Want to know the secret to achieving vibrant health? Best-selling author and nutrition coach Randy Rolfe takes you beyond food myths into a world of mindful eating. Explore how traditional cooking is the holistic way to feed your body and soul.
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Show Notes | Transcript“We need to believe that our body is meant to work. We’re not getting sick because we’re living longer. There is nothing wrong with living longer.” – Randy Rolfe
In this podcast episode, we welcome Randy Rolfe, an expert in parenting, nutrition, and family, to discuss the intertwining of health and spirituality. Randy shares her insights on the importance of natural foods and the spiritual connection to our diet. We debunk myths about aging and health, advocate for a “single ingredient diet,” and stress the significance of traditional cooking. The conversation also explores the spiritual aspects of well-being, including meditation and nurturing the soul. Randy’s curiosity about empowering people to recognize their own strength is highlighted, along with her book “The Single Ingredient Diet.” We also talk about the importance of choosing whole foods and reducing worry for a healthier life.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Importance of connecting with physical bodies
- Debunking false beliefs about health and diet
- Spiritual component of maintaining vibrant health
- Randy’s personal journey of learning about nutrition
- Misconceptions about aging and health
- Impact of diet on overall health
- Shifting towards a “single ingredient diet”
- Embracing traditional and cultural dietary practices
- Adopting a holistic approach to health
Resources:
Join the Soulful Women’s Network
Transform Your Relationship to Food in Just 21 Days with Randy’s free resource
Connect with Randy Rolfe:
Website: Randy Rolfe
Connect with Live Love Engage:
Send Gloria Grace a message
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LinkedIn: Gloria Grace Rand
Facebook: Gloria Grace Rand
YouTube: Gloria Grace Rand
TRANSCRIPT
Gloria Grace Rand – I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of The L.O.V.E. Method and author of the number one Amazon bestseller Live Love Engage how to Stop Doubting Yourself and Start Being Yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence and income. Welcome to live, love. Engage. Namaste. Would you like to create a vibrant, healthier body, mind and soul? Well, if so, you are in the right place because that’s what we’re going to be talking about with our guest, Randy Rolfe, who is I’m going to tell you about in just a moment, and she’ll be joining us shortly. But first, if this is your first time joining live, love, engage and welcome. I am Gloria Grace, the Light messenger, and I support women business owners and strengthening their spiritual connections so you can create a life and business that’s not only prosperous, but also really fulfilling and gratifying.
But let’s get to it. I want to talk to you about our guest today. Her name is Randy Rolfe, and she is a bestselling author, speaker, educator, and coach on parenting, nutrition, and family. And she’s got a long and illustrious career that includes a degree in international relations, a law degree, a legal practice, certification in nutrition, and master’s in theology. I don’t know when this woman has time to like, you know, relax it, or because she’s also spent 50 years talking and teaching about vibrant health. And she is also a returning guest to the podcast. We actually had her on the show a couple of years ago to talk about spiritual parenting, but I am super excited now to have her back to talk about health. So without further ado, I’m going to bring on miss Randy Ralph to live, love, engage and welcome you officially back to the program.
Randy Rolfe – Thank you so much, Gloria Grace, it’s great to have you to be back here.
Gloria Grace Rand – Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m I’m delighted to have you. And, especially talking about our health, because that’s certainly something that has been on people’s minds even more over the past four years. And I know that this is certainly you’ve spent practically a lifetime talking about vibrant health. So why does that mean so much to you?
Randy Rolfe – Well, a lot of different reasons. One is I learned to look up and and research nutrition because I just didn’t know what I should eat. I was a doctor’s daughter, but I was very academically focused. And when I went out on my own, I just didn’t know what to eat. And I was making my husband’s food, and I’m like, what do I do? So I started researching and I had was amazed by all the confusion. And so I decided to dig deeper. And so what I learned, I started applying right away, and friends started asking me, well, why don’t you write about this? Because you explain it so simply.
So I got excited about that, and I was actually, helping my fellow lawyers when I was practicing law and my first career to prepare for their trials by eating correctly and keeping their their staying awake and keeping their minds clear and that kind of thing. And then when I had great success with my kids, my friends would ask me, why is this working so well? So in my first parenting book, I explained that getting the child’s body working was the first,, duty of a parent was to feed the child right? And breastfeed if you can, and then go on to natural foods. So it’s been a life voyage, really, of educating people. What an important part of our lives to diet is. And I do think there’s a very strong spiritual side because this is the main way, other than breathing and touching the ground, that we relate to nature.
Gloria Grace Rand – Wow. So many things are coming to mind as, as you’re talking about this. And I’m trying to figure out where is the best place to go. So maybe I’ll just go with some of the talking points that you suggested we talk about today. Because I think they’re, they’re so good. But but I love how you do relate it back to, you know, parenting that’s our first job is to nurture our children. But but we also need to start with ourselves. Really, because we can’t we’re not going to be able to take care of them very well if we don’t take care of ourselves. So you you’ve talked about something about that we need to connect with our physical body in a new way, to feel whole. So why do you say that? And then how do we go about doing that?
Randy Rolfe – Well, yeah, that’s a really important point, Grace, because the,, we are being kind of brainwashed that our bodies break down as we age and that we need to fix them all the time. And yet they’re designed to work. We’re designed to be healthy for a hundred years. And it’s really important to give our body what body, what it needs and what what we’ve eaten the last 2 million years is real food, not man made additives, not refined foods where all the vitamins and minerals and fiber has been removed.
So it’s it’s about nourishing our own bodies and, and having confidence in them that they know how to digest and how to breathe and how to sleep. If we just give them what it needs, what it needs, what our body needs to maintain health. And so I really try to change people’s way they relate rather than, oh, darn, you know, I have these extra pounds I can’t get rid of, or my stomach hurts when I eat this or that and I have to take a pill to fix it., rather than thinking now, okay, what should I change in my lifestyle? I’m not getting any walking in. I’m not drinking enough water. I’m not getting enough fiber. I’m not feeding the microbes that are balancing my gut., so thinking about working with your body instead of against it is still the way I like to say it.
Gloria Grace Rand – And that’s so important because there’s so much number one, so much misinformation out there about food. There’s also in in our strive strivings over the years, I guess, to, you know, have convenience. And, you know, I remember watching a couple of years ago there was a documentary, I think, on the History Channel about sort of the history of some of the food makers and how, like, frozen foods, you know, came about and how you know that this was a revolution back in the day. And at the same time, we seem to be a lot more prone to sickness and to,, conditions that. Maybe we didn’t necessarily have 100 years ago or something when we were eating more natural foods. So how do you and I don’t know why I’m having an echo today, but. Oh, well, we’re just going to go with it. How do you go across communicating to people that it is more important, or I guess maybe number one, that it’s important to really pay attention to what it is we are eating?
Randy Rolfe – Yes. I think that’s the key is to to educate people how there is a direct relationship between our health and our diet. And if we’re not eating the best foods for our body, we are more susceptible to disease. We’re more susceptible to infection from outside sources. We’re more susceptible to reacting to environmental toxins, to allergies,, to,, problems with our blood getting too much fat building up. And it’s not from eating fat, it’s from eating refined foods., just all the problems that are troubling us today at younger and younger ages even are due to the poor diet. And I want to say that what we’re finding now is that 58% of American adults diet is ultra processed foods, and for kids, it’s actually 67%,, you know, some of the cereals are half sugar and the snacks and the sodas,, and, and then everything has added seed oil, which is very hard for the body to deal with and is actually carcinogenic. So,, it and emphasizing that there’s a direct relationship between how good you feel, how healthy you are and your diet, that director election a relationship.
Gloria Grace Rand – What would you say would be the first thing that someone should do if they want to be able to be healthier and to be vibrant, what what would be what or what do you recommend people start to do?
Randy Rolfe – Well, it’s the theme of my new book, The Single Ingredient Diet, that you stop reading all these labels and trying to make sure you get enough calcium and enough B6 and so on, and that you don’t get too much of these long strings of chemical names. Just get single ingredients, go for real food, go to the produce section and, just get organic butter and organically raised, eggs from organic chickens and real food and, and wherever you think that you’re at biggest risk in eating processed foods, make the change there. Like, if you’re really addicted to sweets and sugars and sugar substitutes, then start cutting back on that. Or if you go to the fried food, fast food places too much start pulling back on that. So the, the the biggest change that’s happened lately in the last 20 years, is convincing people that fat is bad. And so that’s very satisfying, and it gives you more balanced energy but people are making up that difference by going for quick carbs for sugar, for something that tastes sweet and gives you a jolt. And that’s why all the energy drinks are so popular. You know, you can just get a jolt from the caffeine and the sugar. So, so starting with just realizing that the ingredients are misleading us, that all these chemicals are okay. They’re not. And the refined foods to try to pull away from them, whether it’s fats or sugars.
Gloria Grace Rand – . Absolutely. And I’ve been noticing now because I guess somewhere along the line they’ve passed a law that says that if something contains a bio engineered food, it has to be on the label now. And I’m so it’s like it’s, it’s amazing when you go into a store and just look at all of these different products that say, contains a bioengineered food. And I’m like, okay, I’m putting it back up on the shelf. Thank you. No thank you. I don’t I want things that are grown naturally in, in the soil and, and not that are necessarily engineered that way. It just to me, it scares me. I don’t know what you’re what your feelings are about that. If you’re familiar with that at all.
Randy Rolfe – Oh, absolutely. Oh, you’re you’re absolutely correct. It’s quite amazing. I came across so much literature from, in food science of what they’re doing now to genetically engineer everything. They’re now making synthetic milk by engineering fungi to grow the milk that’s in cow’s milk. But what happens is it’s mostly the fungi protein that’s in the milk. There’s just a little of the kind of casein protein that is in cow’s milk., and that’s just one example. One of the most recent things I found that they’re synthetic, synthetically altering. And we’re, we’re the guinea pigs because our bodies have never had these genetically altered foods. We know we have hybridized them and try and kind of gotten used to that over the last couple thousand years. But it’s only in the last 50 years that we’ve started playing with the genes of our food,, species and our bodies. We have no idea what the long term results are. We?. I’m not a guinea pig. I don’t want to be.
Gloria Grace Rand – Exactly. I don’t want to be that, either. And and when you were mentioning about, you know, the labels, too, I remember hearing this somewhere along the line,, somewhere that it’s like the fewer the ingredients that are listed on the label, the better it is for you. So if you can have something that maybe has, you know, no more than four, you’re probably going to be okay. Especially if they are. Whole Foods, like you said. I mean, like, you know, because you can look at just as an example and I have not been eating as healthy as I would like to of late, but I have been at least making healthier choices of the crud, let’s put it that way, because it’s like you look at a cookie package, you know, one will have like, you know, 20 different ingredients, and then another one where it’s like shortbread. It’s like butter, wheat eggs and salt. It’s like, okay, I’m going to buy that one at least. At least if I’m going to have something that’s, you know, not necessarily as good for me as, say, a strawberry or an apple, at least it’s more whole.
Randy Rolfe – Yes, exactly. I recommend when you reading the ingredient list, only buy things that have stuff that you would bring into your kitchen if you were making it yourself. So that’s a very simple rule of thumb to just say, well, this tomato sauce has 17 ingredients, but this one has six. And that I could I could buy myself. I have some of those herbs on my shelf, for instance, that I could boil down the tomatoes and add a little onions and herbs. So, same with mayonnaise. You can have 15 ingredients with all kinds of stabilizers and emulsifiers. Or you can have something with eggs and avocado oil and some mustard and vinegar. So it’s, it’s one of the things in my book is I encourage people to make some of those things themselves so they realize that that’s all that’s really in there and it tastes fantastic. And then you can, you know, buy something that’s been put together by someone else, but just with real food ingredients, it’s so much easier on the body. My husband often says, you know, you not only have to eat the right things, you have to avoid the wrong things. It’s what you don’t eat that’s just as important as what you do eat.
Gloria Grace Rand – Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And and I love the idea of of making stuff yourself and I have I met someone about a year ago maybe, maybe a year and a half ago who also she is a dietician and she talks a lot. Same as you, about the importance of eating more,, you know, Whole Foods. And she had a wonderful recipe in there for just making chicken broth. And, and this is something that my grandmother used to do. And so I actually did that yesterday and it was smelling so good in the house. And I just it’s not yes, it takes time. But you know, if you’ve got a Saturday, you, you know, if you’re not doing anything else, you can certainly put a pot of water on the stove with some vegetables and some, you know, the chicken carcass and it’s really not that difficult. And now I’ve got lovely jars in my freezer of, of broth that’s going to keep me going. I’ll be able to make soup out of it, and it’s going to keep me going for a few months now.
Randy Rolfe – Exactly. I have jars right now in my freezer from our turkey, and I always make a turkey stock from our Thanksgiving turkey. And and certainly with chicken bones as well. It’s not hard at all. You just need to be around because the stove is, is,, getting all the nutrients out of the bones. But,, back thousands of years ago, we always opened up the bones to eat the marrow, and we boiled them to get the minerals, so we need to do the traditional things. And I encourage people, if they have a family or ethnic tradition, to, to delve into it, because those people who lived in one area learned to combine all the things that grew locally into a healthy diet, and they would have died out if they weren’t eating a healthy diet. So they did discover it. And our American diet is completely experimental. And we are at the jury’s still out. It looks like we get a lot more problems health wise, and less resistance to disease and early death with chronic illnesses than we did 100 years ago.
Gloria Grace Rand – Yeah, absolutely. And I know there’s been documentaries on the the blue zones, these different areas of the world where people live to be, you know, 100 or even a little bit more. And it’s because they are they’re eating that type of food that they can, that they grow in the garden and they go out and spend. And that’s how they also get their exercise, because they’re gardening as they know they don’t have to go to a gym. They’re doing that type of stuff, and we need to get back to more of that type of a relationship with nature. And I think it would benefit benefit us and benefit our children and grandchildren to come. But I want to talk a little bit about we’ve I think you mentioned it earlier at the beginning a little bit, but let’s see if there’s any others are there any other false beliefs, let’s say, that people have about health and about diet that really,, do keep us from having, you know, the vitality that that we’re born with. We’re certainly, you know. Not. We don’t come into this world with all of these, you know, I mean, the majority, let’s say 99.9%, you know, there are some babies who have something or other that come in. But for the most part, we are born, you know, healthy. And so what what are some of the things that we’ve kind of gotten ourselves believing that we shouldn’t?
Randy Rolfe – Yeah, that’s a great question. And I mentioned earlier of thinking our bodies are just going to let us down., one of the biggest,, other myths is that we are getting all these diseases,, because we’re living so much longer, and even doctors will say, oh, the average age a thousand years ago was 40. But that’s statistically correct because they lost half the children. But if you take the age at 40 or 50, the life expectancy hasn’t changed much at all. And if you’re a history buff like I am, you’re constantly seeing this, this philosopher or this scientist or this king lived to 79 or 89 or even 98.
So it’s not that we are living so much longer. In fact, we’re getting sick earlier and earlier. But,, in my book, I actually give the statistics because it’s such a myth. And you do hear it from almost anybody, including doctors and pharmaceutical companies that, that it’s just because we’re living so much longer that we have heart disease and diabetes and cancer. Well, it’s it’s really a lie because we’re getting those things earlier and earlier. And the statistics show that we have only extended our life expectancy. If you get to 50, we’ve only extended by ten years. And today we tend to get to 50 because most of us are not dying in war or of famine or of disease, infections. So most of us get to 50 and we should be able to expect to live healthily to 90. And, you mentioned the blue zones. I was actually very privileged as a child. And we we traveled every summer, and I, I was in Tahiti three different times, five years apart. And I actually saw the change as the French made Tahiti their center for nuclear testing. So they were bringing in all their sailors and their ships and also all their sweet stuff. And when we got off the ship, they would quick send this early coffee cakes to the bakery shops. So I saw the a dramatic difference between the health of the kids that were playing in the streets at the first trip, compared to the second trip, and especially the third trip they were earlier. They were beautiful Polynesian kids, you know, big smiles, beautiful teeth, all looking just perfect shape. By the end of ten years,, there was fat ones and skinny ones and,, irregular teeth and discolored, and they were grumpy and fighting instead of just so going, going fishing or kicking a ball around. So, I just wanted to tell that story because it’s so important to me, but the other main myth is convincing us that we’re lazy and weak willed and that we have we need to be forced to eat properly and forced to exercise.
My husband sitting for our four year old grandson right now, and there is no problem getting him to move or getting him excited about doing things and eating. Right. You know, he he doesn’t like processed foods. He likes or organic cheese or organic fruits and, and, you know, organic chicken. And he he’s not interested in. Garbage. So? So we need to believe that our body is meant to work. We’re not getting sick because we’re living longer. There is nothing wrong with living longer. I’ve heard. I’ve heard young people say, be afraid. They’re afraid to get dementia or to be disabled. Well, if they eat right, they don’t have to have that fear, so that’s really important to get around that myth. And then this idea that, oh, well, we’re just seduced by sugar. What are we going to do? We’re just going to keep putting on weight. It’s not necessary if you’re giving your body the energy it needs. You don’t want to be eating all the time. You want to be doing things, you know, going out and, like you said, gardening or running or walking or playing tennis, swimming, whatever it is.
Gloria Grace Rand – Yeah, absolutely. And I, I still remember God, God rest his soul. My, my father in law used to, you know, tell me all the time, you know, don’t get old, Gloria. And I’m and I’m like, no, I want to live a long time. Thank you very much. I do, I want, but I do want to be able to do it where I am healthy and mind, body and soul. And so I, you know, do endeavor to do the things that I need to do for that, which is, you know, eating healthy, getting exercise, as you mentioned, getting sleep, doing things for my soul. One of the things I love to do is meditate. That’s one of my my spiritual practices. And you mentioned something at the beginning too, that I want to get, get back to and let you maybe talk about this because you mentioned that there’s like a spiritual component to this. So what is that? Explain that to me a little bit.
Randy Rolfe – Well,, you mentioned all those different disciplines I’ve investigated and, and I always, my real quest has been to find out how to live a healthy, happy, fulfilled life. Because as a child, I, I saw some some pain., there were family feuds and across generations, and and there was alcoholism in my childhood, parents. So I wanted to know those things. So, I really, I, I took theology because I wanted to know what had been said about natural health and family life in the history of spiritual literature. And, it was so much fun. It was fascinating, but they’re all related, you know, everything works together, as you say so well. And so many of your programs that it were all one.
And being authentic means being good to your heart. Being good to your mind, being good to your body, being good to the people around you and the animals and to nature getting out in nature. One of my aunts used to have inner city kids out to her farm in the summer, just so they could touch nature, and eating is one of the things we do preparing our food. Like my my daughter in law just yesterday she said, the kids always eat our food if I help get them to help us prepare it. And that’s so true. You know, if you get the smells and you understand that this is just part of life is feeding ourselves. oh, sorry about that. It’s, it’s, it’s one of our main ways of relating to nature. And, so if you’re in the produce section other and not just buying some prepared vegetable soup, you have a much better sense of where it’s coming from and what it means to you. The green is beautiful.
It doesn’t have to be kind of brown with some colouring in it, you know? So, so, and, and feeling good is a big mood or completely dependent on our diet because we have to feed our hormones. Our brain is an organ. I mean, it’s a spiritual function as well, but it’s an organ that is dependent on being nourished. So, for moods, for to be able to be calm and and meditate and contemplate is and sleep without your head just rushing. How am I going to lose those 10 pounds? You know, you just don’t need that. And being more productive in your work and being more fulfilled in your work is, is all very spiritually connected. And so all those levels, they’re not even levels. They’re kind of a spiral of the mind, body spirit.
Gloria Grace Rand – Oh, I love it. And there’s somebody watching who gets that. Totally. One of my dear friends, she’s been commenting on Facebook and she’s all about the spirals. So she’s going to love that.
Randy Rolfe – Oh yeah. My husband found a note that I’d written long ago about the spiral of personal growth that you’ve got these three areas that are always improving. You work on your mind, but then your body needs a little work, and then your activity needs a little work. Yeah.
Gloria Grace Rand – Yeah, absolutely. I want to ask you,, one other one other question. What are you curious about right now?
Randy Rolfe- Oh, what a great question. Well, I went to a wonderful lecture, yeah. Just yesterday at my law school as an alumna and his, his thesis was that, that right now, our governments are convincing us that we are fragile and stupid and irrational and hateful and that they need to teach us to be different and incentivize us to be different. And his point was that, you know, there’s good and bad in all of us. We’re humans. We’re not perfect, but we we invented our government in this country to support our freedom, our freedom to stay healthy, our freedom to express ourselves. And so my, my, my biggest curiosity right now is how we can best empower people to know that they are powerful. How do you like that?
Gloria Grace Rand – I do like that a lot. Is there anything else I asked you that I didn’t? Any other last point you want to make?
Randy Rolfe – Let’s see. Yeah. We we covered enough. Well, the it it’s up to us to stop worrying and choose healthy food to, yeah, to avoid the conflicts about vegan versus keto. And we should be paleo, or we should be eating the modern foods, depending on the petrochemicals. I think it’s really important that to know that there are many people that are growing good quality food sustainably, and there are experiments all over the world to, to stop desertification, for instance, by herding animals the old way rather than using the giant commercial operations of feedlots and so on. So it’s not it’s how we’re preparing our food, not the food that we’re eating that’s messing us up, and messing up our environment there. There are ways that we can eat what keeps us healthy and keep the environment healthy.
Gloria Grace Rand – Awesome. Well, thank you so much for that. And I know that there are folks who are going to be listening to this and, or watching it, maybe on YouTube later on that are going to want to know how to get in touch with you, maybe how to get your book, the Single Ingredient diet. So,, what’s the best place for people to be able to connect with you?
Randy Rolfe – Well on my website just RandyRolfe dot com and the book is available on Amazon and it was a bestseller new release. And also you can go to Single Ingredient Diet without that and get a short, free training from me.
Gloria Grace Rand – All right. Well, I’ll be sure and get that information from you and have that in the show notes so you’ll be able to get that information. Anyone who’s listening. So again, thank you so much, Randy, for being with us again. And it was a wonderful discussion. You you certainly shared a lot of useful information. And I think the most important thing is you just, you said is for us to stop worrying and just pick, you know, whole foods to eat and, and take the time for that. And I think we’ll be a lot better off. So thank you so much.
Randy Rolfe – My pleasure. Thank you so much, Grace. It’s great.
Gloria Grace Rand – And I do want to thank all of you for watching and for listening so much. And I hope you’ll be sure to join us next week, because we’re going to be talking about how to overcome emotional blocks in your business. So make sure you, if you’re not subscribed already, to make sure that you are subscribed on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to our YouTube channel. And until next time, I encourage you to go out and live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically.
