Top tips for optimum wellbeing
By Alex Fox | 19 June 2021 | Expert Advice, Feature
“Our bodies, when they produce symptoms, are communicating with us – telling us that all is not well. This book will help you to decipher what your body is trying to say,” says author, Kate Chaytor-Norris, nutritional therapist.
This book is like having an expert friend on speed dial, answering all your questions and providing invaluable insight and practical solutions on diet and wellness to help you be your healthiest self.
Nutritional therapist Kate Chaytor-Norris believes that each person is their own best healer. In this, her first book, I Wish My Doctor Had Told Me This, Kate empowers the reader to take their health into their own hands, in addition to teaching us how to listen to and understand the symptoms when our body tells us things are out of kilter.
She weaves in her own experiences and personal stories throughout, writing from the heart in an honest, non-judgemental and compassionate tone. Providing detailed explanations for how our bodies are reacting to different imbalances in the environment and what we can do to change them, Kate provides us with the tools for healing ourselves.
I Wish My Doctor Had Told Me This explores the five key factors or, the Five Ss, that Kate sees as requiring attention for good health: stress, sugar, sludge (toxins), sleep and spirit.
In each chapter, Kate explains and references the latest scientific papers. She combines this seamlessly, with her own, honest opinions and conclusions, whilst weaving in personal experience, common sense and looking at how our bodies are energetically linked with nature. Her aim is to provide readers with the tools to heal themselves by creating a nutritious and nurturing habitat for our bodies and minds to thrive.
Take the gut, “the most phenomenal invention,” according to Kate, who notes that 20% of the adult population is estimated to experience acid reflux. She explains the triggers and symptoms of the condition and provides simple ways to help, from taking time to chew or taking digestive enzymes with food to improving gut bacteria.
The one area that Kate spends most time helping clients with is stress: how it plays havoc with the body and affects blood sugar balance. She highlights typical signs of stress from unrelenting tiredness, cravings for sugar and salt and feeling drowsy after a meal, to low tolerance to exercise and sleep issues. She also looks at the long-term effects of stress on the body including depression, increased blood pressure and a suppressed immune system. Kate follows with options for how we can decrease stress, from incorporating different types of breathing to how to ‘stop the control freak in you’ (in parts it is as much a personal journey for Kate, which makes this an ever more empathetic read), limbic anchoring and meditation, and the importance of digital detoxing.
Sugar, a 21st century buzzword for evil in nutrition, is a key topic. Kate provides invaluable insight into understanding how sugar affects our body. She lists signs of insulin resistance – weight gain around the middle, fatigue after carbohydrate meals, sugar cravings, night sweats and chronic fungal infections – and offers up tools for dietary changes to create a minimal insulin response. Her take on fasting and going ‘cold turkey’ with sugar is compelling for the benefits on good health.
Kate promotes the importance of eating well – ‘Let food be thy medicine’ – discussing the benefits of cooking from scratch and how we should try to eat a rainbow every day. She looks at the properties of particular foods, herbs and spices on our health and sets out her thoughts on good and bad fats.
Kate’s Little Black Book
Opening up her own address book, Kate provides useful lists of natural and toxin-free products to consider, additional reading and cookbook suggestions along with a helpful glossary of key terms.
I Wish My Doctor Had Told Me This (available fromAmazon.co.uk £15.99) is both practical and a great read. Kate Chaytor-Norris’s clear explanations of how our body works and how to identify the signs when out of kilter, is helpful and life affirming. It’s like your best kind of nutrition lesson. Kate is not aiming for perfection but believes that there is so much more that we can do ourselves to heal our bodies. Her positivity combined with her own personal journey and can-do attitude inspires the reader to make changes, however small, that will have a beneficial long-term impact on our overall health and wellbeing.
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Instagram: @katechaytornorrisnutrition