: So important for our kids. I interrupted you though, you were going on even beyond food I think, to talk about the importance of being clean and that bucket idea and when that bucket overflows. Food is one area we can focus on.

Gin Stephens: Right.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Are there other areas to focus on as well when we’re trying to sort of be cleanish?

Gin Stephens: Absolutely. The other areas are the easy ones.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Food is the hardest?

Gin Stephens: Well, I think food is the hardest, because for example, you’re going to go to a wedding and there’s going to be cake there and you’re going to want to eat it. You’re not going to ask the bride, “Excuse me, what’s in your cake?”

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: If you have a child with chemical sensitivities, you’re like, “We’re not going to eat this cake,” but as adults. There are a lot of foods out there and it can be really tricky with food.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: With what you put on your body and what you clean your house with, once you find things that are easy swaps, it becomes really, really easy. For example, let’s think about our skin. Our skin is our body’s largest organ, as you know, and what we put on our skin gets into our bodies. I know your listeners are all familiar with transdermal medications.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gin Stephens: We have a hormone patch, for example, for maybe for birth control or someone trying to quit smoking might use a nicotine patch. We all understand that what we put in our skin, can get into our body therapeutically, but we somehow forget that that body lotion you’re slathering all over yourself or the perfume you’re spraying on, also goes into your skin. It’s not like your skin’s like, “Oh, that’s not medicine. We’ll keep that out.” Your skin doesn’t know. Your skin just takes it in. The research on some of the products that are out there, there was a report. It might have been night, I can’t remember the year that they did the report. It’s in Clean(ish), but it was the Breast Cancer Prevention Partners did a study of a certain number of personal care products and cleaning products. They found that body sprays, for example-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: … had more toxic chemicals than something you might be using in your kitchen to clean your countertops.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: Now, most of us would not go into our kitchen, pull out our kitchen countertop cleaner, and start spraying our body down with it. You know that’s not a good thing, but the actual body spray that people buy, because they want to smell nice, might have more toxic chemicals than what’s under your kitchen cabinets.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gin Stephens: When you start to realize how many things you’re putting on your body every day from your lotion that I mentioned before to your foundation, your makeup, your deodorant, your shampoo, all of it.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: All adds up.

Gin Stephens: It all adds up and each might be a tiny little exposure. Again, think of the bucket, drop by drop. If water is dripping into a bucket, the bucket will eventually overflow. That’s what happens in our bodies. It’s a lot easier to change your personal care products and what you’re using to clean your house because there’s so many great options out there now. I can remember back when I was first starting down this road, when the boys were little, it was not as easy.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right? No.

Gin Stephens: We barely had the internet. We did but it was slow.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: I know. I know. If someone’s trying to start out to lower their toxic load or to be more clean, what are three things that you would say real quickly, “Go do this?”

Gin Stephens: Well, first of all in Clean(ish), I walk the reader through this. It’s very much not a book that you just sit down and you read from start to finish and you’re like, “Okay, now I know about that. Now I’ve read it.” It’s actually the teacher in me who comes out because at the end of every chapter, there’s a place for you to reflect and take action. For example, after you read the chapter on personal care products, I actually tell you exactly what to do next. “Now go look at your products and see what you’ve got.” Now you need to look at them more closely and see how safe they are.” It’s really simple for example, there are apps out there. Just one example of an app that I rely on, is the Environmental Working Groups app. Do you use their app to check your products?

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yes.

Gin Stephens: It’s a great app.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah, it’s awesome.

Gin Stephens: For example, you can check the products you already have, or let’s say you realize, “Gosh, the products I have are not scoring very well,” you can actually go to a section and try to find a product that’s going to work better. A great example of that is mouthwash. I had a crown and my dentist was like, “You’re going to need to get a water pick and you’re going to need to use mouthwash around that.” I wasn’t really using mouthwash and my husband had some. I went and I looked it up and it was a brand that looked very healthy and clean, that’s what we call greenwashing by the way, they make it sound so great on the label.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah. Right.

Gin Stephens: I checked it in the Environmental Working Group app and it didn’t score as well as I thought it would score it. Wasn’t that great at all. I went to the app instead and I said, “Well, let me just browse through.” I sorted the mouthwashes by best to worst, started at the top, scrolled my way down. One that scored really, really high and shocked me, Listerine Original scored better than the one that-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: All the other stuff? Interesting.

Gin Stephens: … the one that, well, there were some that were higher, but they were like, one was spearmint flavored, one was a tablet, but Listerine Original, the amber stuff my grandmother used, scored really, really high.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: It scored better than the one my husband had that I thought was a good quality.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: It looked really clean. I was like, “Well, that just goes to show you can’t just tell by looking at the label.” When I checked all of my cleaning products as well, I found that I had been super duper greenwashed by many of them that I thought were great choices. The dish soap I had been using, that I thought was clean, didn’t score as well as that blue stuff we’re familiar with it that they use in the oil spills to clean the animals, that rated higher-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: … than the one I’d been using that I thought was better. It was shocking. I didn’t go out and buy the blue one.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: So that’s the EWG app?

Gin Stephens: Yeah.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Correct?

Gin Stephens: Yeah.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: That you’re referring to? That’s a great resource and I love it. I recommend it to patients all the time. That’s a great resource for trying to find what we should be really paying attention to-

Gin Stephens: Right.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: … in terms of products. They also talk about food they talk about the clean 15 and the dirty dozen-

Gin Stephens: They do.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: … and the foods that you need to buy organic versus the ones that you can let slide a little bit. Lots of resources there, for sure.

Gin Stephens: Absolutely.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Is another tool like, don’t buy color, don’t buy colored detergent. Don’t buy colored mouthwashes.

Gin Stephens: Oh, well absolutely. Most of the big name brands that are out there, are not going to be very clean.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah.

Gin Stephens: The one that your mom might have used, for example, the brand with the scent.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yes.

Gin Stephens: Really, you want to avoid the dyes.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yes.

Gin Stephens: You don’t need any of those dyes.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: Or the fragrances. Fragrance is one of those ways that the product manufacturers, whether we’re talking about beauty products or shampoo or cleaning products, they can pretty much hide anything under the word fragrance. They don’t have to tell you what it is. It goes back to some old labeling laws that protected-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: … the cosmetics industry. They can even claim that a product doesn’t have something in it, but it could be hiding in the fragrance. Super, super sneaky, the way that they get away with labeling things. Yeah.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: So fragrance free, no dyes? Those are some good general rules.

Gin Stephens: Yeah. Those are definitely things to look for.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: I love that.

Gin Stephens: For me, what really has made it easy is finding brands that are committed to being clean and safe. The beauty products that I use for my skincare-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yes.

Gin Stephens: … and my shampoo, they have what they call a never list, where they’re like, “These are the things we will never have,” and they’re constantly reformulating to make their product safer. I know anything they sell is going to fit my criteria for clean beauty. It’s very, very easy.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yes.

Gin Stephens: I don’t even have to think about it because you’re much more likely to stick to something when it’s not hard.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yeah. Definitely want to make things easier and better. What about families? I’m dealing with this a little bit, to be honest, because we have sometimes other people that go out and shop for us to help out-

Gin Stephens: Right.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: … or run errands or grandparents or all this other stuff. How do we get a whole family to be on board with this? Just this weekend, I went to run a little laundry and it was the one with all the fragrances and the colors. I’m like, “Oh my God, how many of these are here?” How do we get everyone on board? Do you have tips on navigating that conversation?

Gin Stephens: It’s just a matter of explaining to your family what you’re doing and why, and that they… For example, the laundry, and just say, “Here’s what we’re going to use now. I’d like you to respect the why,” and really teach them the why.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Yes.

Gin Stephens: Why are we using this one versus this one?

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: I think people want to choose something that’s healthy for them, if they understand why it matters. I say that, but there are two different laundry detergents in my laundry room right now. There’s one that’s cleanish, emphasis on the ish, that my husband uses. That’s the one he likes. It’s fragrance free and it’s dye free, but it’s not as clean as the one that I use on my clothes. It’s baby steps and figuring out what your family can live with.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: I love that. I think it’s more helpful. Is there a rule of numbers or do we not make this difficult, we just keep trying to do the best we can? It sounds like the key categories are clean food, clean beauty, clean homes, right? Am I missing one?

Gin Stephens: That’s really it. I mean, the personal care products and your cleaning products, that would be the living mainly clean part. The empowering part of my book Clean(ish), is that every person at the end creates their own definition of what it means to live mostly clean or eat mostly clean and live mainly clean. It’s all about what are going to be your rules that you’re going to design for yourself. For example, for me, I have a rule for me I do not use artificial sweeteners or ingest anything with an artificial sweetener ever. That’s one of my never, never, ever list things. I’m not going to have it at a restaurant. I’m not going to have it at a friend’s house. If the only beverages around were artificially sweetened, I would drink water because that’s just something I don’t really like. I don’t think it has any positives to it at all. It’s really easy for me to say, that’s a hard line. I’m not going to cross.

You figure out what are your nevers and what are your sometimes. I try to avoid seed oils, the canola oil and all those inflammatory oils that we now realize are not very good for us, but they’re not on my never list. If I go out to eat, I might eat some french fries and I know they’re going to be fried in that oil. I don’t cook with it at home, but that’s on my sometimes I mostly avoid that list. It’s just a matter, that ish part, is creating a lifestyle that you can live with. Now, if I were eating in restaurants every single day, I would certainly not be eating a lot of french fries at those restaurants-

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Right.

Gin Stephens: … because of those inflammatory oils. But as a sometimes, something that’s here and there, is not going to totally fill up my bucket for example.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: No. I love these tips. I think they’re also helpful. I’m sure they’re all in the book, right?

Gin Stephens: They are.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: Where can we get our hands on the book, what’s the best way to find it?

Gin Stephens: Well, you can find it wherever books are sold, whatever your favorite book retailer is, Clean(ish). Again, I’m Gin Stephens, G-I-N, Stephens with a ph. You can find my website, ginstephens.com and everything is linked from there.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: I love it. I love your story.

Gin Stephens: Thank you.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: I’m so proud of all the hard work you’ve been doing over the years and getting this message out. I think for many of you, this concept sounds abstract. I was thinking as she was speaking, we don’t think about the liver because it’s not in our face and we don’t understand very quickly it’s not the type of thing you get a toxin in, suddenly you break out. We can see it in our kids a little bit more clearly, but really wrapping our head around this and understanding that so much of what’s going on right now, especially is related to our toxic load, and even cancer they’re saying is more an accumulation of toxins, more than any genetics or any-

Gin Stephens: Right.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: … of those types of things. I think the sooner we put some energy into understanding the concept, the better. Let’s make it fun. Let’s make it simple. I also have a quiz on my website too, to help you guys navigate some of these categories too. All these resources, I would just grab and really make a difference for yourself and for your family. It really does. It really does matter. Thank you Gin for-

Gin Stephens: Thank you.

Dr. Taz Bhatia: … putting this book out there. Everyone else, I hope you get a copy and use it to guide you. Thank you for watching this episode of Super Woman Wellness. Remember you can rate and review it and share it with your friends. I will see you guys next time.