Suzanne Proksa:
Welcome to the Suzanne show with me, Suzanne Proksa, HR and business strategist, former featured Etsy seller, plant addict, concert lover, gardener, landscaper in training, and human straight up obsessed with helping others and cheering on women. Here, we talk a little business, personal development, women's health, and a whole lot about things that matter, help people, and give them joy. Grab your coffee or your wine, Break out one of your hundreds of notebooks. Light that soy candle, and let's dive in. Hello, everybody. My little wellness coach heart is pumped for today's conversation. We are talking about spring cleaning for your body with Christina Martin. Christina has been in the health and wellness field for over 25 years, an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, wellness coach, meditation teacher, maker of magic, and a detoxification specialist.
Suzanne Proksa:
Wow. Currently, she's most passionate about the beauty of detoxification and how it can lead to great change in all aspects of your life. After guiding many tau to wellness patients through elimination diets and detoxification. Over the last 15 years, the program expanded nationally and became virtual in 2021. Christina holds a master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine is a nationally certified diplomat of acupuncture, a fellow of the acupuncture and TCM board of reproductive medicine and a licensed coactive life coach. In general, she's been an avid seeker and student of Buddhism, spirituality, and personal growth over the last 25 years. For fun, she's recently become a meditation teacher on insight timer. Christina is based in New York where she splits her time between Manhattan and Long Island.
Suzanne Proksa:
Her husband, Sean, and 2 teenage stepsons, Reed and race, keep her plate full of all the things. Christina, I am so excited to have you here. Please feel free to add to that intro and, you know, tweak anything that I may have
Sandra Cooze:
mispronounced. Oh, I don't think you missed anything. And actually you pronounced everything. Most people say Dow. Most people even say Tayo. So, Suzanne, you did an amazing job. Yeah. I don't have much to add.
Sandra Cooze:
I think you hit everything right on the head.
Suzanne Proksa:
All right, Christina. Let's get into the nitty gritty. So let's start talking about some of the things out there. Oh, it's a list. Some of the things out there that are negatively impacting our health from environmental concerns to stress, to our diets. Let's just do a little rundown of the different things out there that are negatively impacting people's health, especially that environmental piece, because I don't think that everybody realizes how our day to day has such a big impact.
Sandra Cooze:
We are getting bombarded by toxins from, from everywhere. So, you know, it's not just if you live in a major city or in a metropolitan area. I mean, that's a given, right? That's what we think of. Oh, you know, the city is so toxic. Right. You can smell it. It's terrible. But even, you know, living in the country.
Sandra Cooze:
Yeah. And living in the country, I live in Manhattan and long island and in Long Island, I'm surrounded by farms, which is wonderful. It's beautiful. And now farmers are using, you know, very sustainable and if possible organic, pesticides or no pesticides rather, or very little, but even 30 or 40 years ago, farmers were using a lot of pesticides. And so researchers would say that we're still getting some of that from the soil. You know, besides that, of course, I think most of us try to be organic or at least some of us all the time, but it's hard. You're going to a restaurant or sometimes it's just not available. So we're getting pesticides in our produce, in our meats contaminated water, you know? Yes.
Sandra Cooze:
The water that we drink in America is clean, but what are they cleaning it with? We don't know. We don't always know, you know, pesticide or excuse me, not pesticides, toxins in our beauty products in plastics. There's also emotional toxicity. There's just so much going on. If you spend any time in traffic or driving your car, you're getting toxins. So yes, it is. It is everywhere. And I think our bodies are just overburdened because ultimately we're supposed to be able to detoxify naturally.
Sandra Cooze:
That's just biologically what the body does, but when it's so overburdened and then you add stress on top of it, I think that it's, it makes it for a very overburdened and difficult time to purge successfully.
Suzanne Proksa:
Thank you so much for that rundown to get us started. That's gonna be super helpful here. So you talk about spring cleaning and the power of detoxing. Why should we care about detoxing?
Sandra Cooze:
Why do we care? Right. It's like, well, yeah, we're getting toxins from everywhere. So what do I care? Yes, you should care. So what happens is when the body is overburdened with toxins, the body is just not balanced. The body is not working at its optimal. And what happens is that that can lead to an increase in free radicals, which essentially is oxidation. So free radicals are basically cells that are rendered incomplete. And so if we go back to, I don't know, what is it chemistry or something like that, they're missing an electron.
Sandra Cooze:
So they're kind of cruising around the body and they're missing an electron. So they're incomplete. So they're looking for another electron. So they're cruising around and they see another cell and they're like, they're thieves, they're scavengers. I'm gonna steal your electron, but then that renders that cell incomplete. So basically all of these cells are incomplete and it's not just happening like 1 at a time, one at a time it's happening a lot of the time. So one cell can render a whole bunch of cells incomplete. And so what happens inside the cell is oxidation or oxidative stress.
Sandra Cooze:
It's kind of like when you cut open an apple and you can see it kind of oxidizes, it gets brown rather quick or like an avocado that's oxidation. And when oxidation is happening inside of your cell, that's not good. It's not good. It's basically the whole system. Free radicals oxidation Proksa is like a gateway or an open door straight to diseases straight to cancers. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I want to stay as healthy as, as, as long as I can, just to, to, to be healthy, to be happy and healthy. That is my goal. And, and especially in my older years, I want to have rich golden years.
Sandra Cooze:
I don't want to be not feeling good. So.
Suzanne Proksa:
All right. Awesome. So there are a lot of people out in the world with food sensitivities and allergies who have no idea because the medical world seems to think of it last for whatever reason, statement I know, but it's one I've experienced myself and seen happen to numerous other people as well. So I'm pretty confident in it. Many people think of digestive concerns as the negative results, you know, when it comes to food sensitivities and allergies. But realistically, there's not a lot more to that. So what else can these sensitivities impact? Can you kind of give a rundown of some of the things that are top of mind? Well, things come to mind.
Sandra Cooze:
Let me just first say about food allergies, you know, Western medicine they'll, they'll do blood tests and allergy testing for the big eight. Right. You know, the most common food allergies, milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, peanuts, wheat, soybeans. And I think it's tree nuts is the 8th one. I used to do food allergy testing in my office. I don't anymore. And we had a panel that we would check on over a 100 different foods. So not like broad groups, like milk.
Sandra Cooze:
It was like specific to cow's milk, goat's milk. It wasn't just, you know, tree nuts. It was all kinds of nuts or all kinds of fruits and vegetables. And honestly, what I found is that food allergy testing. Doesn't really do it. It just there there's something I had patients that would come back without Landis things like chicken eggs, but not duck eggs, cranberries, and pineapple, and they couldn't eat whatever it was. They followed the diets of what came back, But it didn't matter. And I also think that we're changing.
Sandra Cooze:
Our bodies are changing dramatically. I mean, I mean, red blood cells, you know, the, the birth and the death of red blood cells. We have a new body every 90 days, but I think food wise, our bodies are changing every year or every couple of years is, from experience of myself personally, but also working with people. So, so that's, so that's that. And then, so there's food allergies and then there's food intolerances. Allergies are ones we know, like you eat something and you start getting itchy or a rash, or you can't breathe or something like that. It's more of an emergency food intolerances are things that are, like I say, there's, there's no good food or bad food. There's only foods that aren't doing you any favors.
Sandra Cooze:
And so that's kind of like an intolerance Now intolerances go and they kind of ping or hit 2 different systems. Yes. 1 is the digestive system like you mentioned, but the other one is the immune system. But out of those, because the digestion, especially in Chinese medicine, the digestion is like such a a core system. You know, what's coming out of the digestion system, the foods and how they're transformed and transported out is actually giving me vitality. It's actually, feeding my brain chemistry. It's actually keeping my hormones in check. So yes, there are so many other symptoms.
Sandra Cooze:
It's not just digestion related. You can have low energy. I see people that have foggy headedness blurry vision, of course, your regular digestive related things like, you know, stool issues, you know, bathroom issues, whatnot. But there's such a huge plethora, of course, like rashes. You can also have pain. I mean, a lot of the foods that we eliminate during my detox program are, they can cause a lot of inflammation, not in everyone, but in some people. So, you know, we, you want to know that you want to know that you want to know which foods aren't doing you any favors and, make choices from a powerful place. Excellent.
Sandra Cooze:
Thank you. So that sets the stage for my next question. And that is what is an elimination diet? Yes. An elimination diet is one that's temporary where you eliminate the most common intolerances, allergies, foods that are inflammatory foods. Again, might not be doing you any favors. So during the elimination diet that I lead, we eliminate things like of course, caffeine and alcohol. And I know already people have just stopped listening because people really love their coffee. People love their alcohol, but people really love their coffee.
Sandra Cooze:
And, you know, we eliminate sugar, of course, gluten eggs, nightshades nightshades are a little lesser talked about, but they can also be inflammatory dairy, things like that. Like all the heavy hitters and it's only 21 days. And what's, what's wonderful about it is after the 21 days, most people feel incredible because not only are we eliminating things, but then we're also detoxing the body and getting rid of toxic overload at the same time. And then at the end, we bring those foods back in 1 by 1, like, like it'll be like a dairy group or like corn or eggs specifically, and you eat them and you see how you feel for 1 or 2 days. And then you go from there and think, okay, well, now that, now that my body has gotten quiet, it can give me the messages that I need to hear that, you know what? I don't do so well on eggs. Let's say, or cheese is kind of not my friend, because I was feeling incredible. And now I'm feeling like poo.
Suzanne Proksa:
Okay. Thank you so much for that information. So you have a program for this. Can you tell us about that and what the benefits are? I think it's really important for people to understand what the other side of participating in a program like this can look like.
Sandra Cooze:
Program. So like you said, I've been doing it, guiding people 1 on 1 mostly for about 15 years and then not really pandemic related. Groups wanted to start doing it. So we lead, I lead this program every year, usually in the spring, because that's the best time for the liver in Chinese medicine to detox, but really you can do it in the summer and you can do it in the fall as well. So the benefits, I mean, the benefits are just so multilayered. You know, I run people, I have people come and do the program who are anywhere from experiencing a lot of different signs and symptoms to they're feeling good, but not great. A lot of people this year are saying they just haven't really bounced back from the pandemic completely. Like they just got some, some bad habits that are still lingering or they just need a reset.
Sandra Cooze:
So the benefits, gosh, that's also like multilayered. Not only are you getting rid of your toxic overload, so things kind of feel unstuck. Like people just feel better just from that. Like a great example is one of the participants in an earlier cycle this year, when I did a focus group with the new products, you know, I thought for sure this guy had lots of congestion, just always kind of not always, but a headache, at least a couple of times a week. And I thought, you know, my intuition said it's because of dairy, you, it must be the dairy. So we're going to take dairy out. Of course, felt he felt great. He felt great.
Sandra Cooze:
It was, it was great. And then we brought dairy back in the reintroduction phase and it didn't do anything to him. And I was so surprised because I thought for sure I had it pegged, but what actually was happening was that his body was just overloaded with toxins. So once we removed that, then the symptoms or signs or whatever that he was having also were gone and they didn't come back. And he's actually tolerating dairy just fine, which is great news for him. Cause he's a milk lover. Some of the other things that people get, I mean, besides like medically or physically is like a real, like, I guess, an inner or a deeper knowing around their food choices. They really get to see how it feels to really eat healthy.
Sandra Cooze:
And, and I have a recipe book that I, I give out to the participants with detox friendly recipes, recipes that are gorgeous and delicious and lovely. And, I think when we reintroduce food back, you know, by then, no one has any cravings. There's no cravings anymore because we're not eating foods that are pinging the pleasure center of the brain that are, you know, giving you dopamine that you're used to. We're actually creating new neural pathways, something called neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to get dopamine from healthy eating. But so often we get dopamine, you know, things like alcohol or, or sugar or, fried food or things like that. So kind of like a new lease on, on, on your eating regimen, I think is what a lot of people enjoy and get out of it. I think I could go on with the benefits, but I'll stop there.
Suzanne Proksa:
All right. That is super helpful for people, you know, to know what it involves and what the other side looks like. So it doesn't sound easy necessarily, or maybe not for some peoples, other people freeze right through it. What is the level of support that you offer for people? And I I'm sure that that probably varies from from person to person, but can you give a rundown on that as well? This year, I kind of did this new magical makeover of the program because
Sandra Cooze:
I was finding that not everybody was making it through. And that bothered me because I want everyone to make it through. In the past, you know, there was some level of support through zoom calls and WhatsApp threads, like a community thread. But a lot of people weren't chiming in. Maybe they're not posters. Maybe they just, you know, I don't know. They lost interest in the program. So this year, what I'm doing is I've like I said, I created this recipe book.
Sandra Cooze:
It has 52 recipes already. We just started our news cycle and already people are just so excited about the recipes in there. I also do pretty much a video a day for the program. So whether that's going through the recipes, talking about swaps and substitutions, why we care about detoxing or how you can keep your toxic load down. We also have a portion of the program once you get into the rhythm of things about meditation. So just kind of looking inward, going inward, getting really quiet and, and finding peace and tranquility in a different way. So, yeah, we have that video support. Then of course I've written a lot of articles.
Sandra Cooze:
I'm always available via email. We have 3 zoom calls. During the program that are spaced out. And then we do have the WhatsApp community thread that with different prompts and stuff, you know, people tend to, to, people are dipping in a little bit more now because I think that magic happens in community. Absolutely. Magic happens in community. No one left behind. And so that's what I want the program.
Sandra Cooze:
No one left behind. Really. If you're, if you want it, if you wanna get into it, it isn't easy in the beginning. But if you hang in there with me, it will become easy. And then all of a sudden over 21 days, it's kind of like a way of life. And I will say this, the detox portion is 21 days, but I also give book ended support. So there's 9 days of preparation, 9 days where you're getting videos from me. You're going through the material, the recipes, you're getting the coffee alternatives, 9 days to get you set up for success.
Sandra Cooze:
And then at the end of the 21 days is 10 days of reintroduction to discover and, and just, yeah, discover what works for you, what doesn't, and also what are your intentions now for the future?
Suzanne Proksa:
Okay. It's time for my favorite question. What? Yes, I did just sing that kind of. What are your 2 or 3 big takeaways that you want people to take from this episode? If they do nothing else, what do you want them to go out into the world and do today?
Sandra Cooze:
You know, besides the obvious eat more green vegetables, which, you know, we all know that I would say 3 things, get rid of industrialized seed oils. I have a whole thing to say about that, which would take too long, but they're otherwise known as the hateful 8. And the way that these oils out are manufactured, unlike your olive oil, your coconut oil, your avocado oil, which the oil is readily available in the seed oils. They aren't. So they have to heat them up. They have to add solvents to get the oil. Usually it's hexane. They have to add chemicals because apparently the odor after they manufacture, after they create the oil or, or, or excuse me, are able to extract the oil.
Sandra Cooze:
It smells badly. It looks terrible. So they have to add more chemicals. And so this isn't good for your body. You know, our cells, the cell membrane that wraps that goes around each cell is made up of lipid and protein. Lipid is fat. So if part of that membrane is, I guess we'll call it dysfunctional, then that causes your cell to be kind of dysfunctional as well. So get rid of industrialized seed oil.
Sandra Cooze:
You can look it up online, but there are your, your soybean safflower, sunflower, canola, corn. I think it's cotton seed, rape, seed, and rice brown. I think that's 8. So that's one 2 is I would look into getting some antioxidants and just taking them every day, a good solid antioxidant formula because antioxidants are going to take care of your free radicals. So it's just sort of like, you know, having any accidents in your body just kind of cleans things up a little bit better. And then 3, I would say is meditate, meditate, meditate, meditate, meditate is going to bring down the stress in your body. It's going to help, in the brain. Anyway, meditation is proven to shrink the amygdala and, and thicken the prefrontal cortex, which means when stress or situations are coming at you, you have less reaction and more thoughtfulness, and that's gonna bring down stress in your body, which is going to bring down inflammation in your body, which is going to make your liver happier and in turn detoxify a little bit better.
Sandra Cooze:
So there you have it.
Suzanne Proksa:
Thank you so much for being on the show, Christina. I absolutely love to geek out with people about anything that has to do with health and especially holistic health and doing things without all of the drugs and medications that, you know, just mask symptoms because we both know. So I am so happy that you blessed me with your time here today. And I look very forward to seeing you again soon on the socials and wherever else we might cross paths. So, again, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Sandra Cooze:
Me on the show. This was so much fun. I love talking about the topic. So, yeah, thanks again.
Suzanne Proksa:
I hope that you loved this episode. If you did, give me those shout outs, show me some love on iTunes, give me a rating, and, hey, if you wanna know where to find me, you can find me on pretty much all social media at Suzanne. That's suzanneproxa and you can also head over to my website suzanneproxa.com.
Sandra Cooze:
Until then, I'll see you in the
Suzanne Proksa:
next episode and here is parte music for you.
