Words of Wellness with Shelly

Shelly's Shares: Back to Basics: Six Daily Essential Nutrients

• Shelly Jefferis • Season 2 • Episode 101

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Feeling overwhelmed by contradictory health advice? You're not alone. The wellness landscape is crowded with competing theories and trending diets, making it challenging to determine what your body truly needs.

This episode cuts through the noise to deliver fundamental nutritional wisdom, wrapping up our three-part series on the six essential nutrients your body requires daily. We explore the final three crucial components: vitamins, minerals, and water. Discover the difference between fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) and water-soluble vitamins (B complex and C), including how they're absorbed, utilized, and excreted by your body. Learn why modern food quality makes supplementation increasingly necessary for optimal health and how addressing mineral deficiencies can dramatically improve energy, sleep quality, and stress management.

The episode also demystifies proper hydration with a simple formula to calculate your ideal daily water intake while explaining how beverages like coffee and alcohol affect your hydration status. After 35+ years as a health and wellness professional, Shelly has witnessed firsthand how understanding these basics can transform health outcomes and quality of life.

Whether you're just beginning your wellness journey or looking to refine your approach, this episode provides the foundational knowledge you need to make informed decisions about nutrition and supplementation. For mothers seeking personalized support, Shelly also shares information about her Moms who Flourish mentorship program, designed to help you integrate wellness practices into your motherhood journey. Connect with her through the contact information in the show notes to learn how she can support you in your health goals.

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Thank you for listening to the Words of Wellness podcast with Shelly Jefferis. I am honored and so grateful to have you here and it would mean the world to me if you could take a minute to follow, leave a 5-star review and share the podcast with anyone you love and anyone you feel could benefit from the message.

Thank you and God Bless!
And remember to do something for yourself, for your wellness on this day!

In Health,
Shelly Jefferis

Speaker 1:

Do you get confused by all of the information that bombards us every day on ways to improve our overall health and our overall wellness? Do you often feel stuck, unmotivated or struggle to reach your wellness goals? Do you have questions as to what exercises you should be doing, what foods you should or should not be eating, how to improve your overall emotional and mental well-being? Hello everyone, I am so excited to welcome you to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelly Jeffries and I will be your host. My goal is to answer these questions and so much more to share tips, education and inspiration around all of the components of wellness through solo and guest episodes. With 35 plus years as a health and wellness professional, a retired college professor, a speaker and a multi-passionate entrepreneur, I certainly have lots to share. However, my biggest goal and inspiration in doing this podcast is to share the wellness stories of others with you, to bring in guests who can share their journeys so that we can all learn together while making an impact on the health, the wellness and lives of all of you, our listeners. The ultimate hope is that you leave today with even just one nugget that can enhance the quality of your life, and that you will. We all will, now and into the future, live our best quality of lives, full of energy, happiness and joy. Now let's dive into our message for today. Hi, friends, and welcome back to Words of Wellness.

Speaker 1:

This is the Shelly's Shares episode and I am going to be sharing briefly today, wrapping up my sharing of the basic essential nutrients that our bodies need on a daily basis. The first episode I shared two weeks ago was on protein. Last week I shared about carbohydrates and fats, and today I'm going to wrap it up with the last three essential nutrients vitamins, minerals and water. And again, if you listened to the episode two weeks ago, I really wanted to just come back to the basics and just share the basic essential nutrients that our bodies need on a daily basis. So I think it's important. We get bombarded by a lot of information out there in the news, on social media, and there's a lot of great information, accurate information. And then there's a lot of information out there in the news on social media, and there's a lot of great information, accurate information, and then there's a lot of inaccurate information. And it just dawned on me that I wanted to just come back to the basics and just share the basic six essential nutrients that our bodies need on a daily basis, and so today again, I'm just going to wrap up this topic with sharing the last three and, very briefly, I'm going to share the last three essential nutrients are vitamins, minerals and water.

Speaker 1:

Now, vitamins and minerals Our bodies need certain amounts of certain vitamins and certain amounts of certain minerals, and basically, vitamins and minerals help our bodies to function. They help our bodies to be able to metabolize certain nutrients, and every vitamin and mineral has a role to play, and I'm not going to go in any great detail on what each vitamin and mineral is responsible for, but I'll just do a little quick summary. Highlight a couple vitamins and minerals and you know, I encourage you to dive into this a little bit deeper and perhaps part of maybe your physical. When you go and have a physical, you can have your blood work done and then you can be checked on certain vitamins and minerals to see if you're deficient or not, and then that can direct you as to whether or not you need to supplement. So, when it comes to our vitamins, there are fat soluble vitamins, vitamins A, d, e and K vitamins A, d, e and K and basically what that means is we do need to have some fat in our diet to be able to metabolize these particular vitamins, and you don't need these vitamins in large amounts. And as far as how much your body needs, that's going to be kind of an individualized basis. But when you talk about fat soluble vitamins, you're talking about, like vitamin D, um or vitamin E. Those are both fat soluble vitamins and you know, vitamin D helps the absorption of calcium, which calcium is a mineral, and it also does help us with our blood levels of calcium and phosphorus. Vitamin E is an antioxidant, which is really important. So you have these various vitamins. Like I said, the fat-solubleble vitamins A, d, e and K. You need to have some fat in your diet in order to be able to utilize these vitamins.

Speaker 1:

And then we have water soluble vitamins. Water soluble vitamins are vitamin C and the B vitamins. So there are various B vitamins and again, you need them in different amounts, varying amounts. Vitamin C, for example, helps to promote healthy cell development, wound healing and resistance to infections. And the B vitamins a lot of times you use them for energy and they help us to metabolize carbohydrates, which would make sense, right? Because we get energy from the carbohydrates we consume and we eat and then the B vitamins help us to metabolize those carbohydrates. So varying amounts, various vitamin B. We get different foods and there's different B vitamins that we consume. But those are water-soluble and that means that you actually consume those in a little bit larger amounts. And whatever our bodies don't need we will sweat out, pee out. So it's not as critical if we take in more than we need and I'm not encouraging that you do that. But with water soluble vitamins, generally speaking, we just kind of will pee out what our bodies don't use.

Speaker 1:

Fat soluble vitamins are a little bit different. You know you can have toxicity. You can consume too much of a vitamin. It's very rare but you can. And it would probably be a little bit more common with the fat-soluble vitamins because they're not being consumed, uh released from our body, like the water soluble vitamins. So again, a, d, e and k are the fat soluble. B and c are the water soluble. Need them in various amounts in our bodies.

Speaker 1:

And then we move on to minerals, and same thing. There are macro minerals, micro. There are minerals that you need to consume in larger amounts, and then there are minerals that you need to consume in larger amounts, and then there are minerals that we need to consume in smaller amounts. So the ones that we consume in larger amounts would be like the calcium, sodium, potassium. Those that we need to consume but in smaller amounts would be like iron, selenium, be like iron, selenium, and these minerals, again, work kind of alongside each other, but also alongside the vitamins. Right, and it's just, our bodies are miracles, right, our bodies are miracles, the way that we utilize these vitamins and minerals together to help our bodies function in a healthy manner. And obviously there are moments where there are some deficiencies or sometimes our bodies don't function as well and as effectively and efficiently as we would like and various, of course, autoimmune disease come into play and just other illnesses can come into play. But when the body is functioning at its highest, you know these minerals and these vitamins serve us very, very well. And again, you know we need calcium, we need phosphorus and we need magnesium, sodium. They're all very important. And then the minerals that we need smaller amounts, again, are like iron, selenium, zinc, and again, like I mentioned, having our blood work done and checked when we go in for physicals is really important because we can then be able to determine if we are deficient in any of these areas and whether or not we need to supplement.

Speaker 1:

Now. All of my years teaching, many years ago, I used to tell my students that ideally, ideally, we want to be able to get our vitamins and minerals from the foods that we eat. But we know nowadays that that is next to impossible. The value of our food, the quality of our food supply is so very poor that it's pretty much, I say now, required that we supplement. I used to before I started the nutrition protocol that I'm on now. I mean we still my husband and I eat pretty well. I mean we eat pretty healthy, we home cook our meals, we eat out maybe once or twice on the weekend, we have salads pretty much nightly.

Speaker 1:

But years ago, over a decade ago, decade ago, I realized that once I started putting certain nutrition in my body and I started to supplement with this certain nutrition that I've been on, I noticed a big difference in my energy. My energy level went up, my sleep improved, my stress level improved and that was just proof to me that, okay, I was deficient in something, some mineral or something, and also, I believe that the vitamins and minerals were not getting to my body at the cellular level when I started to use this nutrition that I'm on. Now that all changed, so I'm a huge proponent. I believe nowadays you really must supplement in order to get everything that your bodies need, and that's going to look different for every person, so it's just once you get, especially minerals. We are so deficient in minerals we really, really are, and I know that that was a big turning point for me and my health when I started to get the minerals that my body needed.

Speaker 1:

So, lastly, I want to talk about water, just very briefly. Our bodies are made up of a large amount of water. Anywhere from 45 to 70 percent. Our bodies are made up of a large amount of water. Anywhere from 45 to 70 percent. Our bodies are made up of water. So we need to replenish that water and it's really important that we are drinking fluids daily and fluids that will replenish that water supply. Now, if we drink coffee, if we drink alcohol, we want to counteract those, because those actually draw fluids out of our bodies, and so we want to counteract that and make sure we're drinking plenty of water to counteract those drinks, because those drinks do not hydrate us, they actually dehydrate us. So you want to make sure that you're counteracting those drinks. And then, when it comes to water, electrolytes are important, but you also just want to drink plain, filtered, clean water, and I'm not going to go into what kind of filtration system, but you really want to make sure you're drinking clean, clean, filtered water. And when it comes to how much, how much? Generally speaking, the recommendation is that you take half of your body weight, whatever that might be. So a person that is 150 pounds, half of that is 75. So that means it would be recommended that person would drink approximately 75 ounces of water per day, and that's the general recommendation.

Speaker 1:

Now, can you drink too much water? Yes, again, too much of anything is not good and there is a condition where it can become toxic. Now, again, extremely rare, but I figure I will touch upon this just for a moment. And the last case that I heard of this where a person had too much hypernatremia, it was after a marathon, so they were drinking fluids during the race, and that our minerals can become out of balance, our electrolytes can become out of balance, and so, again, it is possible to consume and drink too much water, but, again, extremely, extremely rare that that does happen, but it is possible. So, with that being said, I want you to take your body weight and divide it by two, and then that is your goal for your daily water intake in ounces per day. So I hope you have found some of this value Again.

Speaker 1:

You know this is again just review, it's just basic. Back to the basics, a little bit of a review and just an overview of what I've shared the last three weeks, including today. Basic, essential nutrients that our bodies need on a daily basis carbohydrates, fat, protein, vitamins, minerals and water. So there you have it, my friends, and again I hope you can feel your best. Have a lot of energy, do something for yourself on this day. Have a lot of energy. Do something for yourself on this day.

Speaker 1:

And, as a quick reminder for all of my moms out there, I have opened up one-on-one mentorship in my Moms who Flourish program. So if you would like more information or you would like to connect and see if this might be something for you, if you are needing any kind of clarity with your own personal wellness goals, health goals, your fitness, your nutrition and then also support alongside combining your wellness with your motherhood journey, that is what I am here for and, again, any of my moms out there who are empty nesters. If you're needing some guidance and support along the journey, I am here for you, so reach out. My contact information is in the show notes. Let's connect and love to see how I can support you along your wellness and motherhood journey. So, with that being said, have a wonderful rest of your day, everyone, and a beautiful, blessed rest of your week, and I will see you next time on Words of Wellness.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. I hope you gained value and enjoyed our time together as much as I did, and if you know someone who could benefit from today's episode, I would love and appreciate it if you could share with a friend or rate and review words of wellness so that more can hear this message. I love and appreciate you all. Thank you for listening and if you have any questions or topics you would like me to share in future episodes, please don't hesitate to reach out to me through my contact information that is shared in the show notes below. Again, thank you for tuning in to Words of Wellness. My name is Shelly Jeffries and I encourage you to do something for you, for your wellness, on this day. Until next time. I hope you all have a healthy, happy and blessed week. Thank you.