[Kevin]
So here we go. We'll keep that in. That's a good introduction.

There's our new theme song. There we go. And speaking of that, hey Michelle, how are you doing?

[Michelle]
I am feeling refreshed and maybe a little bit out of sorts. I've just come back from Bali and I think I'm on this time zone.

[Kevin]
Oh, I don't know. It might be a while until you get back on this time zone.

[Michelle]
I think I'm on the time zone. My sleep is kind of straightened around, but I still don't know what day it is.

[Kevin]
Of course, that'll be a while, I think. Yeah, so it's great to see you. Good to see you.

For a bit of a refresher for our listeners, you know, they've actually had the pleasure of hearing you much more recently than I have because, you know, through the magic of podcasting, it's like you were never gone. But actually, you and I haven't talked for about six weeks or so.

[Michelle]
I know. Yeah, because I was gone at Christmas, right?

[Kevin]
Yeah, exactly. So it's so good to see you and welcome back.

[Michelle]
It's good to be seen. Happy New Year.

[Kevin]
We're still doing that? It's February. So everyone, welcome to Nutrition for Noobs.

I'm Kevin. I'm Michelle. And as you can tell, we're playing a bit of catch up because we haven't talked for a while.

I feel an enormous amount of Michelle deprivation over these past weeks.

[Michelle]
Oh, poor you.

[Kevin]
So I feel I need to get my hit of like, you know, my fix of Michelle. Care for what you wish for. So, well, so this is going to be a looser episode, I think.

And we're just going to chat, and I want to hear all about your adventures and what you were doing in Bali and everything that you experienced. And hopefully, you know, we'll try to mention the word nutrition once or twice. We'll try to talk about food a little bit.

[Michelle]
Oh, travel is always all about the food, Kevin.

[Kevin]
It is. It is. Absolutely.

So tell me, so why were you in Bali?

[Michelle]
Well, I booked sometime middle of last year. I made a decision to follow through on one of my bucket list items. It was a big one, was to get 200-hour yoga certified.

So I've been at my age, I've been doing yoga for about 25 years, just as a participant and as a formative exercise.

[Kevin]
Because you started when you were two.

[Michelle]
Yes. Just to clarify, you started when you were two years old. Exactly.

No, I'm actually, I wear my age very, very proudly. I'm not one of those people that worries about being older. Although I would say it was evident in this trip that I feel my age a little bit more now than I used to.

But you know what? Every few years, I like to do one of these stretch goals and challenge myself. So off I went.

And so, yeah, it was just incredible. It reminded me a lot of when I took off and did Camino in 2018, which is a pilgrimage across Spain. Back then, I did the, just so the listeners are aware, I did sort of the traditional route from the south of France across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain and across Spain to Santiago.

And that's a long, long, long hike. And I had a lot of trials and tribulations on that for the first time. And really challenged my physicality in a way that I never had before.

And learned a lot about myself. And this was very reminiscent of that, but in very, very different ways. I wasn't walking.

Actually, ironically, I don't know if you, I know you've traveled a lot more than I have in this part of the world. But have you ever been to Bali, Kev?

[Kevin]
I have not. No, no, I haven't been to Indonesia at all.

[Michelle]
So Bali, and it would seem to me just from speaking to other people that I shared this experience with, that Indonesia, and I think Thailand is very similar in this regard, is so busy with people on such narrow roads and limited infrastructure, that there's so many cars, and especially nowadays, motorcycles and mopeds, that there literally is no safe way to walk anywhere. So that was very unfamiliar to me. Yes.

I really rely on walking when I travel. Because people are like, oh, we need to take an Uber here and an Uber there in this part of the world, right? And I was like, ah, we'll just walk, especially after doing Camino, after walking like 500 kilometers, I'm like, oh, yeah.

[Kevin]
Right, yeah.

[Michelle]
Yeah, no problem. No big deal. No problem, I'll just walk because I enjoy walking.

So that was, I had to adjust to that, that even if you really want to walk places, it's not safe. You can't.

[Kevin]
Yes. I did go to, the closest I've been there has been to Bangkok. And I found the same thing, that we wanted to go just, you know, a few blocks down the road.

And we ended up taking a tuk-tuk, like, you know, one of those motorcycle taxis, because, you know, there was almost no sidewalk to speak of. And there were like motorcycles on the sidewalk. And it just, and if you're not familiar with a city, you know, it can be very intimidating.

And yeah, I felt similarly constrained, like, oh, I need to walk, but I'm scared to.

[Michelle]
Well, I was challenged in so many ways. I'll just start with, like, completely unrelated to food. I'll talk to just some of the things that I didn't expect to happen.

Like, even simple things like transacting. Like, the world has changed so much since I was last a solo traveler. Like, I did most of my solo traveler before I opened my shop, right?

And my shop has been there for eight years. My eyes were so opened at how much the world has changed. Like, so first of all, like, even car transportation, period, seems to be, like, very outdated.

Very few people, older people like me, are taking cars or when there's groups of people traveling together. But otherwise, people are hopping on the back of these Grab motorcycles and just taking off with, and not like a tuk-tuk where you're, like, sitting back in a little enclosure. This is like, you're, like, hopping on the back and there may or may not be a helmet.

And there's, like, dozens of them in close proximity at the same time, speeding down a road. You know, it's the opposite side of traffic to what we're used to in North America. So the whole thing is just, like, it's very free and it's very, like, bohemian in a lot of ways, but just so different.

And everything is done on people's phones. Like, everything is transacted through apps and through Apple Pay or whatever. And apps in this part of the world, too, are kind of different than the ones that we're used to in North America.

And all of that changed since I was last a solo traveler. Like, I was amazed that people don't really use cash and they don't really, like, currency is different.

[Kevin]
And they don't, and people also don't even, in a lot of places, they don't even have bank accounts. Like, they don't use traditional banks. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing or just a thing, but a lot of the tech companies are now acting as banks and they are the primary exchanges of money for a lot of people.

[Michelle]
Yeah, they're doing a stored cash thing on their own apps and things. So it was really interesting because there were only, like, a couple other people from North America that were part of our group. All of the other participants in this yoga training were Germany and Norway and France and England and other countries.

Like, their banking, like, on these apps, what was really eye-opening, you and I come from a North American banking background. My husband comes from a North American banking background and I mean on the infrastructure system side. And all of the intense controls that they have around transacting on North American banks make interacting with these other apps in this other part of the world are completely incompatible.

Because as soon as I put an Indonesian SIM card in my phone, I was crippled and unable to do any kind of SMS. So the OTP on the Canadian banking system that's required to use Apple Pay, to use Google Pay, to use any kind of an online credit card transaction, I couldn't verify. So as soon as I had this Indonesian SIM card in my phone, I couldn't do anything except physically hand somebody a credit card. Then it worked fine.

So that made ordering a Grab, ordering something else, like, impossible until later on in the trip when I realized I could actually order a Grab and pay cash. But in order to get somewhere, to a bank machine, to get cash, I had to travel. And I couldn't walk there.

So it was really quite funny. So immediately, like, interacting with these younger people that I'm in this training with, I'm the oldest person on the training, of course. And I tell you, these young people that I was training with, and I would say everything from 21 years old to mid 40s.

So I've got a good 10 years on the next person younger than me. But the majority of the other participants were in their mid to late 20s, early 30s. And they're just fearless and brave and incredible risk takers at levels that I wasn't at their age or wasn't, I guess, necessary in the world.

And very, very free. And I learned so much from them. And here I arrived in this landscape thinking I was such a seasoned traveler.

And I immediately felt like a mid 50-something woman who didn't know how to travel. It was- Where's the tour bus, Maudie? It was really uncomfortable for me, Kevin.

And I remember there was one day around dinner and everybody was so kind and people took me along and paid for the car and traveled by car with me because they knew that I couldn't get on a motorcycle. Now, it's not like I couldn't physically get on one of the Grab motorcycles, but I don't know if I mentioned on the podcast, I had this massive fall and a brain injury on October 31st last year. So I'm still healing this massive scar where my head was split open on the back of my head.

So for practical reasons, I'm avoiding getting on a motorcycle.

[Kevin]
You don't wanna take chances. Yeah, no, you don't take chances with the circumcised head in a few months.

[Michelle]
Yeah, because it's still quite tender back there and not quite healed up. So like, even if I had been brave enough to jump on one of these motorcycles, there were practical reasons why that wasn't a good idea for me.

[Kevin]
Right.

[Michelle]
So people were taking me along with them and then I would go to a bank machine and get money out. But even predicting the currency is like, everything is like an Indonesian rupiah. And I remember a massage was like 180,000 rupiah.

And I thought, oh my gosh, that's expensive. And then I did the conversion. It's like $15 Canadian.

So it even took a while to adjust to that. It was a really weird feeling to go to a bank machine and say, yes, yes, I'd like to withdraw $1 million.

[Kevin]
Yeah, exactly. Do that mental calculation and figure out, does that make sense? Is that worth it?

Is it not? How much is this?

[Michelle]
I overcame the currency problem. But the punchline is that at dinner one night, I was telling the others at the table, I said, guess what? I ordered a grab today all by myself.

And I actually had enough cash and I paid for it. Oh my goodness.

[Kevin]
But I think that's one of the things that travel is supposed to do. Like one of the joys of travel, I think, is to make you uncomfortable. Because I don't necessarily, yeah, sometimes you just want a nice, easy beach vacation or something.

I don't, but some people do. And I appreciate that. But if I'm traveling, I don't necessarily want to go to a place that's exactly like my home.

Because then I could just save all this money and stay home. If I'm going to go through the hassle of flying somewhere, and I hate flying. I mean, no one likes flying, but it's a horrible experience.

And the discomfort of not sleeping in your own bed and missing connections and doing all that that travel encompasses, then I do want to be uncomfortable. And I want to do stuff that is outside of my norm, but still in a very controlled environment. But that's one of the joys I find in it.

And if you're not uncomfortable, then you're not doing it properly.

[Michelle]
And I think too, part of it for me was, I was at a place of such massive burnout when I left. And that's not an ideal state to be in when you are traveling to an unusual, beautiful place. But that's just the reality of where I'm at in my life as a business owner and so many things going on and having come out of a global pandemic and all of those anxieties that had been stored up in me and then being able to take this incredible opportunity.

But it was so transformational. Bali was amazing. It's a beautiful country.

It has its ugly spots as well. It has its, there's clear signs of poverty. Of course.

Also though, and this is what I love about traveling in this part of the world. So much simplicity too, compared to like, you really get a feeling of how privileged we are and all of our creature comforts and the way that we live our lives here and things there are just so simple. They don't stress over things like over sanitizing and over legalizing things.

And like, it's not so litigious and constrained. It's just so free in that part. And it helps, I think there's this really strong yogic culture that surrounds the Ubud Center where we were.

The other thing that's so neat about Bali, did you go to Thailand? You went to Thailand, right?

[Kevin]
I went to Thailand, yes.

[Michelle]
So I don't know what the religious context mix is in Thailand, but Bali is unique that it's part of Indonesia and Indonesia is primarily Muslim. But Bali itself is primarily Balinese Hinduism. Which I learned, I didn't know this until we were studying the philosophy part of our training, that Balinese Hinduism is actually has some differences from Indian Hinduism in terms of their worship rituals and some of the aspects of how they exercise day-to-day life based on those beliefs.

And what I found so beautiful about the Balinese people was, I mean, the rituals themselves are beautiful and you're in a beautiful place. They have this daily offering that they do. And I wish I could remember the name of it, but it's fashioned in a flower made out of these leaves.

And then they have these other fresh flowers on it and there's some incense. And what I learned is every single family prepares this fresh offering every single day and lights the incense and puts it out every single day in gratitude for all that they have and for the food that they eat and the bounty of their crops and the health of their family and just for the gift of their life. And they do this.

They take time out of every single day to prepare this offering and go and place it. Wow. And what that's, my understanding is that that's different from Indian Hinduism in that they will do these beautiful rituals as well, but they'll do them on like certain holidays and certain special days.

Right, it's not a daily occurrence. And the Balinese will do it on these special days as well, because we certainly noticed like when there was a full moon, there were a whole bunch of additional things that were going on. And we'd see these things placed in grander scale or slightly differently, or there might be parades or things going on, but they did that in addition to.

And one of the things our philosophy teacher shared with me, as well as some of the folks we were traveling with that had been in Bali longer and had opportunity to talk to some local people, is that it's this, the culture is really framed around this intense belief in karma. And the idea that the way that you behave every single day, your devotion every single day, and the way that you treat other people, and the way that you treat animals or nature around you will have a direct impact on your next life.

[Kevin]
Okay, right.

[Michelle]
So they have such an intense belief in this that they go out of their way to be kind and to be nice to one another and to do kind gestures and keep up with these rituals. And it was just so incredibly beautiful because the Balinese people were the people working on our resort, serving us our food every day, doing our laundry, the people in the spa, and then different businesses that we came across. It was just so different than traveling in North America.

Not that North Americans aren't kind and nice, I'm just saying there's just this different- It's a difference.

[Kevin]
There's a different feel to that, yeah. So tell me about the food. Since this is a nutrition podcast, tell me about the food.

How was the food?

[Michelle]
So I chose this particular resort and this particular training because they did specify that it was vegetarian, vegan cuisine. And my idea of going and getting away and decompressing and recovering from burnout, but also having a very lovely vacation is going where the food, I know the food is going to be good. Food's very important to me.

Right, of course. So having a chef prepare my meals every time sounded lovely. It was just amazing.

And I remember having this experience when we did a trip up into the mountains of Fujian in China, that very normal in this part of the world to have vegetables for breakfast, like just normal.

[Kevin]
Right, yes.

[Michelle]
Just very normal. It seems absurd to North Americans. They want to see eggs and bacon and hash browns on their plate.

[Kevin]
Bowl of fruit loops.

[Michelle]
Or yeah, bowl of fruit loops or porridge or oatmeal. Now we did have, let me think, let me think what chef made for us for breakfast. So the breakfasts were the most delightful for me because I just can't get enough tropical fruit.

Like the papaya and the dragon fruit and snake fruit. And there were these really neat little fruit called water apple. I don't know if you've ever had those.

[Kevin]
No.

[Michelle]
Oh my gosh, just lychee, like just so many delicious fruit. And every single morning. So of course there was vegetables and salad and there was usually some sort of a steamed or a cooked vegetable.

There were, for the vegetarians, they did have some sort of scrambled egg. For the vegans, there was some sort of scrambled tofu or fried tofu of some sort. And then there was always like a chia pudding done in a different unique way every day.

My favorite was the ones with either the fresh passion fruit or the dragon fruit. Mm. Oh, so good.

And there was, I don't think we had oatmeal, but we had a granola every morning that was available. So it was kind of a smorgasbordy thing.

[Kevin]
Yeah.

[Michelle]
But you could have all the fruit that you wanted. Now, one thing with, I think this would be typical, I would imagine a pretty much any type of yoga training. There is a very strong influence of Ayurvedic influences of foods and dosha balancing, et cetera.

So I think that there was far less emphasis on raw foods than would be part of how I'm nutritionally trained with whole food plant-based eating.

[Kevin]
Okay.

[Michelle]
But there was raw there. And I really had to get enough raw in my diet for every meal that I was there. I had to really capitalize on the fresh vegetables at breakfast and the fresh fruit at breakfast and fresh fruit throughout the day because otherwise things were primarily cooked.

And that's very much an Ayurvedic principle is to have primarily cooked foods. And it's not that, this is maybe something interesting to touch on just because we also learned some traditional Chinese medicine in our training because the yin aspects of yoga. So yin being the slower yoga where you hold postures for a long period of time, that actually I learned, isn't part of the Indian tradition of yoga connected to Ayurveda is more of the yang style of yoga, like the movement yoga where you flow through postures.

And it's more of a flow with the asanas. The yin asanas are holding postures for a longer period of time. That actually comes more through Tibetan Buddhist influence.

So that's why there's this connection to traditional Chinese medicine. So it's interesting that if you do a holistic view of the yoga tradition and you want to kind of adopt everything that there is about yoga, which is only minimally about the actual exercise, it's mostly about the internal work and the health and how you treat others, how you show up in the world, your diet, your understanding of philosophy and your connection to living things. That's really what yoga is.

Movement and asana is a very tiny part of it. It inputs Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine food kind of side by side. And then you can inflect people's cultural norms around food on top of that, like me with my whole food plant-based eating and other people in other parts of the world with their forms of vegetarianism.

The bottom line is, and I talked about this with several people, no matter which one of those perspectives you're coming from is your preferred main dietary perspective, we agree on about 90% of things. There's only about 10% that is variant that we disagree upon because everybody believes on locally grown within a hundred kilometers, clean, grown, fresh, cared for, good quality, real, natural, not artificial, not processed. Everybody agrees on all of that.

The how much raw versus cooked and how much plant food versus animal-based food, like that's kind of the 10% variant.

[Kevin]
And also I would imagine that raw versus cooked would also have a bit of an impact based on the locality. Meaning, I mean, if you, you know, like when I was traveling in Mali, for instance, the other alley, this would be Mali in Africa, not Bali in Indonesia, we never had fresh raw vegetables. You never had a salad for the entire time you're there simply because there wasn't water sources that were, you couldn't guarantee the source of water that was used to grow the lettuce or something or wash it.

In which case you cooked everything from a health safety standpoint. So raw, to have raw fruits or raw, raw fruits are a little bit easier because often you peel them and you don't eat the peel so it doesn't matter as much. But raw vegetables, which you often eat the entire plant or a part of the plant without peeling it can be actually dangerous to have raw, like a raw carrot versus a cooked carrot if you don't have water supplies, et cetera, et cetera.

So, you know, that's also a bit of a difference, I think, between, you know, being able to be completely raw based in certain parts of the world.

[Michelle]
Absolutely. And I think another aspect of that, so like the food scarcity piece is really, really important. But then there's also the realities of what modern technology has done to alter the states of some of these countries.

So Indonesia is really known, it has its kind of environmental underbelly side where there's been a lot of deforestation of rainforest, a lot of palm groves have replaced where there used to be a lot of natural grown, like not just foods, but carbon sinks.

[Kevin]
Right.

[Michelle]
And, you know, rice paddy plantations are prevalent everywhere. And I think that's a lot of monoculture taking up a lot of land.

[Kevin]
Well, it's trying to feed a lot of people.

[Michelle]
Yeah.

[Kevin]
I mean, we're trying to feed 8 billion people and we've only got a quarter of the surface of the planet is land. And how much of, what percentage of that land is actually arable?

[Michelle]
Well, that's a debate for another podcast for sure.

[Kevin]
Well, no, I'm not disagreeing, but, you know, I mean, I know that like palm oil is the new smoking and they're horrible. And same as like, you know, coffee plantations 30 years ago were very similar. I think they're improving now because there's more awareness around coffee and how a coffee monoculture can just clear cut, you know, what used to be forested land, et cetera, et cetera.

But no, there's a lot of other monocultures.

[Michelle]
And cumulatively, that's bad news for the planet, right? Cumulatively?

[Kevin]
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Michelle]
But so I'm not gonna share this piece of information to judge anybody living in Bali. I'm just gonna tell you what we saw.

[Kevin]
No, of course not.

[Michelle]
And, you know, upon arrival, these rice paddies surrounding, they're beautiful. They're lush, they're green with the backdrop of the jungle. And, you know, at first glance, it's really fresh and you're like, oh my gosh, I've come to paradise.

And then the reality is we're laying in the shallow one day and we can smell this chemical smell wafting over us and kind of look up and we can see not very many feet away from us, some guy going through the field, spraying pesticides. Oh, wow. And so we were breathing all of that in directly through like a 60 to 90 minute yoga class.

And that was, for me, very unnerving. Of course. And then another time we experienced that again, sitting, eating breakfast, we're having silent breakfast.

So we're not talking to each other. It's we're supposed to be contemplative and mindful eating and taking some space in the morning and we can see some guy out in the field like spraying pesticides. So, you know, that really impressed upon those of us that are incredibly food conscious.

Like we, when we were out and about in Bali, we washed every, like if we picked up some fruit somewhere, like we washed everything really, really, really well because you just don't know. So that was sort of the unpleasant side with that you kind of realize is a reality when you're staying someplace for three weeks, like a week you might just only see the beautiful stuff, but when you're actually living, you're living there on a day-to-day basis and you kind of go through an entire cycle of their farming.

[Kevin]
Well, you see the real, I mean, that's the reality. Unfortunately, that's the reality of their lives that they are subsistence farmers. They're paid probably, you know, the equivalent of pennies per acre of harvested rice. So they have to do whatever they can to get the biggest crop possible, which means pesticides. And, you know, maybe the, you know, the country has very lax rules about chemicals.

And, you know, it's it's unfortunate, but it is also their reality that, you know, that's how, you know, they I'm sure they would want to be ecologically friendly. And, you know, you know, less monoculture and rotate their crops and all that. But they can't because the market and often that's, you know, the North American or European market demands their cheap rice or their cheap papayas at the grocery store or whatever, which then forces the farmers to and these other countries that produce the food.

You know, it's kind of not in our backyard, like if we just ignore where the papayas come from and we just have our nice papayas in our grocery stores here, we kind of ignore that. Oh, you know, the life for the people in the countries that are actually producing the papayas might not be great. And they're smelling these chemicals and living with this permanently.

You know what I mean?

[Michelle]
But let me tell you about an incredible experience that I had, because there are a lot of really cool little farms all over the area. There was we did a friend that I made on the trip, a girl from Germany, and I went on a cooking kind of tour day. And we first went to the Balinese market, and I'm not talking about like the tourist market in Ubud, I'm talking about the real market where people go to get their stuff every day.

And, you know, like I said, it's rainy season, so the ground is muddy, but all these people are out there and there's.

[Kevin]
And your phone's not working, so you can't pay for anything.

[Michelle]
But there's all kinds of bustle going about and there's clothes and there's spices and there's fruit and there's peppers.

[Kevin]
It's the hub of the community.

[Michelle]
Oh, and it's just a sight to see. And like everybody is just vibrant and happy and everything is so fresh. It was just so cool.

So we were the tour took us through this market and we picked up some fruits and things that were going to be part of our meal. And then they took us back into the bus and we went to this organic farm where the where the cooking experience was. And they had this huge, beautiful organic farm in the middle of the jungle.

And that was all permaculture. It was all naturally farmed, no pesticide. You know, everything was kind of growing in its natural state.

So then they took us around and we had baskets and we picked all of the greens that we were going to use and all the spice. We there was they were even growing like cacao. They had cinnamon trees.

So they were pulling off pulling off cinnamon bark. And aside from the, you know, the fresh fresh vegetables that were growing there and so many other things. So that was really cool.

We went through there.

[Kevin]
Sorry, just an aside. Did you try any raw cacao?

[Michelle]
I we didn't get a chance to try it there because the cacao that they that they cracked open was was not ready yet. But I have I have had that experience in Costa Rica, though, Kevin. I have gone to.

[Kevin]
OK, yeah.

[Michelle]
So, yeah, that's I know it's cool, right?

[Kevin]
Because that's yeah, I did that. I went to a cacao farm in Ghana and we had and, you know, they just grabbed a fruit from the tree and opened it up and said, here, try this. And it's really amazing.

It's so cool. Tastes like chocolate, but it doesn't. And it's it's just it's incredible to think that, you know, you take this fruit and then you turn it into chocolate.

[Michelle]
Like it's just it's just and there's something like, yeah, yeah, no, it's a great digression, though, because there's something like three different species of cacao. So the ones that we often commercially buy here as cacao nib that are kind of bitter are not are not like the only version of cacao. That's like the cheaper version.

There are like other versions that are creamier and they're richer.

[Kevin]
And the one I had was medium sweet, but really creamy. Yeah. And really like I would imagine that you'd get a lot of like cacao oil from that.

Like as you like it was just but it was it was a really complex flavor, but it tasted of. Yeah, so good. Semi-sweet chocolates.

But it was just it was just incredible.

[Michelle]
Yeah, because the chocolate that we get over here isn't actually like actual chocolate. It's actually innately plant based with no animal in it. It's just that they take the cocoa butter out of the cacao.

They sell it separately, isn't it, as a product that they can get more money for. And then they put cheap milk into it to make chocolate.

[Kevin]
And then they add other stuff in. Yeah, exactly. Which is why I like, you know, when you sometimes you can get like 85 percent or something.

Or 90. That's really good. Or 90.

Yeah, that's just delicious because it is just pure. There's one place here in Toronto that I found that does pure and it's delicious. It's just so good.

[Michelle]
Yeah, so that was a really lovely experience. And then we they had like these huge two rows. And so we cooked six traditional Balinese dishes.

They had made their own tempeh, their own fermented soy. So like it's a product different than having normal tofu making your tempeh. So like the tempeh that we can buy like frozen in the grocery store, it's like, meh, it's like, OK.

But when people actually go to the trouble to ferment and make their own tempeh, it's a very different product. And so delicious. And I don't know how to explain it.

It's tangy and but not quite as like stiff and chunky. Anyway, it's lovely, lovely to work with.

[Kevin]
Which is what I don't like about tempeh. So maybe I should try some fresh tempeh.

[Michelle]
Yeah, or try that. Sounds like a Kevin experiment. Sounds like something you would do to do an experiment to try to try to try making some.

[Kevin]
Maybe.

[Michelle]
Maybe one time.

[Kevin]
I'm curious now.

[Michelle]
But yeah, so like it was we had this tempeh asamanis. I'm probably butchering the pronunciation of the words, but it's like a fermented soybean dish with lime juice and palm sugar. Yeah, it's so good.

Yeah, there were so many. And then there was like a like a like a traditional like goreng, you know, like a nasi goreng, but mami goreng, there was a there was a goreng dish like which is always a delight. And and then there were some desserts and we had the fruits and there was a oh, the traditional Balinese black rice pudding.

I don't know if that's something that you've ever had. No, I had that in a restaurant a couple of times as well. And then we actually made the dish.

You know, I think that was one of my observations. There were a couple of the restaurants that I went to where I ordered some of the same dishes that we'd had the experience of making fresh in this cooking school in this Balinese farm. Like the there is you can always tell now like kind of the touristy version, the touristy restaurant version.

Of course.

[Kevin]
Of it.

[Michelle]
And it was still really good. It was still really delicious. I enjoyed those restaurant meals, but there was nothing like making it fresh.

[Kevin]
Making it yourself for fresh ingredients.

[Michelle]
And the whole. Yeah. And the whole experience of cooking the food.

Yeah. So that was lovely. So, I mean, throughout the whole trip, we had a lot.

There was a lot of, you know, fresh spices and combinations of spices like their curries are different than Indian curries. So that was really lovely to experience a lot of coconut in dishes. A lot.

And the local banana is not like our banana. It's a very small fruit.

[Kevin]
Well, they're the little stubby bananas.

[Michelle]
Yeah.

[Kevin]
Yes. I love those. Those are delicious.

[Michelle]
And they're. Yeah.

[Kevin]
We get like 40 of them in a bunch.

[Michelle]
And they're so cute.

[Kevin]
And they're tiny. They're like about two inches and really fat. Like really thick around, but like two inches long or something or three inches.

Like, yeah, I love those. Those are amazing.

[Michelle]
In hindsight, I now wish that I had used my chronometer when I was there and like actually input my foods and tried to get a rough calculation because I don't have any idea of our daily caloric intake. But I just know, I know from looking at the plate, we had incredible balance on our plates. Right.

And incredible nourishment. The other thing that I really noticed that I kind of expected when you have a dietary change, like you adapt to a different cuisine for a time, there's often like a period of gassiness, right? Where your microbiome.

[Kevin]
Or worse.

[Michelle]
Yeah. Where your microbiome is not adapted to that. And I didn't have that at all.

And maybe it's just because of the talent of the chef that we had and the consciousness about the quality of the foods on our plate. And maybe it is because there was so much cooked and I wasn't introduced to a lot of like maybe different species that would have come.

[Kevin]
Local bacteria.

[Michelle]
With the raw food. Like, I'm not sure.

[Kevin]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michelle]
Yeah. And our water was safe. We had like good, clean, filtered water available to us.

And thank God I brought my own tea though, Kevin. Oh my gosh.

[Kevin]
Was the tea not good?

[Michelle]
No, it was terrible.

[Kevin]
But don't they, but they, but isn't Indonesia a little bit of a tea producing company?

[Michelle]
Oh my gosh, yes. Country? Indonesia does have, they have mainly like further north in another island, like Java Sumatra is where most of the tea is grown in Indonesia.

Now I did find, I was so happy, I found a hidden Balinese tea farm.

[Kevin]
Okay.

[Michelle]
And that was, that was thanks to this photographer that was working with us. After, when we got our certification, you know, we had an opportunity to have some nice photos taken that we could use to, you know, market ourselves as yogis and.

[Kevin]
Sure.

[Michelle]
And I had brought, you know, some Gong Fu teaware and I brought some of my own tea. And I just asked him, could you take some pictures, some tea pictures with me? Because that'd be helpful with my business.

And, and he goes, oh, you should go to this. There's a, like a tea plantation, like near my house where I live just a little, like an hour north from here. And he's not, not very many people know about it.

And I was like, what? Pardon me. I must know about this.

[Kevin]
Michelle's eyes become as big as saucers. It's like tea plantation, did you say? I must go there immediately.

[Michelle]
And that was amazing. But yeah, on the, on the resort, we just, and, you know, for practical reasons, I understand it's because, you know, we had very much outdoor living spaces, outdoor community spaces. So there was no ability to store tea correctly at a right temperature, cool, dark.

So there wouldn't really, in that, in that outdoor cafe setting in the middle of the jungle, if they had bought really good quality tea and made it available, it probably would have degraded in quality in about, in about two weeks.

[Kevin]
Since it was the rainy season, it sounds like it probably would have been pre-steeped by the time you got to it.

[Michelle]
I don't want to give you the impression that it was like, everything is kind of like, if you're walking through the jungle is kind of damp, but we had plenty of sunshine, plenty of heat. There was a pool. Trust me, we were in the pool often.

We were so hot.

[Kevin]
Oh, no, I know the, I know that tropical. It's, it's, it's just when it rains. Oh boy, does it rain?

And you could easily get like several inches in a matter of a few minutes. And then it stops and it clears up and, and it goes. Of course, I do just want to point out that only you, Michelle, would travel with your own tea and your own tea paraphernalia.

[Michelle]
Absolutely. Three weeks is way too long. Life is too short to drink bad tea.

[Kevin]
See, I would have just been, I think I would have loved it because Sumatra is known for its amazing coffee.

[Michelle]
Oh, yeah.

[Kevin]
So I'm sure, I know, I, you know, I know you probably didn't partake, but I'm sure the coffee, they likely would have been amazing semi-local coffee.

[Michelle]
You know, you, you know what? There was no Sumatran coffee. Like the people who were hardcore coffee drinkers were also having the same complaints that I was.

So, and it, and yeah, and I, it was, it's funny.

[Kevin]
They just imported their Nescafe from, uh.

[Michelle]
No, there was this, the, the, the jar said Balinese coffee, but it, it was, it was unusual. It wasn't like, okay, I think there's this incredible locally roasted coffee culture here. We have a lot of French press and like coffee has its own elite now in culture.

And this resembled something more like out of the 1970s, this Balinese coffee.

[Kevin]
Probably Sumatra exports like 99.999% of their coffee to Seattle and the United States and Europe and all that. And so the, and so maybe they, they just don't drink it locally.

[Michelle]
But I, I did bring back some, just for my own stash, some absolutely incredible Indonesian tea. And I found, I found three places that delighted me completely. One was, one was the tea plantation.

It was called Dewan Tea. And oh my gosh, the, the owner of that farm was just an absolute delight. I enjoyed, uh, sitting with him.

[Kevin]
It sounds like it was an amazing, amazing trip.

[Michelle]
It was.

[Kevin]
Just sounds fantastic. Makes me want to go.

[Michelle]
Yeah, it was. Going through this type of a training, um, understanding yoga, getting so in touch with your body and your mind and connecting your mind and your body to your breath. You're so much time every day dedicated to silent practice and journaling and just relating your connection to the world and how you show up a lot.

Every single person on this had their moment of going through and facing some of their own inner demons. And, uh, I'm myself included. And I, I, I had a rough year in 2023.

I had some odd things happen to me. And I think we were all sort of reeling in the wake of three years of global pandemic that did, did some stuff to, to us mentally and emotionally.

[Kevin]
Did a lot of stuff to us all emotionally and mentally.

[Michelle]
And it really, so holistic nutrition, my profession is a nutritionist. If we just parse off that piece of who I am. The reason I was so attracted to holistic nutrition is that holistic nutrition is not just about the food.

There's some things about our health that have nothing to do with the food, but the food is so invariably connected to it because sometimes the choices that we make in the day don't have anything to do with our food choices, but our food choices often become a result of all of those other things that are going on in us. We'll reach for comfort. We'll reach for easy.

[Kevin]
We'll reach for convenience. What's convenient. What's there in front of you.

[Michelle]
What's quick. We'll reach for a memory of something that made us feel good. We'll reach for a guilty pleasure.

And what this trip brought up for me is I found myself even having interesting conversations inside my head about what was on my plate that had nothing to do with my plate. I don't know if I can explain what was going on inside of me, but I saw this and I shared a lot of experiences with these other 17 people at the table with me that in holistic nutrition, we are taught this, that you can't separate the mind from the body from the spirit. You can't separate what's been going on mentally and emotionally from someone from what's going on in their digestive tract.

We've got this gut-brain connection. Everything is so, it's all one whole. You can't pull a person apart and only deal with their digestive tract and their enzymes and their gut microbiome.

It's all part of one whole. And that was so brought back to me front and center about this idea of mental health. And it made me really realize the weird things that happened to me in 2023 personally.

I put all of my emphasis on my knowledge of diet and nutrition to try to fix and address my problems. But probably a good 75% of what was wrong with me was all mental and emotional. And I'm reminded of that time in my life when I met Dr. Suya Lee, and she wanted me to talk about my food and my food was the last thing that I was willing to look at. And I've gone the other way completely 180 degrees, that my food is the first thing that I look at. And now that mental, emotional thing is probably the last thing that I look at.

[Kevin]
I see.

[Michelle]
Even though I consider myself very well-rounded in that regard, I practice Reiki, I meditate, I do yoga every day. But I realized how much of that has become ritual. Okay, I've got an hour, I'm going to do Reiki now.

I've got an hour, I'm going to do yoga now. I'm going to sit down and do, you know, 20 minutes of meditation. They turned into time slots somehow.

[Kevin]
Right, right. It becomes habits and which maybe makes it lose some of its impact.

[Michelle]
Yeah, I think that's what this retreat did for me is it really brought me back to knowing myself and being holding up that mirror and being honest that I've got to do more self-care that's not just a time slot in my calendar. It's got to be living what we would call a yogic way. Living like a yogic way is like being that person throughout every single one of those moments of your day.

And then you will show up to all of the hard things and the tasks and the work as well as the quiet moments with the same willing to observe and be responsible for who you are. So what yoga training specifically is really about, it's connecting the body and the mind with the breath that they are all part of one interaction. So like you can't just be going through a movement.

You have to consciously cue your breath in and your breath out through that asana. But you and allowing your consciousness to be an active participant in that movement so that you are really connected to your thought, to what you're feeling in your body, where you're feeling it in your body, where your breath is going as you're working through that movement. And that is where you become whole.

And conscious eating is exactly the same thing. When we teach somebody to consciously eat, we teach them to stop, to set their fork down, to consciously chew and to really think about it and be present with what is the mouth feel? What am I tasting, thinking all the way through the swallowing process?

How does that feel in my mouth? How does that feel in my body? That's an exercise that we can take people through from mindful eating.

Anyway, I just found that I found it very complex and very just something I'm grateful for and I'm still processing quite frankly.

[Kevin]
Well, it takes time. I think, as I alluded to earlier, travel is very often uncomfortable. And if you're doing it right, it should be very uncomfortable, as you've just discussed.

And therefore, if you've done it right, it also takes a while to put it into context and to assimilate it and figure out how much you want to assimilate into what I'll call your real life. Once you get home, you have to go back to your regular routine and your regular life and you can choose how much of what you've taken from the travel you want to bring in to that, your regular routine and how much of your regular routine you now want to throw up in the air and shift and change. And that's what's nice about travel, that you can pick and choose and pick and choose from different trips as well.

Like the more you travel, the more you're exposed to and the more you decide what you want to, you can sort of leave off the bad stuff that doesn't make sense and you incorporate the good stuff and hopefully, you know, overall become a better, more interesting person.

[Michelle]
Yeah, my goal with this is always to come back better than I was. And I don't just mean to solve the burnout, but I want to advance myself as a human being in some way. I think that's what travel like this does for me, is that there is this greater sense to the world becoming a little bit smaller.

And that I'm part of it and that I've learned something at every corner of the world that I've traveled from and with every heart that has touched mine along the path along the way. And there's so much beauty in that. And there's so much hopefulness and there's so much intention for things to be better, not just in my personal life, but in the world around us.

And I think that's a really hopeful note that we've come out of this dark time and we come out of our own personal dark times. But there's always so much hope and there's so much beauty, there's so much life around us and there's so much life force in the plants and in the jungle and in the mountains and in the streams and in the people that we share space with. So that's really the beauty of this experience for me and what I hope for people.

As they travel.

[Kevin]
That's the joy of travel. And that's a great takeaway.

[Michelle]
I think you've shared experiencing that on some of your hikes, like just sitting at the top of a summit or...

[Kevin]
Without a doubt, without a doubt. Again, it takes you out of your day to day, which then takes you out of your normal head space and it helps put things in perspective. And yeah, it makes you think about things and see things in a different way, which is always good.

Like it's always good to approach, whether it be problems you have or just your routine or just a rut you've gotten into or whatever it is. It's always good to get out of your comfort zone, go somewhere where you can sit and think and contemplate whatever it is, whether it's food or yoga or hiking or crazy backcountry skiing or whatever it might be, where you can be happy and you can look at whatever aspect of your life comes to the forefront and something you might want to change or not change or whatever. It's good just to be uncomfortable.

I keep coming back to that being uncomfortable. And if you're not uncomfortable, you ain't doing it right.

[Michelle]
Right, exactly, exactly. Yeah, and it was really wonderful to go on that bit of that inner journey and that soul journey in a place knowing that I didn't have to worry about the quality of food that was gonna be on my plate. I think that was another really nice thing to witness is so many people who maybe don't eat that healthy on a daily basis remarked after three or four days of these beautiful meals being served to us just went, wow, I just feel so good.

And they knew it wasn't just the movement and it wasn't just the silent mornings and the being in this beautiful place. We were getting nourished. So it's a big part of the picture.

[Kevin]
Excellent. It sounds like it was absolutely amazing.

[Michelle]
Yeah.

[Kevin]
It sounds like a really, really incredible, incredible trip.

[Michelle]
Yeah, it was. It was. And now I've got some new skills under my belt and anybody that wants to connect with me through the Tea Lounge, we're starting some yoga series with tea and avocado toast actually is our first one.

[Kevin]
Cool.

[Michelle]
It's called Yoga Tea and Avocado Toast. You literally get all three of those things.

[Kevin]
Well, then it's well named. You've named it very well because what you see is what you get. Yoga, tea, avocado toast.

[Michelle]
Exactly.

[Kevin]
You're all set.

[Michelle]
Yeah. Combining my three favorite things and create some beautiful, mindful mornings for some people here locally in the London, Ontario area. Exactly.

[Kevin]
Exactly.

[Michelle]
I didn't get a chance to ask you about you. I made this all about me. I feel so self-centered.

[Kevin]
That's okay. I'm super boring. So I have nothing to share.

I have not had an interesting six weeks since we last chatted. I'm afraid my life is not the jet-setting travel lifestyle that you have. I am looking forward, however, in just two days from now, we are going on a small family vacation.

My son, who just turned 10, wanted for his birthday to get certified for scuba diving. Right.

[Michelle]
I remember that. My gosh, where are you going?

[Kevin]
And so we are going to Grand Cayman Islands. And I chose there specifically because as a young diver under 14, you can only go 10 meters down. So I wanted to choose a place that had a lot of shallower, interesting things to see for him to do.

Because there's no point if you're going on a 30-meter dive, he wouldn't see anything. So that wouldn't be fair to him. So Grand Cayman's got a lot of shallower reefs and such, and a few shipwrecks in shallower water.

So we're going, and we're just going to be very zen. We're going to be swimming in the ocean. And I think probably scuba diving is one of my most favorite things to do because it does, you know, sort of apropos of what you were talking about, like it really, both very literally and physically, it takes me out of what I know.

It takes me out of air. It takes me off of, you know, terra firma. And I'm swimming.

And I think it's just, I always just feel so free and amazing when I'm diving because it's just so, so physically different from being on land.

[Michelle]
You know, I think that is a form of meditation. I really genuinely do. So I've never scuba'd, but I snorkel.

And when I've been snorkeling in Galapagos Islands in particular is where I have had the most magical experience. You can get quite far underwater still with a snorkel without being on a scuba set.

[Kevin]
Oh, for sure.

[Michelle]
And the silence.

[Kevin]
Yes.

[Michelle]
The silence under the water is, it's a peace that you don't otherwise experience. And the visual that goes with that silence is just breathtaking.

[Kevin]
And if you want to step it up a level, you can do a night dive.

[Michelle]
Oh my gosh.

[Kevin]
Because that's not only silent, but also pitch black.

[Michelle]
That sounds terrifying.

[Kevin]
Except for a little flashlight that you're carrying with you. But it's, it's, it's quite amazing because you're, you're surrounded. Like the only other time I've been surrounded by so much like complete darkness.

Like I can't express how dark it was. Like the only other time I've ever been in such pitch black was in lava tubes in Iceland. Mm.

Which are literally tubes formed by lava underground. And so obviously no light comes through.

[Michelle]
I've seen them in Hawaii.

[Kevin]
So it's, yeah, similar. And it's so completely dark. So when you're diving on a night dive, it's so completely dark.

And then the world just comes into color as you, as you move your flashlight around, your world is reduced to like a two or three foot swath of color. And things just pass.