How are you taking care of your family’s health now that fall is here? The summer heat is gone and fall’s cooler weather is here, and places are opening and going back to normal. How then do you ensure your family stays protected in the best way possible? 

show notes:

In this episode, Heidi shares her top five things to do to ensure your family is protected in the fall, and some essential oil tips for immunity boosting. Listen in to learn how to thrive in a toxic world by knowing what to look for and what to avoid. 

“We do need to have both good and bad bacteria; they both play an important role; we just want to make sure the good outnumber the bad.” ~ Heidi Bramm

Top Takeaways:

• How to boost your immune system by supplementing your nutrition to have high-speed strength as the parent.
• A proactive essential oils and blends application on the spine to stimulate the body and address stress. 

What you will learn:

• Nutrition and cellular health. How to up your kids’ nutrition with whole foods supplements to get enough nutritional value.
• Protect your gut with probiotics and enzymes. How to supplement probiotics to provide a good environment for the digestive and immune systems, plus incorporate enzymes for your physical and mental health.
• Embrace movement and fresh air to get in touch with nature and boost immunity. 
• Rest and manage stress. How to use essential oils to help your kids relax, manage stress, and find enough sleep. 
• Reduce your toxic load and exposure. Be careful to avoid metals and synthetics that could be harmful to your family’s bodies. 

Detailed Transcript:

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to the show. Well, this summer heat is gone, and falls cooler weather is finally here. Places are opening and going back to normal. And so my question is, how are you taking care of your family’s health now that Fall is here? And how do you ensure your family stays protected in the best way possible. So this is a clip is this actually going to be one of three parts in this series about fall health. And it’s from an interview I did with my friend Michelle Byrd on her Busy Vibrant Mom podcast, her podcast is for Christian stay-at-home moms. And she talks all about productivity hacks, time blocking, parenting solutions, and more. And so it was my honor to be a guest on her show to talk about what I do in the fall to just kind of keep my family healthy and well-balanced.

Again, this is part one of a three-part series of what you can do just to keep your family healthy during the fall months and preparing kind of bolster up your immune system. And so I’m talking today, on the top five things I do to ensure my family’s protected in the fall, I share some essential oil tips for immune boosting, and just how to thrive in a toxic world by knowing what to look for and what to avoid. So I hope you enjoy this first part before we get into all of that you know about an event I have going on in my private community for the month of October, I have daily drips of education, and everyone for my community is just kind of gathering together sharing their stories and testimonials for not only the top oils, but also own sung heroes.

And so of course, there’s tons of giveaways involved for you can invite friends and family to join in this event as well and just glean from others that are sharing their unique experiences about essential oils and why they feel like it’s worth their weight in gold to have them in their lives. So just honored to be able to bring this event to you. It’s all month long during the month of October. personal success stories create that confidence for you to try oils, right, because you’re seeing that it’s working for other people. And it’s an effective way to educate others about like, wow, I didn’t know that this was even possible. So are we leaning on each other and empowering others to uplevel the way they manage their health care with these wonderful and amazing gifts of the earth. Again, we’ll be focusing on top oils and personal experiences as well as some unsung hero oils and their uses. We’re also going to cover my top supplements and why they’re important to Hello vitality.

And so just allowing you to experience that and just kind of watch be a fly on the wall, read some of the testimonials, and I bet you’re gonna want to get some of your own. So to join in on the fun of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, just email me at support@coveredbeloved.com. And I will personally send you the link to join the group. There’s absolutely no pressure to buy anything. But of course, if you see something you like, just go ahead and connect with me and I can help you get started and get you into my VIP community. So awesome stuff going on there. There’s actually even a special promotion this month where you can get up to three free products when you decide to get your oils this month with me. So we are running this again all month long would love to have you join in. And if you’re like fine isn’t really my thing, just tell me the basics and what I need to know then go ahead and go to my website heidibramm.com and click on essential oils, you’ll get immediate access to my 45-minute essential oils made easy virtual workshop.

This 45-minute online workshop was designed for people who are just starting to explore the potential of essential oils for health and wellness and don’t know where to start. This is a free workshop and again, no pressure. My goal is simply to educate and empower you with the basics to help you understand the power of essential oils. And we actually just got back from the company that I work with. They do an annual conference every year. And we have peer-reviewed research that shows that their lavender essential oil is the gold standard for purity, we have cracked the code for consistency.

And for the first time, we have proven that the whole lavender oil is better absorbed than synthetics. If you are using a synthetic oil, you do not know what damage you’re doing to your body. So I would love to introduce you to the company that I love and stand behind and I’ve stood behind them for eight years. We love our oils, they become the first go-to for almost the last decade in our home. And I love them I want to make sure everybody knows they exist as a safer, cheaper, and more effective option.

So what does this workshop cover? We cover what oils are how to use them what to look for in a quality oil and why it matters basically what I just shared, but more. And then we go over the most popular oils, versatile oils every home should have, along with testimonials that you can make an informed decision on whether or not essential oils are a good fit for you and your family. And if you decide to work with me, you will get all of your oils at a 25% discount. So again, you can go to heidibramm.com Click on essential oils and you’ll get immediate access.

Speaker 2:

We just wanted to talk today about how we can kind of help our kiddos and help our family. We’re in a season now where even though we don’t have maybe as many germs as we usually have in the fall, we’re still starting to kind of open up places are opening up, people are still very worried. And so we just wanted to bring this to you. I felt it was kind of timely in the season of fall when our kids are at school and tend to get sick. So this is just an episode talking about what ways you can help prevent your kiddos and your family from being super sick or just keep the germs at bay. Heidi, thanks for come in.

Speaker 1:

Yay. Thank you for having me back on your show. I’m so excited. And this is one of my passion topics. So I am going to give it all I’ve got today. And forgive me if I get super geeky, like the science and stuff because I just love it. I have to know why I have to know the why behind things. And so yeah, I’m happy to be here and happy to share.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, we’re so happy to have you. So when thinking about central oils, or just in general ways that you can help prevent your kids from getting sick. What are five active steps that you can kind of take as a mom, to prevent your kiddos from getting sick? We know we’re in kind of a flu season. And we just want to do what we can to minimize those germs.

Speaker 1:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s a good question I was trying to think of like this fun acronym to come up with, for the five things to just keep it super easy to remember, but I couldn’t, I wasn’t feeling very creative. So I’m just going to give it to you straight. So number one, I’ll just give you all five steps, and then I’ll just unpack each of them. But number one is nutrition and cellular health, and so on, unpack that and like what we do for that to protect our kiddos. And number two is protect your guts, though 70 to 80% of our immune system is in our gut. And so we want to make sure we’re being proactively supporting that. Number three is movement in fresh air, it can be so easy to you know, with the startup of school and their kids sitting inside all day.

And I know some places that recess is short in order to have more school time. And so just that movement in fresh air, number four is rest and managing stress. And number five is reducing your toxic load or your exposure or your kids exposure. I’ll start with number one, the nutrition and cellular health. So we try to do our best right to keep sugar at bay and processed foods and just keep that intake low. We’re not perfect, but we definitely up their nutrition with whole food-based supplements. And so my kids have this chewable, they take we also do a powder, it’s a fruit and greens powder. And so it has the antioxidant equivalent of 20 servings of fruits and vegetables, which is like wow, amazing, right? So and accents are the good guys, they go around and find all the free radicals and they just help support our bodies from the inside out.

And so I’ll give I’ll put a scoop of that in a smoothie in the morning or even just a shaker cup, you know, my kids will take it that way, we get a strawberry flavored one and chocolate flavored one. And so they’ll rotate between those. But then we also do the whole food-based the chewable supplement, and that has superfoods in it plus more antioxidants. There’s a cognitive blend in there. And then it’s just a more bioavailable form of vitamins and minerals, so their body can actually use it. There’s no high fructose corn syrup, or artificial colors, or sweeteners or flavors, or anything like that, and it tastes like watermelon.

And so they do pretty good with that one, they like it. And so we supplement because there’s all this research, right that shows that no matter how much we eat, we are obtaining less of those essential nutrients for optimal health from our foods because our soil is so depleted than it has been in previous generations and so like they did this study and calcium levels in fruits and vegetables have gone down and like iron and vitamin A and vitamin C and potassium and all these levels have decreased so much so that we’d have to eat eight oranges today to get the same amount of vitamin A that our grandparents’ generation would have gotten from one orange. Incredible. So we’re not going to do that right. Nobody’s going to eat eight oranges in order to get have that same nutritional value, so we supplement. Organic is a little bit better. But again, fruits and vegetables have just become less nutritious over time because of this soil depletion.

So that whole food-based supplementation is key for being proactive and preventative. And it’s one of the first steps I take to support my kids all the time. But even more so during those fallen winter months. We also supplement with more bioavailable versions of vitamin d3 Because we live in northern Wisconsin. And so I heard it say that there’s like a flu season, but it’s really kind of like there’s just a vitamin D deficiency season. Right? And so we do the vitamin d3 because we really only get that from the sun during the summer months. So it’s like June, July, August, maybe September. So that’s important for us. And then we do vitamin C, zinc, and then should they be fighting anything at the very first sign of that we double all of those doses, and then we add colloidal silver. So that’s something that we do for our kids.

And then, of course, we mom and dads have to be taking care of ourselves too, right? So we do the same as far as the whole-food-based nutrition, like the powder, the supplements, all of that I kind of liken it to a high-speed phone charger. So do you have a high-speed phone charger? Do you like having a high-speed phone charger? So my husband and I, we take this, it’s a whole-food-based vitamin, mineral omega, and antioxidant supplement that’s infused with essential oils. And so it’s like a high-speed phone charger for your body. So we’re the ones that have to take care of our kids when they get sick. Right, right. And so we want to be primed to handle anything that comes our way. And it just helps us get to 100% on a daily basis faster than anything else. And it helps me close that nutritional gap from trying to survive on toddler scraps all day. I know you guys know what I’m talking about. And it just helps me to stay on top of my physical mental and mood game.

And so if you’re feeling old and creaky, this helps you feel younger. And if you seem to catch everything that goes around, it will give your immune system that adds up, and even if you’re overstressed, which I mean, let’s face it, I think we probably all are, that takes a toll on your body, you don’t sleep as well. And so this supplement, I feel like helps me relax and stay calm and just kind of carry on. So that’s our number one step is to supplement your nutrition and sell your health with supplements.

Speaker 2:

That’s awesome. And I love the fact that you just talked about as a phone charger, because we as parents here, right, just need to like charge it up. Because if we go down the, you know, the whole rest of the family goes down.

Speaker 1:

Right? Think about it, you would never let your battery on your phone get to like zero. Or even like, I’m like, oh, it’s in the teens, I gotta plug this thing in. We would never do that to her phone’s right solution to that to ourselves.

Speaker 2:

And one quick question what is uh, you mentioned for you and your husband that you take Koto silver, what is that?

Speaker 1:

Colloidal silver in my husband or my kids will take that too. So if you look up silver, it’s just one of those things that can help your body from the inside out. It’s got antibacterial properties, antiviral properties. It’s not like a super-concentrated metal, it’s very in minute form. So like, we need copper in our body, we need all these essential things on a low level. And so silver is one of those things that I don’t know if you’ve heard of Norwex. Like, yes, they have the silver embedded in because it’s so good, actually germs and bacteria, there’s a liquid version of that, that you can take as like a nutritional supplement. Cool. So for girls, you know, they get a sore throat or anything like that, oh, gargle with it and swallow it.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. We’ll need to do that. Two ways with sore throats.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So that’s my first one. Um, the second one is protect your guts. And so I would be doing a huge disservice if I didn’t mention the supplements we use to support that that so kind of continuing with supplementation but on a different kind of for a different reason. We give our kids both probiotics and digestive enzymes. And so our digestive tract has way more bacteria, we actually have more bacteria in our body than we do with cells. And so when we think of bacteria, we usually think that they’re unhealthy and that we should read our bodies have all of them. However, we do have to have both good and bad bacteria, they both play an important role.

We just want to make sure that the good outnumber the bad. And so when we do this, and we supplement probiotics that good bacteria can help lower the number of bad and it provides an environment that’s good for not only digestive health but for immune health, as well. As I mentioned 70 to 80% of our immune system is in our gut. And so there have been numerous studies that show the difference that probiotics can make in maintaining and strengthening our immune system for that reason, and so they help with overall digestion of food but they can also help the body absorb the vitamins and minerals and other nutrients they can help eliminate waste from the body. And it’s absolutely critical for these micro flora that these little strips units that are in these probiotics to survive the stomach acid and reach the digestive tract safely.

And so we use a time-released probiotic that’s microencapsulated. And so it makes it through it bypasses that stomach acid and makes it all the way to the dead just to track where it’s most helpful. So my kids take that. It’s a kids’ version, and it tastes like a pixie stick, they literally love it, I make them take their troubles first before they have this because it’s like their treat. So good. And then we do digestive enzymes, you’re not just what you eat, but what you digest and assimilate into nutrients, right, your body has to be able to like break down and use those nutrients. And so enzymes are life, like every single function in the body requires enzymes. And we as a population are very deficient. Enzymes are like the protein molecules, they’re the things that make up proteins.

And they’re special proteins that our bodies require for almost every single cellular function and chemical reaction. So in other words, your ability to think your ability to move to breathe, to detox through produce, like everything requires enzymes. And we have two types, we have Metabolic Enzymes, which kind of run our body. And then we have digestive enzymes, which help us digest our food. And so if we eat cooked food, processed food, there’s little to no enzymes in that. And the best way to get enzymes is in raw food.

But if it’s not vine ripe and raw food, right, like you just picked it I regarded, it’s lost 90% of the enzymes. So what we typically see in the grocery store, it’s really only got about 10% of the enzymes left. And so that’s why we as a population are very enzyme deficient. And so here’s the problem. When you don’t have the enzymes with your food, in order to digest it, your body has to convert those Metabolic Enzymes just to digest your food. And so all those Metabolic Enzymes that run everything else in your body. You know, if you don’t take enzymes with your food, you’re literally stealing from your lifeforce, your energy source just to digest your food.

We will take one of these little digestive enzyme capsules, and we open it up and we put it in their little probiotic pixie stick and we shake it up. And so they take that in the morning, and that helps them digest their food, which is great, but it also leaves those Metabolic Enzymes alone to run everything else in their body, so they don’t get as tired. And they’ve done studies and they show that people who take digestive enzymes recover after working out about twice as fast as those who don’t. Those who take digestive enzymes get well after sickness faster than those who don’t. And people that take digestive enzymes can actually lose more weight than those who don’t especially taken on an empty stomach, right, you know, like three hours before bedtime, because enzymes will get into the bloodstream and digest any old food that wasn’t able to be digested at the time it was consumed.

And so that’s, that’s why we love enzymes! So when I’m talking to new people, enzymes are just like, oh my gosh, it’s it’s amazing. And you can even do a demonstration with a bowl of oatmeal, let it sit on the counter overnight, and then just break open a capsule. And let’s mix it in really well and just see what happens it starts to turn liquidy every human body needs more enzymes, especially if you’re dealing with anything respiratory or skin or digestive or mood or like anxiety things or inflammatory issues, enzymes will help so much so that summer to protect your guts with probiotics and enzymes.

Speaker 2:

Incredible. Yeah, I was just thinking like you, as mentioning of you’re stealing that energy from your body. And then your body is able to not have that stolen, it’s able to use that for all those other things that you mentioned, like everything else that it needs to do, it has enough energy to then use it properly the way that it should.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, my kids just get one I as an adult, I mean, you can’t take too many, your body’s gonna store them up and use them as it needs to. It’s just a matter of really, the timing of the day and the ease of getting them into my children. So we just find it easier to do that in the morning with their probiotic stick, which is like a long stick pouch, like a pixie stick. I just dump it in there and shake it. So they get it together with her probiotics but like throughout the day, if they needed more, I would probably just put it in open up put it on applesauce because they can’t really swallow capsules, but I, as an adult I take one with every meal. And I take one before bed so I take four a day. Oh, that’s great. Yeah, like three to five days pretty average.

For that did you notice like a difference before you were taking them and then now afterwards?

Speaker 2:

Definitely, I noticed I’m not as tired or if I eat a heavier meal I might take to you know, I don’t typically eat a lot of breads or whatever but I’m not like a hard and fast like thou shalt never eat you know, whatever. So if I’m eating like a heavier meal, or like a more processed meal, I’ll take you know more I’ll take like two. Awesome.

And then so the third one is movement in fresh air. This one is kind of self-explanatory, but just being out in nature boosts our immune system. You know if your kids can take their shoes off and go barefoot that helps them ground with the good things that the earth provides and just helps them get more balanced in their body and when we’re less stressed and feeling more balanced. That helps everything. So movement in fresh air, fresh airman. We are older girls go to public school and our younger girls, we homeschool and so I just feel like there’s such a difference in the air quality and the atmosphere inside the school building.

I wish every single school classroom had the diffuser going versus like glade plugins you know what I mean? Like you just come into true so many different things in indoor air. And so getting them outside if you can after school, maybe even starting the day outside, but just that movement in fresh air that helps boost immunity.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely. I know our kids, the boys get ready, they head on downstairs, get already have their breakfast, and then they play outside until I pick them up, I go work out in the morning and then come back. So they I often find them on the driveway or playing basketball or just running around outside before I pick them up. And it’s actually really helpful. And then when I pick them up and drop them off at school, they play outside for like 30 minutes before they hop in the classroom. I think it also gets their wiggles out. And then they’re ready to like sit still for a little bit.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yep, for sure. Awesome. Well, number four, I’m trying to move it along here is resting manage stress. So of course getting good sleep, those early bedtimes. If they’re not ready to go to bed early, we can always eat them by putting essential oils on their spine. Lavender is a good one that offers a nice calming, it has high insulative properties. So you can combine those two together, you can put them on the bottoms of the feet or their spine, or you can put them in the diffuser. And that just is going to help them rest and relax, turn off their brains and help them recharge their batteries even better while they’re sleeping.

So we actually even do a productive application on their spine each week that has a specific oils and blends that were chosen for stress, immunity, inflammation. And it’s called homeostasis, which is just that state of balance in the body, it helps balance that flight or fight response. And so it’s there’s a very simple thing that we do after bathtime once a week. And whales, like set out in little containers with droppers and I put a little carrier like to dilute it, you know, so it’s not so strong for them. And I put three to four of those diluted drops on their spine in a particular order. And it just simulates the blood flow in the body, and again, addresses all of those systems to help create that balance.

Speaker 2:

That’s incredible do you have so as you said, you do it with a little dropper. You don’t have like a little roller or something that you already have the oil in that you’re rolling on their back. It’s more that you do it with different droppers.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you could use a roller if you had each of these oils, or blends in a you know, glass roller, you could definitely roll it on, I prefer to use the drops just because it’s easy. They’re smaller and droppers and so they’re, they’re tiny, like they’re not the regular size, essential oil bottles. But anything that you can get drops out, it’s just a more consistent way you know how much you’re getting? Right if you’re using the drops. But yeah, you could definitely use rollers. If I’ve done that before with different oil protocols will put on their spine, sometimes I have it in a roller, sometimes I don’t. But this particular thing because we use this application weekly, I have a specific set that’s already diluted that you just bring out that little set, and we use it every time.

Speaker 2:

Great. So you’re all ready to go.

Speaker 1:

Where I lined them up on the bed. I’m like, You’re here, you’re here both got their shirts off. And I’m like, boom, boom, boom, swipe, swipe. And they just lay there. It takes me like five minutes. But yeah.

Speaker 2:

So, you put the same oils on each of the kids, or do you mix it up depending on what the kids need?

Speaker 1:

For this particular application. Because we’re trying to address these four things stress, immunity, inflammation and homeostasis in the body. I use the exact same oils every week. So it’s more of a preventative. It is such a good application though that even with my teenager, she’s prone to migraine sometimes, depending on what beauty products or whatever she’s exposing herself to. I can always tell what she’s, what new products she’s gotten because she’ll get a migraine. But we’re 100% with her with this spinal technique in these particular oils in stopping that migraine in its tracks. As soon as she’s getting the first signs of like, you know, the aura and all of that. We’re like, oh, okay, you got to quickly get that under her body gets back into balance, and she’s able to just kind of sleep off the rest.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that’s incredible.

Speaker 1:

I had my husband actually he got one one time too. And he was out shoveling the deck five hours later. And that doesn’t normally happen when you have a migraine. It’s like two days. Right? Right, one day, and then you have the after-effects the next day.

Speaker 2:

Right, it just depends, since I get them often. Yeah, it depends on how fast you catch it and how fast you would take care of it.

Speaker 1:

And the only negative with that is you can’t really do it to yourself, you know you have to have I mean, you could probably reach around and try to do the best you can getting on the top of the back of your neck and your the base of your spine but it’s better if you can have someone do it for you.

Speaker 2:

Right. Alright, so what is number five?

Speaker 1:

That’s number four. Number five is reducing your toxic load and your exposure. So my second born, this is when we really started to pay attention to what we put in on and around us. And so she was found to be gluten intolerant. I suddenly had read all the labels on everything. I started learning about chemicals and synthetics and all of that When you think of your body like a bucket when we’re born, we actually think our bucket should be empty. But studies have shown there’s almost 300 chemicals found in cord blood of newborns. And so we all should have this empty bucket, but we don’t. But everything we add on every little exposure, it’s adding a drop and drop and drop into our bucket.

And so emptying that bucket into a cleanse or you know, you can drink lots of water that’s going to help to water’s gonna help facilitate, you know, carrying those toxins out. But you can look at what you’re using as far as cleaners, what you’re exposing yourself to so like ditching the synthetics that are making you and your family sick don’t not putting unknown-like things in your body or products on you. Reading your labels, you can look for sources of heavy metals and synthetics those are the two most common things that wreak havoc on the body and are like they affect our ability to defend what comes our way on a daily basis.

I have an entire episode that talks about cleaners and how harmful they are to the respiratory and reproductive and regenerative processes and systems. And so that’s number 13 on my podcast, it’s called tired of toxins. And it’s three steps for using essential oils for a safer, cleaner, greener home. I know that toxins and like toxic, they’re like total buzzwords right now but they are irrelevant. And we can actually learn how to thrive in a toxic world when we know what to look for and what to avoid.

Speaker 2:

That’s incredible. I, I just listened to another podcast recently where they were talking about just two main products that they use from essential oils. It’s a paste and a will bass kind of like spray. And they use that for everything in their house to clean. And I was just like, that’s amazing. First, it cuts down on cost of buying all these cleaners. Second, it cuts down on the toxicity that you’re putting in your house and all over everything. And number three actually kills germs, which is what you want. 

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely. I’m going to share a little I’m going to share two of my favorites towards the end. But I totally agree with that you can replace everything with like two essential oils, vinegar, and water. And it’s very inexpensive. You know you save a lot of money. I want to say there was a staff that the average home spends between four and $600 a year on household cleaning products.

Speaker 2:

Sounds right. I mean, if you think about what you’re buying, and you’re buying a variety of different things, maybe five or six different types of cleaners depending on what you’re cleaning. You could easily buy that. I would think crazy. All right, thank you so much for talking about all these things. Wow.

Speaker 1:

Hey, beloved, real quick before you go. If you found value in today’s podcasts and you learn something new, head over to iTunes for covered, beloved, and leave a five-star review. Hit subscribe while you’re there. And of course, if you have friends who would benefit from today’s episode, be sure to share. Until next time, remember God’s got you covered