Grace Kingswell is a nutritional therapist, breathwork instructor, podcaster and all-round wellbeing ambassador. She believes in the enjoyment – key word here – of food and the power real food holds for pleasurable, feel-good moments throughout your day.
Bethan caught up with Grace to chat about finding joy in nutrition, but also stress management, wild swimming and why its’ important to breathe. Properly.
Getting to the root of joyful nutrition with Grace Kingswell
Bethan:
You recently moved down to Cornwall, a part of the world I love, and I wondered how that’s changed your pace of life after living in London for so many years.
Grace:
It’s so nice. You’ll wake up in the morning and it's really quiet. You just hear the birds. Then you might go for a swim. And that might be the only thing you do all day. The rest of the time you’re at home working or preparing food for dinner. It almost forces you to live at a much slower pace, I think. But when stuff does happen here, an event or a cocktail evening at a local place, it's exciting! Everyone then makes the most of it.
That translates into preparing food too. There are so few places to go out and get food here, so you find yourself relishing in the fact that you're nurturing your body by preparing really good home cooked food every day, rather than buying something ready made from a shop or takeaway place.
Bethan:
As a nutritional therapist, what do you see are the benefits of having time to make food for yourself and making it from fresh?
Grace:
I do much more than talk to people about diet. Helping people make food for themselves and then reminding them to appreciate the food they make is huge part of my job. But the overwhelming challenge people face is that they’re very confused about food. They've certainly had mixed messages from social media and the press. The first step I help them take is to strip it all back and talk to them about what real food is: eating food your ancestors would have recognised as food.
The simplest thing you can do for your health is cook from scratch because we, for the most part, have a really processed diet. And it's so, so, so, detrimental to immunity, gut health, blood sugar. Everything. Even so called ‘healthy’ foods that are shop bought are hugely processed. Hummus for example. If you made Hummus at home, you’d use olive oil. Shop bought version often contain both rapeseed and sunflower oils and that can cause an imbalance.
Bethan:
Why is that?
Grace:
It's the processing and the heating and the cooking and the exposure to oxygen that's problematic. It contributes to high inflammation in the population. I regularly test omega three and omega six ratios of all new patients to look at the balance of those two essential fats. On average we’re supposed to have something around the value of four to one. So, four omega sixes to one omega three.
Omega Six fats are the sunflower oils, rapeseed oil, seeds, nuts, and pulses. The Omega three fat is the oily fish. I've seen numbers of 40 to one come back and it's just crazy. That’s why I'll say to people that they should always check the ingredients in hummus, for example. Cooking from scratch can be transformative for so many people.
Bethan:
I often think there's this disbelief in nutrition. That we're so far removed from what we eat, but things are changing. There's more focus on food and the rise in brilliant resources such as your podcast State of Mind, which is such a fascinating listen, are thankfully helping people become more and more re-engaged with their food. Seeing it not just as fuel but understanding how it affects body and mind too.
Grace:
You know we must remember that yes, food is nutrition but it's also joy. It's sharing a meal with friends. It's having a slice of birthday cake. It's about being good a lot of the time and sometimes just being a bit kind to yourself. For me that isn't going and eating at a McDonald’s, but it is having a piece of cake if I want to eat cake.
I obviously talk about a lot of aspects of health nutrition on social media and via my podcast, but the aim is to share information only. I don’t tell people what to do because I think that otherwise, people can just get obsessive about it without giving themselves a bit of a break.
Bethan:
I think this is similar in non-alcoholic drink space. There’s obviously so many benefits to not drinking, but we're not telling people ‘You must stop drinking.’ It's just a case of reminding them it's important that you just give yourself a bit of a break. And enjoying it when you do.
Grace:
Yes, with something that's flavourful made using ingredients that really sound familiar and are ultimately delicious.
Bethan:
Exactly. Pleasure is such an important part wellbeing. Anything that helps you wind down and feel good. It’s not about trying to be too perfect and then getting worried or really stressed about it. Because that then that stress becomes another factor towards feeling unwell.
Grace:
Yeah, stress is a huge factor towards disease. For so many of us, feeling unwell can come down to just stress.
Bethan:
What might be causing someone chronic stress? And what are the things that can be helpful to counteract it.
Grace:
I think the fundamental thing for people to understand is; although we’ve become modern beings, our stress response hasn't evolved yet to cope with the change in pace. It’s still incredibly primitive.
Our bodies can’t tell the difference between a life-threatening stress such as something attacking you, or one too many emails from your boss. So as soon as that stress is registered by the body, even if it’s only that your partner didn't put a wash on, and it's annoyed you; your body will think it's a life-threatening stress.
We have mechanisms to cope with those stress hormones secreted by these incidents. But back in the day, it would have been a short-lived stress. Either you would have escaped the stress, fought it, or died. But these days, we carry on living with a chronic low-level stress all the time, and that's where the damage is caused.
In terms of what people can do to combat that. I really think it is about finding joy rituals. It’s about laughing more. Breathing more deeply.
Going out into nature and taking your shoes off to feel the ground beneath your feet is a brilliant de-stressor because we’re fundamentally natural beings. We're very connected to the earth via the electron transfer from our bare feet to the soil that we're standing on. So that is a quick and simple way to ground yourself. And it's not Hocus Pocus. It’s science.
Bethan:
I know that when I've got a brought the boys down to Cornwall. As soon as they get to the sand dunes on the way to the beach, they immediately take their shoes off. Like it’s a complete instinct to be sandy.
Grace:
Yeah, it's amazing how we've retained that physiological reaction. It’s the quick and easy wins you want to look for. Finding a bit of time through the day to have space for yourself. It's crucial. It doesn't have to be a four-day retreat. It’s better if it's little and often because you're then training your stress response. You're modulating the way that the nervous system is functioning. Swapping between that sympathetic fight or flight and that parasympathetic rest and digest. Take time to enjoy these little moments throughout the day to do something you enjoy.
Bethan:
I wanted to chat to you about wild swimming. It's become such a big thing and although I love the idea of it - it looks amazing - I'm such a wuss! I've been trying to train myself by having cold showers to get myself used to the cold because I know it's meant to be great for your mental health. When did you get into wild swimming? Was it something that you approached purposefully, or was it accidental?
Grace:
It's funny because it has this name – wild swimming - like it’s an ultimate call or something. But it's just swimming. And for me, that's what it always was. I never swam consistently through the winter or anything, but if there was the opportunity of going in the sea, wherever I was, I would take it.
And sometimes it was really cold, but I realised that I loved it. It wasn't until I started doing it when I was my least healthy that I realised it made me feel so good and so happy. There were times when I knew that it wasn't doing me any favours because cold water is a stress on the body. But it was also a sort of resilience thing for me. I felt like if I could get into the water for just a couple of minutes, I could think as least I've done that today and be proud of it, even if I’d feel rubbish for the rest of the day.
Bethan:
Is it a daily ritual for you?
Grace:
I'd like it to be daily. The reality is that it's not. I go a few times a week. In the summer I do go every single day. It's just lovely. Or I have an outdoor shower, which I also really love - it’s just a garden hosepipe really. But I probably get wet and cold most days.
It sounds silly, but I'm not someone who loves to be cold. I love the swimming when I'm doing it, but in the winter, I will come home and have a hot bath. In Russia and in the Nordic countries they often balance sauna and cold water. What it does is create a pumping mechanism for your lymph system, which sits just beneath the skin. Unlike your blood circulation, it doesn't have a heart pumping blood around the body. It requires manual stimulation. Exercise is fantastic for your lymph and so is hot and cold. It helps to dilate blood vessels and then constrict them. Pumping lymph around the lymph system is a vital part of your immunity. It's like the meeting point where antigens meet with pathogens. It helps carry them out and send them away from the body. It’s a big part of detox. So that's why you have this tradition of a cold, cold shower followed by sauna.
I would just say that if you have been in the in the cold for quite a long time and your core body temperature has dropped quite low, then going into a very hot sauna can make you feel incredibly lightheaded. It can cause some people to faint. That's when you need to be really careful. But if you're at a spa, and you do one of those ice buckets and then you go into swimming, I think that's probably not an issue.
Bethan:
As well as a nutritional therapist, you’re a breathwork instructor, and you mentioned breath as an easy thing to add into your day. Can you talk a wee bit more about that?
Grace:
So breathwork is just a way of breathing. It’s the simplest way the human body has of modulating the nervous system. Swapping between a very common fight or flight sympathetic state, to a very rest and digest parasympathetic state. The simplest way to do that is by nasal breathing. Breathing in and out through the nose activates the sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system in the same way that breathing in and out through the mouth in hyperventilation revs you up and makes you quite stressed. It's so simple to nasal breathe, but so many of us don't do it.
Breathing properly using our diaphragm is beneficial too. Belly breathing. If you watch a baby sleeping, their stomach rises and falls. If you watch an adult breathing, we breathe just from our chest most of the time. We're not actually getting deep down into lungs. If you think of an inverse triangle shape, the largest surface area for gas exchange is at the bottom of the lungs. In terms of getting oxygen to the cells and carbon dioxide out, you really want to breathe with your belly.
To geek out further
Grace is host of the podcast State of Mind, and co-hosts Twos Company with Sophie Hellyer.
You can read more of her nutritional advice, including breath, exercise, recipes and specialist advice on her Patreon page. And you can read more about that here.
Follow Grace on Instagram @gracekingswell.