Jess Sherman is an international speaker and author, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner and award winning Registered Holistic Nutritionist™, board certified in Practical Holistic Nutrition. In this episode, she talks about the roots of picky eating, her approach to helping patients, and much more!

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Highlights

3:17 - Jess talks about her background and what got her into helping resilient kids

8:04 - Jess talks about the granular approach she takes to analyzing a picky eater’s diet

10:04 - The roots of picky eating

13:52 - Creating a culture of nourishment in your family

16:21 - Working with teenagers

20:48 - A good approach to teaching picky eaters about nourishment

24:11 - Jess goes into specifics on how she helps her patients

27:33 - The importance of making sure a child’s support system is on the same page when it comes to their nutrition

29:55 - The importance of community for parents that are on this journey

32:20 - Where to learn more about Jess

34:04 - Some epiphanies Jess has learned as a health detective

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About Jess Sherman

Jess Sherman is an international speaker and author, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner and award winning Registered Holistic Nutritionist™, board certified in Practical Holistic Nutrition. She is also a certified teacher and holds a masters degree in Education from The University of Toronto.

As a family health educator she has guided parents in at least 44 countries towards safe, natural and effective tools to improve the lives of their children with learning differences, anxiety, ADHD, autism and mood disorders.

Back when she was teaching high school, Jess became deeply concerned to learn that at least 60% of her students were on medication - either to help them learn, focus or stabilize their mood, or to help them sleep, poop or manage their allergies.  When she discovered the profound impact of nutrition and stress on resilience she set her mind to helping the busy, frustrated, worried parents of these kids find natural, simple ways to help them thrive. 

She now reaches parents around the world through her book, Raising Resilience: Take the stress out of feeding your family and love your life, her virtual community, and her online coaching program. Jess has been featured as a nutrition and family health expert for online and offline audiences where she has spoken about the impact of nutrition and connection for audiences of parents, medical professionals, social workers and teachers. She is a regular contributor to blogs and print magazines, where she translates complex research into practical action steps for busy parents.

In 2019 Jess received the award for Clinical Excellence from The CSNNAA for her work with families and was picked as a featured speaker in The Future Of Health series at the Mindshare Leadership Summit where she spoke about the challenges of raising resilient kids today.

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Connect with Jess

Website | jesssherman.com

The Resilience Roadmap

Biology of Behavior

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Connect with Dr. Lauryn

Facebook | Dr. Lauryn Lax

Twitter | @drlaurynlax

Instagram | @drlaurynlax

Website | drlauryn.com 

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Transcript (Episode website contains full transcript)

Dr. Lauryn (00:02):

Hello, welcome to the Health Detective Podcast, a show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, food, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, former TV news journalist, an ex-chronic illness patient gone health detective with my master's in functional medicine, nutrition, and my doctorate in occupational therapy. Today, bringing you over 20 years of clinical and personal experience helping patients radically take their health back into their own hands. On this show, I love having real conversations with a variety of interesting guests who are all a little bit of health detectives in their own way, like our guest today, Jess Sherman. Today we're talking about the problem of picky eating and behavior problems in kids, which are often related to food. Family wellness specialist and nutritionist Jess Sherman is the founder of the Resilience Roadmap. She helps parents and families create systematic plans as well as nutrition solutions for ultimately helping build resilient kids in your own lives.

(00:57):

Picky eating and letting food be thy medicine are two of the frontal topics of today's conversation. And absolutely just loved this conversation because I have 20 years of my own experience of working with kids and families as well. I remember when I was 10 years old, starting my own babysitter's club. I was a solo babysitter at the time, but I just absolutely loved working with kids. And as I began to become more of a healthcare practitioner, realized a lot of the things that I was seeing kids for in my therapy clinic, such as ADHD, sensory processing, autism spectrum, just like chronic anxiety with kids, were really related not only to the food they were eating but also what was going on under the hood. So things like their gut microbiomes and their limbic system slash brain health and how they're processing stress. And so today's conversation is just really rich and meaningful in that way of health really is an inside job, both for us adults and for our kids.

(01:56):

And hope today is really empowering. If anything, I hope this conversation is empowering for you, and or if you have any parent friends in your life and or folks that you think could really resonate with this episode, don't hesitate to share it with them. If you're liking the show, also don't hesitate to leave a review. Your reviews mean the world to me and help others become their own health detectives, best health detectives for themselves, by getting the word out there. And if you have a podcast topic or idea, also love hearing from you. Don't hesitate to reach out to me on social media and or my website. My handle is at Dr. Lauryn d r l a u r y n, my website same dr Lauryn.com. D r l a u r y n.com. Without further ado, let's get to the show.

(02:44):

Jess. So excited to have you here. And just to talk about building resilient kids and using food as medicine for our kids and for our kids with maybe behavior issues on quotes or our kids that are struggling in school, <laugh>, <laugh> or kids that are super picky or is all the above. Oftentimes like Let food be thy medicine could be the missing link that is not always tapped into. And so, but before we get into that topic, really just give us a little bit of background about what got you doing the work you are doing to build resilient kids and families.

Jess Sherman (03:17):

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Lauryn. Oh, we have so much to talk about with building resilient kids. I got into this, I started as a teacher. I started, I was really interested in working with kids. I started working with them actually in an outdoor environment, taking them on trips and teaching them skills in the woods and that sorts that of stuff. And that took me into the classroom. And I was teaching in the classroom, and I was noticing that kids were just really struggling, you know, it was getting worse and worse and worse. And I was getting really burnt out, and I was teaching with an exceptional team of teachers, I worked with fairly challenging kids who were already looking for something a little bit different from the normal educational system and came into our school because they didn't really fit elsewhere.

(04:08):

And so we were super creative, and we, it was an amazing team. We got the kids outside, we changed the classrooms around, we threw out the curriculum and focused on community building, and we were doing so much amazing work, and still, kids were really struggling. And I got really tired and really curious about what we were missing. And so I took a sabbatical, what I thought was gonna be a sabbatical ended up being a career change. And I started to dig into children and their bodies and what makes them tick. And it's really interesting to me now to look back and think that I didn't, or, and see that I didn't take a sabbatical to learn more about education or learn more about how children learn or, you know, learn anything about special education or, or things like that. I left to study holistic health and nutrition because somehow I had a gut instinct that was where I needed to focus.

(05:10):

Something was going on in their bodies that was making it hard for them to cope with the expectations that we're putting on them as teachers. And you know, so hence the anxiety and the ADHD and the aggressive outbursts and the, you know, the, what I call now re lack of resilience, which is our capacity to cope with stress. They couldn't cope with stress. Some of them could, but some of 'em couldn't. And I wanted to understand the difference. And so then my mind was just blown open when I started to learn about the connection between what we eat, what's going on inside our bodies, our biology, and our capacity to tolerate stress, which is our resilience. So that's what I do now. I started screaming that from the rooftops cuz I was like, ah, <laugh>, everyone needs to know, Every teacher needs to know. That would be, I would've been, a totally different teacher. Well, I'd say that now, but who knows? It changes how I teach, it changes how I parent now as a mom of three. And yeah, it just, it changes everything when you see this different perspective.

Dr. Lauryn (06:08):

Yeah. Well, I'm so inspired by your story because I just absolutely love working with kids and families as well. And yet just with that epiphany and that awareness that you had, because I think I should, before we started recording, I worked as an OT occupational therapist for quite some time both in pediatric clinics as well as in the school system. And just like already was kind of woken to like using food as medicine in my own healing journey from chronic eating disorders as well as working outside of the scope with or outside of those environments with adults. But really like just seeing these kids come in and like, you know, they're having like red dye in their fruit roll up or like asking them just like curious like, what'd you eat for breakfast this morning? And it's like, you know, pop tart or they got donuts on the way to school or something.

(06:57):

There was just a very clear parallel or just like very clear cut driver for them, and seeing that these kids that were being diagnosed with ADHD or sensory processing issues, a lot of anxiety. Like the theme that I began to like uncover was that the food that they were eating was not feeding their brains or not serving them. I think to the greatest capacity that they could feel their best or to even have the opportunity to not just be told like, Hey little Johnny, stop moving so much. Or oh, you just like, he needs like to go to the special to me <laugh> to OT time and like just being I think the teachers seeing the teachers frustrated, the parents frustrated and the kid just like <laugh> not know he's just operating as his body is telling him. And seeing also kids discharged a lot faster from clinic. When I would work with the families on the diet piece, it's like not, you know, the end all be all. And yet it was a very big propeller I saw in a lot of like the health optimization.

Jess Sherman (08:04):

Yeah, and it's so interesting, too, cuz I see, like when you like zone in on this population, I see a variety. Like sometimes it's really obvious that, you know, they're just, they're just not eating whole foods, and they're just not eating the right foods. But sometimes it's less obvious, and sometimes parents will come, they'll be like, I cook everything from scratch, and it's all whole foods, and it's all organic, and I'm just doing, I'm doing it all right, and still my kid is struggling. And that's when we can really get granular and look at, well, are they eating the right foods for their bodies? Do they have nutrient imbalances because of their genetics? Do they, you know, is there stuff going on in their gut so they're not receiving the foods very well, they're not digesting them very well? So like, I just wanna point out, like if you're, if you're listening to this and they're just like, oh my gosh, I'm just, that's not me. I don't give my kids red dye. I don't give my kids, you know, all the candy and all the stuff, and they're still struggling. There still is a lot we can do with food even despite that.

Dr. Lauryn (09:00):

Yeah. I'm so happy you mentioned that one of my favorite stories that come to mind is working with an almost three-year-old super picky eater when like just ate chicken fingers is what he liked and like maybe cereals, and like come to find out just had a lot of gut dysbiosis, some candida going on in his little tummy. We did a stool, a poo test <laugh> and just like really gently took a pediatric approach with treating that was a little bit of Biocidin drops some probiotics and just would present the food like on his plate or at dinner family time. No pushing or forcing the food, though. And this little boy just began to be, his palette changed or his openness to trying new foods without so much that struggle too. So that's a, a thing I would love to talk to you a little bit about is just like picky eaters as well and like, I mean there's definitely can be a control piece like that just need, we all have for want to control, but also the gut piece as well that could be at play with picky eating.

Jess Sherman (10:04):

Oh yeah. I mean there, there are so many potential roots of picky eating. I think fundamentally, parents need to understand that like to deny yourself the building blocks that your body needs to grow by not eating is not a healthy state of being. Right? That's sort of foundational. So, and I say that because I think, you know, sometimes parents of picky eaters will just fall into this kind of routine around, well, you know, he's just picky, he's just like that. She's just like that. And I think first recognizing that children need a diversity of food to grow and to develop to their fullest potential, that's a thing, right? Like it's important. So it's important. It's, it's worth spending a little bit of time and energy to figure out why. Always asking, just get curious about why are they so picky. And yeah, often I do see that I do see as we look into the ecosystem in the microbiome, and you can see all kinds of opportunistic bacteria flourishing, and the, and the good normal flora that should be protective of us and help drive our appetite and our hormones is sluggish.

(11:17):

Like exactly what you just said, rebalancing that can open up the palette, and it's mysterious, and it's wonderful when you see it, and it's a big leap of faith on the part of parents to say, okay, we're gonna give these drops and see what happens. But yeah, I do see that, I do see that a lot. And like you brought up the control issues, yes, we don't want to create fear around food, right? We need to make sure we remember that your child's relationship with food is the longest relationship they will ever have in their entire life, and it needs to be a constructive and a positive one. So we need to keep that front of mind when we're teaching them about how to nourish their bodies. But if they're not nourishing their bodies and you find yourself stuck in these battles, there's a reason, there's some kind of reason and, and maybe it's in the gut, maybe it's driven by nutritional deficiencies cuz kids get stuck in this vicious cycle of not wanting to eat and then not eating, and then their hormones go all out of balance, and then their hunger cues get messed up.

(12:18):

And so they are stuck in a vicious cycle, and maybe it is around control as well and their sense of felt safety around food and around their family, which sounds really harsh, but that very much can be brought into the picky eating picture. But essentially, that is also a stress management issue, if that makes sense, right? Because if a child feels stressed around food, so there's pushback and there's, there's reactivity, they don't have a very wide window of tolerance to stressful situations, right? If a food offering them a new food is gonna throw them into a tantrum because they're so stressed out about that, then there's work to do on the stress tolerance, the window of tolerance to stress is what I call it.

Dr. Lauryn (13:08):

Yeah, there's a lot of layers, it sounds like, to building quote-unquote resilient kids and very customized to the child. And like whether it is they're overtly just struggling with picky eating sensory issues or if it is more the like, you know, the behavioral ADHD, just a lot of anxiety kind of issues as well. So kind of like, where do you first start? Because I think a lot of them probably have under similar undertones too. The ultimate goal is to like nourish a child to be their most optimal self. Man, if only I had known now what I know or known then what I know now, like as a kid too, cuz I was definitely, I ate a lot of processed food up until probably age 26. I didn't know what non-processed food was. So

Jess Sherman (13:53):

Can we just talk about that for a second because Yeah, because we can't fault our kids for eating processed food if we give back to them, right? Like, because we can't expect our kids to know how to do something unless we teach them how to do it, right? So if processed foods are highly available, inexpensive, very addictive, and tasty, right? And so, of course, that's where they're gonna go if, if they're allowed, if that door is open, right? And I don't think it's fair of us to make them feel bad about their choices if we haven't taught them how to make different choices. That's, that's something, right? So every time I have a family come into my world, and we start working about that, we talk a lot about creating a culture of nourishment in the home, right? What does that look like? What language are you gonna use around food?

(14:43):

What are meal times gonna look like? What are your expectations around food? And it's gonna be different for different families, but it's so important for parents and the number of parents who were like, Oh, I wish I had started this, you know, when I was pregnant or before my child was born or you know, earlier because you, you go on, you get on this treadmill as a parent and life is fast and busy and crazy and stressful and then all of a sudden your kids start struggling, and when you step back, and you realize that you never really talked about food and were considered its position or its place in the family, it's worth doing, it's worth having that conversation with your parenting partner if you have one or with yourself, if you don't have one. Or with your extended family if they're involved to really talk about your values around food and what you wanna communicate to your kids around nourishing their bodies.

Dr. Lauryn (15:37):

I would wonder too, like, I mean, you do a lot of work with different families, kids of all ages, like what about with teenagers? Because, like, once teens are kind of set in their ways I'm, I work with teens whether it's struggling with over-eating disorders or picky eaters as well that have just somehow managed to make it to age 16 or 17 just eating like a select number of foods, maybe five foods and like that's their comfort foods and they're definitely more adult-like and that they can make their choices and decisions and go to the kitchen prep their meals. So like, it's just what they're eating and say, like, how do you even begin to address that with older kids as well because starting young is, like, it would be ideal.

Jess Sherman (16:21):

Yeah, I think so if you have created this culture of nourishment in your home at any point in time, you can always come back to it when things fall off the rails <laugh>, right? As they do when life gets busy. But if you haven't and your kids are older and now facing the situation, I mean, I think what's happened is they're making their own food choices based on a lack of information, right? They don't actually know what is required to keep themselves healthy, and sometimes nor are they interested, right? But it's ideal when we work with the kids who are sort of preteens to start to help them understand what their body's needs are because then we can graduate them, right? Because we can be like, you know, okay And the same thing, it's the same way I approach things like, like disciplinary things. My job is to keep you healthy and safe until you can show me that you can make decisions that keep yourself healthy and safe, and then we can gradually transfer the decision-making power over to you.

(17:23):

So when you have a 17-year-old who is making unsafe and unhealthy choices by limiting their diet to four foods, my feeling is we need to back up and say, listen, you're not making healthy choices, so I'm gonna make them for you right now. And I say that fully understanding the control issues, right? There are lots of control issues, and this is where a really good therapist who understands attachment and trauma and things like that really comes into play because there's healing to do there. It's not all about the food. So you gotta unravel it and work very, very gently. But I think if we were to zoom out and say like, okay, what's the framework we're gonna work in here? The framework would be, you know, you have a, a late teen who is working with the information that, like a, a child might have in terms of their, what their bodies need. So they're not equipped with the tools that they need yet to make the decisions that they're supposed to be making at 17. Does that, does that make sense? I I want this to come across not as blamey or, you know, it's not anybody's fault, this happens all the time.

Dr. Lauryn (18:34):

Definitely, they just don't know what they don't know. And I mean, I so can relate to that cuz at age 17, I was like, I mean my processed foods are, were diet foods, it's like snack wells, a hundred-calorie snack packs or like just not eating much. Cuz I was really struggling with my eating disorder, and yet no one was there to educate me. It wasn't really until I went to, through my nutritional kind of training that it was just like a big aha where I began kind of like cultivating that nourishment just like, I guess, methodology and mentality with food in such a new way because knowledge is power, especially as you age.

Jess Sherman (19:07):

Well and I would love to hear like from your experience, cuz what I see is that when you're working with teens or anyone really over the age of maybe like eight-ish, if they don't have a goal that makes sense to them, then they're not interested,

Dr. Lauryn (19:24):

Right. Motivation.

Jess Sherman (19:25):

Yeah. Like if you just tell 'em all, you have to eat better, you have to nourish your body. Especially if there's an established eating disorder, it's like that doesn't make any sense to the, to that brain, you know? But if there's a goal like, you know, you want better skin, or you wanna be a better athlete, or you just wish you could stop waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares or like, because I can assure people listening and you know this, that food affects absolutely everything. Absolutely everything. So if you can come up with any goal physical or mental wellness related, maybe they want better grades, whatever food is going to be a part of that or can be a part of that, it's gonna impact that. So I think you can have a constructive conversation with your child to say, hey, you know, what are, what are your goals right now? What are your aims, your wishes, your desires? And then your next comment could be food's gonna play a role at that. So can we take a look at that and we explore that together?

Dr. Lauryn (20:29):

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that's really well said. And like yeah, tapping into the motivation cuz it's like if a parent just says, or dieticians that I worked with just said just eat this. Like that's kind of why eating habits for me at, at such a young age through teens and early adults did not stick cuz I was doing it for others or others telling me just what to do, <laugh>.

Jess Sherman (20:49):

Exactly, you know what's so interesting is that when I went through my education degree, I was studying experiential education. So the whole concept was how do we create experiences for kids that help them understand who they are, develop into who they're going to be, create a sense of self come to their own conclusions, right? That's what experiential education was all about. And one of the things we talked about was that you can lead someone through an experience from the top, like pull them through an experience and have very prescribed outcomes of here's what we're gonna do and here's why we're gonna do it and here's what you're gonna learn from it. That's one way to take someone through an experience. And then there's also this idea of leading from behind of constructing the environment, constructing the experience and setting things in place and then letting them explore and being there sort of on the edges to be like, Oh, that's interesting.

(21:44):

Maybe we should try this. Oh, let's go over here, let's explore this. But basically who the person who's going through the experience is left to draw their own conclusions. And that is so much more powerful of a learning process to lead from behind like that. And that's how I approach all things with food, too, right? Like you can come in and like you just said, like here's your diet, here's what you're gonna do, here's what your body needs, I know best, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you that would be the top-down approach, which works in some cases but isn't a very powerful experience and is very much opening yourself to push back and, and things. But this sort of gently coaxing through, that's why I focus on creating this environment of nourishment, this culture of nourishment in your home, facilitating this experience. And you know, I coach my family just a lot to say, you know, just get curious, say, isn't that interesting? And we're gonna try this now <laugh> and just kind of coaxing things through. It's so much more powerful.

Dr. Lauryn (22:50):

I'd love to know some specific tactics you use, too cuz one of my favorites in clinical practice, and I think what you just, I mean the whole leading from behind it explains why diets don't work, plans don't work, and like why we as nutritionists, like I think early on in my career I would like bang my head of like, you know, I'm just giving them the protocol like just do it. It's so easy seemingly like, but there's, I mean, a lot of factors that can play into that and or just again, tapping into that motivation piece as well and, and why 99% of diets fail is like a person can follow it for so long, but like if there's not the discontinuation of even connecting, like I like genuinely feel better versus just like, oh, I achieved the goal or the weight, then it's not gonna stick.

(23:38):

And so I do a lot of intuitive eating type of work early or just like awareness. So whether it is food logging and not to track your calories, but to really log symptoms around like how you feel for a few days and just to really understand and correlate that with what we're eating can be really eye-opening for some. And I know there's like biofeedback kind of devices others will use if you're into tracking like HRV kind of monitoring, like what are some tactics that you help with that coach your parents on maybe with helping guide their kids a bit more specifically.

Jess Sherman (24:12):

Well, you need to, you need to, this is another thing I learned as a teacher is that you don't need to know everything about the subject you're teaching. In this case, nutrition, but you do need to stay one or two steps ahead of them, <laugh> right? Ahead of the kids. And our kids need to know how to nourish their bodies, right? So that means we need to know a little something about nutrition. And I don't know about people listening, but when I became a parent, I actually probably knew more than most about nutrition from a technical nuts and bolts perspective. A lot of parents don't have a clue because they were never taught it by their parents, right? It just wasn't part of their growing-up culture. It was like grab and go eat on eat in the car, or you know, a lot of families don't have dinner together and things like that.

(24:59):

So, but what I didn't know as an early, early on in my parenting was how tough it was going to be <laugh> to implement all I knew, right? Like I knew all of the things, I knew what all my, what my kids needed to eat, but I didn't know how hard it was going to be to actually get the food on the table and into the mouth, right? So I think the very first thing, just from a really strategic like nuts and bolts perspective, is to learn about nutrition and beyond. Like there's the protein, fat, and carbohydrates that your children need in terms of the macronutrients, but also there's the vitamins and the minerals and the phytonutrients and the enzymes and the probiotic bacteria, which are also, those are the micronutrients that your kids need every day. So they, they need all of these categories of foods, and I don't, it's not helpful to like pick it apart and be like how many, how many grams of protein, how it, our brains just, it's not a practical way to think about things and it, it makes people very obsessive, but it, it is important to know what they are and be able to, to look at a meal for example and recognize, oh wow, this is a really carbohydrate-dense meal, and there's no fiber in it, and there's no protein in it.

(26:19):

So what can we do to this to make it a little bit better? And that's, I mean, we spend in my resilience roadmap program, we spend the entire first month just working on that skill of being able to recognize food sources and being able to look at your child's favorite meal and kind of get a sense like not pick it apart into grams and milligrams but get a sense like, could we add some more vitamins in here? Could we add some more color in here? Could we add some more protein in here? So I think that's, that's the first thing is to sort of think about where you're at in your knowledge of this stuff. Recognize, like, give yourself tons and tons of love if you don't know this stuff because where do you learn it? Like you, you don't <laugh>, right? Maybe like grade eight health class or something, if that. So cut yourself some slack but just take stock. Like, do you have a good sense? Do you have that skill? And if not then, then that's where you should focus some energy.

Dr. Lauryn (27:18):

Yeah, definitely. That kind of foundations just being probably modeling too, I imagine, like as a parent, like also or in it together as far as if there are dietary shifts happening.

Jess Sherman (27:32):

Oh yeah. I mean, gosh, our kids are little sponges, right? They learn much more from what we do than from what we say. And, that goes for both parents if they're living together, even if they're not living together so many times like parents are not on the same page in terms of in terms of food and you will dr you'll drive yourself crazy if everybody is not on the same page and that that <laugh> we can get into like the diets thing. Everybody needs the same diet. Everybody needs the same diet, which is real foods, whole foods, and not a lot of junk <laugh>. That's it, right? There are nuances in there because some people don't digest certain foods very well, but that's not because of the diet itself. That's because the body is not receiving that food at that time very well. So that's where the nuances come in, and people are like, oh, those shouldn't be eating grains, or you shouldn't be eating fat, or you shouldn't be eating whatever. So I would say put that stuff aside and say, first and foremost, everybody needs a diet that is full of whole foods, full of color, full of variety, and doesn't have a whole lot of non-foods that are masquerading as foods in them.

Dr. Lauryn (28:44):

The nuances lessen a lot when we just focus on simplifying it.

Jess Sherman (28:49):

Yeah. That I think that simplifies things cuz I get those questions all the time. Like what's the best diet for a child? Can a child be on keto or paleo or, you know, whatever? And I mean that's the, my first question is like, well are they eating whole real foods because that's where you start.

Dr. Lauryn (29:06):

Definitely, and then kind of like in helping implement this, I know you talk a lot about just like not going it alone too, and like that's really why you've cultivated a community of support, especially for those parents that may be out there and they go to a doctor, say their child has ADHD or behavioral issues, not just picky eating and the cure may be a prescription and perhaps like, I mean some folks listening to this may be like curious as to thinking like, well what is possible possibly like what haven't we fully tapped or what haven't we fully tapped even within the underlying the gut health kind of symptomology if we are trying to tap into the food piece. So I mean, tell us a little bit about just where parents can connect and perhaps have a community of other like-minded parents that are just on this journey.

Jess Sherman (29:55):

Yeah, I mean this, so I mean my, my focus is the kids who are struggling in school are struggling with mood and struggling with behavior, and then as offshoots of that, usually they're also struggling with things like sleep and constipation and food allergies and these things that are, that are compounding the problems they're causes, and they're also secondary to those issues. So it's a whole big mess of the game. It's all connected because it's such a holistic kind of problem with inter it's an interconnected web of things. Parents drive themselves crazy because they go to this specialist and then that special, they go to the brain person, they go to the gut person, they go to the, you know, the GP. They go this test and that test, and it's, it's all really compartmentalized, and there's nobody to really pull it together to say yeah, the gut issues are related to the brain issues, which are related to the learning issues, which are related to the sleep issues, which are, you know, and really connected lines between all of those things.

(30:54):

That's what I do. And it's so empowering for parents to not only get that kind of strategic map but also to hear, you know, I do a lot of my coaching in groups and, and to hear what other parents are going through and what other parents have figured out because we wanna help our kids. I mean, I work with the most amazing detective parents who, who are just always, you know, listening to webinars and summits and, and this and that and going to other doctors and stuff. And then they come back to our group, and we put it into the context. We give it all context, and that's invaluable. And then, you know, other parents will hear that be like, Oh, okay, I remember I was told that once too. I didn't understand what it meant at the time. And, and the, just the clicks and the light bulbs really come together, so it's not easy, or I think even possible to do this by yourself, nor should you, it's gonna take 17 times more time. <Laugh>, you know, and our children are only children for a short period of time, right? We don't have the luxury of years and years and years cuz they're developing their sense of self, and they're developing their, capabilities and their, their self-esteem. And so we want them to be super healthy during that developmental period. So it really accelerates the process to do this as a group.

Dr. Lauryn (32:15):

A hundred percent. Well, and where can people find out more about you and just your work?

Jess Sherman (32:20):

My home base is at justsherman.com, and there's a lot of S's in there. There's three S's all at once. But that's where people can find out about my common clear kid's program. If they're more like a DIYer and they just want go on a strategic plan and they can, then they can just kind of go at it. Or the resilience roadmap, which is really the full meal deal of the we handhold, we get you the right labs and the right supplements and the right diet plan and the whole bit to make sure that your, your child is, you know, essentially what it is. I call it the resilience roadmap and not like your plan to reduce ADHD or your plan for autism or whatever. Because what we're doing is we're looking underneath all of those diagnoses into resilient, into the capacity to navigate stress, tolerate stress. And there's a great recorded seminar on my website called The Biology of Behavior. If folks are interested, maybe you could link to that, which outlines what's going on in a child's body when they struggle to cope. So that could look like autism, that could look like anxiety, that could look like ADHD, that could look like explosive outbursts, all of these things, right? It's not a diagnosis, it's a what is causing the behavior from a biological perspective. So that might be really informative.

Dr. Lauryn (33:40):

Yeah, definitely can put that link in the show notes. And well, Jess, thanks so much for coming on just and helping us build some resilient kids and maybe resiliency ourselves. This show is called the Health Detective Podcast, so I'm just curious, what is something cool you've personally learned or uncovered lately? Like a light bulb with me, you've had as your own health detective?

Jess Sherman (33:59):

Oh gosh. Like on a personal level

Dr. Lauryn (34:02):

Or as a student? Yeah, either

Jess Sherman (34:04):

I'll, I'll say on a personal level, I have realized that you cannot be healthy if you don't move your body <laugh>.

(34:11):

And I say that with full like humility because I spend way too much time sitting at my computer and trying to help people get healthy and moving your body. This goes for our kids, too, though, right? Like the kids who struggle to get off the