Optimize Your Health with Amanda Lovett-Jones and Snap Supplements

Welcome registered herbalist, phD student studying inflammation, and senior formulator at Snap Supplements, Amanda Lovett-Jones. In this episode we are talking about optimizing your health, what supplements you should be taking and what you should be looking for in quality supplements. Want to sleep better? Improve your libido? Feel vibrant and energized? -- Tune in!

Timestamps to help you navigate this episode:
(0:00) Intro
(0:20) FREE Self Love & Sweat MONTHLY Calendar
(1:52) Optimizing Women's Health and Supplements
(12:35) Sponsor: Snap Supplements 25% OFF using code LUNDEN25
(13:37) Beets supplement and finding the right one
(21:33) Sexual Health Supplements and Magnesium Benefits
(28:15) SPONSOR: Evolve Telemed (use code LUNDEN25 for $25 OFF)
(31:09) Understanding the Benefits of Magnesium
(35:18) The Benefits of Melatonin and Mindfulness
(38:48) APAP instead of ASAP
(47:10) Spread the message of Self Love & Sweat

Supplements mentioned in this episode (use code LUNDEN25 for 25% OFF)
- Super Greens with Collagen
- Organic Nitric Oxide Beets
- Passion for Women
- Drive for Men
- Magnesium Complex
- Sleep Complex

Connect with Amanda Lovett-Jones:
@functionalhealthandapothecary
www.functionalhealthandapothecary.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:20 FREE Self Love & Sweat MONTHLY Calendar
• 1:52 Optimizing Women's Health and Supplements
• 12:35 Sponsor: Snap Supplements 25% OFF using code LUNDEN25
• 13:37 Beets supplement and finding the right one
• 21:33 Sexual Health Supplements and Magnesium Benefits
• 28:15 SPONSOR: Evolve Telemed (use code LUNDEN25 for $25 OFF)
• 31:09 Understanding the Benefits of Magnesium
• 35:18 The Benefits of Melatonin and Mindfulness
• 38:48 APAP instead of ASAP
• 47:10 Spread the message of Self Love & Sweat

Transcript

Lunden Souza: 0:01

Welcome to Self Love and Sweat the podcast, the place where you'll get inspired to live your life unapologetically, embrace your perfect imperfections, break down barriers and do what sets your soul on fire. I'm your host, Lunden Souza. Hey, have you grabbed your free Self Love and Sweat monthly calendar? Yet this calendar is so amazing. It comes right in your inbox every single month to help you have a little nugget of wisdom, a sweaty workout, a mindset activity, just a little something, something to help keep you focused and motivated and keep that momentum towards your goals. So every day, when you get this calendar, you'll see a link that you can click that will lead to a podcast episode or a workout or something that will be very powerful and quick to read. And then you'll also see, on the top left corner of every single day, there's a little check box in the calendar, and what that is is that's for your one thing. You can choose one thing every month, or it can be the same, something that you want to implement and make this something that you can easily implement, like daily meditation or getting a certain amount of steps or water, for example, and staying hydrated and even taking your supplements. This can be something if you want to get more regular doing a particular habit and routine. You can choose what that check box means. So if you want your self love and sweat. Free monthly calendar delivered right to your inbox every month on the first of the month, go to lifelikelunde. com/ calendar, fill out the form really quickly and you will have your calendar in your inbox within a few short minutes. That's lifelikelunden. com/ calendar. Go, get yours for free and enjoy this episode.

Lunden Souza: 2:06

Welcome back to the podcast. Today we have Amanda Lovett-Jones as our special guest today. She's a wellness expert and a registered herbalist in Australia and she's also working on her PhD studying inflammation, which is such a thing, such an issue, especially in the state. So I'm so excited to have you here on the show today, amanda. I met Amanda, or was connected with Amanda, through Snap supplements, which you guys know if you've been following me for a while and listening to the podcast.

Lunden Souza: 2:39

Snap supplements is one of my favorite supplements, supplement lines. I've been taking them for many years, and so we're going to dive into women's health and optimizing women's health today and we'll be talking about some specific products within Snap supplements. But not to worry if you don't have access to Snap or you're in a country where maybe it's not available. We're still going to provide a ton of value today so that you can learn more about how to optimize your health if you're a woman. So thank you so much for being here, amanda, I really appreciate you joining us from down under. I love your accent, I love Australia, I've been there once and I'm just so grateful to have you. So just to jump in. How did you become a registered herbalist, like where did your interest spark in supplementation and inflammation and on your journey as a wellness expert?

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 3:30

Thanks so much, Lunden. It's a real pleasure to be here. I have to say, to clarify, while I am Australian and I studied naturopathy in Australia, I'm actually in Seattle, so I'm in the Pacific Northwest right now. So, yeah, oh cool, yeah. But originally I got into natural health because I was traveling. I don't know if you've met a lot of Australians, but we do love to travel and when we travel, we travel for a really long time.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 3:56

So I was backpacking through Indonesia and I got really sick. I got cut on some coral on my feet and I got staph infection. I came home and was so, so, so unwell, so much so that I got colsals all over my face. I was just extremely sick and I went to see a homeopath because everything I was taking allopathically, which is Western medicine, mainstream medicine was improving a lot of the symptoms but completely tore up my gut. Old story, old themes, we're still seeing that today.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 4:31

And so I started to see a homeopath and a herbalist to help with that, and what I noticed was, in the consult I was being asked things like what is your lifestyle? How do you? How many hours of sleep do you get a night? What do you like to eat in the morning. How was your concentration, all of these things that identified to me that this person is looking at wellness in a holistic way, as though I'm an entire human being or organism that's not just I'll treat the symptom, I'll treat the gut. I was hooked, completely hooked. I was fascinated by the world of plant medicine and all the things that I could do to optimize my health, and so I enrolled in naturopathic college and five years later graduated, and then my journey into really being deep diving into the plant world and dietary supplement world began, and I've been in the dietary supplement industry and in clinical practice ever since. So 20 plus years. Oh, my gosh, I'm aging myself, Lunden, but there you go.

Lunden Souza: 5:35

Oh my gosh, but you must be, yeah, keeping your inflammation down and fostering optimal female health, because you are stunning and vibrant and I just yeah for those of you listening, you can't see Amanda. If you're watching you can, and I am just so enjoying the view because you're just so vibrant and alive and I'm so excited to talk with you today. I'm enjoying the view Absolutely. Yeah, so let's dive right in. So my listeners know that I've been using snap supplements for a while. I really, really love the college and super greens and the beats.

Lunden Souza: 6:08

Those I've been taking pretty much daily for the last three years I notice a huge difference, yeah, and when I don't take them especially and I've received a lot of messages from people as well who are like I tried it out and then I stopped, and now I can totally notice a difference in how I'm feeling, the energy in my body, even like the stagnance or lack of stagnance and the way we might feel in our body.

Lunden Souza: 6:34

And so, when it comes to today, I really want to focus and hone in on like three pillars when it comes to women's health, which is our physical well-being. You know, I think as women, we like to like what we see on the outside and to kind of optimize the way we might be feeling physically, also emotionally, and then when it comes to our sexual function as well and our libido and things like that. So, as we go through these products, I would love if we can kind of hit on all three of those pillars. Whether it is a product for that or not, we can discuss that. But what specifically? Maybe we can start with the, with the college and greens, and what specifically in them is super, super helpful for women and why should we be including this in our life as women? The college and greens there's also, yeah, the amino acid profile in there and also probiotics. So I know this is like a really jam-packed product.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 7:32

It is, and something you just pointed out, which I'd like to just circle back to, the three pillars of health, and you discussed health and well-being, as in it is a mental state as well. Taking care of yourself yes, women, but also men, I mean. We really care about what we exhibit to the world on the outside, and that starts with what we put on the inside. And if you were, if you were raised in the 80s and 90s, then you were exposed to a heck of a lot of plastics in your food. You were exposed to microwaves or, my goodness, microwave ovens, right and also pesticides. So the biggest thing that I want to talk about is how clean SNAP is, and I really am proud of that. We get a lot of organic ingredients, specifically our beets. It's the best in the world, and if there is other people in other countries that are listening to this and you cannot get SNAP sent to you there, just finding a good organic beet powder is really tricky and I understand that, but it's a foundation of so many things With the college in Greens. I'll talk about that in just a moment but they go hand in hand If you are getting just good quality, organic or as close to nature as you possibly can, as much as you possibly can, on a day to day basis. What that does is bring your gut and your cell and your energy back to homeostasis. Homeostasis is a word that we don't use on a day to day basis, but it basically means just bringing you back to balance.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 9:00

And that is where you know when you're talking about your pillars of health. It's your mind, it's your body, that's what exudes good health. Basically, trying to just medicate all the time is not optimal. But when you're taking a product that has, like barley grass and spinach and apple pectin, and we've got our carrot root, our mac root, we've got all the foundational stuff of good nitrates which comes from a lot of the green vegetables that you notice, right, but who's going to sit there and have for breakfast? For example, I'll have a plate of spinach, I'll have a cauliflower head, I'll have some rosehip fruit, but if I can put all that in one product and optimize my digestion by taking a pre or probiotic at the same time, then that's what I'm going to do, because it gives you this baseline to start your day.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 9:49

And for the gut and, as I said, I'm a big advocate for bringing inflammation down, that stops oxidative stress, so we're gonna look younger. It's basically what makes you age, is free radicals that stress, oxidative stress, chemicals from foods, actual stress from your life. If I can wake up in the morning and take something that's gonna reduce my inflammation before I start the day, that is the single most important thing that we can do, especially as women, because I'm still vain. I'm turning 50 this year and I wanna slow that process as much as I possibly can. Then, taking that first thing in the morning, you get the energy from it and you're laying this foundation of optimal nutrition in your gut which reduces inflammation. That's the best way to start your day, without a doubt, and with the collagen and supergreens, it's actually bringing back collagen to the place where we're losing it most as we age.

Lunden Souza: 10:49

Yes, which is?

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 10:51

Your skin. It's your skin, so for your collagen. Sadly, we know when little babies, when they get those chubby thaws and you just wanna chew them and then you push them and they go straight back out. That's beautiful collagen, right, and that's why we wanna eat them and oh, delicious. But as we get older, that diminishes. Our capacity to regenerate collagen diminishes. Therefore, we get skin that sags or becomes less vibrant and alive, and that's what we wanna replenish. As we get older, we wanna take collagen every day.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 11:27

Not all collagen are the same, so you wanna make sure you're having a good quality collagen. Us at SNAP supplements are actually investigating new collagen sources from seaweed. I mean, how fantastic. Another bio-diverse, another good, environmentally friendly source of collagen. So we're always at the forefront of like scientific endeavors and looking for the best, most organic, closest to nature ingredients that we can possibly find. But this is a product I take every single day as well because of for my hair I have for those who can't see me I have long, thick, dark hair and I wanna make sure that I'm getting all the nutrients for that and my skin. So wake up, have collagen greens in the morning to really reduce that inflammation just in the gut. And if you wanna back that up with your beets, your organic beets for energy, pre-workout, to increase elimination from your liver and your gallbladder and to make sure you're going to the bathroom every day, these are like a one-two punch for me. So when you say foundation of health, yes, you gotta start with the gut first, without a doubt.

Lunden Souza: 12:35

Hey, really quick, I wanna interrupt the podcast for just a minute to tell you about one of my favorite supplements for hair, skin, nails, digestive and gut health, and that is Snap Supplements Super Greens with Collagen. Now, if you're following me on social media, you've probably seen me post about this a bunch because, honestly, this product tastes amazing and it's jam-packed with nutrients, like I said, to support healthy hair, skin and nails, it helps support detoxification, a healthy immune system, and there's even probiotics in there for a healthy gut. It's non-GMO, no sugar added, soy-free, grass-fed collagen and every scoop is gonna give you seven grams of protein, and this is why I love it, because it's not like a protein shake. It's just a scoop of powder. It tastes amazing. I put it in water or, if I want more hydration, I'll put it in coconut water and mix it up, and it's like having a nice refreshing beverage that's packed with a bunch of super greens and protein. So what I'm super excited about is that for listening to the podcast you'll get this discount here. Nowhere else but for listening to the podcast, you can save 25% off on all your SNAP supplement purchases, including the super greens with collagen, and you do that by using code LUNDEN25 at checkout, that's L-U-N-D-E-N. 25. LUNDEN25 to get 25% off at checkout. You can shop on snapsupplements. com or you can shop on my website, lifelikelunden. com/ supplements and you'll see there there's already an additional 10% taken off. But you, because you're a podcast listener, you're gonna get 25% off when you use the code LUNDEN25 at checkout. LUNDEN25 at checkout to get your SNAP supplements super greens and collagen and all your SNAP supplements for 25% off. Now let's get back to the show.

Lunden Souza: 14:32

Yes, yes, and so I'm glad I'm on the right track here, because I definitely take my greens and beets every day. I kind of started this. I just recently moved to a different state and I like to. I like my habits and routines, I like my flow, and so I feel like, whether I'm traveling or if I move somewhere, I really like to settle and kind of find my flow. And so I've been like waking up, taking off my shoes and socks, going outside for like a grounding walk, getting some sunlight in my eyes, just breathing the air, maybe doing like a loop around the block, and then coming back and having my greens and beets and I just feel like so hydrated and so, yeah, invigorated after I drink them.

Lunden Souza: 15:10

So I always do one scoop of the greens and then I do. I do a half scoop of the beets, just cause it is a little bit sweet and kind of dense. So I think a half scoop feels wonderful for me. But you mentioned it's really hard to find a good quality organic beet powder. Why is that and what specifically are we looking for when we're taking our beets A you?

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 15:33

wanna get an organic beet powder, because root vegetables are notoriously difficult. To make sure that you're getting that without the pesticides and chemicals. It's almost like beets taste like dirt. I'm just gonna say it.

Lunden Souza: 15:52

I'm just gonna grow in the dirt. They taste like dirt.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 15:57

That's right, and they're not a vegetable that you can cook easily. They take a lot of time to cook. So optimizing how many beets we can have in our diet is just not going to be plausible for the average person. So when you're looking for a good beet product, a, it needs to be organic, because of what I just said earlier. And two, the taste is really a factor, and what makes ours stand out and what I keep getting feedback on is the berry is sweeter. We have the cherry lime and we have the apple flavor as well for people that might like those flavors.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 16:35

So for me, I find that a lot of the beet powders on the market are intentionally overly sweet, almost like chemically sweet, and I can't even taste the beets. I wanna be able to at least know for a fact that this is what it is. I don't want the flavor to overpower me so much that I'm like I'm basically just drinking a gummy. That's not what I'm after at all. I want something that tastes like it's from nature and completely natural, but doesn't have all the additives in there and it's flavored gently. We use stevia and just regular, natural raspberry flavor to really optimize that. I really like that.

Lunden Souza: 17:17

Yes, yeah, I think it tastes delicious, especially with the greens and the beets mixed together. So, when it comes to our physical and our emotional and our sexual health as women, what is specifically in beets, or why are beets helpful for that?

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 17:33

I'm not sure, necessarily for sexual health, but we want to increase our nitric oxide production for heart health, for brain health, for gastrointestinal health. So when you consume nitrates and that's in the form of your dark green veg red spinach extract is one of the highest sources of natural nitrates and beets so you consume nitrates and your body converts that to nitric oxide in your body. What that does is optimize your blood flow to the heart, increase circulation to your whole body. So that's why when you take beets, you get that energy surge, that real like. It's almost like a warmth that comes from your stomach all the way up. I get that anyway. It's kind of like a flush of energy.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 18:16

We want to do that before we work out, before we start the day, because what I'm finding is women between the age of, say, 25 to 55, we are caffeine consumers, I don't know why. Maybe because we're doing all the things and we're trying to look good and we're getting the kids to school and we're driving around and we've got a career and we've got to get to work on time. So we need to go, go, go, go go. However, we crash at three, four in the afternoon. So to avoid that crash, taking nitrates in the form of just a really beautiful juice every morning is the best way to get that Like okay, I'm ready to go. It allows our synopsis in our brain to start firing. We get that really nice flush of like okay, my circulation is flowing and pumping, which is actually opposite to what caffeine does. It actually minimizes the circulation. We don't want that. We actually want everything from our toes to our head to start pumping.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 19:09

I love how you wake up in the morning, Lunden, but not all of us have the time to do that. To go for a walk and be really mindful and be really present in our body is a wonderful thing to wake up. Imagine your body like a racehorse. That's what we are. That's exactly what we are with these beautiful racehorses. Would you imagine waking up a racehorse with a whip? Or would you imagine waking up a racehorse with this beautiful big bowl of, like, fresh veggies and hay? What do you think the racehorse wants to wake up with? Me personally, I'm never going to whip a racehorse, but if you wake up with a triple espresso first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, it's exactly what it's doing Like get up. It's very abrasive, very aggressive and that's why we crash, because everything's like fight or flight. But waking up gently with that anti-inflammatory stuff is phenomenal. It's the best way to do that energetically.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 20:02

When we're talking about sexual health, which is kind of a different subject, which I love that you brought up, because it's just not talked about, it's simply not talked about. I would say 10 years ago the subject around menopause just wasn't talked about. Oh yeah, it's one of those things that people go through, but like in the shadows behind a closet. And so we're openly talking about menopause now and perimenopausal symptoms. Hey, heads up, men go through andropause. People are just talking about that, but they absolutely do go through andropause. So this is to you guys as well, I'm not just talking to women. But coming up to that age where perhaps you are busy, you're very stressed out, you're exhausted, your libido and sexual health takes a backseat. I would love to open the discussion to that right now, if you're into it, Lunden, because Absolutely, absolutely.

Lunden Souza: 20:54

I love talking about things that most people don't want to talk about. I remember talking about the beats to somebody and I mentioned about blood flow and about male sexual health and how it can increase blood flow and better erections and just different things like that. And she like what'd you say? Erection, oh my gosh. And it was like this moment where I was like, oh, I think that we need to open up the conversation even more. I'm open to have the conversation until it's say the words that make people squirm a little bit and that all means. Whatever direction you want to take it when it comes to that topic, go for it.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 21:32

All right. So I'm a senior formulator at SNAP supplements and I work with a phenomenal guy. We're a wonderful team and it started to come up from the executives who were like, should we come up with some sexual health products? And me and my partner were like, yes, absolutely Like. It's about time, if you are a dietary supplement company and a health and wellness company, let's talk about the hard stuff, let's provide some support for both men and women in this sphere, and like let's get it out there. So we produce two products. One is passion for women and drive for men Pretty self-explanatory and we formulated them specific to gender. Now, let's have it just to think about that for a second.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 22:18

I listened to a ton of podcasts or a ton of research and reading about men's sexual health versus women's sexual health. We are driven by two very different motives, right. Commonly, what impacts women's sexual fire, which I like to call it, is being present, being connected to your partner, having the energy to do so. Having the energy to do so is a really big factor and feeling less stressed. That's just how we roll. If we are on a tropical beach with a cocktail right there and the kids are taking care of them, we are right there, we are ready to go, but in the day to day that's a lot harder for us. So when we were formulating for women, we were like stress needs to be really high up there. We need some botanicals, we need some dietary nutrients to really help reduce those feelings of stress. So even if, though, it is a libido product for women, I actually suggest that women who are feeling stressed, it is a really good product for them, because we put in there some botanicals, adaptogens, which means it helps the body and the mind cope during times of stress. We also put in there some beautiful, highly nourishing herbs to give the indication of the body that we are primed and ready to go.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 23:40

Now, if we want to flip that on the male side, it is about circulation, it is about stimulation and it is about energy. So this is a much more stimulating product than for women, because we want to calm women down. But for men we were like, yes, let's go, and I loved that you talked about circulation, because for men, as they get older, getting an erection may be no big problem, but sustaining an erection can be a problem, also energy as well. So we wanted to really address that in a natural way. That wasn't a little blue pill. It worked the same way as the little blue pill at all. It works on the mental and the physical by increasing and supporting that really strong blood flow and circulation, by inducing bigger and stamina and athletic performance. That's how we addressed it for men's health, because we're not talking about men's libido very much either and we really should blend in.

Lunden Souza: 24:40

Yeah, agreed, and I think too, from my conversations with my male friends and you know, just like experience as a woman being with men, it sometimes can we think that it's like a not I don't want to say a problem, but an issue that only older men experience. And what I realize is it's not really like there could be men in their thirties that struggle with erections or, like you mentioned, sustaining erections. It's not something that, like old men, you know, once they get older, that's a thing I think also with men it's become like a little bit of like embarrassing topic that they're a little bit embarrassed to admit Like hey, I'm 35 and I'm experiencing some of this, like dysfunction or whatever, and so I always try to really hold that open loving space for the men in my life who share that kind of stuff, because I think sometimes we think, oh, that's like when you're 60, 70, 80, but sometimes it could be something that we experience right at when we're supposed to, let's say, be at our peak right.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 25:38

Absolutely. And let's use the word vigor, because I love the word and it really is exactly what it sounds like to be vigorous, to be robust, to be, have that like stimulating endurance. That is what I believe society has labeled. Men from the age of sort of 18 to 35. You're at your peak of your vigor. And what if you're highly stressed at work? What if you're driving on? What if you're a single dad? What if you've got the weight of the world on your shoulders? What if you have sporadic sexual partners? Then you're like Well, how do I take care of this If I don't have a partner that understands me on a regular basis?

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 26:18

Can I take something daily that really encourages that vigor, that stokes that fire, so that I feel prepared and ready when the time comes and I'm not walking around with an erection when I don't really want one, which is a complication of the little blue pill. So when we totally separate product but that's why we took it, took it, we took that direction I want to stoke and increase fire and vigor and the feeling that like I'm on my toes, I'm ready to go. That is what wellness is, that is what feeling vital is. And so I'm really proud of these two products because we took what women said to us and we took what men said to us to heart and really dug deep to develop these two products to address those key factors of holistic health and wellness and sexual fire for both sexes.

Lunden Souza: 27:14

I love that. I love that. Thanks for going there and thanks for sharing that. The next thing I want to talk about is magnesium. This is a micronutrient that I learned a lot about, especially on my hormonal journey of being on birth control for a really long time and then getting off and regulating my hormones. I had acne and just a nice, a nice journey to discover more about myself and I learned a ton about magnesium because I always thought like, oh, when you go to CVS and you see the little magnesium tablets like there's just like magnesium and that's it Right. But I learned there's so many different kinds of magnesium and it serves a lot of different pumpkins, which is why I love the fact that snap has the magnesium complex, which includes a variety of different types of magnesium, and I think people most people don't even know that there's different types of magnesium or their different benefits. So can we touch a little bit about that, on the benefits of magnesium, the different types. Have you heard of Evolve Telemed before?

Lunden Souza: 28:18

It's the super cool opportunity to be able to meet with your doctors without going to the doctor's office, right from the comfort of your own home. I recently got my full blood panel done, cbc with differentials, thyroid panel, hormone panel, all the things and I was able to meet up with one of their doctors directly on a video call, go over all of my results, have just a really comfortable, great conversation, really understand the process of doing my labs and what it means and giving me more feedback than just like, hey, your labs are normal, you know all good. Just going through everything step by step by step and really giving me clear insights as to what I see in my lab. So it was cool, like all I did was get the paper off of the online portal. You'll have your own patient portal and you get the order. And then I went to the lab where you get your blood drawn. I did that. It took like 20 minutes. They sent the results directly to Evolve Telemed and then they uploaded my results directly to my client portal.

Lunden Souza: 29:25

Again, I got to go over it on a video call with one of their doctors. It was perfect. I had everything right in front of me. I had somebody who had an immense amount of knowledge and expertise who was able to give me great feedback, and so it was such a wonderful experience and I just feel like it was so simple and so easy to just look under the hood and double check that everything was all good internally, because I've had a history of PCOS, I've had a history of cystic acne, I've had a history of anxiety and also just like yeah, in general want to make my future not just my history bright and healthy and just like do things in a holistic way and they're very supportive of that as well.

Lunden Souza: 30:06

So if you want to do your labs with Evolve Telemed, you can use code LUNDEN25 for $25 off your labs and you can get started with that process super simply. Just go to EvolveTelemed. com and that's E-V-O-L-V-E-T-E-L-E-M-E-D. com, evolve Telemed and then, when you decide what labs you want to get done, what information you're interested in whether it's balanced hormones or balanced health you'll be able to get that personalized expert concierge level service and you can get it for $25 off. So don't forget to use the code LUNDEN25. And yeah, just doing your checkups, staying up to date with your health and well-being ahead of time and do it with Evolve Telemed. Now let's get back to the show.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 31:08

Absolutely. So I use magnesium a lot and I study it a lot because I am looking at plant ingredients that can decrease inflammation naturally. So MAG is really high up there. For me it is a natural product. But not everybody metabolizes magnesium well. It depends on what it is bound to. So you really want to glycinate or chelate, which means it is partially already broken down and it's combined with something delivered to you so that your body can break it down, detach and absorb it much better.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 31:41

There's another thing with magnesium that is another reason why you need to take it in a glycinate or a complex form is some people get a little bit of digestive upset if they have, or looser stools, if they take upward of, say, 500 milligrams of magnesium. So if I am an athlete, you're an athlete, I can tell by your guns my goodness, Lunden Gun show and so I take upward of 500 to 750 milligrams of MAG when I really, really need it because I have aches, I have cramps, I have pains. If you are somebody who does cramp, you've got to get on some MAG. It's kind of quintessential, but did you know as well? If you're not sleeping well at all, your fidgety, restless legs roll over somebody. That just cannot get comfortable at night. Taking 250 to 350 milligrams of magnesium at night can significantly impact your quality of sleep. Now, I'm not talking about if you have your phone next to you and then you finally fall asleep with all that blue light. That's a completely different thing. We want to bring in some vitamin D, we want to bring in other things and we want to switch your screen off, but for that, you know that physical agitation, Lunden, when you're lying in bed and you're like everything's buzzing, like I just can't get comfortable. It's MAG. That's the first thing I would go to.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 32:59

If you work out in any way, shape or form and you have sore muscles, let's just go to like the workout mindset for a second. When you stretch your muscles, you're tearing them. You're tearing the fibers just a little teensy bit, which creates more capacity for building muscle. That's what it does, right? You have to tear it a little bit to build more. You need amino acids for that, by the way, amino acids you can get from your college and super greens. So you're taking that every morning and your muscles need to repair. Your muscles need to relax. They need that time of healing, they need to stop with the cramping and need relaxants right, and that's what magnesium does. So if you are somebody that works out, if you are somebody that simply cannot sleep well and you're agitated or wake up several times an eye, you have any form of muscular discomfort, mag is the one you should go to.

Lunden Souza: 33:51

Yeah, yeah, I think I can definitely relate to that experience that you mentioned before. It doesn't happen a lot, but, yeah, when I'm training a lot or hiking a lot and I'm, you know, maybe not supplementing to the extent that I know I need to be those nights where you're like tossing and turning and I'm like flipping the pillow and I'm like somehow tired but not. And a lot of people reach out to me talking about how just like winding down and being able to go to sleep and have a relaxing sleep is sometimes challenging and I think we oftentimes go to in our brains. Let's say like, oh, I need melatonin or I need something to make me fall asleep, but it could actually be magnesium and needing more magnesium when it comes to sleep. How do we know if we need magnesium or melatonin? I have my sleep complex here, which I love from snap to to help with just relaxation, calming and sleep. Do we need both? Like, how do we know if it's like a mag thing or a melatonin thing?

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 34:54

Perfect segue, because I was just thinking, when you're talking about that, you know the monkey mind. Monkey mind is where you're just laying there going. Oh my gosh, I got to do this at 2pm, I've got to write that email and mind is this constant, constant, constant, constant. There's a couple of herbs that come to my head when I think of the monkey mind, and one is valerian, one is passion, passion flower, and then melatonin. Melatonin is a natural compound that we have in our body naturally and produces it, but at certain times in our life we can produce less. So by taking melatonin, even at sort of like five milligrams, really low dose, that can actually allow your body to switch from like day, day mode to night mode. So shift workers can have really impactful changes in their sleep patterns, and so melatonin has shown to be effective for shift workers. Nurses basically I worship nurses, they saved us. You run the world, nurses run the world, nurses and teachers run the world. So big shout out to all the nurses out there. I love you. And melatonin is phenomenal. We have it in our sleep, complex with those herbs I was talking to about, about that monkey mind. So we're addressing that chatter that simply like chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. And with melatonin it is important that you take a bit of a break, so you can take it for a month and then you have a month off because your body, in response to taking melatonin, only after you've taken it for quite a while it can stop producing its own content of melatonin, which we don't want. So as soon as you have any, even like a week or two break, your body goes oh, thank you, that's right, I need to do that again, but you may not be producing enough. So taking a little bit can really impact that monkey mind.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 36:39

When you are somebody with true difficulty sleeping, you're tossing and turning. You've got the monkey mind. You can double up and I highly recommend that. So somebody's coming to see me in clinic and they are, say, perimenopausal and I'm just not sleeping because of the hormonal stuff. When I'm working with the hormones on the back end, I will also double up and be like, okay, you need to sleep. First and foremost you need to sleep. It's kind of like the primal needs of the human body is love, safety, eating and sleeping. Not all in those orders. I pretty much make them all all equal. Right, you don't sleep. That's a big thing to take off the table. So taking both if you take the sleep complex, for example, and then you take the mag complex and take it before you go to bed, what you're doing is back about an hour before you go to bed. So that gives your body time to metabolize it and digest it and really sit with those herbs and supplements. That can actually decrease your, your jitteriness that you're finding in all your muscles, and it's not just for people that work out and it can also help with your monkey mind.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 37:47

If you are somebody that sits all day, then you get kind of like a lactic acid buildup in your, in your joints, in your muscles.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 37:54

That can be even more uncomfortable and distressing than if you've worked out in the day and you've got that lactic acid in the muscles. There are days when I am pounding through some research work and I have not had the time to take my 20 minute walk out lunch, to walk the dog in the afternoon, to run, to play pickleball, to dance, all the things I like to do and it's all of a sudden I can't. I, all right, it's 930. Here we go, like, and I'm trying to wind down, I'll stretch and I'll move before I go to bed. But then when I go to bed, my body is like but we normally have all this energy, like I want to work out. Why aren't we working out, let's go, let's go, let's go. So mag can also help in that way as well, just to signal to the muscles it's actually relaxation time. We don't need to be go, go, go, it's relaxation time in a natural, gentle way.

Lunden Souza: 38:48

Yeah, I love that. I didn't think of doubling up on that on those moments or those evenings when you might need it. And one thing that you mentioned was like it's a different story if you're like sitting on your phone, blue light in your eyes, waiting to fall asleep. I think one of the things that's been helpful. Like you know, I don't I like to bring more intention and more presence into my life. I can sometimes be monkey mind go, go, go and I just remind myself APAP as present as possible instead of ASAP. That's kind of like what I remind myself of, but I know that I can't Thank you, thank you, I love words. I like little things to kind of shift how I might yeah, just how I might think and how I might respond.

Lunden Souza: 39:31

But when I take my sleep sleep complex, which isn't every day, but it's usually sometimes a week I know, hey, I can't just like take this and then be on my phone and it's just going to knock me out and give me like this blissful sleep.

Lunden Souza: 39:44

I usually will take it.

Lunden Souza: 39:46

Then I'll go in the bathroom and like dim the lights and like brush my teeth, get ready for bed and like put my eye mask on, knowing that, hey, when I take this, the more that I work with the supplements that I'm taking, the better they're going to work, cause I think sometimes people are like, oh, I'm going to take this for sleep, but then I can still, you know, watch TV before I go to bed or like do last minute emails, and this is just going to make me so tired that then I'm going to fall asleep, and that's not really the case.

Lunden Souza: 40:11

So I like that you mentioned that there is like that's a whole different story. We're not like taking an ambient that's just going to knock us out, you know, in the, you know mid sentence or something. This is really something that our body can work with, and we need to make sure that we're also kind of like acting in accordance or like having reverence for these supplements, of like, okay, I appreciate the work that you're doing in me. Let me quiet down, let me stretch, let me, you know, get into a dark room and kind of appreciate that more. I feel like it works so much better when we, when we do that too, right.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 40:42

Absolutely. When they developed handheld phones, there was really no thought about how it would impact our brains in the long term or our sleep, I mean. Now all of the research is coming out about how social media and phones are impacting young teens. We're aware of it, but for the last but the five years before now it wasn't so. It was sort of like trial, trial and error, where this is what's happening to us as adults. Our brains are consuming so much information on a day to day basis and there is no time for stillness. We have created a society where there's zero time for Lull unless we're in the car, in traffic, and then we're trying to listen to a podcast or listen or listen to music or fill the void.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 41:32

But my favorite thing you just said is the mindfulness of appreciating that A. I'm taking this as a, as a natural thing from the earth to calm and soothe and for allowing my body to do its normal metabolic processes. We have stopped doing that honoring. Just at night time all the lights go out. We certainly don't have screens. We wind down and honoring that is become harder and harder and harder. So what a beautiful thing to actually bring up to remind all of us.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 42:06

You just reminded me. I read until I fall asleep, not on my phone, but I'm an avid reader and so I read, and read and read and that's my way of just going down, but also in a dimly lit room, taking that 20 minutes to do your skincare, taking that 20 minutes to brush your hair, to do all the things that you need to do to take care of yourself. That's when I bring up some really good mantras as well, when you were doing your not ASAP. It is be present in the moment. What is it Present as possible?

Lunden Souza: 42:40

I'm going to say ASAP, APAP, yeah.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 42:44

What a beautiful thing.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 42:45

It's so simple, but I mean, you know you preach a lot of holistic wellness, which I love, so I'd love to finish on that note of saying your mantras like all right, I have done all these beautiful things, I've taken all this, I've taken care of my body all day.

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 43:01

Now it's time for me to take care of my mind and take care of my heart and my spirit as present as possible, as present as possible, as present as possible, because for women and probably a percentage of men, when we're looking in the mirror, the first five things that will come to our mind is oh my gosh, how did my mother get in the mirror? When did this happen? Gosh, you know the lines are here and I've got sunspots there, or you know whatever the narrative should be changed to as present as possible. I am amazing, I am beautiful, I am worth it, I am loved. That changes your whole outlook for the very next day where you wake up and do this all again. Take your anti-inflammatory drink in the morning, have your five minutes of walking around the neighborhood looking to the sun with your eyes to the sun and absorbing all the grandeur that is each season, and moving throughout your day with mindfulness and being proactive about wellness, which I love. It's a great message.

Lunden Souza: 44:03

Yeah, being proactive and appreciative of it. I think sometimes we think like, oh, I just need to take this and it's supposed to just work for me without me working with it. I think the best years that I've I mean when I think about moments where I was thinking I was taking supplements to get more muscles or to burn more fat or to look a certain way. But when I start to work with my supplements to say, hey, this is nourishing my body, nourishing my gut, my mind, helping me reduce stress, helping me show up even better in my relationships and my interactions with others, and then also myself, as we wind down the day, as you mentioned, just being in that space of gratitude for the day, gratitude for what we see in the mirror, and then taking that into rest with us, instead of all the shoulds and supposed tos and the monkey mind stuff that can often be on repeat. I have those moments too, but I really have enjoyed this conversation, because now I think I'm not going to look at my supplements the same.

Lunden Souza: 45:04

I'm going to think about you and about this conversation that we've had today. I want our listeners to know that you can get 25% off all of your SNAP supplement purchases when you use the code LUNDEN25, l-u-n-d-e-n-2-5. If you are somewhere where you have SNAP supplements available, you can use that code Again, all the value and information that Amanda provided today regarding supplements in general will help everybody just shop smarter, be a little bit more present in their purchases and also present with their consumption of their supplements. I really appreciate you, amanda, and all that you've shared with us today. Can you share a little bit more about how people can connect with you even more, whether it's on social media or just to learn more wisdom from you?

Amanda Lovett-Jones: 45:56

Yeah, thank you. It's been a lot of fun, Lunden. I love to do it again. There's so much we haven't even touched on. We haven't even touched on stress. We haven't even touched on gut health. There are so many subjects around wellness that we can deep dive into. Thank you for having me. My name is Amanda Lovett-Jones. I have a clinic in Seattle area, but I see people from all over the world via Zoom. You can find me on Instagram and my website at Functional Health and Apothecary. I will send that through to you, Lunden, so you can share that link with your followers and listeners. That would be great.

Lunden Souza: 46:31

Absolutely. I think. All of that on how you can get connected with you, amanda, in the description and in the show notes. Thank you guys for listening. If you have any aha moments or questions or anything, I invite you to reach out to myself or Amanda. We just love interacting and talking about. I guess I didn't ask you that ahead of time, but I think they can send you an idea on Instagram or something, yeah, and just connect and learn a little bit more. Yeah, thank you guys for listening. I hope you have a wonderful day and let's make it our closing thing to live as present as possible In our minds. Maybe we can think of APAP instead of ASAP. Thank you, amanda, for being here and thank you guys for listening. Thanks, Lunden.

Lunden Souza: 47:15

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Self Love and Sweat the Podcast. Hey, do me a favor Wherever you're listening to this podcast, give us a review. This really helps a lot and share this with a friend. I'm only one person and with your help, we can really spread the message of self love and sweat and change more lives all around the world. I'm Lunden Suza, reminding you that you deserve a life full of passion, presence and purpose, fueled by self love and sweat. Self Love and Sweat. The Podcast is a hit spot. Austria production.