Graceful Healing With Coach Shea

What’s your favorite cooking method in the summer?

Morning everyone! It’s a gorgeous day outside, and I had something on my heart I wanted to share ♥️. Heads up: this is a long read, so hang on!

Anywho, I wanted to share my favorite coffee mug with y’all and share some thoughts I’d been having lately. If you’ve been a member of this group before, it may look familiar, and I still use it as often as I can.

I’ll be super heartbroken if this one ever breaks because this mug is a daily reminder of what life actually is. Journeys have their ups and downs, their hills and valleys. This lifestyle mirrors a journey: it too has its ups and downs, hills and valleys just like life does. Our responsibility is to find the spot of sun in the valley that’s covered over with a dark tree line and grab it. Too many of us let the darkness of the valley get us down in the doldrums way too often.

Mindset towards the journey is one of the hardest things to change over. Society’s “diets” make us think that if we follow a set of rules that we’ll end up on a hill. But what they don’t show are the ones that take the accidental (or purposeful) nosedive off of the cliff. They also don’t show us what happens when the diet is over. What do the dieters do afterwards? Go back to the way they were eating before? That’s how rebound weight occurs. You lose the weight with your mix of low-fat and low carb salads and smoothies (typically a mix of both body fat and muscle because you’re not eating enough to sustain both), start eating your Mickey D’s again and the weight “magically” comes back, with more to boot.

I could be looking at my current stall as a valley, but I’m not. My weight loss has slowed down again, and I just found out my thyroid isn’t as optimized as I thought yet. But guess what: I’m choosing to see the sunspot through the trees and living in the sunshine. I am still working towards being the best I can be, stall and all, through Trim Healthy Mama, semaglutide, and plain old hard work. I’m choosing to be ok with that.

Please, don’t let the temporary valleys get you down. Temporarily going dairy/gluten/whatever else free isn’t going to mess you up unless YOU choose to do so.
Instead of saying “I can’t eat dairy or wheat”, go over the list of things you CAN have. Yummy healthy fats that speed up your metabolism more than cheese does, super satisfying carbs like fruit, beans, quinoa, brown rice that give you more flavor than wheat products do. Mindset is probably the hardest thing to change, but by golly it can be done!

I believe in you ♥️. I’m here to cheer you on and push you along when you need it.

Trust the journey, not the rules 🥰.

Sometimes you do what your body can handle.

Kentucky was hit with some nasty humidity this past week, and it’s played havoc on my lungs this weekend. Today I decided to go for a walk to get some needed movement in, but couldn’t do it for as long as I usually did because I started coughing like my lungs were trying to escape.

Sometimes mamas, we have to take a step back and evaluate ourselves. I finished my split training for push 25 on Thursday (4 workouts a week for four weeks), took Friday off because I only got a couple of hours of sleep, and decided I was done. I took the weekend to rest, and am taking a much needed destress week before I start Push back up, this time at three days a week with walks/rebounding and mobility workouts included.

I love what my body can do because I’ve taken care of myself, but I have to honor what it’s gone through up to this point (for newbies I’m a disabled Army veteran with a bunch of health issues, lungs included). Sometimes I cannot push through the pain and lack of oxygen, so I have to remember it’s ok if I don’t get a workout done.

Don’t think you HAVE to get a workout in if you’ve only slept for two or three hours the night before, or have so much running to do you’d have to be up at 4 in the morning to get it done. What you don’t do today can be done tomorrow ♥️.

Did you start this week with a workout or movement?

Vitamin C and Weight Loss

Trim Healthy is all about eating right, isn’t it? Plenty of protein to keep your body satiated and muscle growth for a higher metabolism has been pushed lately. HOWEVER, what is the #1 component of our meals that we absolutely should NOT neglect? Those nonstarchy veggies and berries that we get to add to our meals.

What do they contain? Fiber, water and a multitude of vitamins and minerals, the king of which is vitamin C.
What is vitamin C? Simply put, vitamin C is an antioxidant, meaning it fights free radicals in your body from inflammation (https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-c/art-20363932). Free radicals are unstable atoms that have unpaired electrons, so they’re go looking for them to become complete. When they attach to other molecules, they can cause oxidative stress. This leads to a host of oxidative disorders, like Alzheimer’s, inflammatory diseases, diabetes (!) and age related issues like wrinkly skin, hair loss and greying (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318652 -and-free-radicals).

What role does vitamin C play in all of this? Antioxidants donate an electron to these unstable atoms, making them stable again and preventing oxidative damage. One major disease that’s related to a lack of vitamin C is scurvy, the disease that’s related to sailors that spent months on ships crossing the ocean. Scurvy is a connective tissue disease, and caused by not having enough vitamin C in the diet.

What does vitamin C help with weight loss? The research is mixed, but it’s out there that vitamin C can help with not only protein synthesis in the body, leading to a reduced BMI (body mass index), but it can help with cholesterol levels in the body, along with improving blood pressure (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352939319300260)

How can you get vitamin C in your diet? If you eat a balanced diet already with plenty of fruits and vegetables, you don’t need to worry about supplementing of you don’t want to. Many vitamin C supplements aren’t really very bioavailable, so your best bet is from a whole food source if you can. Brightly colored veggies like summer squash, leafy greens, rainbow peppers, all kinds of berries and fruit powders like baobab (my personal favorite 😉) are some of the best bioavailable sources of vitamin C on the planet.

So what are you waiting for? Throw some riced cauliflower in your egg scramble or blend up some greens in your vitamin at breakfast (the super swig from THF is my ALL-TIME favorite), load up your plate with as many nonstarchies you can with lunch and dinner and have some berries on the side with all of them. Your body will thank you for all of it.

What is a favorite meal you need help trimmy-fying?

You could say I’ve gone off the deep end a little bit 🤣.

Hard boiled eggs topped with fermented, raw sauerkraut. Slightly funky, definitely salty, and overall a good compliment to each other.

Did you know adding fermented foods such as raw sauerkraut and homemade milk kefir can help your body with digestion? In this case, to help me digest the protein in the eggs and sausage so I can fully absorb the amino acids in them. The extra enzymes in ferments adds to the enzymes already in my gut from the pancreas and duodenum and break the aminos down more completely.

So if you want or need a way to increase your body’s ability to digest your foods, don’t put all your money on fancy pills that may or may not do anything. Go to your supermarket’s fridge section and grab the oldest sources of enzymes around. You’ll help your gut, and keep your wallet intact too 😉.

To all of my new followers, I figured it was time to reintroduce myself here.
•My name is Shea (She-ah) Wilson and I live in Louisville Kentucky with my gorgeous husband and two beautiful daughters. I am a born again Christian than believes in my heart that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead and is the only way to get to Heaven. We bought our first house less than a year ago and we live with my mom and dad and my sister and her family (husband plus two boys and a girl). We’re first time homeschoolers so keeping all that energy under one roof hasn’t been easy for us.
•I am a United States Army disabled veteran that has had many of my aches and pains taken away from simply eating a low GI, low inflammation lifestyle. I was diagnosed with degenerative arthritis in my ankles and joints of my feet and the pain was incredible! Healing my body through nourishing foods has helped to take that pain away so I can play with my kids again.
•my Trim Healthy Mama journey started, officially, in 2017 and has had its share of ups and downs. In 2015 I discovered it through Briana Thomas’s blog when I was looking for a keto drink to make for Christmas (her hot eggnog detox is super yummy!), and I bought the plan book not long after that. Having worked in food service in the Army and having a passion for athletic nutrition and fitness, it made sense for me right off the bat. I started my journey with my hubby and kids in tow and haven’t looked back.
•I graduated in 2025 with my Bachelors of Science in Holistic Nutrition from Purdue University, and am officially in my last semester at Liberty University in their Masters of Science in Dietetics and Nutrition track, with a focus on athletes and (eventually) children and adolescents.
•I was officially diagnosed with PCOS (now called PMOS) in 2023, and started taking semaglutide for it in 2025. It’s been a game changer in my mental space because I can make much better decisions health wise (it’s hard to make good decisions when your husband’s chips are constantly calling for you from the bedroom he has them stashed in 🤦‍♀️) and exercise more because my joint pain from inflammation is now gone.

I’ve had my ups and downs (Reece’s and Cadbury eggs will always be a weakness of mine when the season comes), but the ups keep me from going down too far, too fast or staying down for too long. My all time favorite Bible verse “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13) has helped me remember that if He can get me through an Iraq deployment, or get my family through the financial hardship we experienced when I first got out of the Army, then He can help guide me through my most intense cravings and feelings of doubt. If you have any questions, feel free to message me here, or drop a comment below. Thanks for reading!!

What is one thing you’ve never made before that you do now in the name of health?