Raising Autistic Children with Christel Land #16

The mBraining Show

Raising Autistic Children a mums perspective.

Raising Autistic Children

Raising Autistic Children. Christel Land an mBIT Coach and Trainer and was born to an American father and a Danish mother, who were in to health foods (macrobiotics) and grew up around the health center that they ran for many years. The international flavour of her upbringing has given her the gift of being fluent in 4 languages (Swedish, Danish, English, German), and she has since learnt an additional two languages (French, Mandarin Chinese).

When it was time to choose her field of study, Christel wanted to make a difference in the world and in some way concluded studying international politics was the best route to go

During her studies, Christel started working in a European based company and quickly ended up in the management of the company and later completed an MBA from the University of Leicester.

In 2008 while living in the UK, Christel met her husband, and joined ActionCoach, the world’s biggest business coaching organisation. Learning business coaching through them taught her a lot of the hands-on, practical tools that are useful for smaller businesses, especially in the area of marketing.

Christel never had any experience what it’s like Raising Austistic Children until she became a mother. Her first born Kian who is 5 has autism diagnosis and Felix who is 2 does not.

What may help when Raising Autistic Children

About a year ago, a friend of Christel’s in the UK told here about mBraining and she instantly bought the book. After reading it she immediately signed up to become a coach and a trainer.

In the beginning of May Christel will be running the first ever Coach Certification in Danish here in Copenhagen, and will be running the first ever Coach Certification in Sweden in Stockholm in the beginning of June.

The past 15 years of her professional life have centred around leadership, change management and entrepreneurship. Since 2015 Christel has been running her consulting company, One Degree Consulting, where she coaches and consults small to medium sized businesses across Europe.

Christel loves to cook as a creative outlet, as well as yoga, travelling and exploring new cultures and places. Today’s chat with Christel is amongst other things about how mBIT gave her unique insights into her sons Autism.

www.mbraining.dk
www.mbraining.se

Highlights:

00:19 Introduction
07:33 Emotional trauma could cause physical damage
15:47 Dealing with the diagnosis
22:34 Most things can be learned
32:33 Inflammatory food
42:30 Behavioral observation
51:24 Food is a tool
58:07 How to reach Christel

Transcription:

Intro 0:04
You’re listening to the M, brining show, a show about the new field of ambit, where you’ll get a blend of neuroscience based research with practical applications for wise living. And now, here’s your host, Bill Gasiamis.

Introduction

Bill 0:19
As a coach, one of the things that I’ve learned since I began, this part of my journey is that in order to turn up and be able to hold the space for my clients, so that they feel safe and nurtured, I must be able to sit without judgment, whilst not projecting my model of the world, on my client, as this will not be honoring their process.

Bill 0:40
Projecting would make me no different to the caring friend that’s offering advice that comes from the right place, but is often not that useful. I realized early on that I myself needed regular coaching.

Bill 0:54
And the more I engage with amazing coaches, helping me to deal with my own challenges, the better coach, I became, I still receive regular coaching. Because like a sports team, the coach doesn’t turn up once and the team wins the league. The job is not done in one session.

Bill 1:12
The top sports people making a living from their craft who remain at the top in their field know the power of ongoing coaching. When was the last time you committed to regular coaching. If you have been considering engaging with a coach do get in touch, we can chat via Skype, in person or over the phone.

Bill 1:33
Go to billgasiamis.com and fill out the contact form and I will be in touch. Today I have another amazing guest and one thing I love about mBraining is that it’s global. And I get to speak to people from amazing different parts of the planet and today we have Christel Land, who was born in Sweden to an American father and a Danish mother.

Bill 1:58
How about that for a covering all bases with regards to nationality, who were in the health food macrobiotics industry and she grew up around the health center that they ran for many years.

Bill 2:14
The International flavor of her upbringing has given her the gift of being fluent in four languages, including Swedish, Danish, English, German, and to spice things up a little more. She has recently added the additional languages of French and Mandarin Chinese to the mix.

Bill 2:36
Christel has a degree in economics and international politics from the London School of Economics, and an MBA from the University of Leicester as a certified action coach, and an mBIT coach and trainer and will be running the first-ever coach certification in Danish, in Copenhagen. And in Sweden, in the beginning of June.

Bill 3:04
Christel is a mum of two boys Kean, who is five and Felix who is two. And Kean has an autism spectrum diagnosis. And that is going to be some of what we discuss today. Welcome to the program. Christel.

Christel 3:19
Thank you very much bill.

Bill 3:21
How do you like my pronunciation of Leicester?

Christel 3:28
I prefer Lester but you know, whatever works for you.

Bill 3:32
All, my English friends listening please, please forgive me. I’m so sorry. I could have edited this out. But I thought I’ll just keep going.

Christel 3:41
Yeah, it adds to the spice, doesn’t it?

Bill 3:43
That’s it. Christel, welcome to the program. I really appreciate you making the time and connecting with me. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Sounds like a very interesting upbringing with all the different nationalities and places that you’ve lived?

Christel 4:03
Absolutely. Yeah, like, like you said, in your intro, I grew up and around my parents health center. And that was that was their passion. And it really is sort of flavored flavored my early my early life, we would travel to places where my parents would lecture or teach cooking.

Christel 4:25
And they also ran a health center where people from all over the world would come so I and I would go to school, like any normal kid, and then I would come home in the afternoon and then there would be anywhere between 15 and 150 people around the house.

Christel 4:40
And they would come from any number of places around the world. So it was just a great environment to grow up in. And I think that really sort of gave me that strong sense of wanting to find my passion and wanting to make a difference in the world because that’s what I saw my parents do. And somehow in my 20 year old brain, I decided that studying politics was the best way to achieve that.

Bill 5:08
I did that at 17, and really quickly realized it was not a wise decision.

Christel 5:14
Yeah, it took me a few years to realize, but yeah, I’m not really sure what I was thinking. But no, it was still sort of an interesting course to study. And then just by chance, I ended up working in business and turned out I was pretty good at it.

Christel 5:36
And that’s how I then ended up with sort of management in organizations ended up with business coaching. And that was really how I was introduced to coaching. But in a very different setting in a very different approach, than in emBIT.

Christel 5:54
And then I had a few years where I had my children and I did a bit of project management, and stuff. And then when I was coming back from maternity leave after my second son, I then started up my business.

Christel 6:11
And that was just over a year ago. And I have been in a process trying to work out what I wanted to do. And I just felt that that was the right thing at the right time. And I’m really happy I did it.

Christel 6:25
And just a few months after that, a friend of mine, Patsy, who I’d worked a little bit with in the UK when I lived over there. She said, Oh, you know, we connected on Facebook one day, and she said, if you get a chance, you should really try and Google mBraining I’ve just been on a course and it’s amazing stuff, I really think you’d like it.

Christel 6:46
And I think I was just in a place where I was looking for sort of something new to breed or something, you know, something new. And so went online, I looked on the website and thought, yeah, I think she’s right, this sounds really interesting. I ordered the book. And then I was going down to visit one of my one client. And I was on the plane. I work sort of a bit around Europe.

Christel 7:12
And I was on the plane. And I was reading mBraining. And I got I think about halfway through the book on my way down there. And there were just three things that really, really spoke to me or that really made me think wow, this, you know, I could relate it back to my own life.

Emotional trauma could cause physical damage

Christel 7:33
The first thing was that my youngest son had been having some seizures just sort of a month earlier. And after we’d been through different hospital tests with him, they determined that it was down to stress and that he probably wasn’t we sort of interpreted it as he wasn’t quite ready for daycare, we took him out.

Christel 7:54
And that helped the situation. He didn’t have any more seizures. But the interesting thing that happened was it when he’d been going to all these, you know, well baby visits, and you know, they’ve been listening to his heartbeat since he was born.

Christel 8:08
And there’s never been anything to note about anything at any point, you know, we’ve always had a perfect heart rate. But after those seizures that were stress induced and we’re very emotional for him, it was an emotional situations that it had happened.

Christel 8:26
They then told us that there was something with his heart rate, and in the mBraining book, I then read that there was scientific research that backed up the notion that emotional trauma could actually cause physical damage to the heart.

Christel 8:41
And that completely explained what the doctors had not been able to explain to me. And that was really powerful for me. The second thing was, for me personally, I’d had a period of about 10 years where I’ve been traveling a lot from my work. This is before I had kids, I’d been eating in restaurants a lot.

Christel 9:01
And I always tried to choose good food, but it’s just difficult when you’re sort of on the road and you never really know what’s going to be available. And so when I stopped traveling, I decided to have a period of time where I focused on sort of gut health.

Christel 9:01
And I went back to basics and a bit went back to my parents pickling traditions from when I was a kid and I started picking on vegetables and I started I experimented with oil pulling that I’d read about on the internet, and I made my own kafir.

Christel 9:36
And, interestingly, over those sort of 10 years where I’ve traveled a lot, I’d also been quite reactive in terms of you know, quite often I would get the question, you know what, you know, what, what’s your goal what, where do you want to be heading and I could never really answer that one.

Christel 9:56
And then, interestingly, about six months After I’d started this project of gut health, I woke up one day, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do, which is what I’m doing now. And that never really made sense to me, I just thought, well, it was just a phase in my life, and suddenly, I had some clarity that I hadn’t didn’t have before.

Christel 10:17
But reading, mBraining, and I saw the relationship of the gut with motivation and goals. It just made total sense. And then the third thing that really sort of hit home with me, when I read the book was relating to my son, Qian, that you mentioned earlier, who, when I read the book, we didn’t know yet that he had autism spectrum disorder.

Christel 10:43
But we were definitely aware that there was, you know, something about his behavior that was difficult to deal with, that we didn’t know how to deal with. And that we were sort of in search of trying to find ways to help him with.

Christel 11:01
And what really amazed me when I looked in the book, and what is sort of continued to amaze me after we’d been on this journey of realizing that it was autism, and going through the diagnosis process, etc, was that everything that is sort of an autistic trait, if you like in him, is on the sympathetic side of the gut brain.

Christel 11:24
And you look at the core competencies and how they behave and parasympathetic and sympathetic mode, then his autism traits are basically sympathetic gut. And then I usually call it on steroids, because it’s sort of the extreme version of every single one.

Christel 11:42
And, that for us, really. I mean, there’s obviously a lot of research out there. There’s continuously more research in the area of sort of the gut and the relationship to autism and how the gut bacteria affect behavior and all of this, and I’m sure over the next decade, that there’s going to be some big breakthroughs in that area. But for us, we really kind of been able to link it back to the ans, the nervous system, made us be a little bit more targeted in how we then tried to go about helping him.

Bill 12:27
Yeah, it allows you to sort of get a little bit of a magnifying glass out and sort of focus in one area and begin the healing from there and see what happens, pay attention, adjust your approach, see what happens, pay attention, keep doing, you know, the things that you’re seeing that you’re getting benefits from, and that he’s getting benefits from, and then running with that.

Christel 12:49
Exactly, And so one of the things that we’ve since then tried with him is I did some research and read and could see that cranial osteopathy is something that where they also work on the autonomic nervous system.

Christel 13:08
And so we decided to try and take him to that. And that’s actually had a really good calming effect on him. And he’s, after every treatment, he sort of always has a day or two where he can definitely do more than he can the other days.

Christel 13:27
So we’re on sort of a path there that’s really interesting. And it’s definitely given him benefits. And the other obvious one is is obviously sort of probiotics and that something we’ve given him before, but now we’re more focused on that area.

Christel 13:48
And then the other thing that I’ve really learned from mBraining and that was mostly from going on the coach certification and becoming a trainer is really understanding the incredible effects that breathing has on the autonomic nervous system. And so that’s something that I’ve slowly started to introduce him to.

Christel 14:11
He’s only five so and one of his sort of artistic traits is that he does have quite compulsive tendencies. So I would never be able to tell him to count his breaths in and out because then I’m not sure he would ever sleep again, he would be counting them.

Bill 14:28
Counting means something different than for what it means to us.

Christel 14:35
Yeah, exactly. He wouldn’t be able to count and then let go. Once he started counting, it would just be something he kept doing. So but one thing that I noticed about his breathing is that whenever he’s heading in towards a stressed state, or when if he’s heading for that what they call a meltdown.

Christel 14:59
Then It usually starts with the breathing going really shallow and really quick. And so what we’ve started practicing is that when the when the breathing goes that way, well then we say now let’s take some deep breaths together, we put our hands on our belly, we can feel the belly moving when we breathe.

Christel 15:19
And, depending on the situation, there’s definitely situations where he’s sort of too distressed to, for me to be able to pull them out out of it with breathing. But we’ve also had plenty of situations where we’ve been able to avoid a full scale meltdown. Because we’ve been able to catch it at the breeding stage without it escalating into sort of the more serious stages of a meltdown. That’s been really profound for us.\

Dealing with the diagnosis

Bill 15:47
Well, that’s really amazing. So, Christel, I’m curious to understand, when you’re a mum, who gets told that their child is on the autistic spectrum? How do you respond? What do you do at the beginning to deal with the initial wave? The diagnosis sort of comes at you.

Christel 16:11
Yeah. I think it’s obviously really individual. And I think a lot of it also depends on whether you’ve had suspicions before or not. But I mean, for us, we mean, I started, I just stumbled across a documentary on TV one evening, and my mom, she works with autistic children.

Christel 16:40
But as teenagers, so I’ve obviously heard a lot from her about what kind of challenges they have and stuff, but it was always from the perspective of a teenager. And so I thought that that’s what autism was, and I’d never related it back to, to my son’s behavior.

Christel 16:56
And then I just stumbled across one evening, a documentary on autism on TV. And I was just amazed these parents, they were describing my son. And I thought, wow, that’s all of these sort of, you know, little quirks or whatever you want to call them. I had no idea that they, they were all symptoms of autism.

Christel 17:22
I then tried to go the normal route of getting health through the public health care system. And I realized that at least, at least in this country, it can be quite difficult. If it isn’t something incredibly urgent than the public health system isn’t really geared towards that.

Bill 17:43
Let’s just tell the listeners where you are at the moment.

Christel 17:48
Yes, I’m in Denmark, and so, so we ended up going through a private hospital instead. So we definitely had to fight a little bit to get the system, if you will, to take us seriously and to you know, we just wanted someone who knew a lot about this to, to take a look at our son tell us what they thought.

Christel 18:12
And that was difficult. And we ended up going through a private hospital in the end, where we got the help that we needed. But so through that process, I I definitely, I definitely had a strong suspicion that this might be autism. But despite that, when we sat down with a psychiatrist, and she gave us the diagnosis, it was still a really emotional experience.

Christel 18:41
And I would say it’s a mix between a big relief, because there’s just, I mean, ever since he was born, actually, there’s been aspects of being his parents that have just been fundamentally different than when we look around at our friends that have kids. There’s been, you know, plenty of situations where my husband and I have sat down in the evening after the kids are asleep and said, you know, what is it we’re doing wrong?

Christel 19:07
Because everyone else seems to be able to go out on date night and be able to get out do you’re stuff easily and here, you know, all hell breaks loose. If the tiniest little thing changes. And we end up paying, you know, paying in inverted commas because the sort of the unsettledness that say a change in routine will cause then will mean that we’re not going to sleep very consistently for a month or two.

Bill 19:36
So you might have motivated to change purely out of missing out on date night.

Christel 19:42
Exactly.

Bill 19:43
That’s a good place to start as a married couple with kids. Why not start there?

Christel 19:49
Exactly.

Bill 19:50
So poor little guy. He didn’t realize you know how much he was getting involved in interfering with mom and dad’s date nights.

Christel 19:58
Exactly. So there was definitely a sense of relief there that ah, so this is what’s been going on. And, and understanding that this, that there was an explanation to what we’ve been experiencing.

Christel 20:13
And also a relief that we could then start again, being a little bit more targeted in, you know, reading some books, getting some going on some courses, understanding how we can then meet his needs, and hopefully, then also make the entire family dynamic, more functional, more healthy for everyone.

Christel 20:32
So there’s definitely also a sadness in really realizing that what we’ve found challenging is not just the face, it’s something that’s here to stay, and even though it’s going to evolve over the course of his life, as he develops, then, at least with what the knowledge of current researches, then, then this is something that that is, it’s sort of more of a permanent thing than we had thought.

Christel 21:05
And with there are several different types of autism and the type of autism that he has is, is, is a type where children are or children or adults that where their biggest difficulty is processing emotion, right. And so, and out of children who, who have that specific type of autism, there’s a group of them who over the course of their teens sort of seem to grow out of it.

Christel 21:40
And then there’s another group that sort of have the same tendencies for the rest of their life and who, who really struggle with the emotional side of life. And they often end up having, you know, struggling with mental issues, their whole life, psychosis, or depression or, you know, Tourette’s or OCD, you know, a number of different mental issues.

Christel 22:05
So our main focus, since we since we learned this has been to do absolutely everything we can to give him as much positive stimulation as we possibly can, so that he, he can develop into someone who maybe has some weaknesses that other people don’t, or at least some other people don’t, but that he’s able to manage on his own, and that he can sort of function in the world on his own terms.

Most things can be learned

Bill 22:34
Yeah, if mBraining has taught me anything, it’s that most things can be learned. And regardless of what your deficits are, so to speak, can be learned and the reason is, is because we know that in mBraining, we teach that the heart and the gut are also brains about what makes that fabulous, as if being brains isn’t fabulous enough, is that they have the same ability to adapt.

Bill 23:05
And they also have neuroplasticity, which the head brain can do. And as a result of that, around the heart, we know that people who are considered young at heart tend to have, you know, more than 120,000 neurons in their heart. And people who are known as cold-hearted will have closer to sort of less than 30,000 neurons in their heart.

Bill 23:28
And if somebody experienced a life-changing experience that made them become a little hard-hearted because their heart was broken, if they desired to actually feel younger at heart, again, just by focusing on being young at heart and doing the things that children do, for example, like laughing and mucking around and doing all crazy sorts of things.

Bill 23:53
They could actually grow the neurons in their heart to increase the number of the those neurons increase the number of those neurons that support certain behaviors and therefore be able to be identified as somebody who’s young at heart. So my gut, and I imagine your gut would be guiding you down a similar path with your son.

Christel 24:15
Exactly, and that’s exactly I think, what what has been the big learning for us in terms of mBraining has been sort of the the link to the autonomic nervous system. And then the concept of neuroplasticity and just taking that and saying, you know, we’re going to do our absolute best to to stimulate neuroplasticity and stimulate the most positive developmental sort of development that he can you know, possibly experience and then and then see see where that takes us.

Bill 24:57
My my hunch Christel is that you’d probably be one of the first people on the planet who’s going to be focusing on this type of recovery around, you know, a child with autism so that they don’t have these setbacks that other children take into their teen years. And then later on in life, and this could be breaking new ground.

Christel 25:22
Exactly, that’s what I hope, both my husband and I are really, really focused on that. And, and I can’t wait to see what what it what it brings with it, just the small things that we’ve, that we’ve introduced so far, and really had a visible effect on him. So I’m sure that we’re gonna go far with this. And you know, then time is just going to tell where we end up. That’s the other beauty of the journey is you never know where it takes you.

Bill 25:51
Yeah, beautiful. So as you as this is the mBraining show, I want to get a bit of an insight into how your multiple brains were working before you found out about mBraining, you know, how were you guided by your gut, you mentioned something earlier on, regarding some challenges that you had around being able to identify, identify with who you were or what path you’re on. And then all of a sudden, that actually became clear, take us back there a little bit, give us a little bit more of an insight into that.

Christel 26:25
Yeah, it was really interesting. Up until the point of, I think I was around 20, 21. I knew exactly what I wanted. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And it was I wanted to go into development work, I wanted to work in the third world and, and help that that part of the world.

Christel 26:49
And that’s how I ended up studying politics. And then at some point in my early 20s, that just shifted, and I became more reactive. I’m a pretty bright person. And I have a pretty strong work ethic that I got from my parents. So I’ve had plenty of great opportunities come my way.

Christel 27:12
And every time that’s happened, I’ve made the most out of them. No question about that. But I’ve never really been able to in that period of about 10 years, I could never really answer the question. What do you want? Or what do you want to be doing? And every time that question came up, I would say, Oh, well, you know, I’m not really a one trick pony.

Christel 27:33
I know some languages, and I know some business. And I know some politics, and I know a bit of this. And amid a little bit of that. And you know, there are many things that make me happy. So I don’t have one thing that I want to be doing, you know, lots of things can make me happy. And at the time, I didn’t feel that that was problematic in any kind of way.

Christel 28:01
And then, it was looking back. It started around the time where I got a job in a restaurant where part of I was a student and I worked in a restaurant and part of my salary was that I could eat there every day. And so yeah, but because it was the staff would you would then think that I really nice food, because it was the staff food. They didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it.

Christel 28:28
Because I’m a vegetarian. I then ended up mainly eating rice to be honest rice and a bit of vegetables. And not brown rice either, which is sort of my childhood food, but it was white rice, and, you know, some some certified vegetables, which tasted very nice, but obviously wasn’t from a nutritional point of view wasn’t really, you know, enough.

Christel 28:52
And looking back, I think that’s sort of when I lost that focus, and I never really got it back until out just over a year ago, when I had for seven, eight months, really been focusing on gut health. I’ve been reading some articles because my dad still works with health food, he shares all kinds of articles on Facebook and I’ve been reading about gut health and I thought, you know what, I think that my gut health is maybe not the best.

Christel 29:22
It’s not terrible, but I think there’s something here I could do to improve. So I was on maternity leave with my youngest son. And so I had a bit of free time on my hands in between feeds and nappy changes, and thought you know what, I’m gonna I’m gonna try so I went online and I read a bit about oil pulling, so I started doing oil pulling.

Bill 29:44
What is oil pulling?

Christel 29:45
Well, it’s, basically, this sounds really weird. And when I read about it, it is really weird. So bear with me here.

Bill 29:55
It’s actually an ancient Ayurvedic Indian tradition. Which is how they used to clean their teeth when they didn’t have toothbrushes. And the way they did that was that they used oil as mouthwash. So you basically take some oil in your mouth doesn’t really matter what kind of oil it is and then you swish it around and then you spit it out.

Bill 30:19
Would motor oil work?

Christel 30:22
Probably as long as it’s fat compounds from a chemical point of view, then apparently it does the same thing. I tend to use sort of sesame oil. That’s what they use traditionally, in Ayurvedic traditions, or.

Bill 30:35
I think you missed my joke. It was a motor oil that I said.

Christel 30:39
Oh, you said motor oil? Well, you know, as long as it’s fat, then I think it would work, but I’m not sure that’s sort of recommended.

Bill 30:52
Don’t do motor oil people. If you’re listening, please do not use motor oil.

Christel 30:56
We take no responsibility.

Bill 30:59
Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. So you use a little bit of vegetable oil?

Christel 31:07
Yeah, exactly. And then I switched that around. And that’s supposed to sort of neutralize the sort of bacterial flora in your mouth, which then obviously, is one of the things that feeds the bacteria in the gut. So that’s sort of the, the, the explanation to it.

Christel 31:25
So I tried that and noticed that some I had a bit of a rash that sort of disappeared and I’m well that’s interesting. And then I’ve also been reading about kefir, which is a it’s a traditional Russian fermented milk.

Christel 31:43
And I don’t drink dairy products. So I but I used it with almond milk. And then I started making kefir with that, and I could, I’ve been using, I’ve been pickling my own vegetables, and I’ve been taking some probiotic supplements. And so I’ve definitely been doing probiotic stuff before, but I’ve never really taken anything probiotic where I could almost instantly just feel the difference.

Christel 32:08
But just within days, I just felt I just had more energy. I felt my mind was just clearer somehow, that’s the only way I can I, I had no, even though I mean, I obviously had at the time, I had a little baby who didn’t always sleep at night, but I just I just had sort of a rush of energy that I’ve, that I hadn’t really experienced for a while.

Inflammatory food

Bill 32:33
So when I, what I’ve had the opportunity to chat with a lot of the amazing people in our community. But early on before there were so many people around, I would talk with Grant about, you know, the gut-brain and all that type of stuff to sort of try and understand a little bit about it with, you know, the challenges that I was going through.

Bill 32:53
And the beautiful way in which I understood and Grant explained was that what happens is when we take the inflammatory foods, for example, out of, you know, the system, and we support the gut to heal, depending on you know, who you are, you know, that might take some more work than other people.

Bill 33:15
For me, it certainly did take a fair amount of work and taking out a lot of different foods that were interfering with my gut health, what happens is we turn up the volume, so we get, more of the signal, and we decrease the noise ratio.

Christel 33:33
That’s a really good way of explaining it. And that’s exactly how I felt as well,

Bill 33:37
So we’re able to tune in and pay attention and actually hear the signals that are coming up from the gut, because we know that the majority of the signals actually come up from the gut, exactly into the head. And now you can imagine a child who’s doing a tough experiencing symptoms of ADHD and all that kind of stuff.

Bill 33:58
Which they are now, you know, which research is finding that, you know, could also have something to do with, you know, food and sensitivities around food. You can understand now how when things are going bad in the gut, the stuff that comes up to the head is also bad.

Christel 34:16
Exactly, exactly.

Bill 34:18
And then children act up on what’s coming up to their head, but it’s really what’s coming up from the gut that’s causing that to come out. And I heard this podcast can remember exactly which one it was where I think they we’re interviewing a guy called Dr. David Perlmutter, who’s one of the forefathers of research into challenges that are caused by gluten and wheat sensitivity and all that type of stuff.

Bill 34:45
And he said that what gave him the desire to find a solution for all the challenges that his patients were finding was that as a neuroscientist, he was the most frustrated of all the scientists out there because it He wasn’t ever able to find a solution for all these neurological disorders by focusing on what was happening in the head.

Bill 35:09
And when they started to focus on what was happening in the gut and what food was doing to the gut, and then noticing the shift that was happening in mood in the way people were responding to certain foods, then they started to really unlock a lot of the work that went into a lot of the papers and the research that Grant and Marvin did into the gut brain and how to help the gut brain.

Christel 35:34
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, going back to what we talked about autism earlier, there’s also plenty of research into into that area. One, big study that was conducted a few years ago showed that about 30% of children with autism make considerable improvements in their behavior when caffeine, so milk protein, and gluten is excluded from the diet.

Christel 36:01
And more and more I mean, one of one of the things I read research wise, just recently was that I think it was National Geographic had a big piece on it was that they’ve actually done experiments with mice where they can transfer autism from one mouse to another by transferring the gut flora.

Christel 36:19
So they’ll have you know, a group of mice that are autistic, take some of that gut bacteria transfer it into healthy mice. And within I think it was, was it three weeks or five weeks, then the healthy mice are autistic.

Bill 36:36
Wow.

Christel 36:37
So there’s there’s some really, really interesting research. And I think I honestly think that in the next sort of 10 to 15 years, we’re going to see huge breakthroughs in this area, because because there’s there’s definitely something there. And there’s so much detail yet that that researchers still need to nail down but it’s it’s all pointing in the same direction.

Bill 36:59
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes up in the next few years, there’s also a ton of research into Alzheimer’s disease, and that Alzheimer’s disease is considered type three diabetes, and is the next stage two, obviously, type two diabetes.

Bill 37:20
And begins also by food that includes a high carbohydrate diet and a low saturated fat diet. We’re talking about healthy saturated fats not, you know, the takeaway variety. And, and as a result of increasing the fat content in somebody’s diet, from, you know, made products for people who eat meat products for from coconut oil, from avocados from Brazil nuts and all those amazing nuts.

Bill 37:54
What people do is, they end up healing their neurons and the way that their gut responds to the different stimuli from around the place by actually surrounding those neurons in a layer of fat, which is called up which is a process called myelination. And when the neurons are myelinated.

Bill 38:15
They are able to actually emit the signal properly to the other neuron and talk to each other and make new connections and grow, you know, new neural patterns as a result of being myelinated. And when we go on a high carbohydrate, low fat diet, we actually destroying the sheath, that myelinates that sort of wraps around that particular neuron.

Bill 38:39
And that’s why the signal gets messed up. And that’s why the feedback that we get is, you know, something that we don’t understand. And the challenge with the head brain is that when we eat foods that damage our gut-brain, our gut-brain feels bloated, or we get some kind of feedback, you know, we’ll need to go to the toilet if a food particular food didn’t deal with didn’t serve us or, you know, wasn’t good for us, we’ll get cramps, we’ll get some kind of feedback that perhaps you should avoid that type of food.

Bill 39:14
Now, the head brain doesn’t actually have any ability to feel anything because it doesn’t have sensory neurons, you can’t feel pain. So when we eat something that affects our gut, there’s a good chance that it’s affecting our head, but because the brain can’t feel anything you don’t know.

Bill 39:33
And it happens that the only way that people end up finding out that something is affecting the brain is when symptoms start to come on, like MS, like, you know, Alzheimer’s, like all those different diseases that are plaguing society these days. And, that’s the biggest challenge is, you know, how do we prevent these diseases?

Bill 39:55
And how do we support people that are going through you know, different versions of autism and you know, different other neurological disorders without taking tons and tons of medications that have a profound effect on people’s lives as well, you know, sometimes for life.

Bill 40:15
How did you guys go about being advised to treat the autism, we’re your doctor’s suggesting that you guys needed to take your son and place him on some kind of a regime of pharmaceutical sort of interventions?

Christel 40:33
No, I’m the only thing. One of my son’s symptoms, if you like, is that he in periods, he sleeps there, his sleep is very disturbed. And so they told us that they believe it hasn’t been proven, apparently. But they believe that people with autism have a lower melatonin, the sleep hormone production.

Christel 41:03
And so you can get synthetic melatonin and give to them if you need them to sleep. That’s something that we’ve chosen not to do, because what we’ve found is that when his sleep is disturbed, it’s usually in periods where there’s something during the day, that’s really stressed him.

Christel 41:23
And so by knowing that his sleep is disturbed, we also know what level he’s being affected by the environment, and we can then help him. So by drugging him, he’ll sleep great at night, but we won’t actually know how affected he’s being by sort of his day at kindergarten, or the playdate he had or whatever it might be so.

Bill 41:48
So feedback, you guys need the feedback to be able to then, you know, help him grow and adjust and overcome things and coach him through the things that challenge him in life. Even though he’s five and autistic, you know, he’s still will be able to be influenced by mom and dad who loved him the most, you know.

Christel 42:07
But that’s the melatonin has been the only suggestion they had about medication, otherwise, there isn’t really, again, there’s several different kinds of autism. And I’m convinced that in sort of 10 to 15 years, well, start take one step back. Autism is a behavioral diagnosis.

Behavioral observation

Christel 42:30
So you can’t take like a blood test and work out if someone is autistic or not, it’s a question of observing the behavior. And then if there’s a certain combination of different behaviors that have a certain intensity, then you’re deemed as being artistic. But the way I see it is that in any walk of life, one behavior can have very many different causes.

Christel 42:54
And I’m convinced that as research starts looking more into this, in 10, or 15 years, there isn’t going to be one diagnosis called autism, there’s going to be several different conditions as we learn more about what actually causes it, because I’m convinced that even though the symptoms may be similar there, they can still be caused by very many different things.

Christel 43:17
So and so that was just to say that in terms of the pharmaceutical aspect, there are certain types of autism where there are some medications that they recommend, especially if it’s autism combined with ADHD, for example. But, in our son’s case, then there isn’t really anything that that is that is relevant from a pharmaceutical point of view.

Christel 43:39
So that, that part is such as being quite easy for us. We’re, not overly keen on the pharmaceutical idea, even though of course, there’s there’s situations where maybe it’s the better of several evils. But um, so it’s not something that we would categorically reject. But it’s definitely something that we want to use as as absolutely little as we possibly can.

Bill 44:08
Yeah, I think your instincts are guiding you and your husband well, because there’s no doubt that sometimes, you know, medical intervention, well, let’s not face not sometimes many times medical intervention is necessary and extremely useful.

Bill 44:23
But, if you can find a workaround, which means that you don’t have to provide, you know, a artificial version of sort of, I don’t know, help, whatever it is that pharmaceuticals provide, then I think the work around is the best solution, even if it is a slightly longer process.

Christel 44:47
Absolutely. And I think a lot of pharmaceutical solutions are based on the idea of treating the symptom and not the cause. And, by, that’s been our philosophy by focusing on the symptom, and by treating the symptom, then it can also get a bit harder sometimes to then look for the cause.

Christel 45:06
So that’s why we’ve sort of taken the approach that there are definitely circumstances where we would consider it. Because one of my son’s traits is that he does when he gets stressed to a certain point, he starts damaging himself and hurting himself, which is also one of the sympathetic parts of a stressed gut brain.

Christel 45:33
But, so of course, with that in mind, there’s also definitely situations where we would consider a pharmaceutical solution, but as long as we can avoid it, it we see it as giving us then a window of opportunity to dig deeper into the the root cause and try and work on that one instead.

Bill 45:51
Yeah, I had crystal, I had the pleasure of meeting your dad in Melbourne. I think, about a year and a half ago. And he was a pretty cool dude, I went to his house, and he took me through some a session regarding some foods, what to avoid, and what to eat, because I was recovering from some brain, challenges of my own, you know, three brain bleeds.

Bill 46:19
And before I met your dad, I hadn’t had brain surgery yet. Tell me about how influential, you know, growing up with your dad, maybe at the time, you didn’t realize how amazing the kind of work that he was doing around food was? How much did that influenced you in going down this path of sort of looking at diet and changing your diet? Was it difficult to get to the point? Or did you sort of find yourself getting there easily I know that we spoke about, you know, you started feeling unwell. But how did it sort of work out for you?

Christel 47:01
Well, one of the things that I really learned from, from growing up in the environment that I did was that food has an incredible effect on Well, on everything really, in our body. And I was, you know, with all the people that came through my parents Health Center.

Christel 47:24
It was just, you know, I had a really early age and I came in contact with people who were terminally ill from cancer who had AIDS who had flowmetry diseases who had autoimmune diseases. I mean, I’ve seen so many people with various different challenges come in through our front door and be helped.

Christel 47:48
And so for me, macrobiotics, which is the sort of health food tradition that my parents worked in. And that my dad still works in is, is made up of the two Greek words macro and BIOS, which means big life. And so the idea is that by looking after your body, well, your mind will be clearer and you’ll be able to live a fuller life.

Christel 48:17
In lectures and books and cooking classes, the focus is a lot on the actual foods, but the ideas behind it are actually not so much about the the food, the food is more a tool to be able to live life more fully.

Christel 48:32
And it’s based in the Eastern philosophy of yin and yang. And so that was just sort of the framework that, that I’ve had I, when I look at, when I look at the world around me, I think about it in terms of yin and yang, it’s just sort of part of my part of my vocabulary and part of my, my way of describing and thinking about the world.

Christel 48:54
And, so the the effects of food have also in that sense, just always been there for me. And as soon as I’ve experienced anything sort of health wise, my first sort of thought is always I wonder what I’ve done. That could have caught this not as a blame kind of thing, but just as a, you know.

Bill 49:17
Curiosity.

Christel 49:18
Exactly like something has happened. There must have been something that that caused it what could that be? And so that has really had a big effect on me and even though I’ve then I mean, I still eat macrobiotically.

Christel 49:37
And I think what had happened to me was I had because I didn’t mean traveling around a lot I I had excluded the things that I was used to not eating so i’d excluded meat and dairy. But I hadn’t had access to all of the other great foods that are also part of a macrobiotic diet like you know seaweed.

Christel 49:56
Some people will find that weird but you know I love seaweed miso soup, lots of these really nourishing East Asian and traditional foods. And I didn’t really get much of those. And I think for me, that was where they were the imbalance sort of came from. And when I went back to basics, and I went back to that, then I noticed those big shifts, especially in my sense of my motivation, and also in the sense of risk.

Christel 50:25
I’ve been, you know, talking about starting my own business for several years. And I was, on some level, I was definitely not in doubt that that was what I wanted to do. But every time I thought about it, I would talk myself out of it really quickly, because oh, my goodness, are you aware of the risk?

Christel 50:49
And, a really scared gut brain, you know, what if? What if I can’t find any customers? What if I find customers and they don’t pay me? What if, what if, what if, what if? And really quickly? I would always manage to talk myself out of it.

Christel 51:07
And, that shifted as well. Whereas I now look at risk. And I think, yes, so what? You know it’s just something is, it’s just something to work through. It’s not something that worries me and that shifted.

Food is a tool

Bill 51:24
Yeah. So you said food is a tool to live a life more fully. I mean, if you want to live life, more fully people, hopefully the listeners paying attention right now. Just use food. And my and that’s really wise what you’re saying. Because if we nourish our gut, our gut is our Action Center.

Bill 51:46
That’s where we take action from Yes, so if we nourish our gut and give it the best fuel in every sense of the word, emotional fuel, and you know real fuel that it can use up and actually help it take action, that’s the place to stop beautiful food and my ancestor, Hippocrates said, and his wife insisted, because I’m from a great background, Christel.

Bill 52:10
And I like to claim him as my ancestor, he said let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. Or the other way around, I’m not sure but he said something along those lines. And it’s a philosophy that a lot of people are using now to regain their health and overcome stuff like inflammation in their joints and you know, put an end to arthritis you know.

Bill 52:35
Put an end to all these things that are causing people to really not live fulfilled lives and really be sort of stuck and in fear for doing something because of pain or because of additional suffering or because of what all those things could mean. Imagine if they just knew that they could use food for certain things you know, to help them live a more full life.

Christel 53:04
Yeah and, and that for me, I think has been the really maybe at the end of the day the most exciting thing about mBraining for me personally when I look at the future is the sense that it brings together my childhood in terms of the focus on balance the focus on living your life fully.

Christel 53:34
And then it also brings together what has become my passion over the last 10, 15 years in professionally training people coaching people helping people to move forward from where they are and for me mBraining just pulls together all of that and takes it to the next level. So it’s really exciting stuff.

Bill 53:55
I think it’d be really cool to learn from you in an mBraining environment because of your unique background especially the background with the food because you’d have some amazing insights to share with your delegates you’re going to be the first person to run a mBIT coach certification in two countries remind us of those countries?

Christel 54:22
Denmark now in May and Sweden in the beginning of June so there aren’t actually any mBIT coaches in Sweden yet so but because I speak Swedish I’ve taken the torch and I’m heading to Sweden to see if I can spread some some balanced breathing and and some highest expressions to to that part of the world as well.

Bill 54:46
Yeah. Beautiful and in Denmark. Are there any mBIT coaches in Denmark yet?

Christel 54:54
No, I was the first one and, you know for me, I love this story because to me, it just really highlights the level of compassion and passion that is in the mBIT community. I had signed up for Wilbert, the Master Trainer here in Europe was going to be running and coach certification in Copenhagen.

Christel 55:18
So I signed up for it. And then a few weeks before it was due to run, I got a message from him saying, I’d like to Skype with you one day. So we Skyped. And I thought, Oh, he’s going to tell me that not enough people have signed up. And that is cancelled.

Christel 55:34
And I really, really wanted to do the trainers training, but at this point, it was November. And trainers training was in January. And I could only do the trainers training if I’d done the coach cert.

Christel 55:43
So I thought oh, my goodness, oh, no, what am I going to do? And I was I haven’t even told told Wilbert. But I’d actually before hit the Skype session and started looking on the internet to see if there was anyone else anywhere running a coach cert in the end of November or December so that I could go there.

Christel 56:02
And, and so we Skyped. And he said, Yeah, as I expected, not enough people signed up. It was me and then a lady from London who was going to fly into Copenhagen for the course. And he said, usually, I would cancel it when we only have two people. But luckily, I don’t live my life based on money.

Christel 56:25
I live my life based on wanting to spread mBIT through the world. And we don’t have many people in Scandinavia, I think I’m the second one who’s an mBIT coach in this part of the world. So he said, I really want to come to Copenhagen. And I’ll train you.

Christel 56:40
So he came up to Copenhagen. I found a little meeting room we could be in and then the lady flew in from London, and the three of us had a beautiful coach cert. And I’m, you know, eternally grateful to Wilbert for doing that.

Bill 56:56
Yeah, he’s a cool dude. I had the pleasure of interviewing him a little while ago. And I knew he was an awesome guy. When he told me he was starting his own school.

Christel 57:05
Yeah, yeah. That’s an amazing project.

Bill 57:08
You know, so he’s starting his own school, and 50% of the curriculum is going to be personal development. And there’s going to be some mBraining modules in there as well. And I thought, well, that is a guy really sort of, you know, practicing what he preaches.

Bill 57:24
And really putting it out there, and he’s going to make a difference. So it doesn’t surprise me that he ran a coach cert for two people in another part of the world, when he normally doesn’t coach. So I’m glad that he did. Because if he didn’t, that means you and I wouldn’t be speaking now.

Christel 57:41
Exactly. And I probably wouldn’t have managed to become a trainer. So and that would have meant I wouldn’t be able to run my coach cert this spring. So I’m really grateful to Wilbert for it and to me, it is really just another example of how compassion is just really at the heart of what mBraining is all about. And at the heart of the community.

How to reach Christel

Bill 58:07
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Tell me Christel. If people want to find out more about your trainings and more about what you do, where should they go?

Christel 58:17
They should go to either mbraining.dk, which is the Danish website, or mbraining.se which is the Swedish website and they’ll find some local information about mbraining a few translated articles by Grant and Suzanne Henwood. And they’ll also find information about the courses that are coming up.

Bill 58:37
What do you reckon the chances are of getting the princess there?

Christel 58:42
Which one of them we have quite a few.

Bill 58:44
Princess Margaret, from Australia.

Christel 58:48
Princess Margaret from Australia. Oh Princess Mary?

Bill 58:53
Princess Mary?

Christel 58:54
Yes, well, you know, I live only a few miles away from the palace. But she hasn’t signed up yet. So I’ll have to see.

Bill 59:04
Drop her off a book hand it over to one of the guards and ask them to kindly pass it over to the princess with love Australia. And apologize to her in advance for me calling her Margaret instead of Mary.

Bill 59:22
Christel. It’s been amazing getting to know you and having a opportunity to hear your unique insights into mBraining I really do appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I wish you all the success in running your first two coach certifications.

Bill 59:37
And I know your delegates will be lucky, absolutely lucky to sit through the coach certification with you. And I look forward to getting to you know, get to know you more, as the next few years and beyond evolve and emerge.

Christel 59:57
Thank you so much. Bill, it’s been great speaking to you.

Bill 1:00:02
You know one of the things that I love the most about mBraining is how many different places that we’ve found that it’s actually applicable. And this episode with Christel just shows that mBraining can be used to assist and to give people some insights into what’s happening at the head, heart and gut-level in different neurological disorders, and even in autism as we heard in this interview.

Bill 1:00:29
So guys, if you like this episode of the mBraining show, one of the best things you can do is tell others, text them a link straight from your podcast app posted on your Facebook feed, and go across to iTunes and leave us a five star review.

Bill 1:00:44
This will help others discover mBraining and might help to make a positive change in their life. This episode of The mBraining show was brought to you by mBrainingaustralia.com.au, one of the world’s leading mBIT certification providers.

Bill 1:01:01
If you are living in a country that currently does not have somebody running an mBIT coach certification, do get in touch, go to mBrainingaustralia.com.au and fill out the contact form and I will be in touch. Let’s see how we can work together to make an mBIT coach certification happen in your corner of the world. Until the next episode, thank you for tuning into mBIT radio.

Intro 1:01:29
The presenters and special guests of this podcast intend to provide accurate and helpful information to their listeners. These podcasts can not take into consideration individual circumstances and are not intended to be a substitute for independent medical advice from a qualified health professional.

Intro 1:01:47
You should always seek the advice from a qualified health professional before acting on any of the information provided by any of the transit lounge podcasts. This has been a production of themBrainingshow.com check us out on Facebook and start a conversation facebook.com/mbrainingshow.

Intro 1:02:07
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