00;00;01;17 - 00;00;28;09
Speaker 1
Hello? It's Filly here. Just a quick announcement before we jump into today's episode. Natural Medicine Week, hosted by Astraea and Traditional Medicine Society, is coming up on the 22nd to the 28th of May. I'm a proud ambassador for Natural Medicine Week, which showcases all the many ways natural medicine can restore the body and mind with live online events run by qualified practitioners across Australia.
00;00;28;21 - 00;00;56;21
Speaker 1
You can check out the link in the show notes to find your way to Natural Medicine Week. As part of the event, I'll be holding a special free root cause of emotional eating masterclass, which you can sign up for via the Natural Medicine Week website. During the Masterclass, I'll be digging into emotional eating, food addictions, sugar cravings and the hidden imbalances in the body that cause this behaviour, as well as the metaphysical imbalances that are at the deepest root cause of emotional eating.
00;00;57;01 - 00;01;00;24
Speaker 1
Hope you can make it okay. Untutored Ease Episode.
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Speaker 2
Hello and welcome to the ending Body Burn Out Show, where your hosts Chris and Filly co-founders of Multi-award-winning Functional Medicine Practice, serving busy people with energy, mood and got issues.
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Speaker 1
Well, busyness, overworking, addictive, doing and perfectionism might be the norm. It's not normal and it's a major contributor to health issues.
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Speaker 2
Our goal with this show is to give you a holistic root cause approach to healing your body so that you don't have to continue doctor or diet hopping or popping a gazillion supplements hoping something might stick.
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Speaker 1
So get ready to heal your body, get your spot back deeply, connect with yourself, and step into the life of your dreams. Let's dive in.
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Speaker 1
Hey, it's Filly here on the ending Body Bennett show. I am so excited for our guest today. I'm going to be talking to Jo Weeden from Quirky Cooking. If you don't know Jo. You're going to just love her if you do. I know that you're going to love this conversation. So Jo and I go into her own healing story.
00;02;17;14 - 00;02;45;26
Speaker 1
She has a fascinating story about her own health and how she used food as medicine to heal her body and then later on to also heal her son, Isaac, who is diagnosed with OCD and severe anxiety. We're going to talk a lot about gut health because that was a big part of their journey. And look at the root causes behind their own health issues and also answering some listener questions.
00;02;45;26 - 00;03;18;18
Speaker 1
So I put out a post and we've got a few questions from listeners who wanted to pick Jo's brain as well. So if you submitted a question for Jo, wait until the end, because she is going to answer your question now let me introduce Jo officially. So Jo Weeden lives in far north Queensland where she runs her business, quirky, cooking from home and enjoys the country life due to food intolerances in her family, herself and her four children.
00;03;19;08 - 00;03;44;21
Speaker 1
Jo began researching ways to improve her health and their health through diet. From the time her kids were very young. In 2008, she began a blog quirky cooking to share what she was learning and the recipes she was developing for her family. In 2014, Jo's son Isaac, was diagnosed with severe OCD and anxiety, which resulted in a deep dive into gut health and food as medicine.
00;03;45;10 - 00;04;16;16
Speaker 1
Not only did Isaac's mental health stabilise, but her whole family saw massive improvements in their overall health. Jo has since helped thousands of families to heal with food sharing. The principles she used to heal her own family. And I was one of the areas I've been cooking along with Jo for the last ten years. Jo runs health seminars, cooking workshops, retreats and other events both in Australia and overseas, sharing how to transition to a healing whole food diet in a doable and sustainable way.
00;04;16;27 - 00;04;43;18
Speaker 1
She also shares podcasts and videos and facilitates gut health programmes to support people working through healing with food regularly develops new recipes for her audience, and shares daily cooking videos from her kitchen on social media. Jo is the author of three best selling cookbooks, Quirky Cooking, Life-Changing Food and Simple Healing Food. And I am so excited to talk to Jo now.
00;04;44;18 - 00;05;06;13
Speaker 1
Okay, Jo, I am so excited to have you on our podcast. Just I think I said in my email that I've been following you for the last ten years. So my whole way when I got into nutrition and food is medicine after my own health breakdown. You were the first person that introduced me how to use at seven weeks to cook healthy food.
00;05;08;19 - 00;05;09;07
Speaker 3
That's cool.
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Speaker 1
So it's very exciting to have you on the show today.
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Speaker 3
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
00;05;14;05 - 00;05;36;06
Speaker 1
Awesome. Okay, so our podcast is all about ending Body burn out. So most people who get into health and healing from my experience and knowing quite a lot of people have usually experienced their own form of body burn out. And we we see that specific clean energy mood and gut issues and usually other inflammatory type symptoms showing up.
00;05;37;09 - 00;05;54;28
Speaker 1
So I don't know if this resonates with you, but I always say your message is your message. Yeah, and I do know I do know that you've had a really incredible healing journey for yourself and your family. So can you take us back to the early 2000 and what your health looked like back then?
00;05;55;23 - 00;06;25;14
Speaker 3
Oh, like early 2000. How old was I then? I think I was in my thirties and I had I was very exhausted and I think I had a lot of signs of burn out. I have always been a very go, go, go, go kind of person, you know, intense in some ways. Like just if I'm stressed or anxious, I'll work harder, which I think is pretty common.
00;06;26;17 - 00;06;53;17
Speaker 3
And I had four kids that around that time, let's say, well, I wouldn't have had four kids by then because my youngest is 19. So I mean. Yes. So it would have been yeah, I would have been in the midst of the crazy years in 2000. And it was full on. For those of you who have small children that are pretty close together.
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Speaker 3
Yeah, it's.
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Speaker 1
For kids to.
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Speaker 3
Cope. Yeah, I had always struggled with my health and I. I had been underweight all my life. Low energy, always getting sick, hormonal issues, skin issues.
00;07;12;28 - 00;07;16;11
Speaker 1
Is that even right back like to childhood. Would you say more?
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Speaker 3
Yeah. And I know a lot more now about why. But when I was a child, no one knew why. I was always the one that was sick. You know, having done so much research and study and work on my health now, I know that I had genetically I wasn't able to detox. Well, we lived in a house that would have well, my bedroom would have had a lot of mould.
00;07;40;11 - 00;08;18;10
Speaker 3
We lived in a house where it flooded the underneath of the house every year during the wet season, and my bedroom was under the house. And so my bedroom would have this much water in it. Every year we'd sweep it all out and it was a cement floor with matting. We just dry all the matching outside and, you know, the lovely chipboard wardrobe I'm sure soaked up plenty of mould and I was always sneezing, always really high histamines and itchy and all this histamine stuff that associated with mould and the low energy.
00;08;19;26 - 00;08;42;09
Speaker 3
Yeah, so that would have been part of it. And I just have always struggled with any kind of mould now. Yeah. So back then we didn't know what it was and I just had Sudafed and many histamines and you know, all that stuff didn't seem to work. And as I got older then it was all the hormones stuff.
00;08;42;14 - 00;09;16;27
Speaker 3
Then of course I was put onto all the the pill and the medications and all of that kind of thing for my skin and for my hormones reacting to all the foods. And so by the time I had kids, I was so depleted. And I in 2000, in the early 2000s, yeah, it was three kids. The fourth was born 23, and we were living on a farm by then and crop dusters flying over the house, spraying the fields next to us.
00;09;16;27 - 00;09;49;20
Speaker 3
The all the pesticides in the fields right outside our window. I think that wouldn't have helped. And my health just got worse and worse, and so did my kids. And we just really struggled. At that time. I thought it was I didn't know much about that health and I thought, it's food intolerances where what we need to do is pull back and not have dairy and gluten and sugar and this and this and this and this, and then we'll be better.
00;09;50;03 - 00;09;54;00
Speaker 3
So that's the stage I was at in the early 2000 was.
00;09;54;18 - 00;10;17;08
Speaker 1
Okay, well, there's so many edges saying stuff. I'm like, Oh my gosh, that sounds so much like me. I remember it wasn't when I was young, but before kids lived in an apartment that was flooded every winter, every winter, sometimes three times. And you'd, like, pull the carpet up, draw it all out, stick it back down, flooding my mouth, so much mowed.
00;10;17;16 - 00;10;31;25
Speaker 1
And it is interesting, too, because a lot of people like, did you notice there was the reason why you started thinking about food first because you saw a connection with your symptoms. So with certain things that flared up when you ate certain foods. Yeah.
00;10;32;01 - 00;10;45;08
Speaker 3
So, you know, if I ate dairy, I was on the toilet in half an hour. Yeah. Less. And the headaches and the, the, just the runny nose and all of that dairy really made it a lot worse. And I figured that out quite early.
00;10;45;14 - 00;11;00;06
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is interesting because I find that like in my clinical practice too, a lot of people are like, Oh, it, it's this street and it's this food and it's this food and oh, I don't know now I don't know because sometimes I can eat it and sometimes I'm fine and then other times I can't.
00;11;00;22 - 00;11;15;24
Speaker 1
And it can get super confusing, especially when you're just trying to look at just food alone. And we'll talk about deeper stuff as well. But then it's almost like, well, how what do you do? Do you just eat restricted for the rest of your life, which is not a fun place to be in?
00;11;16;11 - 00;11;49;03
Speaker 3
No, I remember going through the whole when I was at uni and I was like 18, 19 seeing dietitian and the dietitian and the doctors and everything about all the trying to gain weight, trying to stop having so much issues with all the food reactions, trying to fix my skin, trying to fix my hormones. And really the only answer I was given was but my skin I had I was given the pill and medication and cream to put on my skin that took off the top layer.
00;11;49;24 - 00;12;14;02
Speaker 3
Horrible. You know, I can remember what it was cold. And then I was told to have the little pills before I had any dairy that broke down the enzymes. And then I was also told to drink soy milk. I was told to sprinkle substitution on all my food that was not very nice. Sausage and flavoured mashed potatoes is not nice.
00;12;14;20 - 00;12;31;05
Speaker 3
But I did it. I did everything they told me for a year. Mm hmm. One thing changed. Zero. No weight gain wasn't helped. The everything was the same. And I was like, Well, that's that. There's nothing I can do. It's genetic. I have to live with it. Yeah. So.
00;12;31;05 - 00;12;37;18
Speaker 1
And. And then what? Well, and then, like, is this when Wendy quirky cooking start becoming a thing? Now.
00;12;38;00 - 00;13;03;12
Speaker 3
I always had in the back of my mind, I think it was a gut feeling that I, I just knew that food had something to do with it. But whenever, like, the dietitian didn't really help me with that, she was more prescribing things than actually helping me with food. And the doctors. I asked a doctor about how I could help with my help with my health and my weight and underweight and all that.
00;13;03;12 - 00;13;08;01
Speaker 3
And he said, just you just need to eat lots of chips and ice cream. And then you're going.
00;13;08;21 - 00;13;12;29
Speaker 1
Oh, man, ice cream. Yeah, hang on. Isn't that a dairy thing going on, too?
00;13;13;10 - 00;13;39;06
Speaker 3
I know. And yeah, I just couldn't seem to find anyone that would talk to me about food. I remember scouring the second hand shops for cookbooks on health, and I would find all these old seventies cookbooks and stuff, and it was all about raw food and vegetarian. And so I'm like, Well, maybe that's the answer. So then I was trying to have as much role as I could, which does not suit me.
00;13;39;13 - 00;14;04;04
Speaker 3
And especially when you've got got health issues, I was cutting all the fat off my meat. I was trying to have less meat, I was trying to have a lot of legumes. And of course that really made things worse. I didn't know that at the time I was having so much grains because I was really focusing on, you know, trying to do everything myself from scratch because I thought health food from scratch, maybe that's the answer.
00;14;04;04 - 00;14;26;12
Speaker 3
So I would grind my own grains and make all my own breads, and then I would eat like six big slices of bread a day because I was hungry and I was looking after little children and breastfeeding and starving. Yeah, and always low blood sugar. I just shaky and hungry within 2 hours of eating, just like it was constant up and down.
00;14;26;20 - 00;14;50;07
Speaker 3
Mm. And then as I finally when my youngest was one, I finally went to an extra pack and a chiropractor at the same time around the same time, and they were the ones that got me on the right track. So both of them talk to me about the food I was eating and food for healing and that's when everything started to change.
00;14;50;07 - 00;15;15;05
Speaker 3
And then as I learnt all of that, little by little, of course it wasn't instant. I started to adjust my recipes and started to make up recipes to suit how how we needed to eat. And that's when the idea for a blog happened. When I was there living on the farm in 2008. Yeah, so.
00;15;15;05 - 00;15;36;26
Speaker 1
Cool. So cool. And then your blog just was a kind of like exploded because I came across you a little bit later, probably in when was my first child? Probably in about 2012 or 13. Were you kind of just like sharing recipes and and then all of a sudden people are like, Give us more?
00;15;36;27 - 00;15;56;16
Speaker 3
Jo I think I, I think I hit the market at the right time, which I had no idea. Like, I remember thinking, I'm going to start a blog with like, what actually is a blog? So I'm like, watching on the Internet. Yeah, Well, and my idea was to share the kind of things that I was cooking and a meal plan each week.
00;15;56;23 - 00;16;20;12
Speaker 3
So that's how it started. And I was using the Thermomix a lot. And back then there wasn't a lot of them sites or recipes online, and especially not for healthy recipes, but the recipe books that came with them. Because at the time there was just the two little booklets. I got my first time in 2004, and all there was was a couple of little booklets and it wasn't really healthy food.
00;16;20;21 - 00;16;41;27
Speaker 3
And so I was making out recipes for that. And I think that's one of the reasons the blog took off, because there's so many people that, you know, struggling with food allergies or intolerances and health issues in their family looking for special diet recipes. And then those ones that had it, that mix were like, oh, here's a site that has it all.
00;16;43;04 - 00;17;10;08
Speaker 3
And then also I was sharing the meal plans on an international site every week. And so you could go through and decide what kind of meal plan you wanted, what kind of diet you're looking for, and then you click on that and it would go to that person's site. So I think that was part of it. And then just really I one of the main reasons I started the blog, I was going through a really rough patch and feeling very alone.
00;17;10;08 - 00;17;38;18
Speaker 3
And, you know, when you've got little kids and living out of town and feeling like the odd one out amongst my friends and family because of the way I ate and like I used to get called Quirky. So that's why I called it quirky. Yes, it happens. Yeah. Yeah. I just really felt like I needed an outlet and I needed to be able to connect with other people that were on the same journey.
00;17;38;18 - 00;18;07;28
Speaker 3
And so that's that's why I started the blog. And so I spent, you know, mostly time at night when the kids were in bed. I would write on the blog and I would talk to people. Back then it was mostly Twitter and and just really started to connect with other people on the same journey. And I think the connections were what built the blog, because the more that you connect with people and talk with people, they feel like they've got support.
00;18;07;28 - 00;18;25;23
Speaker 3
You feel like you've got support and it becomes this community, this beautiful community. And that's what built quirky cooking was the community. I take recipes to my community and say, I've been playing with this, who wants to test it? And we don't try it together and everyone give feedback. And then I'd put it up on the blog and then they were like, Whoa, Jo, could you could you make a cookbook?
00;18;25;23 - 00;18;40;25
Speaker 3
I'm like, I don't know how to make a cookbook. And then people I met on Twitter helped me to write a proposal and get it to in front of people that could actually help me. And then that's how that happened. So it was just all about the connections.
00;18;40;25 - 00;18;53;15
Speaker 1
I think the circle, that's really beautiful. It kind of just happened naturally, but then also the community and the people that were following you actually helped you to progress in your like business journey as well?
00;18;53;24 - 00;19;17;09
Speaker 3
Yeah, because I would never have been game to write a cookbook and put myself out there. I was back then, I was very introverted and would just I think I was just hiding away from the world a lot and that was my sort of outlet. But I had no self-confidence. Yeah. So it took years to build up the confidence and to actually start it as a business.
00;19;17;09 - 00;19;20;06
Speaker 3
But back then it was just a way to connect with people.
00;19;20;15 - 00;19;25;20
Speaker 1
Yeah. Cool. So cool. So their cookbook came out in 2014.
00;19;26;09 - 00;19;26;23
Speaker 3
That's funny.
00;19;27;07 - 00;19;35;08
Speaker 1
And then not soon after I believe Jason Isaacs Health started going downhill. Yeah. Can you share what was going on for him?
00;19;35;18 - 00;19;59;19
Speaker 3
Yeah. So even when, when he was younger, like I remember probably from the timing this time, he was always very sensitive to sounds to all sorts of things and he was like, Yeah, it was a little bit odd. Sometimes the reactions he'd have and the way that he stopped screaming or he was intense, like more intense than me.
00;20;00;26 - 00;20;25;14
Speaker 3
And when we started to notice the ups and downs with the anxiety and the sort of really strange behaviour, sometimes I, I had no idea what was going on. I remember taking him to the doctor when he was probably ten or 11 and saying, Look, he has all these phobias and he's like And the doctor was like, Oh, just take him to a psychologist.
00;20;25;14 - 00;20;49;10
Speaker 3
Something I want. I don't know. I just didn't really feel like I was getting the answers that I needed. And I and I really did know this, that whenever I was because I was learning more and more about, well, at the stage at that stage, my gut health knowledge was very minimal, but I knew a little bit and I was also learning about inflammatory foods and that kind of thing.
00;20;49;10 - 00;21;17;00
Speaker 3
And so whenever I pulled back on the inflammatory foods like the processed dairy and processed grains and flowers and processed sugars and vegetable oils and things like that, when I took them out of his diet, his anxiety would calm down and he would be a lot better. He went through a stage where he had this massive phobia of the little girl up the street and there was absolutely no reason.
00;21;17;09 - 00;21;40;03
Speaker 3
She was just she'd just come over and play with my daughter and go home and he would run in his bedroom, slam the door, lock it and cry. We'll like it's going. We tried to get it out of him and he's like, I don't know, you know, And and there was all sorts of strange things like that, not just but I did notice whenever I was really careful with his diet, he would come out of that in his things.
00;21;40;11 - 00;22;02;20
Speaker 3
And then I was like, Is that a coincidence? And so I'd let the things creep back in, or he'd be at friends places or grandmas or whatever, eating whatever. And then he would go downhill again and I was so flat out with it, you know, I was actually like working in the mix at the time and managing a team and writing a book and homeschooling.
00;22;03;20 - 00;22;04;16
Speaker 1
All the things.
00;22;04;23 - 00;22;25;22
Speaker 3
Yeah. And staying up so well in the mornings I'd write something on the blog. And so I went up. He yeah, he got really bad around that time. And I remember while I was writing the first book, half the time, he was sitting on my lap at the computer while I was trying to write, you know, crying and holding on to me.
00;22;26;11 - 00;22;55;02
Speaker 3
So that sort of when the book came out, he really went downhill around that time and it felt like an overnight change. But looking back, I see all the steps. So one day he came to me and he said, Mama, I just don't feel like I should be playing computer games because I can't stop thinking about them. Oh, and he said because he was really into Minecraft.
00;22;55;02 - 00;23;10;27
Speaker 3
He was 13, you know, He's like, I think I should stop playing Minecraft. I only let him play it for like half an hour or an hour a day. But he said, I cannot stop thinking about it. He said, It's like it's like everything's made out of blocks and it's all in my head. And everywhere I look, there's blocks and I can't stop.
00;23;11;03 - 00;23;27;06
Speaker 3
Like I think about it all day and at night. And he said, It's like, I can't get it out of my head. I think I'll stop playing it. I said, That sounds like a good idea. Wow. But playing it And the next day all these massive OCD symptoms started, which I didn't know it was that at the time.
00;23;27;06 - 00;23;48;16
Speaker 3
Wow. And it was like his mind had to have an obsession. And as soon as he let go of that obsession, everything else started. And he started having a sort of just screaming out of nowhere, just screaming and throwing his arms around and saying, the rocks are closing in on me. And he could see stuff that we couldn't see.
00;23;48;16 - 00;23;50;27
Speaker 3
Like it was horrible. Maybe.
