Leaving a Legacy by Living a Life Well-Lived By Regina Topelson

2022 just flew by so fast, it’s as if we’re playing life at twice the speed. At the beginning of the year, we set goals for ourselves. Things that we want to tick off and put a checkmark on, things that we want to accomplish.I would be shocked if "health and wellness" didn’t make it to your resolution list. Because it would be a waste not to prioritize your health, especially in times like this. And our guest for today would probably agree with me on that matter. Meet the registered dietitian, mother, podcaster, and cancer survivor, Regina Topelson. She enjoys exploring health and wellness from a variety of perspectives and is eager to share her experiences and knowledge with you. --- Listen to the podcast here: Leaving a Legacy by Living a Life Well-Lived By Regina Topelson Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about our health, because our health is very integral to everything we want to pursue in life. We keep ourselves in good health, well, you know, we’re more likely to be more energetic and we’re actually also more likely to be in good mental health. There’s kind of a connection between the two. And, of course, we must take care of our bodies in order to have the energy to pursue whatever it is that’s inspiring us. My guest today has a perspective on the whole field of health from multiple angles. Her name is Regina Topelson and she is a registered nutritionist, a news contributor as well as the host of her own podcast that features people who have dealt with some tough health challenges, mostly cancer. --- Regina, welcome to the program. Hi, Stephen. It’s so great to be here. Thank you. It’s such a pleasure. Thank you, Regina, and first question I want to ask is let’s start from beginning. What inspired you to make this health and wellness, you know, your life’s pursuit? Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, both of my children were born with food allergies. Twenty years ago, that was still kind of an unheard of type thing. It was heard of but it was very rare. What made my kids extra special is that they had multiple food allergies. Prior to that, it was one kid with one food allergy, like peanuts or tree nuts or eggs or something like that or dairy, but mine had multiple all rolled into one child. And so we kind of went down this path in our family where we really had to try to figure out how to keep these little guys alive, you know? Yeah. So, when my oldest was eight and my youngest was, I think at that time, five and a half, I decided that I wanted to pursue becoming a nutritionist, what I ended up doing was becoming a registered dietitian, but what I thought of in a broad spectrum was I wanted to follow this traditional kind of path with education and evidence-based practices for health and wellness because what I had was a lot of moms coming to me and saying every time I feed my son bagels, he breaks out in a rash around his mouth and my husband thinks I’m crazy but I see it every time he eats bagels, you know what I mean? And so I thought, you know what, if I’m going to be counseling and helping people in my community, then I really should be well versed at this. I should be a professional, not just a lay mom. I don’t know why that wasn’t enough for me. It should have been enough for me, it could have been enough for me, but it wasn’t. I wanted to have the professional background for it. How much emphasis should be placed in any pursuit on developing some form of traditional education, whether it be going back to school for a degree or whether it be some sort of a certification program? I guess the question is how much do we need to know what the world knows versus kind of the other school of thought being learning by experience, which is just, “Okay, I’ve observed this, I’ve observed that, I started doing this, I interview people,” all the other ways that people can become informed about whatever it is that’s interesting to them at the time? I think you can do both. It depends on the person themselves. Sometimes I think to myself, do I really need a PhD? Is this a need to have or a want to have or a good to have, you know, but is it like really necessary? And I think that each person kind of has to answer that for themselves. I keep going back to the fact that probably having a PhD in nutrition, unless I wanted to do research or teach, is probably not necessary. I have enough self-knowledge, I have enough world knowledge, and I have enough education to back me up to do what I do today sufficiently, more than sufficiently. At this point, I haven’t really decided that going back for a PhD in nutrition is really going to move the needle significantly in the way that I do my work. And so you do have a certification? You said you were a registered nutritionist. I’m a registered dietitian nutritionist so that kind of sets me apart from other nutritionists or certified nutritionists. You could take a weekend course, you could take an online course, you could hang your shingle and no one knows any different. The course to become a registered dietitian and in the time that I have been a registered dietitian, they added nutritionist to it because there’s just so much confusion in the marketplace that they just said, “Okay, we’ll just add that word so that people are less confused.” But the truth of the matter is that I had a four-year program, didactic program, learning all about all the sciences, chemistry, biochemistry, biology. I had the cooking classes, I had the nutrition classes, you know, different from biology, different from chemistry. So I had all of that. And then I had the essential almost aspect of it, which is I worked in the field. I worked at a hospital for three years. It’s not necessary to have hospital experience but it is necessary, I think, in my opinion, to not just hang your shingle and say, “I’m a nutritionist now,” or, “I know how to fix a plant-based meal.” You could go to chef school and be a chef and know how to fix a plant-based meal. I think what sets me apart is the working with people who have health issues, the experience that I got from working there for the length of time that I did, you can’t beat that experience. So, it sounds like you’re saying you want to find out what niche you want to be in and then find out what experience you need to get to really fill that niche, what kind of people you need to work with, what specific educational background it is, whether it be that weekend course or the PhD program or anything in between, and once you combine that, you could pretty much figure out what you need to do to get into the place you want to get into. Now, what I’m wondering is when you say you work with people who have a health issue, what constitutes a health issue? If someone just feels, “Oh, I just feel kind of a little bit low energy,” does that constitute as a health issue or are you talking about more of the specific ones? I mean, I think that low energy is a symptom of a greater problem.Share on X I should also mention that the third piece of the requirements on me is that I have continuing education requirements to meet every year, where a regular nutritionist, certified, whoever, whatever, may not have. They may not have those same requirements. So, I guess going back to that original question, I would say figure out what it is that you want to do and then what are the requirements on you to do those things going forward? Going back to the latter question, low energy is definitely a symptom of something else, okay? So now we’re going back to the root cause kind of thing, which I know you said you’ve spoken to functional medicine practitioners before, I happen to also be one, that is not something that I got in my traditional RD training, that is something I had to pursue on my own afterwards. But I really thought that, for me, that that was absolutely necessary to the type of practice that I wanted to have. Now we’re talking about the difference between evidence-based and do I want to practice like traditional registered dietitian, “Eat those, don’t eat that,” or do I want to be able to dig deeper and have those tools to be able to do my job at a higher level? And so when you say dig deeper, you’re talking about beyond, say, something like, “You should eat more of this, eat less of this, you’re not getting enough in this, you’re getting too much of that,” usually sugar but sometimes it’s other things, to the point where you’re like looking at a deeper root cause. What do these deeper root causes usually mean? Are they usually like a functional issue that someone has, some kind of a disease or sometimes the root cause ends up being some kind of a lifestyle issue? It could be both, either/or, or it could be both. You know, in functional medicine, we talk about the example of a plant or a tree. Plant is doing well, it has green leaves and everything is wonderful. That’s great. But if you start to see some brown leaves or some yellow leaves, you don’t go with a paint can and spray them green. But that is the way of traditional conventional medicine. You show up at your doctor’s office, some of your leaves are brown, some of them are yellow, some of them are drying up, and they say, “Oh, hold on, wait a second. I have the pill for your ill.” They’re masking those symptoms. “Oh, you can’t sleep? Here’s a pill.” Not what’s keeping you up at night. Could this be hormonal, or let’s check some labs, but, “Here’s a pill.” And so that’s the equivalent of taking out that spray can and painting those leaves green again. “Oh, you’ve got some yellow leaves, don’t worry, we just, you know, cover that up.” Like I’m sneezing, I have a runny nose, so I’m just gonna like give you a Sudafed or give you some sort of decongestan