Summer Bock: New Year’s Resolutions, Cleanses, Probiotics & The Golden Poo

Have you ever tried a cleanse?

Today we’re here with a master fermentationist, avid outdoorswoman, and good friend, Summer Bock. You’re going to learn how to upgrade your gut health with probiotics, how to properly complete a cleanse, and I’ll even share a few tips to help you with your New Year’s Resolutions.

In this show you’ll learn:

• How to do a cleanse the right way
• How Summer went from party girl to herbologist
• The truth about the golden poo
• The best exercise advice I’ve ever heard
• Natural allergy remedies
• And much more…

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Summer Bock: Taco Bell Party-Girl to Sauerkraut Chef

Abel: A trained herbalist from the New Mexico College of Natural Healing, Summer Bock has a background in microbiology and is certified in Integrative Nutrition through Columbia University.

Summer has an avid following and presents a clear, fun, and educational approach to gut health, cleansing, and the art of fermentation. She is based just down the road from me in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What’s cookin’, Summer?

I’m running my cleanse right now, and I get so much energy from the cleansers. I feel amazing! I have 145 people in this round and the cleanse is 10 days. I do 8 calls with them during that time because it’s so important to walk them through their questions, or they quit.

Abel: So how did you go from party girl to herbologist?

In my late teens and early 20s, I partied really hard and it wasn’t the best thing for me. I had underlying stuff going on constitutionally and took a lot of antibiotics, then add in emotional stress and my health deteriorated quickly. I didn’t really know it because I was partying.

I ended up going to herbal medicine school.

When I did my first cleanse, I had a moment where I felt like a wool blanket was pulled out of my brain.

Everything was crystal clear, I felt grounded, and it might have been the first time in my life where I didn’t feel this sense of impending doom. I suddenly needed everyone to know what this felt like. I realized I was not well most of the time, and this was how I was supposed to feel!

How To Do A Cleanse The Right Way

Abel: Whether it’s a first time cleanse or you start a diet that really works for your body, it’s incredible when you experience that clarity. It’s feels like you’re levitating.

I have done a lot of cleanses since that cleanse. One of the main premises of cleansing well is that it has to feel good. A lot of people have heard about the juice cleanse or master cleanse, and they go on them and feel really sick and starving. It just has to feel good or you won’t keep doing it.

One of the main premises of cleansing well is that it has to feel good. @Fermentationist Share on X

I focus on gut health and digestion—getting all the bad bacteria out of your gut. I have this cleanse set up where you find food that does not feed the bad gut bacteria. We have gentle phases using alkaline foods.

Abel: What foods turn up the juice and push that lever in right direction?

Water is going to be the ultimate fast. If you’re drinking just water, after 24 hours your body will go into detox mode. With no food to eat, your body is finding glycogen in muscle, but over time your body will start to recycle diseased cells. It will break down proteins and reuse them, and it will get rid of stuff it doesn’t need.

Your body’s ability to do that increases as you fast. A water-only fast is putting on the gas all the way. Vegetable juice is right behind that, then fruit juice, and smoothies are a little bit slower because you have the fiber. Fiber slows down the process because you’re having to use the colon. If you’re drinking water and juice you’re bypassing the colon.

After that, it’s veggies and fruits and then the fermented foods—sauerkraut, and then basically some grains and beans. This is where it gets murky. I might say starchy vegetables for some people, and then for others gluten-free grains, and then maybe some proteins for some other people.

I start people out with eating food. We don’t want to have it be too fast too soon. When I client comes to me, first we do pH testing. We look at saliva and a urine pH. How much are you detoxing? How much acidity is coming out of your body? If your pH gets really acidic, you’ll have headaches, nausea, and feel really funky. I like to stay one step ahead of the cleansing reactions.

Some people will even start by eating some meat because that’s the only way to prevent their body from cleansing too fast.

Abel: A lot of bad things happen when you intentionally “starve” yourself. How do you bridge that gap between health and disorder? So many people get the wrong idea when they start a new diet or fast.

That’s one of the biggest things I deal with. Someone might say, “I feel so good, so I decided not to eat anything for the rest of the day.”

What you eat today determines how you feel in two days. @Fermentationist Share on X

If we just keep on that premise, it helps people slow it down. I see it more with my American clients, there’s this “all or nothing” attitude. If you’re not doing it all, you’re not doing it right. It’s extreme, and in terms of health, that attitude couldn’t be further from the truth.

When I do a cleanse for myself or with a client, we do a ten day cleanse and then create sustainable habits. The biggest health issues people face are:

• Nutrient depletion
• Being toxic
• Not having the right herbs, supplement, or foods in your diet

It’s important to have herbal allies coming in to help you do the work.

Abel: Day to day, what are your herbal allies?

My secret weapon is holy basil. I’m a huge fan of holy basil because it just makes me feel good.

I had multiple chemical sensitivities, food allergies, hives, rashes, and my eyes would swell shut. I’d wake up at night with panic attacks because my body was in high adrenaline mode trying to shut down this inflammation response.

In the process of figuring this out, I did fermented foods and gut rebuilding and got pretty far. The reason I love holy basil so much is that it has been a teacher for me, which has involved me learning how to relax, really deeply relax, and trust that all is as it should be.

I roll my eyes at people who are like, “Everything is fine and flowers,” but that’s the last stages of healing for me. Holy basil is a wonderful ally in learning how to do that.

Abel: I take rhodiola and holy basil almost every day, and I can really feel them. Those herbs in particular have been a powerful part of my journey.

I had burnout and adrenal exhaustion. I was experiencing this because I was so sick, but also from stress. It’s self-induced and taught. Stress has become the norm, and I do a lot to combat that on a regular basis. It’s one thing I talk about with my clients all the time.

If you’re not in a state of rest and restore, your body isn’t healing. You can’t heal while you’re running from a tiger.

The Truth About The Golden Poo

Abel: I had a conversation recently with my friend Pedram Shojai about this. If you go to a competitive school and you want to excel—the way we’re trained in the system is: the better you do, the more you have to stay on top, the more you have to learn, the more degrees you earn, and then you have to excel even more… then you go out with your friends and binge drink through the night because “you need to let off some steam.” We need to un-learn that conditioning.

The “party hard, work hard” mentality sets a lot of people up for disaster. @Fermentationist Share on X

Most people who come to me at this point are in some level of health crisis, and they’re really at a place where they’re ready to change. They want to get out of it.

I’d say the main thing i think about in terms of this is: it’s a gut-rebuilding issue. I really do think that the gut is a foundation of health and the research is profound on the subject.

If you can take care of your gut, you’re going to be okay. You won’t get diabetes, asthma, allergies, or be overweight.

How do people get to that spot?

Antibiotics and processed nutrient-lacking foods are like kindling and lighter fluid. You can put that all over your house, and then stress is the match that lights it all on fire.

What happens at that point?

Allergies. You gain weight quickly, your thyroid is falling out, and then a lot of skin issues like acne, psoriasis, rashes, and bloating.

The epitome of gut health is the Golden Doodle. @Fermentationist Share on X

What does that mean? When you go the bathroom, it’s effortless, it’s easy, it’s a clean break—you don’t really have to wipe, but you should. If that’s not working well, there’s something wrong with your gut.

Fiber works but you need to have the right bacteria in there to make it work. There are conjugating bile salts that make things smooth and sticky to make everything move through your colon effortlessly.

Abel: You’re trying to revamp your diet and you want better gut health. What can you do to get on track?

Bring probiotics into the diet. When I choose probiotics, I think about what my ancestors would have used, “What was the whole food version of probiotics?” They were using sauerkraut and fermented foods like kefir. Sauerkraut was a big one in my ancestry, so I started making it.

Eat two forkfuls of this with each meal to get the probiotics you need. Share on X

People’s sugar cravings can even go away just from doing that one thing. My secret goal is to make sauerkraut one of the top ten condiments in the United States. Raw and unpasteurized sauerkraut—not the stuff sitting on the shelf that’s canned, pasteurized and cooked.

It has really been a missing part of the Standard American Diet. A lot of people argue yogurt is a good source of probiotics, but in industrially-produced yogurt, the probiotics die off. So, they add strains of lactobacillus and acodiphoidis bifidus—those are produced in a laboratory and scooped and harvested and shoved into the yogurt.

Abel: What do you suggest for people who are intrigued by the process of fermenting foods?

I challenge every single person to make sauerkraut at least once. It’s the sauerkraut challenge. Make it at home. Figure out how to make this yourself. We can give people a video.

What you learn when you make your own sauerkraut is not just about making food, you have to break through this old paradigm about being germaphobic and sterile.

For some of you, this isn’t new information… but you still need to hear it. You need to experience it. When you let vegetables sit on your counter and rot for a week or two (sometimes it gets mold) then you eat what’s under that top layer, you are changing the way your brain works. There are so many different options for fermenting things.

I love kefir, and you can make it with coconut milk or raw dairy. Kefir in the store isn’t true kefir. If you’re getting real kefir, you’re using kefir grains and they’re clear gelatinous cauliflower-looking blobs. You put them in the milk and in about 24 – 48 hours, you have real kefir.

Miso is one of my absolute favorites to make—you let beans sit for months and they become delicious.

Here’s what i want people to understand—it’s not rotting. It’s a controlled environment and it’s producing it’s own natural antibiotics. It becomes a naturally-preserved, very stable food. Back before refrigeration, this was crucial to the survival of our species.

When you have the right bacteria in your gut, they’re doing the exact same thing. They’re producing natural antibiotics in your gut that prevents pathogenic bacteria and yeast from growing there.

Abel: What can people do at home, right now, to start healing their gut?

Eat fermented foods. You want to feed the probiotics. They love vegetables. They like some fruits too, but straight-up vegetables—that’s one of their favorite foods and they start to crave it.

Abel: I get cranky if I don’t have my greens.

This Taco Bell-Dr. Pepper party girl never thought, “I’m gonna crave kale some day.” @Fermentationist Share on X

Abel: What helps with allergies?

We can make some generalizations, but the process is long. I ate fermented foods for a long time, rehabbed my gut, and then got overloaded with histamines and had to stop eating fermented food for a while and go low-microbe. That protocol cleared everything up and now I just eat fermented foods whenever.

I don’t react to the food at all anymore. For some people, getting the right probiotic in their body will work wonders. Other people have a histamine issue. Then we need to focus more on detoxing than the rebuilding process. Cleansing and rebuilding—you take away and then build back up.

Most people are nutrient deficient. But if you create the right environment, your body will heal itself.

Abel: What do you do when you see a client come out of a cleanse, just to eat cheat meal after cheat meal?

That’s when I look at emotional landscape and stress. “Why do you need to reverse all the things you did so well?” For some people it’s candida, and we use various herbs to deal with that. Sometimes when you deprive yourself of sugar for ten days, the candida are like, “We don’t wanna die!” So you end up craving sugar.

Why You Shouldn’t Exercise To Lose Weight

Abel: Let’s shift gears. I know you’re active and awesome—what do you recommend to females for physical activity?

Mountain biking is my personal favorite. You can’t be exercising or moving your body to lose weight. If that’s your intention, it’s not going to work. You have to find the thing that gives you pure joy. You’re expressing gratitude for being in a body. That’s what physical activity is about.

When I get done riding my bike, I feel awesome. For you, is it dance, walking, hiking? It doesn’t need to be an extreme sport.

Don’t exercise to lose weight, do it for the pure joy of being in your body. Share on X

It’s a frickin’ miracle that you’re alive!

Where To Find Summer Bock

You can find Summer on her website at SummerBock.com, and sign up to get in on her Easy 5-Day Gut Challenge. You can also find Summer Twitter @Fermentationist.

Before You Go…

Here are a few quick tips for how to drop fat and get results with your New Year’s Resolutions:

• Be specific with your goals. Instead of saying “I want to lose weight,” say “I’m going to get back to my high school weight.”
• Upgrade the quality of your meats. Switch to grass-fed pastured meat instead of factory farmed.
• Stay away from sugar and grains, especially in the morning.
• Try a new recipe every week. I suggest you try The Wild Diet Bacon Cheeseburger, Sauerkraut, or maybe these Power Cookies…

So, did you make a New Year’s Resolution to drop a few pounds, shed that spare tire, improve your health, or get in the best shape of your life? Keep reading to find out how we’ll help you do it!

Over 65% of people who make resolutions include fitness goals as part of their new year promise… but not so promising is that 1 in 3 will have abandoned their goals by the end of January!

Many people quit because they either lack knowledge about how to accomplish their goals, or they don’t have a supportive community to make sure they stick to it. It’s really hard to decipher the good from the bad and the ugly when it comes to health and nutrition.

The good news is that we are here for you with information, motivation, and support.

Don’t give up on your fitness goals. Join the Fat-Burning Tribe, make friends in fitness, and get your game on with our upcoming challenges, videos, and recipe, and meal plans.

In our monthly meal plan, we share 30 days of mouth-watering meals that are designed to help you drop fat with real food. The meal plans are Paleo-friendly, easy to make, and are literally the meals that my wife Alyson and I eat just about every day to stay lean, fit, and happy.

Here’s what you have to look forward to:

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My wife and I developed the 30-Day Meal Plan using our favorite recipes backed by the principles of The Wild Diet to help you shed fat as quickly as possible, while enjoying delicious meals and real food treats.

There’s a six pack under there and we’re going to help you find it.

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What’s your New Year’s resolution? Leave a comment below to share it with us.