2022 just flew by so fast, it’s as if we’re playing life at twice the speed. At the beginning of the year, we set goals for ourselves. Things that we want to tick off and put a checkmark on, things that we want to accomplish.I would be shocked if “health and wellness” didn’t make it to your resolution list. Because it would be a waste not to prioritize your health, especially in times like this. And our guest for today would probably agree with me on that matter.
Meet the registered dietitian, mother, podcaster, and cancer survivor, Regina Topelson. She enjoys exploring health and wellness from a variety of perspectives and is eager to share her experiences and knowledge with you.
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Leaving a Legacy by Living a Life Well-Lived By Regina Topelson
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about our health, because our health is very integral to everything we want to pursue in life. We keep ourselves in good health, well, you know, we’re more likely to be more energetic and we’re actually also more likely to be in good mental health. There’s kind of a connection between the two. And, of course, we must take care of our bodies in order to have the energy to pursue whatever it is that’s inspiring us. My guest today has a perspective on the whole field of health from multiple angles. Her name is Regina Topelson and she is a registered nutritionist, a news contributor as well as the host of her own podcast that features people who have dealt with some tough health challenges, mostly cancer.
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Regina, welcome to the program.
Hi, Stephen. It’s so great to be here. Thank you. It’s such a pleasure.
Thank you, Regina, and first question I want to ask is let’s start from beginning. What inspired you to make this health and wellness, you know, your life’s pursuit?
Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, both of my children were born with food allergies. Twenty years ago, that was still kind of an unheard of type thing. It was heard of but it was very rare. What made my kids extra special is that they had multiple food allergies. Prior to that, it was one kid with one food allergy, like peanuts or tree nuts or eggs or something like that or dairy, but mine had multiple all rolled into one child. And so we kind of went down this path in our family where we really had to try to figure out how to keep these little guys alive, you know?
Yeah.
So, when my oldest was eight and my youngest was, I think at that time, five and a half, I decided that I wanted to pursue becoming a nutritionist, what I ended up doing was becoming a registered dietitian, but what I thought of in a broad spectrum was I wanted to follow this traditional kind of path with education and evidence-based practices for health and wellness because what I had was a lot of moms coming to me and saying every time I feed my son bagels, he breaks out in a rash around his mouth and my husband thinks I’m crazy but I see it every time he eats bagels, you know what I mean? And so I thought, you know what, if I’m going to be counseling and helping people in my community, then I really should be well versed at this. I should be a professional, not just a lay mom. I don’t know why that wasn’t enough for me. It should have been enough for me, it could have been enough for me, but it wasn’t. I wanted to have the professional background for it.
How much emphasis should be placed in any pursuit on developing some form of traditional education, whether it be going back to school for a degree or whether it be some sort of a certification program? I guess the question is how much do we need to know what the world knows versus kind of the other school of thought being learning by experience, which is just, “Okay, I’ve observed this, I’ve observed that, I started doing this, I interview people,” all the other ways that people can become informed about whatever it is that’s interesting to them at the time?
I think you can do both. It depends on the person themselves. Sometimes I think to myself, do I really need a PhD? Is this a need to have or a want to have or a good to have, you know, but is it like really necessary? And I think that each person kind of has to answer that for themselves. I keep going back to the fact that probably having a PhD in nutrition, unless I wanted to do research or teach, is probably not necessary. I have enough self-knowledge, I have enough world knowledge, and I have enough education to back me up to do what I do today sufficiently, more than sufficiently. At this point, I haven’t really decided that going back for a PhD in nutrition is really going to move the needle significantly in the way that I do my work.
And so you do have a certification? You said you were a registered nutritionist.
I’m a registered dietitian nutritionist so that kind of sets me apart from other nutritionists or certified nutritionists. You could take a weekend course, you could take an online course, you could hang your shingle and no one knows any different. The course to become a registered dietitian and in the time that I have been a registered dietitian, they added nutritionist to it because there’s just so much confusion in the marketplace that they just said, “Okay, we’ll just add that word so that people are less confused.”
But the truth of the matter is that I had a four-year program, didactic program, learning all about all the sciences, chemistry, biochemistry, biology. I had the cooking classes, I had the nutrition classes, you know, different from biology, different from chemistry. So I had all of that. And then I had the essential almost aspect of it, which is I worked in the field. I worked at a hospital for three years. It’s not necessary to have hospital experience but it is necessary, I think, in my opinion, to not just hang your shingle and say, “I’m a nutritionist now,” or, “I know how to fix a plant-based meal.” You could go to chef school and be a chef and know how to fix a plant-based meal. I think what sets me apart is the working with people who have health issues, the experience that I got from working there for the length of time that I did, you can’t beat that experience.
So, it sounds like you’re saying you want to find out what niche you want to be in and then find out what experience you need to get to really fill that niche, what kind of people you need to work with, what specific educational background it is, whether it be that weekend course or the PhD program or anything in between, and once you combine that, you could pretty much figure out what you need to do to get into the place you want to get into. Now, what I’m wondering is when you say you work with people who have a health issue, what constitutes a health issue? If someone just feels, “Oh, I just feel kind of a little bit low energy,” does that constitute as a health issue or are you talking about more of the specific ones?
I mean, I think that low energy is a symptom of a greater problem. Click To Tweet
I should also mention that the third piece of the requirements on me is that I have continuing education requirements to meet every year, where a regular nutritionist, certified, whoever, whatever, may not have. They may not have those same requirements. So, I guess going back to that original question, I would say figure out what it is that you want to do and then what are the requirements on you to do those things going forward?
Going back to the latter question, low energy is definitely a symptom of something else, okay? So now we’re going back to the root cause kind of thing, which I know you said you’ve spoken to functional medicine practitioners before, I happen to also be one, that is not something that I got in my traditional RD training, that is something I had to pursue on my own afterwards. But I really thought that, for me, that that was absolutely necessary to the type of practice that I wanted to have. Now we’re talking about the difference between evidence-based and do I want to practice like traditional registered dietitian, “Eat those, don’t eat that,” or do I want to be able to dig deeper and have those tools to be able to do my job at a higher level?
And so when you say dig deeper, you’re talking about beyond, say, something like, “You should eat more of this, eat less of this, you’re not getting enough in this, you’re getting too much of that,” usually sugar but sometimes it’s other things, to the point where you’re like looking at a deeper root cause. What do these deeper root causes usually mean? Are they usually like a functional issue that someone has, some kind of a disease or sometimes the root cause ends up being some kind of a lifestyle issue?
It could be both, either/or, or it could be both. You know, in functional medicine, we talk about the example of a plant or a tree. Plant is doing well, it has green leaves and everything is wonderful. That’s great. But if you start to see some brown leaves or some yellow leaves, you don’t go with a paint can and spray them green. But that is the way of traditional conventional medicine. You show up at your doctor’s office, some of your leaves are brown, some of them are yellow, some of them are drying up, and they say, “Oh, hold on, wait a second. I have the pill for your ill.” They’re masking those symptoms. “Oh, you can’t sleep? Here’s a pill.” Not what’s keeping you up at night. Could this be hormonal, or let’s check some labs, but, “Here’s a pill.” And so that’s the equivalent of taking out that spray can and painting those leaves green again. “Oh, you’ve got some yellow leaves, don’t worry, we just, you know, cover that up.”
Like I’m sneezing, I have a runny nose, so I’m just gonna like give you a Sudafed or give you some sort of decongestant.
Correct. Yeah. But what’s really happening? Is it a histamine problem? Is it something that you’re eating? Could it be environmental? Absolutely. But, with that, why are there people who are affected by environmental issues and people who are not? Why is it that even in the same person, for example, I went for several years in a row, three, four years, where seasonal allergies did not affect me at all. Now, I’m back to again feeling like I have a runny nose up until 3, 3:30 PM. Why is that?
And so what do you observe with that? Because I’ve also heard some people talk about that and saying that there’s some sensitivities that can be kind of addressed over time with dietary and lifestyle changes, even ideas like the 12-hour window and then the 16-hour intermittent fasting to allow your gut to recover, I don’t think I’m saying it right but I think you know what I’m saying.
You are saying it right but what your original first part of that question kind of gets to is the state of inflammation of your body. If you are eating an anti-inflammatory diet and having lifestyle practices that also support an anti-inflammatory body, then the likelihood of you being affected by seasonal allergies goes down. I’m not saying it’s not going to happen at all. I don’t know that there’s a cure for that. But if you’re lowering the inflammation in total, then it makes it easier for your body to kind of fight those other things. Versus when your inflammation is up here to your eyeballs, the ability of your body to fight other things that would cause inflammatory response goes way down. So the question is, what is your level of inflammation and how do you combat that?
And then what you’re saying is that this 12-hour window that I read in one book and then the 16-hour plus intermittent fasting is just one of several methods you can use to kind of allow your body to reduce that inflammation?
I think that we’re like trying to mesh kind of two waves coming together. Inflammation is one thing, fasting or intermittent fasting is kind of another thing. It does affect the gut microbiome and your gut microbiome obviously affects your overall health.
Yeah.
But it’s still depends on what you’re eating, how you’re sleeping. If you’re not sleeping, all bets are off.
Yeah. And a lot of people aren’t. Yeah.
Exactly. And a lot of people aren’t. You know, it’s things like that more than the intermittent fasting that’s going to tamp down that inflammation. So, what are you thinking? Are you thinking toxic thoughts all day long? How are you feeling? Are your emotions toxic? Are you sleeping? Are you eating well? You know?
And it’s kind of the whole picture as opposed to doing one thing and saying, “Well, that didn’t work.”
Yeah, I see a lot of that. Because it seems like some of these like fad diets, as people refer to it, seem to be a lot about people taking one category of food and demonizing it and eliminating that as opposed to thinking about it more holistically.
Definitely. I think about things more holistically. I wouldn’t say necessarily in categories of foods, but you could say that, right? Like animal products versus non-animal products. They each confer different benefits but also different risks to us. And not everyone can do it perfectly, you know? First of all, no one can do it perfectly because no one’s perfect but not everyone can do a vegan diet.
Yeah, it’s not for everyone.
Most people can eat a plant-based diet and I know that there’s like a hundred different diets out there. The reason why? It’s because no one can stick to one. Do you know what I mean? For some people, keto works; for some people, Atkins works; for some people, Mediterranean works; for some people, vegan works; for some — you know, for people who none of those things work for, I think you can definitely bring it back to just plant-based and then sprinkle in the other things. So, if you can’t be vegan, then be mostly plant based and have a little bit of good quality animal products.
It sounds like you’re talking about not just what we eat but there are also lifestyle factors that play into our health outcomes. So things that you were talking about such as how much sleep do you get, how much stress do you have in your life, what kind of people you’re around, how does all that play together?
It’s incredibly important to have all those things in place. It’s like a puzzle, if you want to think about it that way. You have pieces of the puzzle, and they all have to fit together. And what happens is, when you’re missing a piece of the puzzle, is that then you’re not getting those benefits. That’s an area of your health that’s suffering. And so when we think about it, I said that I’m a practitioner of functional medicine and now I’m actually getting a certification in what’s called lifestyle medicine. So, it’s not a different type of medicine, it’s just what you bring in, it’s what you incorporate into your practice.
And so, lifestyle medicine incorporates six key components, right? So diet, exercise, relationships, stress, sleep, and toxins. Click To Tweet
And I have added two of my own that I think that when those are missing, they also like take away from the benefits that you could be getting, and that is spirituality and purpose. And we can talk about all of these.
Yeah. They’re all very important topics. And so, when you’re working with your clients, do you oftentimes make recommendations that are related to this, the spirituality, the purpose, or even the other ones you mentioned before, the relationship components? Like how often do you say to someone, “You need to build better relationships,” or, “You need to stop being around toxic people so much, it sounds like you got this person, this person, that person in your life that’s just making you bring and feed yourself with a lot of negative emotional energy?”
It’s funny I do. And you know what? It’s all related. I’m going to give you a couple of examples right now, right? So, if I’m talking to someone with heart disease or someone who wants to lower their cholesterol, I’m probably going to touch on all of those topics in one way or another. And you’re probably thinking, well, what does spirituality have to do with lowering your cholesterol? I’m not going to tell you to pray your cholesterol away, but what I can say to you is that if prayer or some kind of communal interaction or just going out in nature, people say a lot of times, “I feel very spiritual,” I’m talking about spirituality, not religion, so if spirituality to you means some component of religion, whether that’s prayer or reading Psalms or whatever, that’s great. You do you, you know? Whatever works for you.
But if spirituality means to you feeling there is more to the universe than just you because you’re out in nature, then by all means, go out in nature, because what it’s doing is lowering that inflammation. Again, tamping it down, lowering your stress levels. It’s not only lowering your stress levels, it’s probably having a beneficial effect on how you’re interacting with the people around you too. How well you get your work done. If you have less stress, you’re also probably going to sleep a little bit better that day. If you’ve been out in nature, right? Like you’re getting multiple things by putting those puzzle pieces together. I’ve been talking to someone who’s a cancer survivor, through my program Wings of Hope, I’m definitely touching on all of those things.
And that’s a great segue into one of the other main topics I wanted to discuss in this podcast, because your own experience with cancer has led you to not only work with cancer survivors but also launch your own podcast. Tell us a little bit about that experience and how that brought your journey to where it is today.
Thank you, thanks for asking about that. Yes. So, it took me a long time to really own what happened to me. And so what happened two years ago was I decided, you know what, my business is shifting. I’m not seeing as many people in clinic anymore or in the doctor’s office where I shared office space that wanted to know about lowering their cholesterol or tamping down their diabetes, getting their blood sugars down. All of a sudden, you know, I was left with I don’t know where those people went. They’re all staying at home and their cholesterol isn’t bothering them and neither is their diabetes, you know what I mean?
And so I said, you know what, I think I’m finally ready to kind of own this experience that I’ve been through and I started my podcast because I really wanted to bring high quality information to people who needed it at the time when they were feeling most vulnerable. Because here’s the thing, cancer didn’t stop just because COVID came around. COVID did not push cancer inside and say, “Hey, baby, it’s my turn,” right? Like that did not happen, so what happened was is there was still lots of women and men being diagnosed in the last two years where everything was heightened, like security was heightened. You know, you couldn’t bring people to the clinic anymore with you to sit there while you were having infusions, to have your tests done. It just changed everything. All of a sudden, immunocompromised took on a whole new level of thinking and so I said, you know what, I am going to do my part and I started my podcast so that I could talk about these tenets of lifestyle medicine and what people could do for themselves while they were at home, to take back control of their health, no matter what they were going through.
For sure, because there’s a lot that people can do to take back control of their health, regardless of what your health situation is. Now, on your podcast, you interview people who are on various segments of this journey, I guess, is the easiest way to put it.
Yep. I interview not so much patients. I interview survivors, I interview caretakers, and I interview people who are experts in lifestyle medicine or the different topics of lifestyle medicine. That’s what I do do. What I don’t do is I don’t interview patients who are going through it at that time because it’s kind of like the difference between a wound and a scar.
Yep.
Right? You get what I’m saying. So, if it’s the wound, it’s, you know, sometimes it’s festering and sometimes it’s just so painful. When it’s a scar, you’ve had some time out from that event and you can look at it and say, “Man, that really hurt while I was going through it but I have a different perspective on that now.”
Yeah.
And my podcast is all about bringing hope and inspiration so I don’t talk to my survivors about, “How sick did you feel when you were on that medicine that day?” “Was it the third round or was it the fourth round that did you in?” You know what I mean? I mean, we don’t talk about those kinds of things because if you are a survivor, you know you’ve been through it. If you’re a caretaker, we kind of talk about that a little bit in this terms of what was the perspective of the caretaker?
Yeah.
It’s very hard to be the caretaker when you’re in it all the time. It’s even a still different perspective when you’re the expert or the medical provider. So I’ve had, for example, I’ve had oncologists I’ve had on, I’ve had — I had one woman who was a physical therapist.
Yeah.
You may not think that you need physical therapy if what you’re going through is cancer, but let me tell you, surgery after surgery, you start to lose, you know, movement and range of motion.
When you talk about this message of hope, what I’m wondering is, obviously, cancer is a tough thing for anyone to go through but you also work with people who have all kinds of other health concerns and some of them can also be pretty awful and there are people elsewhere in life that can have other really horrific things going on in their lives. Do you think this message of hope kind of applies to all these different situations?
I really do. I do. You know, as a speaker, I say, it could be cancer that’s the thing that turns your life upside down. Or it could be a different illness. Or it could be any other major life-changing event, right? I’ve had either people on my show or I’ve talked about people who didn’t make it on my show. And some of them are children, right? Who didn’t make it. What I talk about is that it may not be you, it may not be your illness, but it’s something that takes your world by storm and just rips it apart and then you’re left with the tornado came through and I’ve got to put the pieces together.
Yeah.
And so I try to offer hope and inspiration to everyone who’s been touched by life’s great disrupter.
And these life’s great disrupters, some form of disrupter is going to be happening around you, whether it happens to you, whether it happens to loved ones. What can someone do, first of all, while their life is not being disrupted to be better prepared, to be better tough, tougher mentally, tougher physically for them? And then during the disrupter, what can someone be doing while they’re being disrupted or while someone they really deeply care about is being disrupted?
To the extent that you can, it’s kind of all the same, right? If we think about these puzzle pieces as a great big wheel, right?
Okay.
Sometimes the pie, right? That like, you know, if we’re talking about a diet, that’s a piece of the wheel, it’s a piece of the pie, right? So sometimes diet is going to be up here and it’s going to be great and you’re going to be doing awesome at it. And sometimes it’s going to look a little deflated in that area because maybe that’s not your top priority. And so, if we think about what you can do for yourself to make sure that you are in the best health possible, it’s to pay attention to those eight things that I mentioned. It’s to make sure that you are in the best health that you can be in at any given point in your life.
Part of your question is what can you do if it’s happening to someone else, right? And then how do you take care of yourself at that point or how do you take care of that person? It’s kind of the same, you know? It’s not going to look the same. Like I’ll give you an example. You know, before I got diagnosed, I was actually three weeks away from running my first half marathon. I thought I was eating well but I can also tell you I was making a run, no pun intended, to Dairy Queen every single day, right? Because that was my reward. So if I ran my 5 or 6 or 10 miles to prepare, I also gave myself a little reward at Dairy Queen. Well, not such a good idea, you know?
Heads up, yeah.
Right? Okay. But one of the things that my doctor said to me going into it, he said, you know, it’s because you were exercising, it’s because you were taking care of yourself that you had set yourself up for less problems going through it, like it could have affected me much worse had I not been paying attention to my health prior to it. But the funny thing was that I wasn’t saying to myself, like, “I want to be in the best shape ever.” That wasn’t why I was doing it. I was just training because I wanted to do a half marathon.
During the process, I couldn’t run. I could barely remember my own name. I could barely string two words together. When I say great disrupter, it really disrupted everything. But what I did do was I walked every day and I did gentle yoga. And that was about all I could do in terms of physically, but he told me, that same doctor, he told me, “You have to keep moving. If you feel tired and you lay down on the couch, you’re gonna get more tired.” And he said, “If you feel tired, go for a slow walk, or go for a walk.” And so that’s what I did for myself during.
Now, afterwards, you know, I pay attention to what I can and what I cannot do. Some days, I do vigorous exercise. Some days, I do moderate exercise. Some days, I just go for a walk. It depends on my energy level but, each day, I try to do something.
First of all, it sounds like different people have different capabilities, have different needs in different parts of their lives and, therefore, what you can do or even what’s optimal is going to vary quite a bit from person to person with some kind of universal principles, I’d say. One of the things I’m wondering is, when people are talking about being tougher, there’s going to be some days when you just don’t have it, you’re mentally checked out, or you’re exhausted from some other circumstance, what do you think is where people trip up the most? Is it letting these tough days stop them from moving, stop them from eating well? Or do you think it’s more not taking advantage of those days, where maybe it’s a little bit easier on you today, maybe you do have the capacity to instead of driving through fast food, cooking a nice meal, or going on a two-hour hike or bike ride or something that’s going to get you out there into nature and get your body moving?
I think it’s mental, honestly. I think the barrier is a mental barrier much less than physical because if you tell yourself, even on your worst day — I mean, I’m not saying like, okay, we know what we feel like when we have pneumonia or bronchitis. You’re down for the count. Nothing matters. You could care less if the world blows up that minute.
Yeah.
Because that’s how bad you feel. Okay? But on the continuum, so that’s like feeling like 10 percent yourself. And then there’s like when you feel 50 percent yourself, where you think, “I’m getting a little bit better but I’m not quite there yet.” At 80 percent, you see yourself, you’re feeling like, “I’m turning the corner. We’re almost there. We’re homestretch.” I think that what happens is, for most people, is it’s a mental barrier. “Oh, I don’t feel just quite good just yet.” “Oh, I’ll wait until tomorrow until I feel a little bit better.” “Oh, gosh, it takes, gosh, 15 minutes to get to the gym and I have to change and I’m gonna be sweaty when I’m done and I’ll have to take another shower —” I mean, it’s like all of the excuses, right? If you could just make the commitment, you can get yourself there.
So it’s all these mental excuses we make, and I think similar ones can often be made around the weather too, especially for outdoor activities, like, “Oh, there’s a 10 mile an hour wind and it’s gonna make the bike ride a little annoying,” when 10 miles an hour, I mean, sure, yeah, a bike ride is way more pleasant with no wind than 10 miles an hour, but that doesn’t mean it’s all of a sudden made it like this terrible experience, this really suboptimal thing to do versus we’ve recently had some days with 30, 40, 50 mile an hour wind gusts and those are the days where you probably don’t want to go on a bicycle because you can get blown over.
That is correct. That is correct. Absolutely. Yeah. Like I’m saying, it’s mental so it’s like anything that you choose. It’s like you could say, “Oh, it’s a windy day.” “Oh, it’s like overcast.” For diet, you could say, “You know what, I just don’t feel that great so today I’m just gonna treat myself to whatever I feel like.” You know, I’ve had so many people on my podcast say, “I should have paid more attention to my diet. I gave myself the permission to eat whatever I wanted, if it was mac and cheese, I ate the mac and cheese.” I don’t judge them for that, you know what I mean?
I feel like if you really do feel like so down and out that day that all you can muster is to eat mac and cheese, by all means, eat the mac and cheese. You can make healthier choices with the next meal. You can make healthier choices tomorrow. You don’t have to eat mac and cheese every single day. So, the point is that like even if you’re feeling like it at this point in time, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to feel like at this point in time and in this point in time. And just because you say to yourself, “Tomorrow, I’m gonna start the Mediterranean diet,” and tomorrow you fall off the Mediterranean diet, start it the next day. Don’t even wait for the next day, start it at the next meal.
Yeah, so it sounds like just this little change in mentality or mindset can get it to the like where you’re still going to have that variance, you’ll still have those days where you do really well and those days you do really poorly, but if you’re just 10 percent more likely to make the better choice at wherever you are in the continuum and every single day, then you’re going to slowly but surely make that progress toward a better state of mind. And you talked about these eight different parts of the wheel, some of it mental, some of it social, spiritual, dietary, and everything like that, how do they interact with one another? Can someone do really well on one part and really poorly on another part? Or are they all going to naturally drag each other in the same direction usually?
I’m going to give you some life wisdom here, okay? First of all, I love the phrase, “Progress, not perfection.”
I always say, “Progress, not perfection.” Click To Tweet
So that’s one thing. Another thing is, do they interact with each other? Absolutely, they do. So just a bit ago, I was talking about how your emotions, emotions aren’t actually one of the piece of the wheel, they’re not one of the pieces of the puzzle.
Yeah.
If you’re all excited or all worked up about something before you’re ready to go to sleep, you’re not going to have such an easy time falling asleep. If you are worked up about something during the day and you can’t resolve it, you’re probably going to wake up at two in the morning still thinking about that thing. So, emotions can affect any piece of that puzzle, any piece of that wheel. And it’s like that with everything.
When lifestyle medicine talks about toxins, they’re talking about alcohol and drugs. They’re talking about the hardcore things that you need to remove from your life in order to be healthier. But I’ll add a couple other things to that. I’ll add things like the chemicals in our food, which are toxins. I add things that the chemicals in our environment. I add things in our water. I add the chemicals that women like to put on their faces, right? And men like to slather on their bodies, right? So because if you live in a dry climate, you’ve got to moisturize. But if you’re not paying attention to the things that you are putting on you and in you, that’s going to have a bigger effect and affect everything else that goes with it.
What am I talking about here? I mean, one thing that’s common to both women and men, and besides lotions, is perfumes, cologne. But if you’re not aware that there are endocrine-disrupting chemicals in those substances, then you’re just kind of like bathing yourself in it, you know? Spritzing it everywhere and you walk outside and some people are going to say, “Wow, you can smell that person from a mile away,” and some people are going to say, “My gosh, that sounds like a beautiful bouquet of flowers walking around,” right?
Yeah.
But whatever it smells like to them, they smell it for a second and then you’re gone. You are wearing it. You are absorbing it through your skin. And so, yeah, it’s true. Each one of those pieces of the puzzle affects something else. And one thing that we didn’t really get to touch on very much is purpose.
Yeah, it’s very important.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
There it goes. See, I think you’ve got to have a sense of purpose. You have to know that when you wake up in the morning, there is something for you to do.
One thing that I really hope everyone listening out there does, one thing I sincerely hope to help a lot of people do is find that purpose and live according to that purpose and alignment with everything else. When someone is in a bad place in some sort of capacity or another, do you think people should invest a lot of time into finding that purpose or determining that purpose? Is that really imperative, say, someone listening, say, you’re 25, 30 years old and just kind of got a job, started doing some things, point in life where that whole like, “Oh, this is the first time I’m taking care of myself, making my own money,” starts to wear off, does finding this purpose become the number one priority, the number one imperative, even over some of these other things that we were talking about before?
Listen, kudos to the people that knew at the age of two that they wanted to be a doctor, you know, an astronaut, or, you know, whatever, right? I mean, kudos to those people. Most of us are not the people that know what we want to do from the age of two. So, I would say that if you’re in your 30s and you just are clueless, you don’t know what your purpose is in life, absolutely do not spend time trying to figure it out in your own head, like, “What is my purpose? What is my purpose?” Like no. Figure out what you like to do and then apply yourself, and I think that through the doing is when you will find your purpose, like it will come to you, you know what I mean?
If one of the things that you like to do, Stephen, is to go for hikes, then start volunteering with Colorado Mountain Club or whatever that goes and fixes the trails, right? Maybe you’ll find your sense of purpose on one of those trails. Maybe you’ll find that one of the purposes you have in life is to making sure that those trails are preserved for other people or just that you are taking care of the earth.
Sense of purpose can come from anywhere, anytime, it can land in your lap, but if you’re running after it, it’s kind of like running after happiness. It’s just so elusive, like you think you almost got it and —
And then there’s something — Yeah.
Right? You’ve almost got a grasp on it and then it just, beep. Listen, meaning and purpose are two different things, right? Purpose is I’m waking up in the morning and I know that today, I’m going to go out and work on cleaning up a trail or making sure that the cairns are in the right place and that they’re not broken or whatever. For some people, purpose is making sure that their lawn is green. They like to have nice flowers and a green lawn and they wake up every single day and they work on it six hours a day. They have the best lawn in the neighborhood.
Yeah, that’s a lot for that but, yeah.
Well, that’s their sense of purpose and that gives them a sense of meaning. They enjoy the compliments they get from all their neighbors about how green their lawn is and how beautiful their flowers are.
So it sounds like one thing you’re saying is that if you put yourself out there and even try out some things, because there’s no guarantee that the thing you just tried is going to give you a sense of purpose, you could end up moving on to something else or you could end up having a really good conversation with someone that says, “Hey, have you ever tried doing this?” but as long as you’re putting yourself out there, you’re not constantly running away from something and numbing your brain with whether it be drugs, chemicals, or constant binging Netflix or whatever it is, that eventually you’ll find something that come to you, but as long as you’re also kind of being open, because like the whole running after purpose, running after happiness, running after money, running after a career thing, that can really kind of end up being counterproductive.
That can really derail you. Absolutely. I think that those things are like kind of our new age vices, if you will. We had the old vices like — oh, I don’t know what they are, I don’t remember. Patience was one of them, I think, right? People who didn’t have patience was — you know, people who didn’t have patience, that was a vise, right? So there were the vices that we had before. But now I would say the new ones are the things that distract us.
Yeah. Prevent you from being present in the moment with whatever it is you’re doing.
The social media, the constant news bombardment, the things that land in your email that you’re like, “Who is this? Why are they sending me their itinerary for their summit that I didn’t sign up for?” you know what I mean? It’s things like that. And it derails you. It takes away from your energy. It steals your joy every day and it distracts you. And then it makes you feel like, because, all of a sudden, you go on to that social media thing to say, “Well, where’s my purpose? Maybe I’ll find my purpose or my meaning on social media today.” And then you start comparing yourself to everyone who’s doing whatever it is that they love. They don’t even know that you’re comparing yourself to them.
No idea.
Right, and so they’re just putting out videos of themselves dancing in their negligee because that’s just what they feel like doing.
Yeah.
They have no idea that you’re like sitting there watching this and going, “I don’t wanna do that,” you know what I mean?
Yeah.
I mean, you just have to like figure out — and you’re not going to figure it out by watching other people. You have to get in touch with yourself.
And that’s where some of that spiritual stuff and the spiritual practices, there definitely seems to be a tie in with that. So, before we wrap up, Regina, I just want to give my audience a chance to get in touch with you. First of all, your podcast. How would someone go about finding that?
My podcast is called Life Well-Lived with Regina Topelson and it’s on all of the major podcast channels. It’s on iTunes and Spotify and Google. They can find me on my website, which is reginatopelson.com. And all of the social media, you know, it’s some version of Regina Topelson.
And that’s Topelson, in case anyone had any questions about how that’s spelled and that’s also how someone could potentially contact you about nutrition or any of these kind of functional medicine, these lifestyle concerns that we were talking about throughout this episode?
Right. I do food sensitivity testing and I offer counseling, nutrition counseling and coaching on that and so that’s, yeah, that’s what I do.
Well —
It makes me happy.
You know, Regina, first of all, I’m really glad that you found something that gives you purpose every morning that you know like why you’re doing what you’re doing, which is what I feel like a lot of people that motivated me to start this podcast are feeling right now. Thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, and I would also like to thank everyone out there listening today to, or whatever day it is that you’re listening, because that’s how podcasts work, and encourage you to go out there and find that purpose and also encourage you to take care of your body, take care of your health, both mental and physical. Take care of what you’re doing with your time. Be mindful of what toxins, whether they be physical toxins, like cologne, perfume, or emotional/spiritual toxins like that news commentary show you watch a little bit too much or something like that that can lead to those toxic emotions, that can bring us to a spot where we’re less likely to take care of ourselves and less likely to be resilient whenever anything does go wrong or those disrupters happen.
Yeah, absolutely. I forgot to mention, I wanted to mention too, I have a YouTube channel where I have some videos but also a lot of the things that I do as a media news contributor, so just health and wellness segments to help people feel better and eat better and stay healthy. So, speaking, if anyone ever needs a speaker for any of their events, I’m happy to do that.
That is wonderful and it’s wonderful just to hear all the things we can do to take care of our health and wellness, which I think is a better way, you know, to incorporate the mental, spiritual, that stuff in our lives. We all want to be healthy and well people and the purpose kind of ties into that. And when you find that purpose, you’re going to naturally be healthier because, you know, you’re going to see that fifth of vodka and say, “Hey, you know, I have something important to do tomorrow, I’m not gonna drink the whole thing.”
There you go. Definitely don’t do that.
Fantastic.
Thank you so much. I really appreciated being here with you today.
Well, thank you as well and have a fantastic rest of your day, whatever day this is for everyone listening and wherever you are out there.
Important Links:
- Regina’s website
- Regina on Instagram
- Regina’s Youtube channel
- Life Well-Lived with Regina Topelson Podcast
About Regina Topelson
Regina Topelson is a Registered Dietitian, podcaster, news media contributor, and speaker. In her private practice, Life Well-Lived, she works with clients to help them reclaim their health so they can pursue the life they envisioned. As a 9 News Nutrition Expert, she creates health and wellness segments to help her community eat better and stay healthy. On her podcast, Life Well-Lived with Regina Topelson, she interviews cancer survivors, caretakers, and experts in the field of lifestyle medicine to bring valuable information to a vulnerable population at a time when they need it most. Her program Wings of Hope helps cancer survivors heal and move forward after a cancer diagnosis. And her signature talk aims to help audiences take back control of their health without waiting on our healthcare system. Regina is an avid supporter of several organizations raising awareness and funds for cancer research.