013 Eve Kalinik: Nourishing the Whole Self

I’m delighted to be talking to Eve Kalinik today, author of Happy Gut, Happy Mind, and champion of promoting nutritional wellbeing as a way of supporting your mental wellbeing. She says: “If we truly want to have an authentic life-long attitude towards nourishing ourselves - which by the way food is only one part - then quick fixes, fads, detoxes and diets are not going to cut the proverbial mustard.” As for Eve herself, she had a successful career in fashion PR, which she says was anything but “healthy” - long hours, fast food, skipping meals, being sucked into weird diets. Which is something we can all relate to. Subsequent burnout and recurrent kidney infections led her to really take stock and stop, to look at her life, look at what she was putting into her body and to make that leap to connect the way she lived and ate and the way she was feeling. So we talk about her journey, we also talk about the microbiome and the gut, because, as she lays out in her book, the gut is intrinsically linked to the state of our mental health and the new science around our gut is fascinating. She also talks about this idea that we’ve got a lot of time back. Because of COVID and lockdowns, we aren’t commuting for so long, and she says we need to use this time to start nourishing ourselves by slowing down the way we work, the way we think, the way we eat.  Maybe even going back to former traditions where we honour our food and take our time with it, rather than being obsessed with working and productivity. “What has transpired in the last six months," she says. "Is that reconnection - fundamentally reconnecting with ourselves.” She also talks about how you can nutritionally take small bold actions now, that can have a lifetime of effect. I’ll think you’ll get a lot from this, there’s some really practical stuff that you can take away, and some fascinating ideas for starting to nourish your whole self more.