Episode 19
Heart of Stone: The Calcified Woman
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Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?
As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.
Can we believe that we only have four episodes, including today, which is episode 19 of season one left? It's kind of sad, we're coming close to the end. But it couldn't be a foundation season if we didn't at least brush or touch up on minerals. And this is not going to be a super in depth discussion about minerals, we're going to talk about something very specific, what I like to call the “calcified woman phenomenon.” With minerals being all of the rage right now in a lot of health spaces I feel like in the past couple of years, you know, compared to three years ago, minerals were barely being talked about at all, except for kind of the very basics.
And now it just seemed like mineral education has exploded, especially within the pro metabolic space. You know, everyone's talking about minerals, but even beyond that they were being touched upon in the low carb and keto space, even before that. And that was mostly as a way to combat the Keto flu, because when you go low carb, or you go keto, what's gonna happen is, as your body switches to using adrenal hormones like adrenaline, adrenaline kind of acts as a diuretic, so you're gonna lose a lot of water weight the first week or two, which is why a lot of people are like, Oh my gosh, I lost five pounds, or seven pounds or ten pounds, but it's because you drop a lot of water. Especially when you're not eating carbohydrates, your muscles stop storing as much water within the tissues. For every one gram of carbohydrate, the muscle tissue stores about four grams of water. So as your muscle glycogen gets depleted, you're gonna lose a lot of the water within your muscle tissue. And you're gonna probably also lose a lot of water weight. In general, this is usually under the effect of adrenaline and then just using up your glycogen stores.
On top of that, a lot of people don't recognize that insulin plays a big role in salt regulation, mineral regulation, and when you don't have the same secretion of insulin that you did before, because you're not eating carbohydrates, it will often lead to a loss of sodium. And sodium really governs water balance within the body and the tissues. But I think a lot of people talk about minerals in the pro metabolic space because they see it as kind of the next level to metabolic restoration. A lot of people can see the connection between hormones and mineral regulation, mineral corticoids, which are our mineral regulating cortical steroids, or that kind of group of hormones that falls under the adrenal hormones that the adrenal cortex would create play a foundational role in regulating mineral status. Even the ones like I mentioned before, like insulin, is not technically seen as a mineral corticoid. Yet it does have an impact, a secondary impact, on minerals, but things like aldosterone will have a direct impact on our mineral status.
And so hormones and minerals are really intricately connected. They really govern both energy and electric conduction within the body. They really play a big role in hydration status and our ability to regulate the water within our tissues. And remember, the water in our bodies in itself is conductive in nature. So they play a big role in helping us regulate energy and this is why sometimes they are referred to as the spark plugs of the body. In this podcast as we continue to really talk about the foundations of my teachings, and really the truth that so many women these days are having to sustain their energy by metabolically expensive cellular processes, right, we're not in alignment with how our body is supposed to operate, or stay balanced. And so a lot of us are having to expend extra energy continuously, to maintain the level of output that we have, you know, whether it comes from our job, or our house duties are a mixture of both things that we have on our plate, the amount of stress we have on our plate, our own behavioral patterns that add to our stress, most of us are suffering from various hormonal issues, digestive issues and beyond, really, because we're living beyond our energetic means. We are really living so far out of alignment with where our energy wants to remain. And we're shifting our systems to have to maintain this huge amount of output that we just can't sustain for the long term.
So when you actually talk to various experts in the mineral field, and I've talked to a few of them, a lot of them actually deeply believe that the part of a hormone's job is to really move minerals around and direct mineral usage throughout the body. And this track, I mean, if you look at people who have severe hypothyroidism, and when you look at that active form of T3, that active thyroid hormone, it really allows the cell to be the right type of permeable. Every cell kind of has this barrier that keeps the minerals that are supposed to be inside of it inside of it, and the minerals that are supposed to be outside of it. And in hypothyroidism, for example, or when we have low thyroid function, which so many of us struggle from these days, just because of the slew of estrogen that we're dealing with from every single direction can really suppress not only our thyroid function, but our metabolic output in general, which will tend to always have us end up relying on our backup systems, our adrenals. And so when you look at, for example, a pullback of thyroid hormone or not having enough thyroid hormone, this often leads to these permeable cells that are leaking minerals in and out, they're unable to maintain the proper levels of hydration. And they almost become leaky, in a sense, the cells themselves become leaky, and they have a hard time holding on to the minerals that they need like magnesium and potassium.
Electrolytes
And so when we are in this really burned out state or this hypo metabolic state, that so many of us, we've gotten so far into this place that we're slowly kind of digging ourselves out of it, you can start to see how important it is for us to pay attention to minerals. Even when you look at the word electrolyte, it really is within the name - electric light - or is that conductor of electricity in a way. And I know I know, not all minerals are electrolytes, but usually the ones that are considered our main minerals, or macro minerals, which we'll get into in a second are usually considered electrolytes. Really what electrolyte means or what an electrolyte does, is it really is just any mineral that helps carry an electric charge throughout the body. And to do so, there really needs to be a conductive medium or fluid as well, AKA water, which is why our body is primarily or a large percentage water because water can be kind of act as this conductive fluid.
Water is this amazing conductive fluid. If you have never seen Dr. Masaru Emoto’s experiments with water and his beliefs that water has a type of memory. He played different types of music and different things to water. And then he studied the water under a microscope and what he would find is that water would take different shapes depending on what it was exposed to. He actually believed that water had a consciousness and he wrote a book called "The Hidden Messages in Water” that is just fascinating. Water and minerals are interrelated and you can't have one without the other. This is why chugging a bunch of water doesn't always just hydrate our bodies. We actually need the minerals associated with the water that would come within the water. Minerals can really determine if water is living or not and doesn't really hydrate our bodies at all.
How Hydration Works
And just as a side note, you know, I've noticed a lot especially within the pro-metabolic space how much water has kind of become almost demonized, which is really interesting, because it's just, it shows our human tendency to go to one extreme, and then the other. People used to chug a gallon of water a day, or they would have the goal of like, I'm going to drink a whole gallon a day or multiple liters a day. And then we kind of became aware that just chugging a bunch of water can actually strip the body of minerals if we don't have enough minerals, because the minerals are pulled in order to help that water hydrate the body. If we don't have the minerals there, then we're not going to be able to hydrate and just kind of go right through us and actually maybe even deplete us of the exact minerals that we need.
But then on the flip side, some people have really been drinking absolutely no water at all, and have become chronically dehydrated, and so focused on mineral-rich hydration, focusing in on broths and milk and juices and things like that, that some people have gotten too far away from making sure that their body is remaining hydrated, and it's affecting them on a digestive level, on a hormonal level. It really affects your mood, and your mental and emotional health, your mental clarity. There is something to be said about making sure you are getting enough water. And of course, it's going to shift depending on the season, how hot you are, how much you're sweating, how much physical activity you're doing, where your hormones are at. You know, some people don't evaporate as much water from their skin, because of hormonal imbalances, or some hormonal imbalances can actually impact our ability to get thirsty. And so we find ourselves never thirsty. It's important to be aware of this and to be getting enough water. There is nuance there. And we can't operate on either side of the extreme where we're chugging a gallon of distilled water, that's definitely not going to help us.
And then on the flip side, barely having any water at all, and almost wearing that as a badge of honor, like, “I only get my hydration from mineral rich beverages.” And some people really do need some water. I know that's not surprising to a lot of you. But I think some people listening probably need to hear that there doesn't always need to be like this constant, huge amount of mineral cocktail added to the water. Yes, if our water is de-mineralized, it's a good idea to add some minerals back in. But we don't have to make this very mineral cocktail every time. But now that we've gotten that little rabbit hole out of the way, I feel like I gave a public service announcement for the day.
So everybody has a different definition of what our main macro minerals are. Sometimes you'll hear people refer to it as calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium, some people will include chloride in there, some people will exclude calcium, some people will include phosphorus. But at the end of the day, those minute details don't really matter. Really, what we have to understand is the reason that they're called macro minerals is because these are the most minerals we have in our body, other minerals like trace minerals, zinc, selenium, copper, those types of minerals are considered trace, because we just don't have as much in our body regulating as many processes, that doesn't mean that they aren't important, it just means that they are just not as present in our bodies in super high amounts. And we often think about minerals more from a physical perspective, you know, how they're going to impact our metabolism, how they're going to impact our hormones, how they're going to impact us on a physical level.
But mineral patterns really do align with psychological, emotional and spiritual patterns. And it's actually believed in some circles that when we go through a traumatic event, whatever mineral pattern we're in at that time will kind of get imprinted on our system. It will become the mineral pattern, which aligns with the neural pathway, or the experience that we have been through, and it will actually help in setting the behavior. So some people will say when they go through a traumatic event or life experience, and they'll say, man, it just feels like I'm still stuck in that time, or I haven't aged since then in my head mentally, or I still have patterns of behavior that I learned from that time that I'm having a hard time breaking. Oftentimes, you'll be able to see on a mineral level, like if you're running a hair tissue mineral analysis test, for those of you that don't know what an HTMA is, you can often see the patterns that back up that behavior and back up that trauma. It's interesting because when we start to heal our body and are really focused in on minerals and balancing minerals or replenishing minerals, what can sometimes happen is that we'll start to move through mineral patterns of the past and so we can actually kind of revisit a mineral pattern of the past and it will bring up a past experience. It'll bring up those thoughts, those feelings, the things that we went through, even if we didn't really find ourselves thinking about it very much before then.
It's often a part of the process of mineral balancing when you are nourishing your body on a cellular level, whether that's through food or adding supplemental support, in certain ways, depending on your needs, you can actually find a lot that your mineral patterns are really lined up with your emotional patterns or your behavioral patterns, where you are spiritually or psychologically. And so throughout this season, we've really talked about femininity and what it truly means to be in our feminine energy. We have done it in a way that is kind of not aligned with a lot of what's out there. So I think it's led to a lot of you, you know, asking where can I learn more about this, but this has all really come from my research of physiology and how I've really learned about the female body. It has helped me see its essence more clearly. And as much as I have learned from certain people's work or has guided me in a specific direction, it has come from a lot of my research into hormones and physiology, which is why it might sound like stuff you've never heard before. Because it's also stuff I've never heard before. This is something I'm teaching from the very ground up and developing with you along the way with your feedback and your experiences that you shared with me. It really is aligned with what I'm seeing as kind of the feminine experience.
But throughout the season, we really talked about this almost lack of softness that has come from women. We have hardened ourselves in order to be able to sustain our masculine energy. We've had to really build up walls and build up this type of “weak strength” which is kind of how I would call it and, if that bothers you just hear me out, I'll explain it in a second. Or maybe a better phrase would be “brittle strength,” where we perceive that we're so hard and we're so strong, and we're, you know, we're capable. But on the inside, we're crumbling, and we're having a hard time where we're one step away from just collapsing under the stress and the weight of it. And our bodies are showing that day after day after day, you know, physically, we can't show up as our best self, because our bodies are having to bear the brunt of that, bear the weight of it. And this does impact us on every level on a metabolic level, on a cellular level, how our hormones are functioning.You know, hormones are really just chemical communications between the cells. And so if the cells are stressed, and the cells are struggling, and the cells don't have what they need, then on a more macro level, you're going to see the hormones reflecting that.
But what a lot of women don't recognize or realize or maybe even know is that when you are in a stressed out state for a long period of time, often that's going to be very physically depleting. Because we talked about quite a few episodes back, I think it was in the “Missing Piece to Healing Trauma” episode, we tend to go through these different stages of stress. So there is an initial period of alarm, where our body is going to utilize hundreds of resources and kind of shift things in order to be able to meet the need and survive, right? This is usually going to come at the expense of our future. I always kind of think about it as like metabolic debt or cellular debt, you're often going to pull from your deep wells or your deeper mineral reserves to be able to sustain the amount of adrenal output that you have to you know, in a stressful experience where you're pumping out lots of cortisol and adrenaline, it's gonna require a lot of sodium and potassium, to give you that get up and go.
A lot of women really confuse that manic type of adrenaline energy to real sustainable energy. And that manic energy really comes at a cost. Of course, it feels good when it's happening. But the crash and the come down is really the recovery from it. And so sodium and potassium are particularly the minerals that are going to give you that get up and go. Whereas calcium and magnesium are going to be the ones that kind of pull the brakes or calm things down. Every time you're pushing forward using your backup systems, and then you're having to pull back using your other systems. It causes an expenditure of minerals, you're utilizing minerals in that process. And so for so many women who are living in this kind of constant state of chronic stress, they are going to start experiencing deep mineral imbalances at some point, and it really depends on the nutritional wealth that they were given by their mother and the nutritional wealth that they really had going into the stressor.
It's probably no surprise that some of us are set up better than others, depending on our mother's mineral status, because our mother's mineral status really imprints upon us. Mothers give about 10% of their minerals or four pounds of minerals to each baby, which is why in the research you actually see the oldest tends to be the smartest. And there's actually science to back this up. Catherine Shanahan and her book “Deep Nutrition” talks about this, where as each child gets the nutrients from the mother, the mother is only going to give her or him what they have to give. So it's not really a practice anymore, at least in our culture to replenish post pregnancy, like it was in traditional cultures where if you were planning on getting pregnant, you would usually support and nourish your body in a specific way for sometimes six months plus, leading up to that time. Then there were specific postpartum rituals to replenish the mother as well of her nutrients and minerals, which now we don't do that.
We don't practice pregnancy spacing as a practice, we also don't actively or consciously replenish our nutrients, the nutrients that we've lost in a structured or practiced way anymore. And so not all of us are set up the same nutritionally. It really was determined by our mothers, and then our diets growing up and while we were developing, and really our diets during the stress as well, or during the stressor. So this is often why you can see one person, you'll be like, why can they sustain this really stressful diet? You know, they're intermittent fasting, they're low carbing. They're, you know, plunging and cold baths for an hour every day, like, how are these sustaining that? But then I tried that for two months, and I can't sustain it at all, like I got adrenal burnout within months. And this is usually why it just really is determined by how we go into it.
The Calcification of Women
And although all minerals have a delicate balance with one another, you know, these main macro minerals, calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium all impact each other immensely. They're intricately connected, and one will bump up the other or one will bump down the other, if you take too much of one, it will lower another, there's a delicate kind of balance there. But when we're talking about the physical hardening of women and how that's affecting us on a psychological level, it really comes down to calcification, or what's often referred to as the calcium shell. So calcification is often thought of as a process of aging, which it kind of is, but really, it's actually a process of stress that leads us to age faster, to get sick. And in a lot of instances, it's actually related to a lot of the reasons why we end up dying, at least the most common ones today. But what I kind of see in the space over and over again, as mineral education gets farther and farther, and people start to educate about calcium shell, I think a lot of women start to think, oh my gosh, if I have a calcium shell, something is wrong with me. Or this is something I have to heal from, oh, no, it's scary.
I got this question actually, through my Instagram DMS the other day. I think it was just like, how do I recover from a calcium shell. I want to remind women that it is a protective mechanism that ends up backfiring on us. It is a pattern. And it is what it is. It's something that our body has accumulated to protect us from the stress. If we become aware of it, we don't have to stress about it, it's just a pattern that our body is going to have to move out of. And so on an emotional level, it can often lead us to feeling like we have a physical shell around ourselves because that is what's physiologically happening. There's almost a buffer that's being placed in between ourselves and what we're going through. And it can sometimes be seen as feeling really numb, feeling really depressed. That feeling of like I can't bring myself to just care like I just am completely going through the motions. It can also sometimes be referred to as shut down or emotionally cold or unfeeling or feeling like a shell of yourself.
When a woman has a calcium shell or she's starting to become calcified, she's hardening, the body is saying, “Hey, I hear you, we're really stressed out and we're under a lot of pressure. So I'm going to actually strengthen us. I'm going to turn us into stone. I got you, I got your back.” It really is a physical barrier that the body is building as protection. And so you know that's represented in nature, right? You know, an egg, the egg shell is complete calcium carbonate or when you look at a pearl you know, an irritant gets inside the oyster and then it builds this pearl around the irritant and that pearl is also made up of mostly calcium. There are very real, often physical calcification symptoms that we can suffer from, like gall stones and kidney stones and tonsil stones and the hardening of the arteries. Even sometimes just a general feeling of like a lack of flexibility or credit, that kind of crunchy feeling that we get in our joints like really feeling like, Man, I've lost a lot of flexibility and resilience and elasticity, I'm really hardening.
Of course, on an emotional level, we can often see that we're really closed off having a hard time receiving people's gratitude or emotions or feeling emotional, right? We just feel kind of cold and unfeeling. Like we cannot be moved by much. But so many women don't realize that this can be being felt for real physical reasons that goes beyond sometimes the emotional or the spiritual. In the psychological it can go into the realm of the physical. Our body often will build calcium shells, or calcify itself in the first place, from trauma from experiences we go through if we're in really stressful situations for a period of time where our body is having to physically brace and protect itself. Even just general irritation or inflammation or nervous system excitation, when our body is constantly in a stress response, or we're constantly inflamed, our body will bring in calcium almost as a buffer system to create some type of physical barrier.
Even some women that get their breast implants removed, we'll find that there's often calcium deposits on the silicone itself to almost again, create this protective barrier around whatever the body sees as an irritant. But it even goes beyond that, because we have to kind of see this epidemic of women who are calcifying their soft tissues, they're also depleting their hard tissues. So that goes back to kind of that “brittle strength” that that I'm talking about. I think that's descriptive of what's going on. Oftentimes, as we calcify, we're going to become more stiff, more dysregulated, more inflexible. We're gonna have a harder time thinking through all of the nuances of things, we're gonna probably stick to more black and white style of thinking, really kind of strict in our minds, both to ourselves and to others. But on the flip side, as we get more hardened in those ways, we're going to often find ourselves becoming less and less resilient to stress. Because physiologically, what's happening as much as I've seen the functional health space, kind of almost demonized calcium, because there was that really weird period of time in the 80s, and 90s, where calcium supplements were just recommended, like just take these massive amounts of calcium supplements, and then people start to recognize, oh, this might not actually be the way to go. Because of this very phenomenon, calcium is not always regulated by just calcium, you have other cofactors that are going to really regulate the use of it, and it can be deposited into the soft tissues. Even though it doesn't belong there. 98% of our calcium belongs in our hard tissues, like our bones and our teeth, and fat soluble vitamins.
And you know, the hormone of the sun, Vitamin D plays a big role in regulating our usage of calcium, especially vitamin K, too. So what's often happening is actually, if we're not getting enough calcium within the diet, which let's be honest, a lot of women are not these days, you know, so many women are avoiding dairy, are having a really hard time digesting dairy. So their main sources of calcium are like vegetables that are often not cooked properly or prepared. Traditionally, what can happen is when we're in this state where our body really wants to build up this defense mechanism, our body will get the calcium from somewhere. So if we're not getting it in the diet, we're actually going to see our bodies start to pull calcium from our hard tissues. It will use hormones like prolactin, or parathyroid hormone, where if we're getting a lack of calcium within the diet, the body will actually hike up these hormones like prolactin, or parathyroid hormone.
These are catabolic hormones in high amounts, they can rapidly disintegrate our bone when needed under stress. And so we're simultaneously pulling from our hard tissues, our resilient tissues that are supposed to be strong and steady and sturdy, to strengthen the softer parts of ourselves to create the shell around the softer parts of ourselves. And this over time really causes the cells to on a metabolic level not function appropriately, they're not going to burn sugar the way that they're supposed to, not going to burn glucose properly.
It's going to have this chain reaction within our bodies where we feel like the way that we store fat. And the way that we are appearing physically is going to actually start to shift we're going to start to look more masculine, we're going to start to store fat in a more masculine way, where remember that the masculine form has more of its, I guess the center of its weight is in the chest and the upper body, whereas the center of the females weight is going to be in her lower body, her hips and her pelvis. And so you'll see this shift start to take place where women will tend to store fat, the majority of their fat in their upper body, especially when under stress in their arms and in their abdomen and less than their lower body. They can sometimes actually start to see their physical features change the softness shifts. And there are, again, physical reasons why this is occurring. And it's not the only reason. But for a lot of us, a lot of us are the calcified woman. And we often can feel it. But a lot of times, if we do run some type of hair tissue mineral analysis, where we analyze our minerals, we can often see this pattern with, you know, high, high, high levels of calcium, or sometimes over time, our tissue levels of calcium can get really, really depleted, too. So it's going to usually show up and very, very high, excessive amounts of calcium just skyrocketed high on an HTMA, or very, very low.
So often, you'll hear the recommendation of increasing sodium and potassium, and magnesium. And these can be effective ways to start to move calcium out of the soft tissues, absolutely, because the minerals kind of all align with each other. And so if you have an elevated amount of calcium, you start to take some magnesium, for some women, that's gonna really help kind of bring balance back to the body, or, you know, you add in sodium and potassium, and it helps the body mobilize calcium, it almost causes a softening. Vitamin K2 is often also recommended when there's a calcium shell, at least sometimes. And it is a really powerful tool that we have to break up calcium.
Another very physical factor that can impact the calcium shell is vitamin D. So a lot of people right now are taking part in this excessive amount of vitamin D supplementation. And this can often lead to an intense amount of calcium dysregulation in the body, and therefore can sometimes contribute to excessive calcification or an imbalance of how the body utilizes calcium. But really, one of the most simple and effective strategies is just to get more sodium, magnesium, and potassium within the diet.
But it's important to remember that again, there's a delicate balance. So I've seen people slam sodium or slam potassium, or slam magnesium. And it's just too much for their system, they need to go low and slow. They need to be a little bit more careful and cautious and gentle with their system, especially keeping in mind that if this is a shell that the body has built up as a protective mechanism, it's going to want to kind of hang on to it. And to try to just strip it away or to break it up forcefully. I just don't see it as something that needs to be forcefully fixed. It's something that needs to be gently supported, and made aware of.
The Only Way Out is Through
To me, I think it can bring a lot of freedom to women, because they can understand, wow, like this is why I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling. I think sometimes when we feel like a stone cold woman who's having a hard time connecting to our emotions, deep down, we can feel like there's maybe something that's wrong with us. But in reality, it's that our body has felt so much, it doesn't want to feel those things anymore, and so has numbed itself down or kind of separated itself from those things. And so as we gently support our system back to balance, what can happen is we have to feel everything that we didn't feel while we had this calcium shell. And so instead of looking at it as a pattern that needs to be fixed or corrected, we have to start to maybe shift our mindset to this is a pattern that needs to be moved through and felt through.
Really, in some cases, like a case of a calcium shell, the only way out is through it. And as calcium breaks up when the body is really ready to experience the experiences that have numbed itself down from it can be a wild ride, it can be a wild roller coaster to really feel all of the experiences that the body had kind of numbed itself down from and so it should be looked at both a physical pattern and an emotional and spiritual pattern and it should be approached from both angles. The body is going to need to cry the tears. It needs to cry and grieve the grief that it needs to grieve. And there's a lot of things that will come up as we're working through a calcium shell pattern, and there's no reason to forcefully go through it.
Sodium, Potassium, Magnesium, and Calcium
But what are some easy ways to get more sodium in, which a lot of us when we're under stress, we need to make sure our sodium intake is good. You know high quality sea salts, from cell salts, and even sipping on fermented beverage juices like sauerkraut juice or kvass juice or kimchi juice. You know some of these can be really nice and salty and briny. Even a really properly fermented pickle can be great. Sometimes salt hits differently when it's suspended in water. Sometimes when you sprinkle it on your food or something like that, it just can be a little bit different than when it's suspended in some type of liquid.
And then same thing with potassium. You know potassium is a really difficult mineral to get in adequate amounts. Our body burns through a lot each day – around 4700 milligrams – and it can be quite the job just to get enough potassium. Many of us are really missing out on it. We talked a few episodes back about how blood sugar is really the sweetness of life, right? So potassium plays a big role in allowing us to accept the sweetness of life. And it has a big, almost insulin-like effect on blood sugar. So, you know, it's utilized when we're getting sugar into the cells, which is why potassium is almost always found in whole foods in nature that contain carbohydrates or contain sugar. And potassium also helps the cells respond to thyroid hormone. So for a lot of people who feel like they have thyroid issues, but it doesn't show up on a test, sometimes it can actually be cellular hypothyroid, where we have enough of the hormone in the blood, but the cells aren't receiving it properly. And that can be potassium. And potassium is also really responsible for all of nerve conduction. So over time, as our nervous system fires and fires and fires and over fires, we're gonna blow through a lot of potassium, and it's going to become harder and harder to have normal nervous system responses to stressors.
Great sources of potassium are gonna be well cooked greens, obviously, like the obvious ones, potatoes, and bananas, tomatoes and tomato juice, tomato sauces, things like that can have high amounts of potassium, avocados can be a great source, all types of fruits and fruit juices tend to have potassium, berries, coconut water, green juices, you know, there's a reason why so many people get obsessed with celery juice. And I think a lot of it has to do with the potassium building their stomach acid, it feels really good for them. Dairy products have potassium, meat, fish, molasses, and even aloe vera is full of potassium as well.
And then magnesium. You know, magnesium has been really popular in the health space for the past couple of years for good reason. I mean, a lot of us are deficient in magnesium, and it has a lot to do with the water that we drink because we no longer drink spring water, no longer drinking these mineral rich waters that are passing over rocks and different minerals within nature to pick up the minerals within those rocks and also the bicarbonates that are within those ecological systems. And so we miss out on some of the living components of water just because most of us don't drink water from a spring and some springs have been contaminated a little bit. So there's really no perfect water to drink anymore. Unless we're in a very remote place. We just happen to get very blessed and very lucky and have a really strong and healthy source. But we used to drink a lot of magnesium through natural spring water and also we used to soak up a lot of it on our skin through bathing in natural bodies of water, which is why transdermal absorption of magnesium is so powerful and we tend to absorb a lot through our skin.
But some great food sources of magnesium are pretty much all vegetables, green vegetables, leaves are gonna have magnesium in them, whether you steam them and drink the liquid that they're boiled in or you boil them or use just saute them. Greens are very rich in magnesium and things like chlorophyll or anything that says extracted from greens. Properly prepared greens and beans are also can be very rich in magnesium. Certain organ meats like beef heart are very rich in magnesium. And then even when we just take Epsom salt baths or magnesium chloride baths, oftentimes magnesium chloride is sold as magnesium flakes. I really like to take magnesium in the bicarbonate form. Even just adding a little bit of magnesium bicarbonate to my water can make a big difference. I use supplements like magnesium glycinate and malate is kind of cherry on top to make sure I'm getting enough.
But a mistake that a lot of women can make is actually they slam magnesium. They are really low in sodium and potassium or their calcium is very dysregulated. And so sometimes when you slam magnesium, when your body's already trying to buffer with calcium, it can actually lead to feeling worse. It can lead to further depletion in both sodium and potassium. It can lead to us feeling even more burnt out or almost less resilient to stress. So there is a time and a place to supplement magnesium and not every person is going to respond well to magnesium supplementation. And in fact, sometimes it can make women feel worse and this is something that should be paid attention to. This is not something that should be overlooked. It could be that we're breaking up a calcium shell but a lot of times we need to just pull back and be a lot more gentle with how we're approaching magnesium. Especially if we've gone to such a burned out place because most of us are using those kind of get up and go minerals, the sodium and potassium, so much that by the time you realize something's wrong, or that we're not feeling well or we're metabolically unstable, we have gotten to such a depleted place where we pulled from our deep wells of minerals, that there needs to be some replenishment of those before we go ham with the magnesium.
Calcium Isn’t Bad
But one of the biggest mistakes I actually see when someone has a calcium shell mineral pattern is that they're told or that they end up avoiding calcium thinking it's bad, or thinking it's going to contribute to the problem. In reality, a lot of times when we have a calcium shell, we are both in need of calcium, because we are going through our own stress processes to deplete our hard tissues of calcium and deposit them into the soft tissues. And so it has been shown that low calcium diets will actually increase the hardening of the soft tissues. Because as we're not getting enough in the diet, we will slowly start to break down our own bone using things like prolactin and parathyroid hormone that I mentioned before, to harden and kind of create that buffer.
So in my opinion, I don't think it's a good idea to avoid calcium, I think it's really important to focus on getting enough and also getting the cofactors needed to utilize the calcium, you know, looking at those main minerals in balance with one another – calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium. Also making sure we're getting those cofactors like Vitamin K2 and there's not maybe some big overarching contributors in the diet like excessive vitamin D supplementation that are leading to the calcification. Having a diet that's rich in cooked vegetables and cooked greens and dairy or Kefir or yogurt and Greek yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream squash, sardines. You know, whole sardines are a great source, anchovies are a great source of calcium.
All types of leafy greens like collards, mustard, turnip, kale, bok choy, spinach, anything, especially when those are cooked, they can be a great sources of calcium, but we want to make sure to cook them because it makes the calcium more bioavailable, especially when can we combine them with a vitamin K2 to rich fat like ghee, or butter, or cream, which is why you'll see a lot of traditional diets do things like creamed spinach or creamed collards or collard greens or often have lots of fat in them. And there's a reason for that. It's the wisdom of traditional cuisines that sometimes even making sure we're getting enough, you know, especially for conditions where we are utilizing tons of calcium like breastfeeding would be a great example of this, sometimes getting extra bioavailable calcium, like eggshell powder, or pearl powder can be really effective and helpful.
I guess I think the worry from some people is that those sources of calcium will contribute to the problem. But as long as we're gently inviting ourselves out of this pattern, and we're gently supporting it, the body is wiser than that. And if we are actively, you know, trying to rewrite old patterns and behaviors and work through our traumas and our experiences, oftentimes, you know, adding in the minerals alongside of that it kind of creates this perfect duo, where you're focusing on the physiological aspect of it, but you're also focusing on the more psychological or emotional part of it, and it works together. Because if you are actively and receptive to softening yourself, and you're actually working to soften yourself and be more aware of your patterns, your body is going to meet you where you're at. The physical is going to always impact the spiritual and the psychological and the spiritual and psychological is always going to impact the physical. That's why you can very rarely do one without the other.
And in addition to focusing on my macro minerals and vitamin K2, one thing that I really like to do when you know when you're in a calcified state, is create some visuals to hang on to. I really like to pair mineral regulation or mineral balancing with visuals of what's happening physiologically. If you think of yourself as a steak defrosting or a flower opening or can even physically, you know, picture yourself as a statue kind of breaking open to show a melty, gooey inside, pretty much any visual that works for you. When I was working through my calcium shell, I always had this visual of like melty, gooey, gooey honey. It was just something that always came to my mind whenever I was feeling hardened or numb, or I was going through a mineral pattern that was shifting and I was feeling really agitated. I would just imagine warm, gooey, melty chocolate or gooey, gooey honey, just something to really give myself that visual of and connect it to my experience giving my body some type of image to hold on to.
But I hope this has answered some of the questions of why I think sometimes we look around and we say how have we gotten here, what is going on, because it's something just deeper than just masculine energy and feminine energy. And, yes, it is deeper, it's complex. There are many facets to this diamond. It's not just one thing or putting your finger on one thing. But calcification is something huge that women are dealing with to this very day. And our minerals are dysregulated from our stress. We're becoming calcified at a younger and younger age because of the amounts of stress that we're trying to buffer ourselves from. And this is not something that we have to stress ourselves out about, we have to recognize that our body has done something really protective for us, and it has listened to our need for strength or for armor. Now it's going to listen to our need to soften. If we set that intention, and we seek it out and we search it out.
Remember that energy is going to flow wherever your thoughts go. And so now that you have this awareness, this is not something to stress about or be like okay, now I need to create a checklist or I need to do this, this, this and this and this. It's just something to start being really aware of. And mineral patterns can play a big role as if we're feeling that we're stuck in a certain pattern of behavior. Let's say we feel like we're really stuck in our masculine energy, and we're having a hard time getting out of it. Even though we're aware. Sometimes something physical can help us set the pattern in motion in a different direction, and it can help get us started and act almost as a jumping off point or a starting point.
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