Good For You by dapbooks

Good For You is published under Karanema Books, sectionalized division under Di Angelo Publications INC.

KARANEMA BOOKS

an imprint of Di Angelo Publications Good for You. Copyright 2021. Claire Chitham and Kylie Bailey in digital and print distribution in New Zealand, The United States of America and worldwide with exclusive copyright for publishing by Di Angelo Publications.

Di Angelo Publications 4265 San Felipe #1100 Houston, Texas, 77027 www.diangelopublications.com

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publications data

Good For You. Downloadable via Kindle, iBooks and NOOK.

Library of Congress Registration Hardback

ISBN: 978-1-942549-72-7

Created by: Di Angelo Publications Words by: Claire Chitham & Kylie Bailey Layout: Kimberly James

Photographer: Helen Bankers Make-Up: Jules Armishaw Stylist: Nicola Vuleta

Printed in China

No part of this book may be copied or distributed without the publisher’s written approval. For bulk and wholesale orders, please contact Di Angelo Publications sales team directly at sales@diangelopublications.com. The authors of this book are not medical professionals or doctors. No part of this book should be considered direct medical advice

1. Health and Wellness

2. Adult General Trade - All Ages —— Health and Wellness ——Overall Wellbeing—— New Zealand with int. Distribution.

CLAIRE CHITHAM & KYLIE BAILEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY HELEN

BANKERS

A New Zealand and American Collaboration. Brought to you by an all-women team.

THE STORIES

CLAIRE’S STORY 13

KYLIE’S STORY 47

THE GOOD GUTS A LITTLE NOTE FROM CLAIRE MEET OUR GOOD PANEL A LITTLE BIT ABOUT PRACTITIONER TREATMENTS

SYSTEMS OF THE BODY

DR. SUSAN PARRY Q & A

GUT AND IMMUNE HEALTH

THE HEALTHY GOODS

GOOD MUST-DOS (OUR TOP 20 FOR GOOD HEALTH)

GOOD GO-TOS (56 MORE GOOD IDEAS FOR YOU TO TASTE & TEST)

65 68 71 81 83 86 93 161

No matter who you are - your identity, race, religion, or birthplace – one thing we all have in common is what we are made of. We are different colours, shapes, and sizes, but inside we’re all the same stuff. Cells, organs, tissue, muscles, and bones arranged in the same order, connected by identical systems that keep us breathing. A beautiful intricate design that makes us human. Cut us open and we all bleed.

And we ALL POOP!!!

I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease – an autoimmune illness that manifests as a chronic inflammatory bowel disease – when I was 13 years old.

I used to be really sick. I was in a lot of pain. I was hospitalised 20 years ago. I’ve spent a LONG TIME looking at my poop. I was told I may need to have life-altering surgery or be medicated on immune-suppressant drugs for the rest of my life.

I chose NEITHER.

Kia Ora, my name is Claire Chitham. I’m an actor from Aotearoa/New Zealand.

While I’ve been lucky in some ways, I’m also a stubborn, determined fool.

And so, I’ve been PAIN-FREE, DISEASE-FREE, and living a balanced life of great health and vitality for over 20 years now.

This is because I practice ‘Self-Health’ constantly.

SELF-HEALTH is about me taking responsibility and ownership over my choices in order to best protect my health and my ability to live my life the way I want to.

It means having STRENGTH, AGILITY, CLARITY, and FLEXIBILITY in my body, mind, emotions, and energy. It means taking notice of how I am and striving to take care of myself as best I can. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do the work I love.

I know from experience that it’s easier said than done. I’ve had to make my health my absolute priority in order to prevent experiencing that acute physical pain again (as much as it is in my hands to do so).

Today, I don’t rely on luck. Instead, I’ve studied, practiced, and taught myself to listen and figure out what’s good for ME.

Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about the fascinating and complex ways the human body works. We are Mind-Boggling and utterly Awe-Inspiring! We have great capacity for health, growth, adaptation, and healing.

Good Health is a constant balancing act: of the body, the brain, our lifestyles and environment. It’s a huge challenge to consider all of these things at all times and, to be honest, it can be too much. We just can’t do that all the time, and we can’t control our circumstances as much as we’d like to. Global pandemic, anyone?

The word BALANCE is a funny one though. There is this notion that, to achieve balance in one’s life, means you must reach some blissfully static point of perfection where everything just clicks and you’re done. Eureka! Perfect form! 10/10! But balance requires constant movement. It is not a static thing. When I became a Pilates trainer, I learned to stand up on a swiss ball. Balancing on a giant round ball requires constant motion, correcting and counter-correcting with all your tiny stabilising muscles in order to stay on top. It’s useful to remember that perfection is a myth and balance requires constant (but gentle) attention and self-correction in order to avoid falling over.

It is, therefore, a daily practice of mine to keep wobbling around somewhere in the middle of my health, and I certainly don’t always get it right. Occasionally I fall over. But I have accumulated a lot of practice hours and use a variety of tools to keep wobbling on this planet in a mostly upright position.

I am constantly amazed and bewildered by the amount of pain us humans can withstand. On every level, physical and otherwise. Why do we tolerate so much of it? Sure, we wouldn’t understand pleasure if we didn’t know pain.

But PAIN is a signal system – one that we are really good at ignoring, suppressing, and blatantly running away from. It requires a little bit of courage to face your pain – whether it is a backache, a toothache, or something much deeper. But if you’re willing and able to face it head on, you can often find surprising pathways to relief and freedom (apart from the toothaches, just get to the bloody dentist).

I learned all of this the hard way. I lived in utter ignorance and denial of my pain for a good few years before it got so bad that it put me in hospital. It sucked! It was a literal Pain In My Ass (and my guts, heart & head).

I was 22 and had one of the coolest jobs you could get – acting in the country’s most popular television drama. I certainly didn’t want anything as silly as stomach cramps to stop me from having my fun. But my body gave me no choice: it was stop or explode. The inflammation levels in my bloodstream soared so high, they became life-threatening.

I share that story with you on page twenty-one.

At 22 years old, I got taught a stern lesson; if I kept ignoring my body’s pain signals, my life as I knew it would be over – one way or another.

Now I’m 42 and I’ve figured some shit out. I’ve learned to listen. I’ve learned that when I get certain inflammatory signs on or in my body, I need to make some small adjustments to what I’m doing, thinking, feeling, or putting in me in order to selfcorrect. For me, that’s mostly when I’ve had too much pastry or been drinking too much wine (did someone say Lockdown 2020?), or when I’ve let myself become too stressed out or wound up by work.

I’ve learned that BABY STEPS create the most lasting change. It’s the little things I tried and smaller adjustments I made that had the biggest impact long-term. They’re simply easier to stick too! Especially when faced with healing your body or mind of an illness.

We have a LOT going on. At first, making changes when you’re unwell can seem like the most daunting thing in the world, and therefore the easiest to dismiss. But it was making smaller choices that moved me forward faster in the end. I felt things shift, and that motivated me to keep moving towards the bigger changes, such as quitting smoking.

Amidst all the off-screen drama, I had a couple of lucky breaks. I had an amazing specialist who helped educate me on my illness and supported me through trying new things. I found a great masseuse/homeopath, the first of many alternative healers I saw, who taught me about the millions of other ways to influence my health and healing. I had an autoimmune illness that had created a chronic inflammatory gut disease. I learned how to repair my immune system and rebuild and support my digestive system. But it wasn’t a quick fix.

I utilised both Western and Eastern medicinal knowledge to get better and stay healthy. I needed my gastroenterologist as much as I needed my naturopath. These were the first of many teachers who helped me on my road to health.

WARNING GONGS!

Wellness is about trying to stay as healthy as we can in this very real, very busy, very unpredictable world full of people, stresses, unique challenges, external influences, unfair systems, and constant, chaotic change.

WELLNESS has become a popular term for an ever-growing industry of products and services, but to me, it just means THE OPPOSITE OF ILLNESS. The idea of ‘being well’ and the industry that supports it is there to try and help prop us all up, because let’s face it, we clearly need all the help we can get these days, right? But it can be a confusing, over-saturated, and, at times, far too overwhelming minefield when it comes to understanding what is ‘good for you’ or ‘bad for you.’ And it feels like those things change on the daily (depending on what post you just read!).

I hope that by sharing what I’ve learned on my journey, this book can help clear the clutter and give you a roadmap of sorts to wobble your own way to balance … to YOUR Self-Health.

We’ve been as practical and real as we can be. We’ve got science on our side and experts to help explain things. We’ve been practicing what we preach for the last 20 years, and we don’t discuss anything we haven’t tried ourselves.

I don’t believe Wellness is some idealistic nirvana where we all wear white, never catch colds, do yoga from dawn to dusk in shiny leotards and drink from turmeric fountains of youth!

But I’m no doctor! I’m a bloody actor, ok?! The realisation I made when I was sick was that my quality of life and my health were truly in my own hands, not anyone else’s. It was my responsibility to either improve it or let it slide. Once I had healed my body of acute pain with the help of my doctors and medication, it was up to me to try and stay that way.

Now, that kind of power over ourselves can feel like a heavy burden, but I believe it’s just because we haven’t been traditionally taught to own that responsibility yet. We handed it over to other people long ago. At first, it was the responsibility of our parents, whānau or carers to keep us well. Then, if you got sick, it was your doctor’s job to fix you.

A pharmacist can sell us some pills to help with a headache. But modern medicine doesn’t always have the answers we require. And often, it’s the little things like bloating, bad skin, funny aches and pains, or your POOP that can be a sign something is amiss. This is why only you can truly understand you.

I hope you discover what makes your body tick, your heart sing, and learn about choices you can make that are deeply GOOD FOR YOU .

It was while sitting in the Auckland sun outside a café a few years ago, getting my aforementioned daily caffeine fix, that fortune bumped me into a colleague who has fast become a friend and companion in my health-driven mission to share what I’ve learned. Kylie Bailey was a journalist and editor in the women’s magazine industry for 15 years. We’d met back when I was on the telly and she was interviewing me about my love life! But this day we reconnected outside that café over our shared passion for healthy stories because we’d both learned so much from our own.

Kylie has walked the tightrope of suffering from severe anxiety from a young age. On page 48, she shares her journey and the ways in which she’s learned to manage it.

Kylie has gone on to author multiple books and articles with a health and wellness focus, as well as kick ass in strategic brand management for sustainable businesses. She is a fact finder and research guru. And, in her spare time has been training to get her certification in Iyengar Yoga – no easy feet! (spelling pun intended)

Kylie has been practising making her own healthy choices for the last 10 years, and together we wanted to build a platform to help people to take their health and vitality into their own hands. Thus, GOOD FOR YOU was born.

This book is an opportunity for us to share some of what we’ve both learned along the way. We discuss how and why to pay attention to your mind-body connection, and we get down to basics on vital info regarding our GUT and IMMUNE HEALTH.

Whether you’re sick and on the road to recovery or well and hoping to stay that way, we hope you gain valuable insight into the fundamentals of embracing your own SELF-HEALTH.

‘Cause it’s all about balance baby …

Your health is in your hands (literally!)