Written by Christopher Kelly
May 21, 2015
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by a very talented young female cyclist, Carolina Villafañe.
Hi, Carolina.
Carolina: Hi! How are you doing?
Christopher: Good, thank you. So I'll do a quick introduction for you and maybe you should say something about yourself too.
The Villafañe family, fairly well-known amongst cyclists in the NorCal area. I race quite frequently with Carolina's older brother, Julian. They seem to be one of those annoying families where everybody's born with a VO2 max in the '80s. And your younger brother, Ben, is crushing it right now and you're doing great things too. The thing that we have in common is that we're all coached by the same fantastic guy, Chris Mcgovern, which has been really fun for me.
But why don't you tell us about yourself and your involvement with cycling right now and what your ambitions are.
Carolina: Well, I'm originally born and raised in Argentina -- Patagonia -- and I moved here when I was 13 and that's when I picked up a bike. My older brother told me if I join the mountain biking club he'd buy me a bike so I thought it was a pretty sweet deal. And it turned out to be really helpful, helped me out with a lot of the transitioning periods of being in a new culture and I actually ended up doing really well.
I kind of stopped for a while after high school to do college and then I came back about three years I want to say, 2013 maybe. And I came back, I started with cross-country and then I started doing Cyclocross because Julian was doing that and I really enjoyed watching the races. So I figured, next time around let's do something different.
And so I started in the B categories and I started winning the races so everyone was pushing me to do the A category locally.
Christopher: I'll have to interrupt you here and say that's no mean feat. So NorCal, particularly the Cyclocross, is quite an extraordinary scene where sometimes you'll get like multiple world champions competing in the same race. It's very competitive and the women's race is no different.
So you did the A race and then what happened?
Carolina: So I did the A race the following year which was my second year back on a bike and I got second.
Well, actually, what happened but my first race ever I didn't do because I was really scared. I was really scared and that's when I started talking to Kristin Keim, she's a psychologist. She's helped me out a lot actually through the whole season.
So I went and raced. And actually that first race, Meredith Miller was there, Elle Anderson, really great talent --
Christopher: Really strong, yeah.
Carolina: -- and I ended up getting fourth. And then as the season went by I started winning the local races back to back. And then the team that I was with at the moment, Rambuski, they said, "Well, how would you like to go to some UCI races?" and I was like, "Yeah, why not? Let's try it."
And so we went to Gloucester and then to Providence and the first day of Providence, I got ninth and I was like, "Wow, this is amazing."
Christopher: Yeah, so the very famous Cyclocross race is on the East Coast. I've never been but I hear nothing but amazing things about these races. It's supposed to be really fun, the conditions are fantastic.
Carolina: Yeah, and the courses are super hard too.
So that was when I really decided I wanted to really get into it. To be able to come my first year and get top ten in one of these races is not something you see to achieve, I don't think, your first year.
Christopher: And I should point out that at this stage you're only 22. I hope you don't mind me saying how old you are but you're a baby. Most of the people I work with amongst those athletes are older. So that's pretty cool.
So what's happening now?
Carolina: So now I'm riding for Vanderkitten. So last season we did basically all the UCI races. I went and travelled to Hoogerheide-Amsterdam area. I did the World Cup and then I was the first South American/Argentine to represent at the World Championships in Tabor and that was a very cool experience I must say. It took a lot of work but it was definitely worth it and this took me to a whole different level as well.
[0:05:20]
Christopher: And weren't you the first Argentinian to do that?
Carolina: Yes, yeah.
Christopher: That's pretty cool, making history right there. That's awesome.
Carolina: Girl power.
Christopher: So what are your ambitions now for cycling? You've obviously real talent and this could be a career for you. I don't really know that, I'm not an expert. But is that what you're thinking?
Carolina: Yeah. Well, we were talking with Chris Mcgovern after Worlds and he said, How about trying for the Olympics? And I was like, "Chris, I'm just getting started here."
And so I had been emailing back and forth with the Argentine Federation and I figured, "Well, I'll just send an email." I know they have their riders and their roster for this year for the Olympics, for Rio next year, but I emailed them and I was like "Hey, how would you like me to maybe try for the Olympics?" He was all into it. The only thing is I would have to show them my talent which means going and racing against these girls from Argentina which are pretty talented. There are a handful of them but they're really talented. I actually picked five events that I want to do for cross country. I'm talking cross-country because Cyclocross is not in the Olympics yet. And my hopes are to gain fitness and stuff and then in July go to Nationals in Argentina and potentially do really well to where that gives me an in into the Argentine Federation and then gain their support for future racing, meaning World Cups and hopefully, Olympics. Maybe not next year but in four years.
Christopher: That's awesome. So the CEO of Nourish Balance Thrive is Dr. Jamie Busch and she races UCI World Cups. And she was quite excited to see your blood chemistry and picking over this with quite detail, a lot of thinking on, like really wanted to sort that kind of mother hen type approach. That's phenomenal.
I go to sort of low-core bike races and I haven't seen you in any of those, the mountain bike races. Are you racing right now? Are you just training? How's that going for you?
Carolina: Well, I took February off and then I started training March. So I've been training a lot and I start racing at Sea Otter which is this weekend so I'll be doing the cross-country.
And then we picked out other events. We're going to Utah in May and we're going Colorado Springs and then I go to Argentina to race Nationals. And depending on where my fitness is, I was considering the World Cup in Windham in New York.
Christopher: Excellent! This is such a different calendar for me around this too, the local bike monkey events which are very good and they attract a lot of people but it's definitely not the World Cup, that's for sure. Well, that's just awesome.
So tell me about how your training has been going and any challenges that you've that been facing. Like how have you been feeding on a day-to-day basis, are you recovering well?
Carolina: I think I'm recovering better than I was last year. I have a heavier schedule now in terms of training and it's a lot of minimum three-hour rides where I do an hour worth of intervals.
So I definitely have more time to recover because I'm not studying and I only work like three times a week. No, I've been recovering good. But then I got sick so I haven't quite really seen how my body's able to adapt to the new schedule. But in overall, I'd day I'm doing better than last year. That's for sure.
Christopher: Okay. And do you have any specific health complaints or is it just really kind of looking to optimize performance here?
[0:10:01]
Carolina: Well, I get tired really easily. I can't do too much, if not, I get exhausted and I can't put in the power that I need to in the workouts. And then I have a really hard time digesting food for whatever reason so I always have some problem with my stomach.
Christopher: And is that particular foods that cause your problem or is it just in general?
Carolina: I don't know if it would have to do with maybe being stressed out sometimes and not eating at the right times. And maybe it has to do with the food. I'm very sensitive to things that are not organic, I've realized that. So if I go out and I eat say Mexican food or like very strong spices, my stomach gets really upset. I'm eating more Paleo so it's been working out actually.
Christopher: Oh, really, already? So we talked briefly last week about this stuff. I talk about the type of person that we'd been working with and some of the types of intervention that we'd been making into people's lives.
We use this word "Paleo" and I have mixed feelings about it because whenever I use it to someone who's never heard it before, they think of cavemen and reenactment and some kind of weirdness like that. When really I'm just talking about eating whole food diet that's mini, mini processed, nothing with a ton of ingredients and no added sugar and then the removal of grains and some other things that we know from the science are fairly authentic.
But when we have that conversation it seem like you were really, really close to that type of diet anyway. It wasn't like you're eating a ton of junk right now.
Carolina: Oh, no. I think the only real junk I eat is a bunch of chocolate. I like milk chocolate.
Christopher: Okay. But yeah, I think that's great compared to certainly… I mean I go to different sorts of bike races I guess but the types of crap that I see people eating after a bike race for example, maybe that's the exception for those people rather than the rule but there's definitely very suspect roach coaches turn up and serve up food after a bike race that certainly would completely destroy me for some period of time.
We thought it was a good idea to run this blood chemistry and it's a really basic blood chemistry. And the procedure's pretty simple, isn't it? I just send you a PDF requisition and then you take that to LabCorp and LabCorp draws some blood and we get these results back. And I've got this software which is proving to be really, really helpful. The reason it's helpful is because the normal reference ranges that you see on the slip of paper that comes back from LabCorp, those are standard reference ranges and they're defined just be averages. So if you can just imagine the US is full of a ton of sick people and those sick people go to the doctor more often than people like you and me. That's skews the averages quite badly. And so when you compare yourself to those averages, you don't really learn anything. Like how do I compare to the slightly average obese sick person?
And so the software, it was written by a guy called Dicken Weatherby who's a Functional Medicine practitioner, a naturopathic doctor. He's a great guy and he really understands biochemistry and physiology and he's defined these titer limits which the software uses to define an optimal range. So when I look through your blood chemistry, I'm not just comparing you to the average sick American. I'm like really nitpicking over the results.
And so the stuff that I'm going to talk about now in this blood chemistry is not like a disease state or anything like that. It's like me nitpicking, trying to optimize performance. I've spent some time talking about this result with Jamie and I think we've got some good stuff for you here if nothing else. We're going to make some changes and the Paleo thing is one of those and then we can redo this blood chemistry in two months' time I think would be a reasonable timeframe to see some changes. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see what difference it makes.
[0:15:11]
Tell me about when you went and had this blood drawn, were you sick? Am I right in thinking that? We talked about this briefly.
Carolina: Yeah, I got whatever's going around which is really strong. I don't normally get sick but when I do, it's pretty intense I'd say.
Yeah, I was out for two weeks. It took me out for two weeks. I was feeling good and then I was feeling bad and I was feeling good and I was feeling bad and then finally three days ago, I felt normal.
Christopher: Okay. You can see this on the blood chemistry, there's an elevation of neutrophils which are a type of white blood cell that the immune system produces in response to bacterial infection. And then there was also an elevation of total white blood cells. That did suggest that something was going on.
Normally, I would wonder if this person got some sort of chronic infection, bacterial infection, maybe they've got some bacterial overgrowth in their gut or something else going on but I think that explains it. If you're feeling fine when you do the next blood chemistry, then I think that will be something to look at again but for now, I wouldn't worry about that too much.
It was interesting that you talked about your digestion and how you're quite sensitive to certain foods even though you're eating what sounds like a really good, clean diet. There are hints on the blood chemistry, low total cholesterol, low triglycerides. It hints that you might have a problem with cholesterol synthesis and that would also lead to low bio-acid production which could affect the way in which you digest food. So in particular emulsifying fat, so just breaking up the fat to make the surface area bigger so that you digest it better.
And so it kind of hints that you do need some digestive support. And then also this kind of science of gastric information so the markers I'm looking at are also low total globulin which is a protein. You've got low hemoglobin, low creatinine, and so I think this is an issue that you should get on top of. I think we'll do that with some of the changes we'll talk about.
But let's talk about hemoglobin for a moment. Now you talked about being exhausted and tired. I talked about this at length with Jamie, with Dr. Busch, and we're pretty sure we're onto something here. Your hemoglobin… so hemoglobin is the molecule that transports oxygen around your body and obviously for you as a cyclist, oxygen deliverability is critical and the more oxygen you can deliver to the exercising cells, the more power you will produce and the faster you will go.
Now at the moment, your hemoglobin is 13 points. So that's still inside the standard reference range. If you went to the doctor the doctor would say you're fine. But it's below this optimal reference range, this titer reference range that's been defined by the guy that wrote this software. The thing that's cool about it is the patterns, they span multiple markers. So there's something else I'm looking at that kind of makes me think about oxygen deliverability and that's the mean corpuscular volume. So this is the size of the red blood cells.
And for you, they are slightly enlarged. Again, I'm not talking about a disease or pathology of anything like that. You're still well inside the standard reference range but above the optimal reference range. What this means is the size of red blood cells is bigger than you'd normally expect. And the reason I think this is happening is because the cell is unable or some of the cells are unable to eject the nucleus which is a normal process of red blood cells maturing. In order for this to happen, several nutrients are required and two of the most important are vitamin B12 and folate.
And so the end result is slightly low hemoglobin which I think is critical for you, someone that wants to have an appropriate amount of energy and wants to perform better as a cyclist. So you have to ask yourself, where is the B12 and folate, like are you eating enough? So why don't I ask that question right now?
So folate primarily comes from leafy vegetables. Do you eat any leafy vegetables in the first place?
[0:20:19]
Carolina: I do, yeah, mostly in salads or in the morning actually. I don't think I eat nearly as much as I need to though.
Christopher: Okay. And B12, I guess there's a number of places but it's mostly animal sources in particular red meat is a really great source of vitamin B12. So you do eat meat and red meat in particular?
Carolina: Yeah. We eat meat quite often although I have a really hard time eating a lot of it.
Christopher: Yeah, it's a tough one. Hydrochloric acid is the chemical in your stomach that starts the breakdown process of protein and you need certain nutrients in order to produce it including B12. Sometimes you can see this vicious cycle where you need something to be working in order for you to absorb the nutrients but you need the nutrients to make the thing work in the first place. You've got this horrible like catch-22 and the supplements can be quite useful for breaking that vicious cycle.
There are a couple of other nutrients actually here which are hinting that you're low on. And the first one which i see is quite a common problem for women is low serum iron. And again, we're not talking about low outside of the standard reference range, just low outside of this optimal reference range. So just kind of hint you needing maybe like… Iron is kind of like a double-edged sword -- you don't want too much because it's an oxidant. It can cause quite a lot of harm in excess. But at the same time, it is required to produce red blood cells which is one of the problems that we're after. So it does seem justified to take maybe a tiny bit of a supplement.
The other suggestion that Jamie made was just use cast iron cookware. I don't know if that's something you do already. Is it?
Carolina: I have no idea. I have to check on that one.
Christopher: That's funny. Yeah, cast iron, we use it as well. It's like the trend is towards these non-stick pans which tend not to last very long and who knows what they're made out of and whether any of that non-stick coating ends up in your food. I'm not quite sure. Probably if you get it hot enough. Obviously Iron is ubiquitous and it's super cheap, there's no reason to be deficient in it so that's definitely something to look at.
And the other thing I was wondering about and this is I think especially relevant to your immune function is your Zinc status. It sounds like I'm doing a bunch of really fancy blood work here but I'm really not. This is a $26 blood chemistry. The marker I'm looking at at the moment is called alkaline phosphatase which is an enzyme which requires Zinc in order to be produced. If you have insufficient Zinc then you might see low alkaline phosphatase. It's not a really hard and fast diagnosis; there could be other reasons why alkaline phosphatase is quite low. And again, it's still inside of the standard reference range which is when you look at some of them, it's crazy how wide the reference range is.
So yeah, definitely extra Zinc which is kind of hard to find in food to be honest. I don't know if you like oysters but that's a really good source of Zinc.
Carolina: My grandpa used to like oysters.
Christopher: That doesn't count. You're going to have to do better than that.
Carolina: Yeah, I'll eat them.
Christopher: So yeah, that's something to think about. Probably like the supplement I think would probably be better. No, it wouldn't be better. That's not the right thing to say. I think it's more likely to happen is what I mean by that. But yes, Zinc is really important for a bazillion different reasons including immune support. But there's also like strong nails and hair and it's required to produce certain hormones like testosterone -- super important for an athlete.
[0:24:55]
It's pretty cool that you can do like look at all these stuff which is a simple blood chemistry and then I think it's going to be really interesting to track these for you over time. So in two months' time let's just make some really slight non-invasive changes and then redo the blood chemistry in two months' time and see where you're at.
The suggestions I made, I'm kind of a bit of a supplements guy. I sell supplements and I still take quite a lot of supplements and I really notice when I stop taking them and that's why I do it. I didn't want to supplement you to death before you'd even like try to get some of these from food. So you're going to take the Thorne EXOS multivitamin?
Carolina: Yeah.
Christopher: So that's got Zinc in it. The nice thing about that multi is it's got like a reasonable amount of a lot of things and you might end up needing a little bit more Zinc or a little bit more Iron but it's a good place to start. And I think this is really important for someone like you that's an athlete that's got just higher demand in general than a normal person. You're doing something kind of extraordinary, you're expending a lot of energy and it follows I think that you would have extra requirements for some of these nutrients.
So let's talk about your diet. Walk me through a typical day, what would breakfast be like for you?
Carolina: Breakfast for me is scrambled eggs with spinach, avocado, and tomatoes in it and then I put a little bit of salt and pepper to add flavor to it. I was doing orange juice but since I talked to you, I drank a tangerine instead. And I'll either do either a coffee or a tea depending on how the day is. Like today I had tea. That's my usual. And then bacon.
Christopher: Okay, that's great! Well, how about that, that's fantastic. That's really exciting to see people, the top athletes in the world that just kind of naturally gravitating towards the best solution. I'm sure that if I was to talk to a lot of 22-year old budding athletes, they would have given a very different answer to that question and it would have been a ton of refined carbohydrate with lots of added sugar. So looking at cereal and milk.
The orange juice is probably not the worst of all evils but when you look at it it's just a lot of sugar in a liquid form. I'm not really sure it makes sense to drink any sort of calorie, least of all a sugar. And so that's cool. It sounded like it wasn't really neither here nor there to you anyway and so that's a really simple change. In general, that's a fantastic start of the day in my opinion.
So what does lunch look like?
Carolina: Well, I'm just kind of weird because it depends. Like some days I'll work at 1:00 so I'll eat my breakfast, I'll go ride. Then I come back and I'll eat either leftovers from the night before which is a dinner that my mom cooked or I'll do like a smoothie which I put bananas, almond milk, honey, berries and Osmo. And that's usually after the ride.
And then the days that I don't work it really depends when I'm training. Lunch is weird. I wouldn't say I have like a consistent lunch.
Christopher: Okay. I don't want to say anything too much about the smoothie at the moment but it does sound like quite a lot of sugar. When you make a smoothie like that, you have to remember that what you're really doing is you're kind of pre-digesting it. You're taking away some of the work that your digestive tract would normally do.
And if you've got like trouble digesting stuff, then that might make sense. But the thing I'm a little bit worried about is your fasting glucose was at 90 milligrams per deciliter which is it's not horrible at all by any means, you shouldn't get too worried about this. This again is very much me nitpicking, like getting fussy and so. But you need to watch this because it starts at 90 and somebody raises an eyebrow and then two years later you check it again and it's 97. And then the doctors starting to think well, she doesn't have diabetes yet. And then ten years later it's 110 and then you've got real problems.
[0:30:12]
The thing I'm worried about for athletes and in particular young athletes is the sugary sports supplements. It's not so much smoothies I care about but I see a lot of pictures on Facebook and Instagram, young athletes are quite vulnerable to the donations of certain companies that will remain nameless, giving them very sugar-laden sports products.
What do you do for that? Say you're going out for a three-hour ride and it's all endurance pace, no hard intervals or anything like that. Do you eat anything when you're on the bike?
Carolina: I like taking fruit with me because if I eat like the sports nutrition it really, really upsets my stomach. But I do take Osmo and my water. I'll have one that has Osmo in it and I'll have one that has just like normal water. And then I'll do a banana or an orange or apples. Mostly fruit.
Christopher: Yeah, it's very difficult to go wrong with any whole food source. There's only so much sugar that can be when it's wrapped up in fiber and other things like in fruit. The thing I'm worried about is -- I'll give you an example that I saw a bike race on Sunday. It took me 90 minutes to complete this bike race. Just before the start I saw somebody's bike that had 8 200-calorie power gel taped to the top tube -- so 1600 calories of sugar for a 90-minute race. I saw the bike again, I just happened to see the guy afterwards and there was only two left on the top tube. I'm like "Holy cow, that is a lot of sugar" especially for a guy that he kind of had a bit of a belly. He probably took longer than me to finish the race.
That's what I'm really worried about is it's actually possible with some of these concentrated sugar sports supplements to consume more sugar than you really even need. But you're clearly not doing that, you're nowhere near that. Yeah, just watch that fasting glucose. It's maybe something to keep an eye on.
Of course it's only one reading as well and glucose is something you can check for yourself very easily at home. You can hop on to amazon.com and buy one of these finger stick test and just check this for yourself and you might find that this has absolutely nothing to do with your diet at all. And it was just a result of you being sick, like you being sick or having some sort of bacterial information would be like a mild stressor on your body and so your liver might be kicking out a little bit of extra glucose and that's what we're seeing here on this blood chemistry. So it could be just an anomaly but definitely something to keep an eye on.
And I would like to know what your blood sugar gets up to after you've had that smoothie. Like get the finger stick test and test it. Send me the number, I'm interested to know what it gets up to.
Carolina: Yeah.
Christopher: And then so dinner, you're lucky in that it sounds like a really strong social family connection for dinner and you've got somebody else cooking. Is that right?
Carolina: I got my mom. My mom cooks at night.
Christopher: That's awesome. And she's cooking like amazing quality food and doing a fantastic job there, right?
Carolina: Yeah, it's mostly like European food. Growing up in Argentina so meats, salads, potato, sort of that food more plain than your normal average American food here which… I mean in California it's mostly like Mexican food is pretty strong, I'd say around here so like pretty spicy things. But ours is pretty plain. She does a bunch of like meat usually and then she does veggies as well. She keeps a variety going, yeah.
[0:34:52]
Christopher: Okay, that's excellent.
Obviously your total energy requirements are really high and I think it's a good idea for athletes to meet those additional requirements for energy by getting extra fat in their diet. Don't go too crazy on the carbohydrates. Like if you're still hungry don't eat a ton more potatoes. You're probably better off adding some more butter or tallow or coconut oil or something like that or an avocado will be another great source of added fat.
So do you find that after you've done a big ride or hard ride that dinner is enough for you or do you find yourself still feeling hungry?
Carolina: No, dinner usually is enough for me.
Christopher: Okay, that's good.
Carolina: And if I'm feeling hungry I usually eat dessert which is fruit, either a banana or grapes, or an apple which is that's what I grew up with. You have dinner and you have dessert and dessert's usually fruit.
Christopher: That sounds great. How often does bread or pasta or any of the grains feature in your diet?
Carolina: I rarely eat pasta anymore just because it makes me feel kind of bogged down whenever I eat it. Bread, I love bread so that one kind of comes and goes. I try to not eat it as much but I'll have my sandwich here and there. And sometimes I'm feeling like I want some toast with a lot of butter in it. So I'm not super strict on that one. So the bread, I wouldn't say I eat it every day. It just kind of comes and goes.
Christopher: So are you up for giving it a try then, say maybe going 30 days without eating any kind of bread or grains or anything to see what difference that makes?
Carolina: Yeah, that shouldn't be hard.
Christopher: Good, that's cool. So it might be subtle, sometimes it takes a while for the change to kick in, sometimes it's a delayed reaction. Pretty much everybody I worked with are sensitive to wheat and grains in general and sometimes the person doesn't notice right away, it's kind of like a delayed thing. It's only when they've made the change for a number of weeks or even months, they really start to see the benefits.
So at this point I am extremely biased and I don't really have any hard science. There's nothing in the blood chemistry here that says "You're sensitive to wheat, therefore you shouldn't eat those foods." It's not that kind of diagnosis but I'm just going on previous outcomes. The thing that really biases me is I would say probably 80% or 90% of people that come to me have already made this change and have gotten fantastic results with it. And now what they're saying to me is "Okay, so that was 90% of the solution. How do I get this last 10%, what's going on for me?" and that's where the lab tests come in.
You're somewhat unusual in that you haven't already discovered this. But you're young, give it a try. If in two months' time we run another blood chemistry and it's absolutely not different and you don't feel any different then there's a good chance I'm wrong about that but I think it's worth a shot.
Carolina: Yeah.
Christopher: And then tell me about… I know that the diet piece is really important but it's important not to get fixated on that too much because there's just so many other moving parts or variables. So how is your sleep, do you manage to get eight hours of sleep every night?
Carolina: Yeah, kind of comes and goes depending on what's going on that week. But I usually do wake up without an alarm so I wake up when my body decides to wake up and that's about 9:00 or something. I go to bed at 11:00, a little bit late. I've always been more of a night person. So I'd say I get a pretty solid amount of sleep and I would even take a nap here and there.
Christopher: Okay, that's what makes you different. Sometimes people wonder what the differences between a professional athlete and someone who's working a day job and it's that ability to say, "I'm not really tired, a little bit, but I can probably put my head down for ten minutes" and you just can. Like it's different when you've got like a meeting to go to or something horrible like that.
But that's great, I'm glad you're sleeping well because I know that's so, so important and definitely hang on to that. It's a gift. Nearly everyone I talk to has got insomnia so that's super cool that you're sleeping well.
[0:40:06]
And then how about your stress level? It's kind of interesting that you mentioned that the sports psychologist and there must be a certain level of anxiety associated with your racing and there's quite a lot of pressure on you, with like you talking about the Olympics and stuff. But how well are you handling that?
Carolina: Good. I've been working with Kristin for about two years now and she's really helped me gain confidence as an athlete. When I first started I didn't think of myself as an athlete. She makes it more about the journey not the end result because results are results. It's really more about the journey in the day to day and really enjoying it.
So I think talking to her, she tells me what are the things that you can control and we work through that and how to improve, what are the things I'm struggling with and what are the things I can do to make them better. She kind of puts everything into perspective; it's a big picture, so that helps me out a lot. But she helps me a lot more with the emotional side of things of life -- relationships, what's going on at home, or work, or whatever -- whatever it is that's bothering me I can just let it out and she can give me her outlook on it. But at the same time, saying things out I feel it makes me look at them in a different way, kind of like I'm outside of myself and I think that kind of helps me out a lot, being able to see things from not an emotional perspective.
Christopher: That's awesome, that's amazing that you've got that as a resource. I'm sure everybody listening wishes they had that as a resource.
Yeah, you shouldn't do anything but I would suggest you trying other things too, things like yoga maybe and… Headspace is an app that you can get on your phone. It's a guided meditation training course. There's a program that I run called Take10. The idea is that you do ten minutes of this guided meditation every day for ten days, see if you can get through it. It's different from talking to someone, it's different from doing yoga, it's different from reading a book. It's really quite something special and everybody seems to universally love it. I get everybody to try that so I'm hoping that you'll be up for like giving it a try.
Carolina: Yeah. I've actually been doing some sort of meditation stuff --
Christopher: Oh, that's right, we talked about that. You were starting a class. Did you do that now?
Carolina: Yeah. I do this since I kind of like travel and I kind of come and go. There's this website which I think is incredible, it's called YogaGlo and that has like different types of yoga in it and you can get from like frustration to meditation to like a really good workout.
But I found this really good clip which is a 20-minute clip in it and it's a guided meditation. So you're basically laying and your body's not moving but he's guiding you through different parts of the body through imagery. I've been doing that pretty often and not only kind of gives me more energy, kind of gives me like a quick wake up throughout the day, but it really calms me down. It makes me feel more at peace with the day. I've noticed that I don't get upset as often I'd say, like not irritated because things do irritate me. I'm a pretty calm person but I think that the meditation has helped me kind of be more at peace throughout the day.
Christopher: So this is quite a new thing though, isn't it? This isn't something that you've been doing for years, right?
Carolina: Oh, no, I started like a week ago.
[0:44:58]
Christopher: Okay, excellent. I know that the stress piece and stress physiology plays a huge part in the problems that I see on the lab work and in people's lives and so anything you can do to improve your resilience to stress is going to be really helpful. So I'm really, really glad that you started that by yourself and obviously I'll link to this. It's YogaGlo, I'll link to that in the show notes.
Carolina: Yeah.
Christopher: The thing that is best is the thing that you like doing, so if tats what it is then it's perfect. That's awesome.
I've sent you some of the Thorne multi and then also just some digestive enzymes which I think will help with your ability to handle the foods. I'm hoping it's going to help in particular with your ability to digest fats so we'll see how that goes. Do stay in touch and let me know how that works out. I think we should redo this blood chemistry in a couple of months; time and see what changes we've made.
Carolina: Definitely.
Christopher: Excellent! So where can people find you? I'm right in thinking you've got a Facebook athlete page now.
Carolina: Yeah, I just made one because I get a lot of friend requests so I figured why not just make an athlete's page. So it's Caro Gomez Villafañe. It's basically the same as my Facebook if you're already friends with me on Facebook. And then I do a lot of Instagram. I love Instagram, and that's the same, Caro Gomez Villafañe.
Christopher: I think I follow on Instagram. You do take some great pictures and there's a fantastic publicity shots of you. The Vanderkitten people seem to be… who is it that's taking those pictures? Is it Vanderkitten that are taking the pictures?
Carolina: It's a little bit of everyone's work, like I go and take pictures and I can send them to them and they can post them. It depends whether… the late ones we did a camp this week so it's been multiple. We have a social media. Tanya does the social media.
Christopher: Okay, excellent. Well, I'll link to those two things on the show notes for this episode. Yeah, thank you for your time and we'll catch up in a couple of months or so.
Carolina: Awesome!
Christopher: Okay. Talk to you then.
Carolina: Thank you so much. Bye.
[0:47:19] End of Audio
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