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Ten Free Things That Fix What Ultra-Processed Food Broke
Here's a statistic that stopped me mid-sentence during this conversation: 93% of Americans are estimated to have some form of metabolic dysfunction. If you put 100 people in a room, 93 of them are dealing with a body that isn't turning fuel into energy the way it's supposed to.
Natalie Ellis, host of the Motherhood Matters podcast and a health coach with five kids of her own, walked me through what that actually means, using a book she's been studying closely, Casey Means' Good Energy. Picture your body as a city made of trillions of tiny power plants, your cells, whose entire job is to take in food and oxygen and turn it into clean, usable energy. When that process works well, your blood sugar stays steady, inflammation stays low, hormones stay balanced. When it doesn't, because of decades of processed food, sugar, and sedentary living, you get what Natalie called "bad energy," which shows up as brain fog, afternoon crashes, weight gain, and eventually the long list of downstream diagnoses: type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, PCOS, heart disease, and what some researchers are now calling "type 3 diabetes," Alzheimer's driven by glucose dysfunction in the brain itself.
Natalie's point, and it's one worth sitting with if you've ever felt broken rather than just under-informed: this isn't a personal failing. It's what happens to almost anyone swimming in the same current of modern food and habits. You didn't fail. You got handed outdated tools and told they'd work.
She shared ten free, doable habits from her research, and I want to pass all ten along:
Walk after meals. Even ten minutes cuts glucose spikes by 30 to 35%, and one study found 7,000 daily steps associated with a 70% reduction in mortality risk. Timing matters more than duration: a short walk right after eating does more for blood sugar than an hour at the gym at the wrong time. Can't get outside? March in place, do a few squats, walk the aisles at Costco.
Eat single-ingredient foods about 80% of the time. Not 100%, 80%. Food as close to how it originally looked as possible: an egg instead of an egg product, a whole apple instead of processed apple anything. Know your own personal exception, though. For something like sugar specifically, if you're high on the addiction scale the way Natalie and I both are, "just have a little" doesn't work the same way "have some pizza on vacation" might.
Compress your eating window, with the caveat that this looks different depending on where you are in recovery. The principle: every time you eat anything besides water, your body releases insulin, and if insulin never gets a break, it interferes with normal fat metabolism. Natalie's practical version: stop eating and brush her teeth a few hours before bed, giving her body a consistent 12-hour stretch without officially "fasting" in a way that feels restrictive. If a longer fasting window causes anxiety or white-knuckling for you, that's your cortisol working against the very goal you're going for. Better to find your natural rhythm than force someone else's protocol.
Know your actual numbers, not just "normal." Standard lab ranges often flag disease, not optimal health. A few target numbers Natalie shared: fasting glucose under 85 (most labs call 99 "normal," and prediabetes starts at 100, a much smaller gap than it sounds), triglycerides under 75, HDL over 60. If you haven't had labs drawn recently, that's a concrete place to start.
Protect your sleep like it's a foundational pillar, because it is. This is one where Natalie and I are in complete agreement: food and sleep run neck and neck in importance. Under-slept, your brain goes looking for fast energy, and it's not reaching for carrot sticks. There's a quote Natalie shared that stuck with me: fatigue makes cowards of us all. Tired, everything feels harder to resist.
Mix your types of exercise instead of doing the same thing daily. Natalie switched from pure running to adding heavy strength training a few years ago and says it changed how she feels dramatically. Muscle acts as a "glucose sponge," the more you have, the more places your body has to send the sugar you eat, rather than storing it as fat. Diversify the way you'd diversify a financial portfolio.
Get 20 minutes of morning sunlight within two hours of waking, without sunglasses. This sets your circadian rhythm and, per Natalie, has real mood benefits beyond the physical, something almost spiritual about starting the day connected to something larger than a phone screen. I do my bleacher workouts at dawn specifically so I catch the sunrise, and it's become one of the most grounding parts of my week.
Eat fiber before your meals. Fiber, think berries, avocado, nuts, seeds, bell peppers, feeds your gut microbiome and slows the release of sugar from whatever you eat next into your bloodstream, naturally boosting your body's own GLP-1 production instead of relying on a prescription version of it. I've talked before about how fiber creates short-chain fatty acids that act like little soldiers guarding your gut lining. It's genuinely one of the most underrated levers available to you.
End your shower with 30 seconds of cold water. Neither of us loves this one, but the research behind it, that cold exposure prompts your mitochondria to multiply, is compelling enough that we're both willing to keep trying it, starting with just 10 seconds and building up.
Move for two minutes out of every thirty spent sitting. Set a timer if you have to. Your body was built to move regularly throughout the day, not in one concentrated hour bookended by ten sedentary ones.
Natalie closed with a reframe on cost that I think about often: you can pay now, in the currency of real food and consistent movement, or you can pay later, in the currency of insulin, hospital bills, and missed years. Neither option is free. You just get to choose which one you're paying into.
None of this requires doing all ten things starting tomorrow. Pick the one that feels most doable this week, and let that be enough for now.
Here's a statistic that stopped me mid-sentence during this conversation: 93% of Americans are estimated to have some form of metabolic dysfunction. If you put 100 people in a room, 93 of them are dealing with a body that isn't turning fuel into energy the way it's supposed to.
Natalie Ellis, host of the Motherhood Matters podcast and a health coach with five kids of her own, walked me through what that actually means, using a book she's been studying closely, Casey Means' Good Energy. Picture your body as a city made of trillions of tiny power plants, your cells, whose entire job is to take in food and oxygen and turn it into clean, usable energy. When that process works well, your blood sugar stays steady, inflammation stays low, hormones stay balanced. When it doesn't, because of decades of processed food, sugar, and sedentary living, you get what Natalie called "bad energy," which shows up as brain fog, afternoon crashes, weight gain, and eventually the long list of downstream diagnoses: type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, PCOS, heart disease, and what some researchers are now calling "type 3 diabetes," Alzheimer's driven by glucose dysfunction in the brain itself.
Natalie's point, and it's one worth sitting with if you've ever felt broken rather than just under-informed: this isn't a personal failing. It's what happens to almost anyone swimming in the same current of modern food and habits. You didn't fail. You got handed outdated tools and told they'd work.
She shared ten free, doable habits from her research, and I want to pass all ten along:
Walk after meals. Even ten minutes cuts glucose spikes by 30 to 35%, and one study found 7,000 daily steps associated with a 70% reduction in mortality risk. Timing matters more than duration: a short walk right after eating does more for blood sugar than an hour at the gym at the wrong time. Can't get outside? March in place, do a few squats, walk the aisles at Costco.
Eat single-ingredient foods about 80% of the time. Not 100%, 80%. Food as close to how it originally looked as possible: an egg instead of an egg product, a whole apple instead of processed apple anything. Know your own personal exception, though. For something like sugar specifically, if you're high on the addiction scale the way Natalie and I both are, "just have a little" doesn't work the same way "have some pizza on vacation" might.
Compress your eating window, with the caveat that this looks different depending on where you are in recovery. The principle: every time you eat anything besides water, your body releases insulin, and if insulin never gets a break, it interferes with normal fat metabolism. Natalie's practical version: stop eating and brush her teeth a few hours before bed, giving her body a consistent 12-hour stretch without officially "fasting" in a way that feels restrictive. If a longer fasting window causes anxiety or white-knuckling for you, that's your cortisol working against the very goal you're going for. Better to find your natural rhythm than force someone else's protocol.
Know your actual numbers, not just "normal." Standard lab ranges often flag disease, not optimal health. A few target numbers Natalie shared: fasting glucose under 85 (most labs call 99 "normal," and prediabetes starts at 100, a much smaller gap than it sounds), triglycerides under 75, HDL over 60. If you haven't had labs drawn recently, that's a concrete place to start.
Protect your sleep like it's a foundational pillar, because it is. This is one where Natalie and I are in complete agreement: food and sleep run neck and neck in importance. Under-slept, your brain goes looking for fast energy, and it's not reaching for carrot sticks. There's a quote Natalie shared that stuck with me: fatigue makes cowards of us all. Tired, everything feels harder to resist.
Mix your types of exercise instead of doing the same thing daily. Natalie switched from pure running to adding heavy strength training a few years ago and says it changed how she feels dramatically. Muscle acts as a "glucose sponge," the more you have, the more places your body has to send the sugar you eat, rather than storing it as fat. Diversify the way you'd diversify a financial portfolio.
Get 20 minutes of morning sunlight within two hours of waking, without sunglasses. This sets your circadian rhythm and, per Natalie, has real mood benefits beyond the physical, something almost spiritual about starting the day connected to something larger than a phone screen. I do my bleacher workouts at dawn specifically so I catch the sunrise, and it's become one of the most grounding parts of my week.
Eat fiber before your meals. Fiber, think berries, avocado, nuts, seeds, bell peppers, feeds your gut microbiome and slows the release of sugar from whatever you eat next into your bloodstream, naturally boosting your body's own GLP-1 production instead of relying on a prescription version of it. I've talked before about how fiber creates short-chain fatty acids that act like little soldiers guarding your gut lining. It's genuinely one of the most underrated levers available to you.
End your shower with 30 seconds of cold water. Neither of us loves this one, but the research behind it, that cold exposure prompts your mitochondria to multiply, is compelling enough that we're both willing to keep trying it, starting with just 10 seconds and building up.
Move for two minutes out of every thirty spent sitting. Set a timer if you have to. Your body was built to move regularly throughout the day, not in one concentrated hour bookended by ten sedentary ones.
Natalie closed with a reframe on cost that I think about often: you can pay now, in the currency of real food and consistent movement, or you can pay later, in the currency of insulin, hospital bills, and missed years. Neither option is free. You just get to choose which one you're paying into.
None of this requires doing all ten things starting tomorrow. Pick the one that feels most doable this week, and let that be enough for now.
You are not alone. Healing is possible. Your story matters.
You’re not broken, and you’re never alone. If you want ongoing encouragement, practical resources, or a supportive community of women walking this path, join my email list or grab our book, Real Food Recovery: If Food Isn’t the Answer, What’s the Question? And catch our weekly podcast here!
You are strong. You can do this. And we’ll walk it together.
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