Mental Health with Clinical Psychotherapist Natalie E West

okay all right hello everybody this is dr anthony chafee uh with me today is a good friend of mine natalie west who some may recognize from our recent carnivore versus vegan debate she was our team captain with the australian college of nutritional environmental medicine um natalie is a 20-year clinical psychologist and has a therapist psychotherapist high apologetic therapist yeah psychotherapist um who's been uh treating mental health uh with diet for the past 15 years and found uh you know significant uh effects and benefits from this thank you natalie for coming on thank you anthony yay it feels like we're a reunion back again yes absolutely thank you no i'm excited to talk about you know my passion and the connection between um what we fuel ourselves with just not physically in relation to what we put in our mouth but auditory and also visually so just to add on what you were saying before i started you know over 15 years ago being trained in clinical psychotherapy and you know all different other modalities like clinical hypnosis to really understand and how to help people understand their minds how their minds work but also too i was very very lucky at that time to be mentored by someone who also was a um a specialist in psychiatric nutrition and you could imagine 15 years ago like that was not even uh on the scale of kind of in the psychological even the psychotherapy world so you know for me it was kind of i felt like i was a floating ship on my own trying to understand that you know anything from a depression or a mental health issue or whatever someone has been labeled with it's just not always a psychological issue about their own self-image or their own thinking or you know their childhood pre-cognitive commitments the mentor that i had worked with very closely he said to me you know it was very clear he goes natalie if you want to help people long term and not just fix one part of the puzzle you must also look at the connection between gut health and you know what people fuel themselves with every day uh with nutrition uh if you don't get that right you'll never ever put the whole puzzle together so for me it just made sense but you know as i said back 15 years ago it was just like you know when you asked someone what they ate they looked at you really weirdly so so so 15 years ago wha what were you guys recommending people eat uh back then so basically i've followed and did a lot of study in relation to abram hoffa linus pauling i don't know if you've ever heard of them but they started back the automatically nutrition and orthomecular medicine back you know i'm talking early 1900s right this has been around for a long long time um and looking at the modality of hold on how how are our brains working from a psychology model our thinking structures and about our own self but also to what's going on in our gut because you know in in the collective community and every everyone that you've ever spoken to in your audience will be aware by now that your gut health is such a critical key we're really the first key to that brain connection um i call it the first brain so it's like what are we feeding that first brain to then send the right signals and the urine neurotransmitters to be made to actually make us operate from a psychological model as well but all together in alignment uh so back then the i guess the protocol for anyone that would come with anything like an anxiety or a depression or even high-end uh disorders such as like schizophrenia and things like that you know those kind of things are you know a 20-year plus high high anxiety disorders but also too it's not just a mental disorder it's also a physiological disorder in relation to the body being inflamed so back then the high recommendations were no wheat no gluten take out anything that was processed no junk food no sugar no cereals all of even porridge stay away from it um so in effect and also to high dose vitamin c checking on your your vitamin d so a lot of that just made sense so if you got rid of the inflammatory food responses then at least you would have some space and gaps to understand hold on if i'm feeling my depression with both how i feel about myself but of also fueling myself with sugar and processed foods how does my body get the nutrients that it needs yeah that's interesting that they they were already you know getting away from from wheat and and things like that back then there was um there's a book that came out called grain brain yes yeah have you have you read that are you familiar with that no i'm not feeling with that one um i've went wheat belly which is similar yeah and yeah but again just talking about these sorts of connections where you know it affects your brain it affects your brain negatively in a lot of different ways i mean even just from just a purely nutritional standpoint not even from you know a toxin standpoint which these things certainly have and can screw with uh your body you know your body you know people say that your brain primarily runs on glucose that's actually incorrect you know when i was studying biochemistry in my undergraduate degree uh it was very clear you know the biochemical textbooks stated very clearly that ketones are our brain's primary uh energy source that's we always run on ketones uh we just you know run on more ketones when we aren't eating any sort of exogenous carbohydrates uh we only run on glucose when we have exogenous carbohydrates and you know as i and we call this a fed state so we said this is our primary state therefore this is our primary nutrition source but obviously i disagree with that i don't think that is our primary metabolic state so ketones you know obviously don't need insulin to get forced into your cells and so when you get peripheral insulin resistance you can get that in your brain as well and then if you're in this this carbohydrate driven state you know you're not going to get energy into your brain because you're insulin resistant but then you switch over to ketogenic diet or carnivore diet you know even better then you bypass that completely now you're just running on ketones you're exclusively well um you're exclusively running on ketones and all of a sudden your brain wakes up and it is you you just kind of go the lights turned on you know and i know experiencing with my own clients that you know i get it when people are depressed i really do and the last thing that they kind of want to do is kind of pick themselves up to kind of go well gosh you know i've been in therapy for 10 or 20 years and now i've got to look at what i put in my mouth you know and and a lot of the people that i've spoken to and worked with for many many years they've never been asked that question like tell me what you eat tell me what you fuel your brain and body with um because unfortunately as a society food has always been used as a comfort as as a connection to joy as a connection to food emotions and we've we've lost our intuition as human beings into actually understanding what real food hunger is as in fuel to drive your body so anyone that knows us we've said this so many times you know we fuel ourselves to make ourselves work to make ourselves feel good i don't use food as a comfort i don't use food to make me happy as in if i have a craving which i don't anymore i've been over carnival for two years now with my own healing but again you lose all of those crazy ruminations of all i think about is eating all i think about is sugar and carbs and we need to disrupt that pattern so that's why it's so so crucial one for people to understand really clearly you're not broken there is nothing actually wrong with you secondly you must understand how your conscious mind works how your unconscious mind works what your self-image is what your value systems are and what your driving of your belief structures and values as a human being and again what are you auditory and visually feeding yourself but secondly you know what are you putting in your mouth and it is very very very clear now that what you put in your mouth will affect your mental health it just is and you know for me coming from that space such you know such a long time ago and just like i said feeling like i was you know a ship in the night by myself because really the you talk about nutritional psychiatry wasn't really on the forefront but you know in the last probably eight years you know the people like dr chris palmer and dr georgia eid and even eric weissman you know they they are psychiatrists that have basically moved into the nutritional space and i've also now started to um apply myself to a new qualification with nutritional psychiatry because it's such an important uh part but i have to go to the u.s to do that i actually have to do that all online because there's nothing here in australia that actually um covers all of the modalities that i want to cover and you know one of the biggest things is making sure that you know protein is not vilified and meat is not vilified in a nutritional psychiatry aspect because it's one of the most powerful powerful sources of nutrition that we have for our mental health um and i'll just give you an idea i've had a client of mine been working with him now for about six weeks uh four months ago he tried to commit suicide um and he was really really in a bad way um and found me through another recommendation through carnival community and literally um i actually wrote a little blurb on my instagram and my facebook about he called me on a saturday and he goes look i just i have to call you today just to let you know he said i've never felt so alive and so motivated to be here and i've first times when i wake up in the morning i actually don't have depression and anxiety which is just phenomenal so all we did was allow him to understand his patterning and his programming around her his own self-image but then secondly it's like you know what are you feeling yourself with what are you doing again it's not uncommon for people to have depression and anxiety and anything that makes them feel flat to feed themselves with carbs processed foods because it's fast it's easy but also too when you're in a really really flat state it also comes back to self-worth and respect of yourself to go hold on actually i always have this saying at the end of my fingertips i have a lot of control so i either have to understand what control and where i'm going with that control and how that's fueling me every single day yeah and so you obviously you know you you promote more of a carnivore lifestyle now and have you seen that how have you seen that obviously you started with you know getting rid of grains and all these sorts of things when did you switch over to which it was just a full-on elimination carnivore diet in your practice and what were the differences you saw in your in your patients so really for me it was my own journey um so with most of my clients i'd always valued you know getting rid of the processed foods firstly but then putting in you know high quality nutrients including high fat and protein but again you know there's a whole caveat on vegetables and fructose and things like that as well you know and and i love what you've said a couple of um days ago you know no one is ever fructose um deficient so again this is about making sure that we are re relearning and unlearning what we believe or have been told to be true in the only way that you can do that anthony is actually go hold on i'm an individual currently what i'm doing if i'm eating a rainbow diet and i still feel like rubbish something has to change right and as much as we are tribal animals and we want to feel like we're going to fit in but at the end of the day i'll always say to people your mental health must come first above everything so with a mental health diet protocol is exactly where we go and so for me um you know knowing my background i had no wheat no you know even no dairy back then i have that now you know i haven't even eat fruit for 10 years like you know like it's just revoltingly sweet and disgusting it's just foul um but i think from where i am and where people mainly are they need that sugar hit it's that dopamine reaction that they need um to feel energy or to feel alive right but again you have the crash the peaks the crashes and then you're down again and then you're still hunting for more fruit or muffins or coke or whatever so for me um it was in lockdown over two years ago and i got lazy must admit we all kind of you know suffered in lockdown and um i actually started eating sourdough bread oh right with avocado because i was just locked inside no work can't work kids are here trying to home school and i kind of lost my mind a little bit um so i just thought i'll be okay it's been years since i've had sourdough yeah no no no no no so after about seven days i woke up and half of my face was numb and i'm like okay something's wrong there so because really that was the only thing that i'd added back in yeah so i ended up going and having some blood tests done and my doctor god love him um don't go there anymore because when he saw my ldl he was like oh okay you need to go on statins i'm like no that's a whole different story i'm like me i'm i'm 47 relax um that was two years ago but i had my blood test done and he come back and he said oh actually natalie i'm a bit concerned about your fasting insulin he said it looks like you're a borderline type type 2 diabetic i'm like i'm 60 healers that's a very interesting concept uh and he also had said this the neurological reaction was actually from the wheat because he also said i had a marker for celac right which i hadn't even realized because i'd been off wheat and glute for years so i was just like okay sure stopped immediately and i went okay and he said oh just no you just keep eating what you're eating you're fine we'll just keep an eye on it i'm like okay so telling me i'm nearly borderline type 2 diabetes obviously i have insulin resistance because the other thing that i'd also notice anthony coming from bodybuilding background as well so i was eating every three hours and a range of because that's what you're told right you're told to keep your metabolism um with carbs and protein but no red meat back then and chicken chicken's a weak bird i don't touch chicken anymore it's disgusting um beef for me is the only thing that satiates me but it was my own experience in going hold on if i'm doing this and this is getting me that and i take responsibility of adding the weak back in so i took that back out and i'm like you know what i'm just going to do some more research so a little video came up for me with paul mason which he's just a rock star to me he's just such an amazing human being yeah um and and what he's doing in the carnival community um is just brilliant so for me i went um interesting i'm just going to jump in so lich because i'm always a very jump in both feet i'm just like i just don't stand back and go i'll just test it out so i went right i'm going full carnival for 30 days so i thought can't die from no carbs or you know because i knew that if you take out carbs you've got to you know refill it with high fat and protein and literally within two weeks i was just whoa what is going on here with this i was i had the most energy i'd ever had my thinking was on point i lost weight by default not that i needed to but i think my body was obviously some inflamed from reintroducing you know back the copious amounts of sourdough that i ate um but i just kept going and that was two years ago so for me when i talk to even my own mental health my mental health's been pretty good because you know i understand how my mind works and understand if i'm going to say something to myself i know where to pull it up you know and i know where it comes from however since being zero carbs so just to let people know yeah i'm plant free i have not touched a vegetable in over two years um not dead yeah or or undernourished yeah um and just live on meat and fat and for me with clients i have some clients that have gone you know what i'm done with feeling this way let's just go straight into carnivore so we basically make sure that we're working every weekly session with psychological adjustments physical craving adjustments and the adaptation phase that i go through so i've got three adaptation phases because obviously we know sometimes our guts have got to kind of adapt to the fat um and people are like well what's going on with my bowels so for me it was a no-brainer and then i just started introducing more low-carb ketogenic style ways of eating for people that are really really struggling with their mental health and um it works and if anyone doesn't know who georgia eden you know dr chris palmer are you need you need to listen to these people as well um they are brilliant human beings that i have so many studies and even rick wiseman i don't know if you know this but over 13 years ago he started a lady who was in her 70s um on a ketogenic style um diet and she had severe severe schizophrenia who was actually diagnosed at 17. so this lady's 70 by the way right yeah so it goes on a ketogenic diet and within two weeks her um hallucinations and her voices in her head disappeared and then six months later she was off all of her medication wow that's fantastic yeah i was actually going to ask i mean i've seen all these studies with to do with depression um and anxiety you know and uh how this can really help and especially getting up your your ldl cholesterol but i actually correct yeah and so uh maybe maybe talk a bit about that but also uh you know if you can delve into the psychiatric conditions as well that can be benefited from that because that's that was something i was curious about absolutely so you know i guess in in the the medical world as it's been such is to treat the symptom okay so for example if someone's presenting with something then we just treat them with drugs and we treat the symptom but we don't actually look at the root cause and one of the i guess the biggest hills we've had to push up and especially people like dr george eden and chris palmer it's trying to prove to the medical industry that you actually can heal your body by feeding it the human speech what we call a species-appropriate way of eating right so if we even go back as far as the 1970s like you know you look at the increasing cases of obesity type 2 diabetes mental health disorders you know the rare fact and the other thing too in in the psychological world anthony is you know the reaction is oh you've got a mental arthritic chemical imbalance in your brain which has been defunct for many many years it was a uk i just lost his name right now but there's a uk psychologist that actually debunked that many many years ago and he he actually pretty much was nearly strung and courted um because he went against the psychology model right um so there's no test to test your brain for what's your serotonin but your serotonin is made in your gut by now most people should know that that over 75 of the serotonin that you need as a neurotransmitter is made in your gut so if you're inflaming that with sugars and processed foods how do you think your body's going to function right and it's the same with the ldl there's a lot of papers that basically have said and actually chris palmer also talks about it is the higher ldl ldl you have the more the brain is supported to actually create the right neurotransmitters to actually work correctly so you know we've got the main things are like gaba dopamine um serotonin and also neuronephrine right so they're all the main things you need to work together to fire to be able for your thinking processes to actually work um and again if you think about lowering your ldl i think there was um i think there was a report you spoke about you know people had more higher mortalities when they had lower ldl um so fat is your brain you need fat and fat doesn't make you fat because otherwise you and i and all the other carnivores in the world will be like obese yeah right but i think the struggle is a lot of the time is for people to trust themselves and to trust their bodies and to trust that they have the ability to heal themselves in the support with their individual needs um but you know what i always say to people even you know who maybe don't need gluten okay for example but they've got really funky symptoms and they're non-specific and the doctor said oh it's an autoimmune we don't know what it is um but it causes them pain you know but they're dropping down a kale bomb smoothie every morning and it's just like well that actually may not be good for you because it's high in oxalates and most people long term you may feel fine in the beginning but if you've got funky symptoms and you've carried them around for a while and they're not psychological attachments and they're physically showing up you've got to look at the things that you believe are healthy for you but they may not be yeah um i'm not componenting everyone go zero carb because guess what that may not work for some individuals however i think the biggest thing is understanding that depression and anxiety and even long-term schizophrenia the study is there the research is there to basically state if you go on a ketogenic low-carb high-protein high-fat way of life it's not a diet i hate that word even when we use a carnivore diet it's like because most people's mentality is i've been on diets all my life but we use diets to lose weight we've got it all wrong it's really wrong yeah yeah well yeah that's it you know it you know you know people talk call it a way of eating and just a way of life um a diet denotes a sense of uh you know temporality like this is this is going to be i'm going to do this you know so i can fit in my wedding dress or my high school jeans and then i'll go back to eating you know custard and you know and then and then you know i remember talking to people um you know the the whether a diet was good or not was whether or not when you stop that diet whether you gain all the weight back or not and i thought that was so dumb you know because people said about atkins they said oh yeah people lose a lot of weight and they get really healthy but as soon as you start eating crap again you gain all the weight back it's like well what did you think was going to happen correct you know i was like i stopped drinking you know 10 years ago i haven't been drunk the whole time but you know what happened as soon as i started drinking again i got drunk i mean what the hell is this what's what's with this abstinence [ __ ] because as soon as i'm not abstinent i get drunk again well and again it's like if i think chris palmer was saying there's like a gap between three to five years so if you commit to healing your own mental health and in conjunction with psychological support um and i will say it's really rare nowadays to find a doctor um that actually will refer someone that can actually support in both elements because a lot of the time as we've said too you know doctors aren't trained in nutritional from a psychiatrist or even from a hey you know the wheat picks and the donuts you're probably eating for breakfast is contributing for you to depression because we always get told that you know depression is a head thing um yeah no no that's like one piece of the puzzle and that's why a lot of people will go to therapy and you know they'll feel good for a little while because that's natural to connect and and download and dump on people to basically get some skills back but the minute that you walk out and you go home and you sit on the couch and then you're fueling your dopamine hits with either xbox or even porn um you know and then food and you order takeaway or kfc arrives every single step that you've just taken is totally undone with what you've just fueled yourself with yeah and um you know something i've touched on before is that you have people that have like a you know genetic predisposition and then the environmental trigger and if you uh you know don't have the genetic predisposition then you're not going to get you know certain disease uh but also if you even even are susceptible to that but you don't get the trigger you're not going to get it anyway and also there's just people that you know certain toxins are just going to cause you know toxicity in certain people and in everyone um some people to to greater or lesser extent um there was a study i remember that came out in 2015 it was um it was a husband and wife uh researching duo from canada they they identified something like 56 or 54 genes that were implicated in schizophrenia and they found that different combinations of these genes you got the different sorts of uh schizophrenia like schizoaffective disorder you know and so forth um but again you know you get you get dependent you you get uh you know the the prevalence of these sorts of diseases even with people that are susceptible it's not a hundred percent you know so the penetrance is is much lower than that uh penetrance being the percentage of people who have a genetic angular gene right and then you know actually display the disease um yeah and again to you know the mind is extremely powerful right so again you know i hear it all the time and even you know even history from my own family like my mum's had you know lots of different things mentally happen in her life but you know we always hear well if that's your parents and then you're going to get it but again it depends on where you are in your own self-image it's the same thing with you know well if you're got type 2 diabetes in your family pretty likely you're going to get it so once you've kind of given someone that information and it's from a doctor who in effect has authority right but we now know that type 2 diabetes can be reversed it absolutely can it is a lifestyle choice and however if you don't have a great respect for yourself or you know you haven't been taught the tools to have self-love and have you know how how am i contributing to my health today what am i saying to myself what am i fueling myself with but again we also get sabotaged externally so i'm sure i also get lots of dms from people um in the carnival world where they've just said you know what i went carnivore and everyone was you know thought i was gonna die because i'd given up my cocoa pops but i wanted to eat steak for breakfast but they've really got to be resilient because a lot of people will self sabotage you um because of their own reflections of like whoa that's so out there it's so weird and i thought well is it really this is where we've come from we've eaten meat and you know eaten once when we're hungry twice maybe um it's it's not radical and at the end of the day if that's helping someone's mental health and they're contributing to that there is nothing more powerful than that and that's what i see in my own clients it's like i didn't know i could do that i didn't know that if i ate that and then i felt like [ __ ] that's like great you know what if someone's done a low carb or even zero carb even into carnival way of life and then they've done that for say four or five weeks and the light's been turned back on then they go out and they eat something and then the next day they're like oh i feel like [ __ ] yeah i'm like great excellent guess what you've just given yourself the power to go this is how i can choose to feel or not yeah and um i certainly noticed that with myself um you know just just physically anytime i i should reintroduce anything i never reintroduce something completely but something will slip in like maybe something ha i'm at a restaurant and you know i tell them not to put you know spices or seasonings or sauces on it but they do i scrape off as much as i can and you know but then i'm curious i'm like okay well you know what is this going to do to me i always feel i can i always tell something you know like i'll get like a stuffy nose or my face with you my asthma will kick in um but you know i certainly noticed you know i've i've had you know bouts of of depression or or you know times that i've just not yeah felt great yeah good yeah yeah and and i really haven't haven't had that you know since going carnivore anytime during that but i also have noticed that when i reintroduced greens just like you know herbs and seasonings and so forth i i get horrifically depressed like clinically depressed to the point of uh actually you know contemplating suicide in one on one instance i was morbidly depressed and i remember remember thinking like this isn't right you know nothing happened today that should make me feel like this but i do feel like this it's exactly how i feel and i realized then that this was a pathological depression statement something was causing this this wasn't this wasn't something in my life that was causing this there's something that happened and so i yeah biological physical reaction yeah exactly and so i figured you know and i had just eaten i've been over at my parents house and they had just started going carnivore but my mom hadn't quite gotten the concept of like not using a whole bunch of plants you cook the meat so she just slapped on just every herb that that she could find i mean it was literally green it was a green crust around oh wow it's like a crust of green yeah and i was i was like um mom you know you're not supposed to have plants they've bad things no no this is just the meat we're not having any size it's just the meat i'm like yeah but you know there's plants on the meat you're not supposed to have that and she just thought it just didn't count because it was it was on the meat and it was like well yeah you can you know tip cocaine into your coffee and just tell yourself you're just drinking oh it's just coffee because it dissolves you can't see it but no obviously there's something else going on there but yeah it's very true anthony and this is the thing i think where you know my passion and my message is you know everyone that we work with and collectively is if you go off something and you feel great and you all of a sudden go hold on the i'll just go back a bit the the other element of human beings and and when we kind of get labeled with something or we've been depressed or we've been anxious or whatever we feel really hopeless right so we we think that it's all something that we've done or psychological attachments to thoughts feelings and reactions but we get so used to feeling at a certain level right so the minute you open the door for someone to go actually hold on once we get the psychological attachments around your self-image get you moving from reporting conflicted self-image of to operating from your positive self-image and then looking at the way you're eating and where you're fueling yourself people become quite um resistant and the reason being is because our minds love familiarity even if it's harming us okay so the first default response is your mind is there to protect you at all costs regardless if you're eating donuts every day this is what we do right so the minute that someone's given that door where you've got one foot in familiarity where they've been maybe for 10 or 20 years and they step one foot out into unfamiliarity and they even get a snippet of oh i've woken up today and i actually feel really good i don't have the rumination i have energy i slept really well and again with metabolic health and you know another person is ben bickman i love him i think he's amazing um your root cause of insulin resistance but again metabolic health you know most people will go you know you just need to keep eating so you keep your metabolism up like there's so many layers to metabolic health it's sleep it's hormones and again you need high ldl for hormones right so once we kind of get all of that in a bucket and people actually go oh my gosh actually i feel so good but i'm also scared of feeling that way because i've just not had the ability to stay there and people revert back because it's it's it's comfort in food so again every single person i know and i've also worked with a friend of mine who was actually an ex-vegan basically a practitioner had said to her eight years ago now if you don't start eating meat you're gonna die in three years i'm just putting it out there and she went [ __ ] okay so she went to the butchers she got a whole kilo of mints put it full of butter and that was even before i had ventured into my kind of horland and now she is a carnivore and she just one thing she said to me she's had depression and anxiety as well she said i have never felt so free in my head and my body around food i don't think about food i eat when i'm hungry i know if the meat doesn't taste good i'm not hungry i'll push it away i'll wait again until i get the right signal she said i know the difference between boredom and my body going brain feed me now i need the fuel um and that's not an uncommon story and it's the same with alcohol um i wrote an article actually yesterday on alcohol um you know and obviously it's it's sugar we know that but the the attachment to so many people dm to me that have been carnivores and said stop drinking the minute i was a kind of war anxiety and depression disappeared i'm like yay yeah yeah amazing yeah that's the funny thing about metabolism as well you say this is the recommendation you have to keep eating keep eating to keep your metabolism up insulin suppresses your metabolism so like what what are you doing yeah you're constantly keeping your insulin raised constantly right that that is suppressing your uh metabolism so i mean it's it's completely backwards and that's what you get yeah and so you get completely backwards results like um it's yeah but but it's so locked in you know like you say there's so many you know paradigms in in just health and nutrition and fitness and so forth that's just this is the way it is and and people just do you know there's so many people that i talk to that they do you know fitness and fitness competitions and so forth yeah i see everything i'm doing they're like wow that's really great i'm really interested i've tried this for you know a couple weeks and i felt fantastic but i've got a competition up and so i'm just i have to go back to the the you know the the tried and true sort of methods and it's just like okay you know if you want to keep getting the same results and keep doing the same thing by all means but you know you but people are so trapped into that they can see this like wow this not only makes sense intellectually but it's improved my life and my training and my results but i'm not going to do it because i'm scared to sort of go away from that but there are there are people breaking away from that um thankfully and they're and they're having fantastic results yeah but you know again you know we've got to go back to again you know like what is metabolic health for each individual person right so again the 90 to basically make sure that we're understanding our physiological psychological feedback that we're giving ourselves 90 of that comes from what we put in here like it it's non-negotiable and the fact that you know dr westman has so many studies even andrew's soul dr andrew saw who's an orthomecular specialist out of the us you know has used high doses of niacin really low carb way of eating and literally has reversed any kind of massive um you know bipolar disorders even amber hearn right she was told i think she had now don't quite know i think was bipolar too um and she was told that she would never get rid of her condition and she'd been on antidepressants i think for around 12 years being quite young so she went carnivore and went into remission and she's not ever looked back and same with emily pertin emily pertin i think was in and out of psych wards she went carnivore and even her psychiatrist was like what are you doing yeah uh it's it the evidence is there um but again i think anthony the the uphill battle that we have is you know it's not dangerous it's not going to kill you to take out for the moment you need to have that elimination process to actually start feeling what you're capable of and what your brain is actually capable of doing um you know it's a step-by-step process it's as i said it's staying in familiarity but just starting to step out into unfamiliarity and getting out of that comfort zone of hold on if i've been doing the rainbow diet and eating every three hours and eating you know mixed vegetables and if something's not working and your mental health is not getting better regardless of the amount of antidepressants or you know anxiety medication that you're on maybe just open your mind a little and just start um you know like myself i jumped both feet in to kind of where i haven't looked back but that's just me um but some people just need a little bit of movement to help um but again i've had other clients that have gone nut i don't want to just muck around just let's get it done um and it's worked really well for them and again like we said i i um cheekily went out too and there was a mushroom on my plate and i used to love mushrooms in my past life right yeah and i'm like oh let me just try it it's been two years i'm sure it'll be fine oh my god it was the most vicious disgusting thing i've ever had in my mouth but this is a thing isn't it it's like you know even my daughter like she's 12 she's pretty much 90 carnivore and the level of her groundedness and her moods and you know going through puberty worlds apart worlds apart yeah so are there other yeah that is yeah especially especially kids are so uh you know they can be unhinged during during puberty and so forth and it's very very horrible you know hard time for them to go through these serious hormonal transitions they're trying to you know see how this fits in in a social spectrum as well um and uh and it's very hard it's very hard to figure out uh on the fly and so you know the last thing you want to do is is do something to spoil your mental health and make it even harder like that sounds awful absolutely yeah and i think a lot of people do have to deal with that um are there are there specific studies looking at these psychological psychiatric uh sort of issues um such as bipolar and schizophrenia to do with diet and what are the specific sort of diets that they look at in these yeah so basically i'll give you all the links um for people to read so literally it is you know pulling away the carbs processed junk foods getting rid of anything that basically is fake not food food like substances and feeling the body with fat medium protein and just keep going and just literally adjust it as they go along so a lot of the studies um that chris palmer has done is literally that like you know high-end psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and you know to the point where it's like hallucinations voices in the ears and i think he was also saying at one last resort he was just like you know what this patient into his was actually obese and he's like let's just focus on getting your weight down right so put him on a ketogenic low-carb way of eating and literally he said everything in his mind started to change so he actually ended up coming off his meds as well and his voices disappeared in his head within about four weeks so chris as a psychiatrist was like what is going on here like we used it as a weight loss method but then secondly it went through and it basically um if it's inflammation in the brain and you know i've written an article myself on the fact that depression and anything like that is is it's inflammation um and i think we've got enough evidence now and even you know if you go to rivero which is you know x meat rex which is sean baker's site you know if you go to mental health depression anxiety um there is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people um you know as you know you get damned i get dm'd now people aren't just gonna say you know what i went carnivore or low carb and i lost all my depression and anxiety like there's no justification for people to want to say that unless they have but i i think the biggest thing and again with georgia e georgia eater's got some amazing studies on again plant oxalates taking out plants um histamine is an issue as well for some people so some people for example may freeze their meat and then cook it and that obviously can raise a histamine in the meat so you know again every single person must be looked at as an individual because everyone is unique but ultimately as a human and a species appropriate way of eating we do need fat and we do need quality sources of fat and we do need protein and as we know meat has the nine perfect amino acids in it now that's not by accident is it um you know and it's the society of the process so you know when you're fueling yourself with carbs it's zero society and you're literally insulin is going up and down all day and then you're just hunting and you know you get anxious if you can't eat you get hungry that's your body telling you where you're not feeling it correctly um the minute you have eggs for breakfast literally people say to me i haven't eaten for five hours and i feel really good i'm like i know that's what happens you don't need to eat all day every day this is what we've got ourselves into the the health epidemic that we're in like this is this is a it's not getting better and it's not because it's there's not a lack of drugs or there's no new drugs on the market you know yeah certainly not we are lacking nutrients we are lacking nutrition and again you know i'm also i don't take things in relation to like if you look at a plant and you go okay well what nutrition is in that plant what soil is it grown in what's it been sprayed with and as we know if anyone's seen crisps the ground amazing documentary on the level of soil health like if your soil has no health those vegetables you're eating you might as well just look at them because they're not going to give you any nutrients whatsoever yeah the um the question you're doing in america um are they because obviously there's a lot of um there's a big push for you know plant-based everything uh in the world and um is it what what sort of uh diet metrics are they uh espousing so it's actually a part of the colorado medical school so they have a faculty called the institute of nutritional psychiatry so when i actually went through the actual modules it was actually a module which i was specifically looking for whether it was driven to plant-based um and they have a section on understanding the deficiencies of vegan diets so also [Music] absolutely but also too very very aware of protein health um and i know chris palmer talks about it too because harvard have a very kind of mixed skewed very plant-based people but also too they've just done a study on carnivore diet so you know i think we're we're we're shifting but again you know if if i'm sitting with someone and they've had depression or anxiety or they just feel really bad about themselves and they're not eating meat and they're feeling like you know really really low in energy and even you know hormonally or sex hormones all of that kind of thing and they're eating high amount of plants well we've just got to be open and go hold on let's just look at something else um because yes at the end of the day if there's a belief structure around it we have to manage that but your mental health and how you get up every day if you're going to hold dogma to a belief structure that's not serving you we really need to understand why and you know popping a couple of pills every day to just treat the symptoms is is not a long-term space for people to live in well i believe yeah i agree um you know and i you know talk to people obviously people go vegan for you know multitude of different reasons but you know some of it is due to environment and ethical sort of concerns for the animals and so forth which is fair enough i mean i think these are these are very important things that we should absolutely look into uh i think if you scratch the surface you'll see that you're you're doing much uh more good by going on a meat-based animal-based uh diet because this is actually you know animals actually help the environment they don't harm the environment they're part of the ecosystem funny enough and um you actually have to kill a lot more animals to grow crops than you do uh just you know by by raising livestock and so it's it's sort of uh contrary to everything we've been told and every and what looks right on the surface but when when you actually dig into it and look at the the reality of it it's very different but you know some people say that well it's good enough a vegan diet is good enough and you you can with supplementation you know you can get an equivalence uh you know equivalency with you know a meat-based diet um and because we do have supplements now then that's fine and then so because these things are equal now you know the environmental and the uh you know ethical concerns outweigh outweigh the other side but i don't uh i yeah i would like to hear your thoughts you think this is equivocal do you think that just being on a vegan diet and then having you know having supplements to fill in the myriad of gaps that there are in the nutritional um supply for from a vegan diet is is that equivalent is that is that good enough well just using my own you know client history um i've not met one vegan that has not needed help and they've come to me because of that reason because of their depression their anxiety and really again it comes back to questioning those belief structures so again supplementation you know for me personally i think if you're supplementing on a diet that means your diet is not full it's not adequate adequately enough for your body to gain what it needs to gain now again most of them are synthetic unless you go and buy a practitioner one which one you know say activated vitamin b might cost you sixty dollars a bottle right um but again they're made in a factory okay so again it's kind of opposing views of let's look at the environment and let's blame the cows in their belches for the methane however the carbon cycles the methane we need that to pull it back into the soil and there's a whole carbon cycle that we need to maintain you know the the um that cycle of water into the ground to maintain the soil and you know the cow poop into the soil for the microbes um and there is enough people out there investigative journalists that are actually you know as you said scratching beneath the surface to say well hold on no it's actually not the cow it's the how and where the cow is so you know we've talked about regenerative agriculture you know yes and feedlots again you know people are understanding that education needs to come back to moving things away from feedlots but again if you listen to rich role and i have such high respect for this man yes he's a vegan and you know he he seems to be flourishing and loving life great you know if i if i hear someone that's doing that and they're mentally and physically on point it's great but you know what mentally a lot of the time they're not on point but again it's about the level of on point that they wish to be based on attached to their belief structures so you know he was also saying an interviewed a farmer who's actually a cow farmer but also a crop farmer and he said that just to build an avocado farm over a hundred thousand animals die and they starve to death and their habitats get destroyed and even rich roll said himself he said if you're in eating a vegan way and you believe that you're saving animals you're delusional he said because there is death in every process but the fact of the matter is that you see a cow and you hear a cow and you know it's lights out for a cow pretty quickly you know but again i actually grew up on a farm as a kid so this is another thing that i'm really passionate about i know what farmers do with their cows i've seen it i've seen how they're killed and it's not suffering and they're out within you know a millisecond whereas if you think about crop growing those animals are destroyed like they have to run for their life and then the whole habitats are actually destroyed but at the end of the day i will always always come back to the fact you're a human being living your life every single day how do you choose and how do you want to feel is up to you so but again i'm very very um you know when people are kind of blaming the cows and they're destroying the planet i'm like it's just not true you know the cow on the epa in the us it's like 3.4 yearly you know but then we're talking about making fake meat and factories hold on let's look at the fossil fuel that that's going to create and all the other extra supplements that are made it's i think you'll always find a belief or or an outcome for what you want right but i think unless you really open your mind and go hold on is this really really the correct information so if you want to remove animals from your diet because you believe it's their suffering well again you've just got to be really mindful of the fact that if you're still eating plants animals still suffer yeah yeah and um you know also you know like like you're saying previously a lot of these dietary changes that you guys go they get put through people through uh for their mental health is is eliminating uh food sources you know food sources um it's not it's not sort of getting them adequate nutrition so the the idea that you know um that it's good enough to just to get enough enough nutrition basic nutrition is sort of you know shown to not be the case there because it's it's these other things that are implants that cause inflammation that cause different sorts of you know just dysregulation in your body that are then causing these uh psychiatric issues and and absorption you know we know spinach blocks absorption so exactly yeah and so you can drink spinach all day long but it's like it's blocking every single out everything else from absorbing and actually one of the other things that i've just really important especially with women is heme iron you know um especially for young girls going through puberty you need heme iron and i don't mean in a form of an iron tablet like it again it's it's supplementing things that are natural but again where are all your amino acids coming from um for that mental health it just it does it you just can't get it from a soul-based plant diet no yeah i would definitely agree um so as far as as your patients what what's what's your sort of clientele that you generally see is it mostly patients with uh you know depression anxiety or or are you seeing other other sorts of things as well and and and how are things going with the dietary changes and and so forth yeah so a myriad of different reasons for people reaching out to me a lot of the time it's just through referral um or just you know looking at my content online so it can be very varied from you know relationship issues um but a lot so a lot of people will come to me for external issues okay because this is how our minds work we go external so i've got relationship issues i've got work issues i've got lifestyle issues i've got depression i've got anxiety right so we've got to bring that back into our own self-image and understanding how we operate and the relationship with ourselves so if we get all that in alignment and we get all that healed everything else outside becomes irrelevant because the boundaries and the values you have especially around food and when you actually decide to make a decision with your diet as i said family and friends are going to you know ruffle feathers um but you've got to be in a space to go you know what this is about me and this is about my mental health so um when we go through the protocol it literally is finding out where you're at both physically and mentally you know someone's really exhausted and they just drag themselves out of bed every day you know we're gonna have to go a little bit more gentle but the most powerful thing that i find for the first two hours when i meet people is generally people just don't know how they work they don't understand why they do what they do they think they're broken they think that there's something wrong with them so if we can kind of get rid of that in the first two hours and give them some tools and strategies to understand why they're doing what they're doing and then secondly unlock that door to explain if you eat this way this is what's going to keep perpetuating give them the information but it's even funny like i had a client now this is popped into my head like she was ketogenic for years and then went off it and a depression came back so it's like well great learning yeah where do you want to go with that you know be empowered with it um same with alcohol if you go off alcohol and then you feel depressed for four days later what people tend to do if they've worked with me they go hold on hold on it's not me being depressed in my head it's my body that's depressed and that's the other thing um people's bodies are depressed their cells are depressed their cells are anxious because if you're feeding yourself sugar and this is funny too a lot of people will say oh no i don't need a lot of sugar and i get them to write out it it's literally 100 sugar that's all they eat hidden yeah in the context of oh i'll have special k or i'll have sultana bran or i'll have cholesterol reducing weak bits yeah it frightens me it's like oh my god that's not food no um so it generally is people have reached an end point and they're like i just i just need something else i've been in therapy sometimes for 10 or 20 years and they've never been asked what do you eat yeah well i think that's that's a good uh good point too is that some people can be in therapy for so long and they really don't i mean they're they're being helped to sort of sustain and maybe maintain or show some improvements but you know you would you would hope that after 15 years someone would come to a resolution of some kind um you know if i as a doctor or any sort of doctor came in and said okay well you have a cold you're going to need to see me twice a week for the next 30 years you know people will probably go find another doctor but we we don't uh we don't think of it that way with with mental health because it obviously is a different thing it's much more complicated but you know you you [Music] you know you can wonder you know if this is if this is providing as much benefit as it could if people have to perpetuate it for 20 years you know you would hope that they get you know get to a point that they could not need it anymore and just just live a normal life yeah absolutely and again you know unfortunately um our programming is you know we we must take self-responsibility so for example you know if you've given an option we've never been given it for 20 years and then you start to open that door and you know try a zero carb or a ketogenic diet um and actually allow your body to heal instead of trying to force it to do things like lose weight because that's most what most people want it's like no no just calm down that's a side effect of you healing your head and your gut and your body um but with humans being so disempowered anthony i believe is the fact that you know even type 2 diabetics are told to eat carbohydrates and it's okay you know and crazy to me that's just crazy yeah that's crazy to me and you know i don't know if your audience know but mr doctor james mook who was australian of the year you know he has such an advocate of type 2 diabetes reversal and you know we're actually got an event with him in sydney so i'm speaking and my business partner is speaking and um you know james is coming up and we're literally talking about you know especially specifically type 2 diabetes in men's health because men also too don't look after your health very well your women are very different but you know i think from a a mechanism of understanding when you go into a doctor's office and you're like you know what i think i was going to try you know a ketogenic or a carnivore diet and the minute you're poo-pooed like nope that's dangerous don't do that um you're totally disempowering that person to go you know what i'm gonna find the support that i need to help me help myself um but again it comes back to compliance as well you know it's like you can support someone as much as you can but it's just that window and it's a i find once they've got over that hump of the first two weeks because people go through pretty much a detox and you will you will go through a detox but you've also got to remember that you've eaten your way into that yeah so then you've got to be responsible of eating your way out of it yeah um and cravings are okay you just don't have to listen to them and acts on them because you're not going to die from the craving if you ignore it but again i say to clients if you've got a massive craving because you're normally about four o'clock and it's like where's the muffin get some high salt electrolytes you just drink that down and again sodium will also cut out any cravings but it's compliant it's actually allowing the person to go you know what i'm i'm actually capable of doing this and empowering the person to go you have every single thing that you need you've just got to trust yourself and trust the science trust the data you know i give them so much information i'm like watch that watch that read that read that and listen to your intuition yeah and go to sites like rivero go go to you know absolutely can't deny that yeah i know and yeah i think yeah i think rivero's a very good place for people to go as well you know dr baker has been doing you know yeoman's work for quite some time now and getting a lot of people involved to get the resources available for people to go there and just get better on their own which is great um natalie thank you so much for coming on i really appreciate it uh how do people find you how do they get a hold of you so yeah so through my instagram my website and uh facebook so it's just natalie.edu.west but i'll send you the link so if anyone wants to come and have a chat with me so what i'll normally do is we just book in a half an hour chat if anything that's resonated with you and you'll kind of want to explore that journey of connecting you know nutrition with mental health and just how you can actually heal yourself and in support um yeah just reach out and if you want to actually get any information about the sydney event for any sydney people um just yeah let me know awesome well great well i encourage everyone to go and and find natalie on instagram and uh and if you have any sort of mental health issues please don't uh try to do this on your own there's help out there and natalie is is someone who can help so if you need to please reach out okay thank you thank you bye bye oh