This podcast episode of Out & About with Antionette is my interview with Dana O’Grady
Dana O’Grady is a fat loss and mindset coach, who shares the benefits of flexible dieting and fitness freedom with her clients. She is the Founder of The Adaptive Blueprint where she incorporates mindset and gratitude practices to offer clients a more well rounded approach to health & overall wellness.
The changes inside lead to the changes outside!
Dana and I met at the recent Ignite Health and Wellness Symposium, in Middletown, DE. I was so excited when I met her and wanted to learn more about the Adaptive Blueprint as many have already given up on their new year’s health and wellness and fitness goals.
Goals are lifestyle changes so Dana and I talked about some of her lifestyle changes. She is a Healthcare Professional, who has been in the healthcare field for over 20 years so she feels naturally inclined to serve in a health and healing capacity.
Dana was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease back in 2011 and that’s what really got her interested in a holistic lifestyle. She also became a competitive Body Builder back in 2015, and that too opened her eyes to a lot of lifestyle and mindset changes as well as better understanding of the impact that nutrition can have on your physique.
So it was a combination of the autoimmune disease and the competitive bodybuilding that really led her to creating The Adaptive Blueprint. She became more interested in getting to know more about nutrition and how it impacts our health. So Dana became a Certified Nutrition Coach and she is also a Certified Health Coach through integrative nutrition. After Dana’s diagnosis, she researched and learned more about what she could do on her own outside of Western medicine to better her overall health.
Dana explained that when it came to bodybuilding, she had an interest but was stalking it from a distance. However, after giving birth to her second child, she was determined to get her pre-baby body back. Dana knew a person who had a bodybuilding business and was a competitor coach. So she reached out to him for help and much to her surprise within six months time, she was competing in my first show and really fell in love with it.
However, that lifestyle proved to be a little too intense for the long term, so she hung up her bodybuilding days in 2017, but is still staying active. Dana still works out and trains regularly, just not with the same intensity and she did get her pre-baby body back!
Dana reiterated what most of us are keenly aware of and that is if you eat clean you will feel a major difference and this is the start of holistic healing. The more Dana cleaned up her nutrition the better she felt. She also states that it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing type of mentality, it can simply be the 80/20 rule which probably suffices for most of us.
However, with her having an autoimmune disease, a lot of foods affect her differently and she now also has a lot of food allergies that she didn’t have before. It is a very eye-opening experience when you start to recognize the signals that your body sends you, when you’re eating something that you shouldn’t be eating and this is something that she is all too familiar with. Dana can now tell almost immediately when something is causing a reaction in her system. This didn’t happen overnight, it took a long time to get there and she doesn’t expect that most people would recognize it right away either, but even small things that we normalize are giving us a warning.
There are many foods sold on the market today that are “garbage” and sometimes cleaning up your nutrition is the first step in getting rid of bad feelings. If small warning signs that you notice after 20 to 30 minutes of eating such as a swelling of your fingers or you feel bloated, or a sinus response, those are all little indicators that something might have been caused from what you ate or were in contact with which can lead to bigger problems.
Dana feels that a lot of people normalize certain reactions and they don’t think of it as something that should be addressed. We all have a choice to make when it comes to eating certain foods. Think about it: Are you okay with having that reaction? Or are you saying? Well, I don’t like the way this feels. Maybe I can find something else to eat that will make me feel better. For example, if you’re someone who likes pizza but is allergic to gluten, there are gluten-free options to choose from.
Take a listen to the entire episode to learn more about Dana, and feel free to send her an email [email protected] and check her out on Instagram @the_adaptive_blueprint