Andrea Nakayama | Developing a Holistic Self Awareness of How of The Systems in Your Body Function

Srini: Andrea, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, thanks for having me, Trini.

Srini: It is my pleasure to have you here. So I was referred to you by Cher Hale, who I basically considered the podcast whisperer of pitching guests for the unmistakable creative at this point, since she's the only person I've never said no to so you know, she's.

Given us a steady stream of amazing guests. So no pressure at all. . ,

Andrea Nakayama: no

Srini: pressure. I wanted to start asking you what did your parents do for work and how did that end up influencing what you ended up doing with your

Andrea Nakayama: life and career? That is such an interesting question. I would say that my grandparents were the bigger, biggest influence, but my parents were living the American dream.

They were the first I'm, I come from Jewish descent, so they were the first generation to really make money in a different way and live a middle. Life. My mom was a teacher. My dad was a salesman, but my grandparents were more intellectuals and they were musicians, and they spent all of their summers.

They bought a little cottage in the Berkshires, which is where the Boston Symphony spends their time. And so I grew up spending every summer with my grandparents, their friends, some of whom were Holocaust survivors. So they really engaged in the joy of. And my peers parents were in the symphony. So I can actually remember the day I was maybe 13 or 14, walking back from the lake to my grandparents cottage and thinking, Wait a minute, my friend's parents do what they love.

For a living because that was not what I was exposed to with my own nuclear family. Yeah.

Srini: Did you play any instruments yourself?

Andrea Nakayama: I did. I played the violin from when I was six until I was went to college, and then it petered out In favor of other creative pursuits?

Srini: No. The reason I ask is as a former band geek who pretty much dedicated my life to band, I know that it.

Profound impact. Almost 20 plus years later, what I learned from pursuing an instrument it has been instrumental to all of my sort of creative habits and discipline. And I'm curious, what are the lessons that you learned from playing the violin that influenced your life later on? .

Andrea Nakayama: That's such a great question too. I will say that I was torn between my creative pursuits as a child, so I was more of a visual artist, and for me, that's what really spoke to me. The violin and the music was more handed down from my family. It was at. Respected of me. So there was a little bit of a yes but a pushback there.

And I also took dance lessons. So I was a child who was immersed in the arts and there was one that spoke to me the most, which was the visual arts. But I will say that, Practicing and learning to practice and continuing to put in the effort. What I like to think of in business as persistence and perseverance, which are the last two Ps in my five P model, that persistence and perseverance.

Taught me that you're gonna mess up and it's gonna be okay and you stand back up and you go at it again and it's not gonna sound perfect. And who's witnessing that? And how are you beating yourself up more than others? So I would say that all of the forms of our taught me publicly mess up and be okay with.

Srini: It's funny because one of the most common fears that I came across when I did some research when I surveyed our audience about people's biggest fears when it came to their own creative work was the fear of public opinion. And I saw that over and I just, to me I think part of the reason I've internalized this lesson is because I've done this for so long and I said, Look, the reality of doing anything in public is, one, you're gonna mess up.

And two, somebody's gonna hate what you created. You cannot avoid that, but yet that paralyzes so many people. Why do you think that is? And more importantly, how do they get past that sort of fear of public opinion that keeps them from doing this thing that they deep down apparently want to do?

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, it's, it was really interesting for me when I started to write, because I was coming from the visual arts and my undergraduate degree is a bfa, so I studied art and design and so for me, I was Are we cursing on the spot?

Can we curse? Yeah. , they're good. We curse. So I was used to putting my shit on the wall, right? Like you put it on the wall. Stuff is outside across the room and it is going to be critiqued. And when I started writing as a young adult and translating my art to the realm of the page, I was really taken by how timid writers can be.

In sharing their work, because for me, I had been trained to recognize that public failure as part of the process and not meaning more than some feedback that I would take in determine what I thought about that feedback, whether I wanted to believe in it or not, and move forward again. So I think it takes practice.

And the internal belief in what you're doing and the recognition that you're gonna get it wrong and it's not gonna resonate. And there's messages in the lack of resonance as well as in the resonance. Yeah. There it's all positive. Part of the process.

Srini: I think there's something that you said earlier that really struck me and stood out where you said you hung out with your grandparents friends who you get to see doing something that they absolutely love, which was Yeah, working as performing musicians.

And by contrast you said to your nuclear family was the opposite. And I know from having had enough Jewish guests here on the show that the narrative of how to make your way in the world as a Jewish kid is pretty much identical to the one about making your way in the world as an Indian kid, which is doctor, lawyer, engineer.

True. And I think it was Daniel Leviton Daniel. Yeah. Daniel Leviton told me, he said there's this joke that Jewish people have. Where somebody is a vice president and his mother is sitting in the audience at the inauguration and she's There's my son. He could have been a doctor.

Right. .

Andrea Nakayama: And that's what my mom says she's like a doctor. She's a functional nutritionist, but she's like a doctor. Yeah.

Srini: What was the narrative about making your way in the world when you grow from your parents?

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, I'm in my mid fifties, so two girls in the family.

Different expectations at the time in certain ways. And for me as a child who was always creative, it was that I had to do something practical with my creative. Interests. So I had to go to design school or architecture school, not to art school. So the narrative was that it had to be career focused, which makes sense.

Not just from where they were coming from in their lifetime, but also that they wanted to make sure that I wasn't just exploring something in college that was gonna catapult me out into a world of the unknown, because that would've been uncomfortable for them, right? But it was all about the practicality of what was clearly my.

Yeah.

Srini: It's funny you say that. I, you may have seen this it was making its way around Twitter. Sometime last week there was a list of all the Indians who are CEOs of companies right now, and the list is enormous. It's 50 different companies. I think it's like Twitter, Google, Microsoft are on that list.

And I started writing about why there are so many Indian CEOs and one of the things. I said is that you might think that the way that these Indian parents raise their kids to be practical is harsh and rigid until you understand the context from which that worldview is formed, which is that they grew up in a situation where their life outcomes were binary.

It was either poverty or security, and I wonder if that was similar for you.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, for sure. Just like I said, my parents were this first generation of the American dream. They could make it, They could have what might have been considered a little bit more of a disposable income than my grandparents who lived through the depression.

My grandfather had to sell his violin to survive and to feed himself and his family. So just a difference in. That perspective of what is your education for? And I joke about this with my boyfriend often who comes from a different background where he's the first one in his family to have not just a college degree, but an mba.

And in my family my grandparents went to college. So there's a different educational background, but also economic background associated with. And he still has expectations of his. Young adult children that they go to college for something that is a career on the other side. Whereas my son, who's 21, goes to a liberal arts school because my thinking from a place of a different kind of, Privilege than the previous generation is.

This is the last time you get to really engage in deep thinking. And you're a deep thinker. Go get your deep thinking on. If you can think and you can write, you'll be able to do anything I trust in that. But those are two different mindsets coming from. Different backgrounds and privilege on my part at this point.

Yeah

Srini: I appreciate you acknowledging the privilege in that, because I think that's something that I just became hyper aware of over the last probably five or six years, is getting to see what a privileged background that I came from, especially after talking to people on the show, been incarcerated and listening to the environments they had to survive.

But there's something else that's really interesting. Your sort of narrative about careers. On the one hand, you have grandparents who are musicians doing what they love, and then you have parents who are the exact opposite of that. How the hell did that happen? This episode is sponsored by TED Business, a podcast from the TED Audio Collective.

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Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, so my grandparents were music lovers, but they weren't the symphony members. Okay. They were surrounding themselves with symphony members.

So my friend, my peers, parents were symphony members. So that was an exposure to me that I got because my grandparents took their life saving and. Bought a tiny little cottage where my grandfather could volunteer as an usher and listen to the music all the time. So they were musicians just as a hobby for them.

It was a passion, but they weren't being paid to be musicians. And I think there just was a desire for a different kind of lifestyle in that next generation. That was my parents' generat.

Srini: Yeah, absolutely. So how in the world do you get from art school to functional nutrition ?

Andrea Nakayama: That's a good question. So I got from art school to a kind of disillusion with.

Design and art school. And I'll just back up and say, I did study industrial design at Carnegie Mellon University and in my junior year I started to feel like I wasn't getting enough of the context for design. So I started to realize as industrial designers were creating the artifacts that not only.

Society, but let us look back on societies and determine things about them and we're not thinking about it. We're just making stuff. And so that led me to wanna break out of that environment. And I myself left that environment. My, what would've been my senior year of college to go to a liberal arts school, a small liberal arts school where I would be immersed in some deeper thinking.

When I went back to finish my degree, I finished in the art department because I realized I no longer wanted to be making stuff like that from the design perspective, whether it was sneakers or ATMs or airplanes or whatever it might be. And that transitioned. Over time to the realm of writing because I realized I, the art world was pretty elitist and I didn't wanna be making stuff that wasn't, people weren't interacting with it on a larger scale.

Then we come to my own health challenges. And ultimately my husband was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumor in April of 2000 when I was just seven weeks pregnant with our one and only child. So my little interests in food and cooking in the Bay Area and having elaborate dinner parties and shopping at the farmer's market turned into a.

Pursuit of what we could do to shape some of the outcomes of his trajectory. At the time, he was given six months to live and we were able to extend his life to about two and a half years. But for me it was what can we do? What are the factors of influence that we have in this horrific outcome that we've been given?

Srini: Yeah. Yeah I think that was one thing that really struck me when I was just going through my research and reading your about page. And I wonder when you realize that what you had imagined to be a future Is going to disappear before your eyes. What does that do to your sense of identity?

Because I've had friends who've been divorced and they say that you have this idea of what your life is gonna look like when you get married and 30 years into the future and it suddenly just vanishes. And in your case you have it vanished along with this incredibly tragic thing, in addition to the fact that you're going to raise a child without his father in his life.

Andrea Nakayama: right? Yeah. It's an ongoing process and I think there's some ways in which it never ends. I wonder about when my son falls in love and when and if he gets married. There's all of those moments along the way. In that moment, I was negotiating away the unborn baby's life. Thought like, let me do anything to keep my husband alive.

Is there some deal I have to make with the universe in order for me to keep him alive? He was my soulmate and the person I wanted to be with, and I didn't have attachment to any child just yet. And so what I found during that process is that. We were in it together, he and I, my late husband and myself.

So we were having a lot of conversations around it, but I had to visit the worst case scenario and not live there. So I had to live in the present and not live in the, What's the worst thing that could happen? He could die, but. Not sitting there all the time, allowed for us to almost utilize that two and a half years as this beautiful, transformative time for not just the two of us, but ultimately the three of us.

And I'm so grateful that I'm gonna say he had the wisdom to guide us there and that I could go there with.

Srini: I guess the follow up to that is how old was your son when you first had conversations with him about the fact that his father had passed away before he was born and what what was the understanding of that?

Cuz I, I can't imagine how strange that must be, especially as a kid when you have a concept of death, yet it's somebody you also have never met.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, he did meet him. So he my husband Isamu died when Gilbert, our son was 19 months old. Wow. So we did have a, that two and a half we had that two and a half years with Isamu, some of which was pregnancy and some of which was the first year of Gilbert's life.

So his father, Had the opportunity and an opportunity for Gilbert too, to have that impression on him. So

,

he knew the love and he can look back at pictures of the two of them. And it was a time in his life a year and a half, 19 months that he couldn't he doesn't miss his father.

In his life, right? He doesn't remember anything different, but he knows his father loved him. And there's pictures I made a little booklet for him as a little toddler that would hang on the side of his bed that he could flip through, that were all pictures of him being held by his dad playing music with his dad.

So there is an impression that he has of that time, and I think I filled in the gaps. Pretty good that he doesn't miss, he doesn't feel that missing of the person. Yeah. And we have a pretty tight relationship in terms of how we operate as a little mini family, so it was always a part of the conversation and continues to be a part of our conversation.

Srini: I I'm just trying to imagine the age at which he starts asking deeper questions about this as opposed to having just a sort of impression that he was there. Because to your point I think when you're one and a half, most of us don't have any memory of being that age.

But so one thing that you say on your actual bio is that I knew I had a choice to let this tragedy define my life in a purely negative way, or to find opportunities hidden within. I became determined to understand the mechanisms that led to chronic disease, to understand how and why the body reacts as it does, and to discern the aptitude that we have to unlock our healing potential using the keys that nutrition.

Nutrition can. All of which we will get into, but I wanna start with the ability to look for opportunities within. Why is it you think you had the response that you did and other people are completely destroyed by something like this?

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, it's a great question in terms of the why, and I think about it a lot just in terms of human resilience and who we are as people.

I, the story I will tell myself is that Isamu, my late husband prepared me. To be ready for the occurrence of his death. Not overtly in that we were talking about it all the time because we weren't. But in his belief of me and his confidence in me, I was able to flourish inside of that relationship.

And I'm sure that it's in me. So one of the things I would tell myself is that I used to find myself saying, but I was my best self with him. And then I would turn that and recognize if I was my best self with him, that best self is me, is in me. So how do I take that mirror that I was given in this beautiful relationship that only got to exist for under a decade and be that person for myself, for my son, and for whoever I can be, who I can touch.

And so I think there's a matter of. Resilience in there that maybe part of my dope personality, , I don't know what it comes down to, but it really is connecting with a deeper passion and purpose. And there were things I experienced through his illness that really struck me as. Things I didn't want to see happen in healthcare, and recognizing that nugget and letting it lead me forward as something bigger than me, something I wanted to be in service to instead of being subject to the pain alone.

Srini: One sort of final question about this, and then we'll get into this entire concept of functional nutrition. When you form sort of new romantic relationships after an experience like that how do you at the simultaneously maintain the integrity of this love of your life while starting in a relationship with somebody else?

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah I kind of love talking about this and I don't get the opportunity to talk about it much, so I'm glad you asked. It took me a long time to want to even pursue another romantic relationship because I was a little busy. I was a single mom. I was working full time in book publishing. Then I started putting myself back through school to study nutrition.

Then started a business. I was busy, but at this point, being in a romantic relationship, for me, the beauty is that I get to rewrite the script. We are coming in as more fully formed people. We don't need to live together. We're not financially reliant on each other, and we don't need it to look like marriage raising children.

None of that needs to be a part of the equation. And that's been a real blessing in the relationship that I'm in, that we're on the same page there. Neither of us needs some of the typical trappings of what an earlier relationship might be, and that gives me room to make them very. Distinct from each other.

We're in a very committed, non monogamous relat, sorry, monogamous relationship, I meant to say. It's not non mono, a monogamous relationship. And we live 40 minutes away from each other and see each other once or twice a week. And we're only tangentially involved in each other's families and kids' lives and that.

Feels right at this stage and very distinct from the life I was creating that had that future hope that you were referring to with my late husband. Wow.

Srini: Let's get into this whole concept of functional medicine. I think that when I look at functional nutrition, just from looking at your about page, I think about my experiences with Western medicine and how it seems much more reactive than preventative.

Like I got diagnosed with a really just awful case of IBS when I got out of school or right after college, and. It took 10 years for me to make this connection. That surfing of all things was the thing that made it go away. And it was the strangest thing. Cause I still remember to this day, the first time I got out of the water on the beach in Brazil thinking, Wait a minute, I haven't felt like this since before the IVs diagnosis.

So what the hell is going on there? What is happening in our bodies and why is it that? Western Medicine has been so focused on treating symptoms as opposed to looking at root causes. Do you bookmark articles that you never read? Do you download a ton of free eBooks that you never open? Do you collect quotes, highlight passages in books, and take notes on online courses and even episodes of this podcast that you can either never find or use or disappear into a black hole of information on your hard drive.

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Andrea Nakayama: too.

Yeah, and I think of this as the three roots and the many branches, right? Any sign, symptom or diagnosis is a branch and. If we think of the analogy of a tree, it's the branch of a tree, and we need to ask why. Why is this happening? And the why is multifactorial. It's about your history and your childhood and your ancestors, and the triggers that have happened in your life.

And in your ancestors' lives as well, in addition to the things that you do each and every day that either help you to feel better or make you feel worse as you identified. And I remember distinctly hearing you tell that. Story on a podcast many years ago. And just being really moved by that connection that you were able to make for yourself.

And understanding those connections is our superpower as patients. And I'm gonna say we're all patients at some point or another, and we're. Hidden. Those are hidden from us because we don't understand what's going on in our own bodies when it happens, why it might be happening, where the connections are.

So for me, I think we have a great medical system that has a lot of gaps because there are a time and a place for addressing the branch, and that's acute care medicine. We need to be able to have those intervention. If you've cut. A limb, you want it to be addressed. If you have cancer and there is a treatment that involves medicine and pharmaceuticals, we want it to be addressed.

And there are plenty of chronic health conditions, more and more that are on the rise, that are not served by an acute care medicine model. And this is where we have to start paying attention to a different way of thinking into. The case. And so functional medicine in its best form should pay heed to three primary tenants, and those are a therapeutic partnership where the patient is a partner in their care looking for those root causes.

And a systems based approach. And that systems based approach is twofold. In my mind. It's both reliant on systems biology, which helps us understand those connections between the gut and the brain and the gut, and the hormones, and the detoxification and the hormones. All of the internal connections. Were not a bunch of ologies.

But also I'm a lover of mental models. And mental models help us to think into really complex problems. And chronic conditions are complex problems that are not being served by model of care that's meant to. Place a bandaid on things. Yeah.

Srini: Let's talk about this idea of a mental model and systems for understanding your own body and how everything works together because I know that you have this diagram on your website of the full body system.

So how do we use this to do something? Let's make this practical, like to understand how our bodies. You react and respond to different stimuli, whether that be food, whether that be the kind of work that we do, whether that be emotional experiences. Yeah

Andrea Nakayama: It's first and foremost backing up even a little bit further, and I have three models that I really like to rely on, and I'll just speak into two of them here.

And I wanna say that for people who are just looking to get healthy, or in the preventative realm, this is probably too. Work to do. It's really not the thinking that anyone wants to apply unless they're being held back by their signs, their symptoms, or their diagnosis or diagnosises. So it's slowing it down to speed it up.

It's really understanding. If we think through mental models, first principle thinking, what's the essence that I'm really getting to here? So the functional nutrition matrix, which is based off the Institute for Functional Medicines Matrix, is a tool that I like to get into the hands of the patient.

And through that we understand what I like to think of as our story. Our soup and our skill and our story are our antied. That's anything we know about our ancestors or our parents', health history, our triggers, things that have happened throughout our lives, whether it's stress from school or starting a job or food poisoning or.

Co a covid diagnosis that's lingering or any other infection, anything that we might think of as a trigger. Dental work, it was different after than it was before. Those are triggers. Through our lives and triggers can go back to our childhood. There's more and more research that's pretty solidified that adverse childhood experiences are correlated to higher incidences of chronic disease states, particularly autoimmunity.

So we look at our triggers and understand them and our mediators, and these are the ATMs in the story area of the matrix and decedents triggers and mediators. Our mediators are those things that help us feel better. Or make us feel worse. And again, once we can identify those for ourselves and create a larger and larger list of those, we start to be able to have more influence on how we feel and ultimately our health outcomes.

So that's the story, and I believe. That we're often looking for resolve with our health issues without understanding that there were myriad facts that got us to this point. This point is just a tipping point. A diagnosis is just a tipping point. What are all the factors that led me to this tipping point?

And when we understand that, we start to take more ownership, we start to have more agency and be a better partner in our healthcare. The soup in the center. Part of the matrix is understanding those biological connections, really recognizing this is the whole picture of how I'm feeling and the symptoms that I'm experiencing, and this is how they map.

I can start to categorize them and. Simple ways that help me, again, back to fir first principle thinking. When we can categorize things, we understand them better and we, it's not just a confluence of challenge, it becomes things we can start to address one by one or realize some of those connections.

And the right side of the matrix, the skills is connected to those mediators. What do I do now? What are my non-negotiables that I have defined for myself that support me? For instance, I have to keep a pretty strict bedtime. Otherwise, I'm not gonna get good sleep and I'm not gonna be my best self. The next day, and it's just not worth it.

And so I keep a specific bedtime to ensure that I'm taking care of myself, and that goes down from everything, sleep and relaxation, exercise and movement, nutrition and hydration. Stress and resilience relationships and networks, and it's not about being perfect. It's about slowly turning the dial and recognizing, here's what I'm already doing for myself and here's where I'm gonna take a next step forward.

I think we live in a time where everybody thinks there's some perfect way to eat or. The keto diet or intermittent fasting, it's gonna solve everything. Keep up my next

Srini: question Oh, ok . Yeah, that's literally where I was headed next. So go for. Yeah think that the thing that strikes me most about this model that you're describing is that it's one holistic and two incredibly personal.

Yes. Versus like you said, the keto diet. Because like I always joke with my old roommate MAD's Dude, you go, here's some influential person tell you about some bullshit diet. And next thing we are basically on this diet and I still. Did it his? I said, You are impulsive when it comes to your diet and it's nonsense.

His parents are like, Matt's diet changes every time he comes home. And he's That's bullshit. I'm like, I live with you. That's not bullshit at all. , your diet changes every time you learn something new and I still to this day, never forgot. We were watching some documentary on Netflix about eating a plant based diet and there was this girl in Boulder who was cooking for.

I like preparing our meals and he just texts her immediately afterwards and says, Hey Carly, can we change our entire meal plan to plant based? And she lost her shit naturally. Because she had already bought all the ingredients and he thought her reaction was unjustified. And I was like dude, just let's think about this from her perspective.

She just bought

,

all the damn ingredients, prepared everything, and is getting ready to make the meals and you want to change the entire thing. Of course, she's pissed off, but the point being, That the reason I'm bringing up that story in particular is that there's so much of this sort of one size fits all approach to, particularly to health where I won't call out any names cuz some of these people have even been armed guests where there's a sort of one size approach where somebody uses themselves as the sample size.

A sample size of one to basically pedal. What it turns out often are bullshit diets or just bullshit health advice because the same advice that royally like fucks up one person's life make another thrive. That's true for prescriptive advice and I'm. Finding more and more, this is true for health.

So for example, the sort of universal, don't eat carbs. Like when you grow up in an Indian family, if you don't eat carbs, you literally are gonna starve to death. We tried this once at my house. It was not effective. And then my mom tried to make these gluten free Ros and they were terrible . And then she said, What did you expect?

They weren't gonna be shit no matter what.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah. Yeah. There is no one size fits all for various reasons that have to do with thinking holistically. And I love what you're recognizing because it's so frustrating for me that everybody's looking for these quick fixes. So much that they're adopting things that are potentially damaging for their body and their mind, right?

Because they're under, they're not understanding why is this not working for me? If we look at keto as an example not only is it being used in appropriately, Based on the research it's not, The research isn't about weight loss, The research is about neurological issues, but we're seeing people who potentially don't have gallbladders or have issue with fat digestion going on a keto diet and doing more damage to their body because they can't process.

The amount of fats or even the amount of proteins that they're then shifting into undesirable chemical activity in their body. And this is what happens when we are basing our ideas on the next influencer or the next in influential idea. And what I'm seeing is that there are people, Still stuck in these ideas that there's one way to eat or one test we should follow that tells us how we eat, or they're basically like, screw it all diet and nutrition has messed me up and I don't want anything to do with it.

And the truth exists somewhere in the middle. And needs to be highly personalized because as you inferred, one person's food can be another person's poison for myriad physiological reasons. And when we overlook that reality, we're ignoring the truth of the body and how it works, how it functions.

Srini: I that quote right there, one person's food can be another person's poison.

I need to share that with Matt.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah. Yeah. It's hard and I can't imagine what you go through when the diet changes all the time too.

Srini: No, boy, I don't live with him anymore. So fortunate that's not the case. But I also want to make sure that you. Just in my own mind there's this temptation to be great.

Andrea's given me license to eat whatever the fuck I want, which I know is not true. Correct. Also

Andrea Nakayama: correct not true because we need to know you. Yeah, I, I think people either assume that I'm gonna tell them not to eat sugar, gluten, and dairy. Because those are inflammatory foods, which I believe they are inflammatory foods, but how each person processes those foods and what it does to them becomes your relationship with risk and reward.

So Shie, I'm less interested in you believing what I tell you to eat than you tapping into your understanding of what you eat. Part of the problem. We're basing our everyday decisions on dogma that isn't tuning in to our very own bodies and their messages and mechanisms. Wow.

Srini: Okay. You gave us this framework to think about in terms of food.

And I'm just thinking about this in terms of how this affects performance. Because the ongoing joke is that if I'm gonna listen to anybody's advice, it has to impact my performance in a way that's positive. People always just say it's like, Yeah, I had a friend who we used to say, it's like, why meditate?

Mainly because it's gonna lead to flow. It's gonna cause us to make more money and accomplish something. Like literally, it's what is this gonna allow me to accomplish that I can't, is always the driver behind every idea that we're thinking about and exposed to, as we jokingly say.

But realistically as somebody who has a d you mentioned things that you need to do. One of the reasons I don't do meetings from seven to 10 in the morning is because if I do the rest of the day is very difficult for me. Like I cannot get back to what I was focusing on. So let's talk about it in the context of something that everybody is wrestling with today, which is distraction and productivity and all that other craziness, because I feel like we're basically addicted to productivity porn, which paradoxically is making us unproductive.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah. So again, this comes back to the idea of risk and reward. And if the reward is productivity, what are we willing to put up with for that productivity, right? So if the risk of having meetings early in the morning or being on social media late at night impacts your productivity and productivity is so important to you, you're going to curb those behavior.

In order to support your productivity, and it's just the deeper understanding of each of those times that were in the risk or the reward and the thing. Funky with food. Many things are, but that we sometimes move from a place of victimhood and deprivation. So if we are to say that if you're eating, let's say a diet that's too high in carbs or sugars or gluten, or whatever it is that you happen to be, Responsive to in your body that we tell ourselves a story about how we get to, that we deserve it, that it's not actually making a difference, and it's just understanding where we're coming from.

I'm gonna use the word a victim story, I don't love that word, but versus an accountability story and that. Time and tuning in. So there is a tremendous amount of connection between the brain and the gut. The brain and the immune system, the brain and detoxification, the brain and oxidative stress. So to be in our best performance, the body needs to be in a kind of humming state.

The body is a vessel that allows us to step into purpose, and when we're experiencing signs, symptoms, brain fog, fatigue, we can't be in that higher purpose because there's too much distraction. And it's a constant balancing act. It's not a one and done if we're under more stress. Things that worked yesterday may not work today if we lost sleep, things that may work yesterday don't work today.

If we're on vacation, things may feel fine. That don't feel fine in our everyday lives, and it's just that Tuning in without it being obsessive. I like to think of it as as non-violent communication with self. So if we think about the history of non-violent communication in partnerships, we're actually listening.

We're tuned in. We're not always trying to fix somebody or silence somebody, but we're tuned in and most people don't even know what I. What does that actually mean? It's just an umbrella term that tells you have an undiagnosed digestive issue. What is. Other say, What are mental health diagnoses mean?

They mean that there's something going on deeper that we could be tuned into. So I don't know if that answers your question, but for me, the reward of the productivity comes with the risk of tuning in, of paying attention, which is actually its own. If we shift our perspective on it.

Srini: It's funny cause I'm trying to figure out how I would summarize our conversation and the title of the episode.

And it sounds to me like what this is really about is developing a awareness of how the systems in your body function.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, the systems in your body are, If that's not of interest to you, just tuning in that you know yourself, you know your story. This journey is yours. Every single thing that happens to you is part of your story.

I'm interested in bringing the story, each of our stories back to healthcare. That self health is about your story. So even if I'm not asking you to understand like psycho neuro immunology and the connections , I am asking you to recognize your connections to your past and how you feel now and when things have started in your life and how they've progressed and really just diving into making your health journey about the.

O me versus the why me, which sounds a little trite, but I think when we're experiencing sign symptoms or diagnosis, we know quick, we go quickly to the why is this happening to me? And there are reasons, and I'm not saying that the reasons are something you've done to yourself. I'm saying the reasons are multifactorial, and there are many things that have led you to the moment that you're facing today.

Wow.

Srini: So this is just a silly question more, but curiosity. We're talking about IBS as a sort of jump off point for this, but I think there was one thing that always struck me, and I remember using this in a newsletter that had nothing to do with ibs. It was about looking at root causes of productivity issues where I always said, It shocked me that a doctor would prescribe medicine and I'd see the commercial on TV and they would say this is medication for ibs.

And it the small disclaimer at the end would be like, May cause constipation, diarrhea, and nausea and cramps. I'm like, Wait a minute. How the fuck is that possible? Isn't that the thing it's supposed to cure?

Andrea Nakayama: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And it's just it's The most prescribed medication is a proton pump inhibitor, which lowers stomach acid.

Most of us don't have enough stomach acid, so we're actually exacerbating the underlying problem in favor of dealing with the symptom. And we're not seeing that it's going to lead to other problems down the line, like our ability to digest and utilize our proteins, which helps with our brain health, right?

So it's those lack of, it's the lack of connection and the bandaid approach that is leading to polypharmacy so that we are then chasing symptoms. Okay, I take that IBS medication and now I need two other medications and now I can't sleep. And now, Pooping my pants on the subway, whatever it is, we are chasing the fix that doesn't exist without us looking deeper at those roots.

Yeah.

Srini: So this is just a random question out of morbid curiosity. I was trying to trace back what changed between sort of college or post college when the IBS started in high school, and I didn't have it, and you may not know this, but one of the things that South Indians do with their meals is that we have yogurt and rice every night.

The first two sort of dishes and I part of that, like they would say this kind of cools down your stomach. And of course I realized yogurt has all these things that help with digestion. And I've always wondered if the fact that I had stopped eating yogurt and rice consistently was one of the things that made things worse.

Andrea Nakayama: Yeah, your pro, your diet probably changed pretty significantly when you went to college because of who was cooking for you or not, but yes, absolutely. We need to think about the microbial terrain and micro microbial Terrain isn't just about fermented foods. There's other kinds of foods fibers, short chain fatty acids, resistance starches polyphenols.

There's foods. Feed our microbial terrain and there's a tremendous connection between the microbiome and the gut and the microbiome in the brain. So back to productivity. But yes, it could definitely be one of the factors that was a change in your diet that became a trigger for you to experience symptoms.

Srini: Wow. I wanna finish this up by talking about the positive changes that you start to see in people's lives when they start to take this kind of approach to their health and nutrition, as opposed to, let me try the bulletproof diet or the keto diet, or all these other diets that make for great bestselling books.

But honestly, our one size fits all solutions based on sample sizes

Andrea Nakayama: of. Yeah hopefully this makes for a bestselling book too, , but I do sometimes think am I speaking in tongues? Because nobody really wants to do the work until they have to do the work. So my. Audience, my real desirable client base in our clinic, in the thousands of practitioners that I train.

And in the work that I'm doing now, that's back to working with a case study group for my book is for people who have been there and done that. So they've tried all the. And they're frustrated. They're so frustrated cuz they're not getting better. And what we start to see is that, first of all, there's relief that somebody is finally looking at them as a whole.

And this goes back to we need to watching my husband go through his diagnosis and be treated like his diagnosis. He was a man who was a husband and a lover, and a father to be, and a brother and a son, and a software developer and all the things, but he was treated like a walking dead man because he was treated like his diagnosis.

And that's the care that we receive and we think it's gonna help us once I know my d. Somebody will know what to do. That's not the case. So the first thing I see that people appreciate is being seen and heard for who they are, the frustrations that they have, and having somebody in the weeds with them, helping them to understand what are those little distinctions.

Oh my gosh, I feel better when I go surfing. Let's make those connections for you so you can anchor. And even if you can't surf all the time, you can do the other things that will be supportive. So awareness and recognition of who you are as a human is first and foremost. And then when we slow it down and start helping people to make associations and make incremental changes, we really do see.

Lowering of numbers or markers that were difficult for them that they were trying to manage with their pharmaceuticals reduction or elimination of symptoms altogether. One of my favorite stories I like to tell was when I was working with a patient who was, who had Ms. Multiple sclerosis, and we did a tremendous amount of work.

Where we ultimately got her neurologist to eliminate her medication because we were able to identify the symptoms it was causing based on our tracking. But then it came to a certain point where he couldn't even diagnose it at as multiple sclerosis anymore because she didn't have the signs that usually lead to that diagnosis.

And we were able to do that. She worked her tail off, but we were able to do that with diet and lifestyle modification. And nutrition support. And that's not a promise for everybody in that si in a similar situation, but there are opportunities to shift the terrain in which the signs symptoms and diagnoses exist, and that's the soil that those roots live in.

When we focus there, we do see a difference.

Srini: Wow. Beautiful. I have one final question, which I know you have heard me ask. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable.

Andrea Nakayama: Oh my goodness. I think we're all unmistakable, and I think it's the tuning in to each and every person's essence of who they are and what they bring forward that allows us to see their unmistakable creativity and witness it.

Srini: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you at your work and everything that you're

Andrea Nakayama: up? Yeah, if you head on over to andrea nakiyama.com, that's lots of a all a's there, andrea nakiyama.com, you will be led to the training through the Functional Nutritional Alliance, the company I've founded and my podcast, The 15 minute Matrix, and any of my writing or work that I'm doing independent.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.