Dec. 24, 2025
Bonus: Eat To Lower Inflammation, with Dr. Prudence Hall
Bonus topic! **Remember that you have personal email access to me as a subscriber. Send your questions or comments to bonus@cherylpfischer.com.** Looking for a saner way to start the New Year? We pressed pause on big, brittle resolutions and asked Dr. Prudence Hall to map a simpler path: anti-inflammatory eating you can actually live with. The approach is grounded and flexible—eat from the land, lean on fiber-rich plants and clean proteins, and make healthy fats a daily habit. Alo...
Bonus topic!
**Remember that you have personal email access to me as a subscriber. Send your questions or comments to bonus@cherylpfischer.com.**
Looking for a saner way to start the New Year? We pressed pause on big, brittle resolutions and asked Dr. Prudence Hall to map a simpler path: anti-inflammatory eating you can actually live with.
The approach is grounded and flexible—eat from the land, lean on fiber-rich plants and clean proteins, and make healthy fats a daily habit. Along the way, we talk through realistic meals, smart beverage choices, and a short elimination test that lets you pinpoint your personal food triggers without guesswork.
And yes, dark chocolate gets a thoughtful green light when it’s 72 to 85 percent cacao.
Personalization is the throughline. If you suspect gluten, soy, dairy, or nightshades are stirring up bloat, joint pain, headaches, or afternoon crashes, try a focused two-week elimination and a single-day reintroduction to read your body’s signals clearly. No moralizing, no shame—just data you can use to build meals that make you feel steady and clear.
Save this for your January reset and pick one upgrade to start: swap refined grains for wild rice, switch your cooking fat to extra-virgin olive oil, or trade an afternoon slump for matcha.
Connect with Dr. Hall at drprudencehall.com.
See you next week as we resume the series on How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy!
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00:00 - Holiday Pause And New Year Reset
00:37 - Introducing Dr. Prudence Hall
02:05 - What Anti-Inflammatory Eating Looks Like
03:40 - Daily Meal Examples And Drinks
05:20 - Healthy Fats, Oils, And Chocolate
06:29 - Eliminating Inflammatory Foods
08:03 - How To Run Your Own Elimination Test
08:44 - Closing And Action To Bookmark
WEBVTT
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Hello, confidence deep dive.
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Just for today, just for this week, this little episode, we are jumping away from our series on how to stop being your own worst enemy.
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It right now is the middle of the holiday season, and in fact, the middle of the week of Christmas, and I suspect your podcast listening schedule is not what it usually is.
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So I'm going to do this now so that you have it here and you can refer to it when we hit New Year's and you start thinking about what healthy things you want to do in the new year.
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And coming on mind your midlife in January, we're going to be talking about resets and we're going to be talking about how to start the new year and things you might want to do, not from the idea of I have to do a huge New Year's resolution and I have to do everything perfectly because I don't think that works, but from the idea of let's just take a look, see what we can do.
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And so let's let this episode be in there somewhere if you're thinking about how you are eating and how you might want to eat going forward into 2026.
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So this conversation is with Dr.
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Prudence Hall, who was my guest on episode 64 of Mind Your Midlife Podcast.
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And our episode, if you haven't heard it, go find it.
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Our episode was about vibrant aging.
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And we spent a lot of time talking about balancing hormones, and then we brought in some sort of mental well-being, and she mentioned how important it is what we eat.
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And so that extra piece of the conversation about how we eat and anti-inflammatory eating is here.
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You've said that we want to be eating as, I guess I would say, natural as possible, although I recognize that word is sort of fraught with issues.
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From the land, I guess is what you said, right?
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So tell us a little bit more about uh what healthy eating really looks like or anti-inflammatory eating.
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It's a little different for different people, but generally waking up with, I'll tell you what I eat, you know, and that's that's pretty much how I'd like people to eat, but with some with some you know variations.
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For example, some people are intolerant to eggs or they just can't stand them.
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So you don't want to eat something wretched in the morning.
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But I generally wake up and have two to three eggs.
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Uh sometimes I cut up a little avocado on it.
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I have coffee that's organic and I put nut milk in it that I make.
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I make almond milk, and so that doesn't bind up the polyphenols in there.
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So you you get some really good uh healthy stuff in the um coffee.
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Even better if you want to have green tea or matcha, which I drink throughout the day, that decreases all kinds of illness.
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It's it's pretty astonishing, sure, how much uh benefit that is.
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And then for lunch, I'll have something like maybe it'll be wild rice with some salmon that's wild.
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Now, wild rice is a grass, it's a wild grass, so the glycemic index is very low, yet it feels filling, it feels glycemic.
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So when I'm talking about glycemic, it's like how much sugar is in that, or how much does it break down to versus the um the fiber?
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So it's a high fiber diet that you want.
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Frequently, I'll do a Thai curry for night.
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Uh, it could have chicken, organic organic.
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I I get the pasture-raised chicken that's also organic, and put all kinds of vegetables in it, uh, cauliflower and carrots and zucchinis and just everything in there.
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And that's really nice.
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And I can put that over amrith, which is another grain, which actually builds the gut.
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Uh, both of those are great for the gut.
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And um healthy oils.
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I frequently start the day with a green drink that is just green extract.
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Uh, I slug that down with water, purified water.
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Uh, and then um oil, healthy oil.
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When I when I was 16, I was living uh with my family in Spain, and my father was on a sabbatical, and I felt like I was too fat.
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I was probably 10 pounds overweight, but I was young and I sort of was looking at all the Spanish girls, and I was feeling like kind of dumpy.
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So I went to watch.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I don't know why I did this, but I started saying olive oil is a big part of their diet.
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I'm just gonna start drinking some olive oil.
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And then I'd wake up in the morning and I would drink like three tablespoons of olive oil.
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At lunch, I would have like a fourth of a cup of olive oil, and I lost weight so fast.
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So it I wasn't keto, I wasn't ketoing or on that kind of diet.
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I was really on a Spanish diet at the time.
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But I just healthy oil grows the hair, it's wonderful for the skin, it's anti-inflammatory, especially omega-3.
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So I I want to get a good amount of omega-3 in in the diet.
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And uh berries, berries have you know all kinds of different colors of berries, and another uh thing that I think is great to eat is some uh yogurt.
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I happen to eat sheep yogurt because I'm a little bit intolerant to to dairy, not too, but a little bit intolerant, and you know, berries and nuts and seeds and uh and you eat that.
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I mean, that's a great breakfast as an alternative to eggs.
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Sometimes having something for dinner for breakfast is great too.
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I mean, that's helpful.
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So I'm gluten-free and I limit sugar.
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I love chocolate.
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I mean, I love yeah.
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One of my one of my good resources here is Balter Longo.
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And Balter Longo is the head of the the USC uh longevity institute.
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Now, this man, his whole life is diet, he studies diet and longevity and who's living the longest.
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And he says that it's all right to have chocolate, that it's actually a superfood.
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So I eat 72 to 85 percent chocolate probably every day, a bit of it.
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And then I feel fabulous.
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I love that chocolate is okay.
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And yes, dark chocolate, the milk chocolate has all the other stuff in it that isn't so good for us.
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Yeah.
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So that's kind of the diet.
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Eat from the land, eat grass-fed, pasture-raised as much as you can, eliminate inflammatory foods.
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So inflammatory foods are soy, uh, gluten, dairy for some people, uh, nightshades.
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So these are you can't kind of keep away from those or test those.
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And Cheryl, the way you test those is you take them completely out of your diet and then you for two weeks, and then you add them back in in abundance, and you see, are my joints hurting?
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Do I have headaches?
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Is my neck hurting?
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And if you if tomatoes are also nightshade.
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So if you react to them, then you can eat them in a very limited fashion.
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Right, right.
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So and I actually am mostly gluten-free as well.
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And the way I figured out to do that is exactly what you're describing.
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I took it out for a few weeks, and then when I ate it again, I realized it was making me very sleepy.
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Oh.
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For whatever reason, that's why I was always sleepy in the afternoon, apparently.
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So I said, Well, I don't want to feel sleepy, so I'm gonna leave it out.
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It was interesting to know.
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That's great.
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Well, we can do that with everything.
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If someone feels like, especially if you have GERD or bloat or stomach, you know, rumbling all the time, or you feel like you're not digesting your food, then you can really separate it out and say, okay, I'm gonna get rid of dairy first.
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And sheep's yogurt is not really traditional dairy.
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People don't react to it like they would.
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And a lot of times, goat dairy doesn't cause the same problem as cow's uh dairy, too.
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So you get rid of something like that, a big category, and absolutely make sure it's not in anything.
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Because what the body does is when we're intolerant to something, we make antibodies to it.
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So two weeks will allow all those antibodies to go away, and then we see how we feel, and then we just chug it down.
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Right.
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But we want to do a good load of dairy and see, well, what's happening with those antibodies now?
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Are they all coming back and causing us to be inflamed and uh migrainey and headache and all that?
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Right, right, right.
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Okay, well, that yes, I mean, anybody can try that at any time, which I love because you can easily kind of figure your body out by eating a little bit differently.
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Make sure you bookmark this so you can come back to it.
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Maybe there are one or two meal ideas in here that you want to try.
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Or you've decided, you know what, I'm not sure that dairy gluten insert item is agreeing with me.
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Let me try what she suggested in terms of detoxing from it and then putting it back to see how I feel.
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Bookmark this episode so that you can easily come back to it and listen to what she said and try it.
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And I will see you next week on Confidence Deep Dive for part three of How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy.
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