Living A Full Life

Everyday Triggers That Keep You Inflamed And How To Stop Them

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 7

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What if the real reason you feel foggy, stiff, and low on energy isn’t age or willpower, but a handful of everyday habits quietly stoking inflammation? We zoom in on the invisible triggers—foods that look “healthy,” late-night screens, low-grade stress, fragrance-heavy products, blood sugar swings, and long hours of sitting—and show you how to shut them down with simple, repeatable steps.

We break down the difference between helpful, short-term inflammation and the chronic fire that saps hormones, slows recovery, and ramps up pain. You’ll learn which oils to ditch immediately and what to use instead, why a high-protein, low-sugar breakfast is a powerful lever, and how a 30–60 minute digital sunset can lower cortisol and deepen sleep. We also unpack the link between emotional overload and immune activation, then offer quick nervous system resets you can use throughout the day to steady your mood and focus.

From plastics and fragrances to non-stick pans, we cover practical swaps that reduce toxic load without turning your life upside down. You’ll get a blood sugar playbook—eat protein first, pair carbs with fiber and fat, avoid naked carbs, and walk after meals—to smooth glucose and curb cravings. We round it out with movement snacks, walking meetings, and strength training as your anti-inflammatory foundation. To tie it all together, we share a 24-hour anti-inflammatory reset that anyone can follow to feel results fast and build habits that last.

Ready to cool the hidden fires and feel like yourself again? Listen now, try the reset, and tell us the first change you’ll make. If this helped, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show.

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Most people think inflammation only happens when you sprain an ankle or get injured. But the truth is, chronic everyday inflammation is one of the biggest hidden drivers behind fatigue, weight gain, headaches, joint pain, autoimmune flares, anxiety, and even digestive issues. And the sneaky part? You are exposed to inflammation triggers every single day without even knowing it. Today we're uncovering the everyday invisible causes and how to shut them down. Welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolcicori, and we're going to focus on and zoom in on one of the root causes behind almost everything: inflammation, not the obvious stuff. I'm talking about the hidden daily triggers you would never think about. Inflammation really matters. And we've had we have episodes on this that are titled inflammation. And this is probably number five on it. But I wanted to go through the deeper layers of things that we don't think about. We talked about chronic stress, chronic toxins, but what about the acute chronic and sedentary inflammation that maybe many of us don't talk about? Acute inflammation from like a short injury is good inflammation. It's your body's way of trying to heal and repair tissue that was injured. Think of it like a rolled ankle or a sprained wrist or something like that, like a ligament that was hurt. Your body's going to work fast to try and repair the damage to that soft tissue. Chronic inflammation is not good. It's the slow internal fire. These are the cause the this type of inflammation causes the body to stay in repair mode. It drains our energy, it disrupts our hormones, and it actually continuously increases our pain. Symptoms that you or people you know that may not associate with inflammation but are things like brain fog, anxiety, weight gain, bloating, morning stiffness, poor sleep, low energy, sugar cravings. So if I spurred a little bit of attention there, you're like, wait a minute, what are you talking about? Morning stiffness. How's that chronic inflammation? We'll get into this. There's everyday inflammation triggers, foods that look healthy but aren't. Let's talk about the foods. It's the most common way to get inflamed is by what we put in our mouth. So we have to talk about it again. Seed oils, get rid of these right now. If you have any of them, throw them in the garbage. Right now, like stop the podcast, hit pause, go into your pantry, throw them in the garbage. Seed oils like canola, soybean, and vegetable oil have to go. I don't care what you bake or your favorite strudel or whatever it is that you do, and grandma taught you how to do it 400 years ago. I don't care. The recipe is dead. You're going to switch it with avocado oil or something else. Because these seed oils are rancid. They immediately cause inflammation in the body. Healthy granola bars, throw them out. There's no such thing. There's no such thing as a healthy granola bar because there's seeds in the granola bar, and the seeds have oils and the and they use the seed oil to put the granola bar together so it stays together so that you can eat it and give it the crunch and do all whatever it is. There's no such thing as a healthy granola bar. Low fat or zero fat packaged foods. If they had to eliminate the fat from the food, it was ultra-processed. Not just processed, ultra-processed. You probably don't want that. Artificial sweeteners, sugary yogurts, high fructose corn syrup. I think most people are getting better with that. No one really carries that in the house anymore, but it is added to our food, so you got to be careful. And then gluten for sensitive individuals. These things create gut irritation immediately as we start to digest them. Blood sugar ends up spiking with most of these, and it creates an immune activation immediately. Your body starts attacking your gut, thinking a foreign invader came in because it doesn't know what's going on. And then we have oxidative stress, which then cascades an inflammatory response, chronic response around the entire body. So some fixes is swapping our oils for all of, like we said, avocado, ghee, coconut, uh, better omega-3 fatty acid chains and triglycerides that are better for us. Eat whole foods. You'll avoid a lot of this processed additives if you just eat whole foods. Hard to add things to a banana, hard to add things to, you know, a head of cabbage. It just, we don't do much. There's pesticides, herbicides, but yeah, we'll get into that later. Eat whole foods, high protein, low sugar breakfasts. By keeping the breakfast low sugar, you eliminate the processed food manufacturers from the heaviest influenced meal of the day, which is breakfast. The food companies have definitely put all chips in on breakfast. They've tried to make breakfast fast, quick, with cereals and to go things. It's where they have their hands the deepest. And if you eat a high protein, low sugar breakfast, you pretty much have to omit all of them because the protein is going to come from whole foods and it leaves you with little to no room for your sugar or your carbs. So you're going to have to grab a fruit with that or something whole, which is why it's a great habit to teach your kids that the morning is about protein. Eat as much of it as you can in the morning and it sets you up for a great day. And read labels. I like the less than five ingredient rule. If it has less than five ingredients, we'll buy that jar of food or that box of food, whatever it is. If it has less than five ingredients in it, if it has more, it's not no longer food. If you have to add a bunch of other stuff to make it taste good. Everyday inflammation trigger number two, poor sleep quality. How does sleep affect our inflammation? Well, let's get into it. You can eat clean and exercise all you want, but if your sleep is inflammatory, your body stays inflamed. How can your sleep be inflammatory? Late night screens. Throws off your circadian rhythm and your entire endocrine system, your hormone system. Blue light exposure all day, stress, just from the things you're reading or doing or the work you're doing, eating too late, late night snacking, and alcohol. We do these things before bedtime in the evening. We create an inflammatory sleep schedule. The consequences is that it elevates your cortisol further. It gives you higher inflammation markers in your blood, slower recovery times, and it increases your cravings. You just start the next day hungry and eating bad habits. The fixes is the digital sunset routine. Talked about this in prior episodes as well, even last week's episode. The digital sunset is just giving you time before you go to bed to unwind, turning off the screens, giving yourself some quiet time, and then preparing yourself for sleep. Taking your magnesium at that time is a great time. A cool sleep environment, opening the window, whatever it may be to cool the room. And then just 30 to 60 minutes of tech free time before you shut your eyes. Everyday inflammation trigger number three, chronic stress and emotional load. We've done a lot of stress episodes in the past. We can go back and listen to those. But the examples of emotional stress come from things like overcommitment. We just overcommit ourselves every day. We're running like crazy from appointment A to appointment B to appointment C to appointment C D. We're getting through the day at a fast pace. Maybe relationship tensions with family members, spouses, work pressure, the always behind feeling, and the social media comparison of just scrolling and doom scrolling on social media. Stress and inflammation are linked through cortisol dysregulation. It messes up the entire system. The fixes for this is a nervous system reset, like the wind down or sunset routine that we have or the morning routine, breath work, mindfulness, micro breaks during the day where you just pull away from work and just do nothing for two or three minutes. Just quiet. Go to the bathroom, go grab some water, do a loop around the office, do a loop around the house, whatever it is, just to deregulate, simplifying your schedule as much as you can and just getting some community connection. Neighbors, friends, whatever it may be. Trigger number four environmental toxins. These aren't the dramatic toxin exposures that we're talking about. We're talking about your everyday environment. Plastics and BPA. Using plastic cups and reusing them over time with hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold drinks exposes the plastics within them, the BPAs, the peripherals. Then these create estradiols in the body. And they block they create chaos. They block receptors, they they fight for other communication pathways in the body, and they just create chaos. Fragrances and perfumes are all toxic. They're all volatile compounds that we breathe in. Using these and spraying them and inhaling them is mind-boggling. Laundry detergents, they can be like that too. They can give off VOCs. Lotions, shampoos, creams, they are filled with chemicals. Make sure you buy as clean as possible. Air fresheners. I live in Florida. You put an air freshener in your car and it's 110 degrees out. It's cooking the chemical air freshener. And you get in the car and you're overwhelmed with this pine scent or whatever you chose, bubblegum, and you're breathing this stuff in. And it's literally being cooked in the summer months. And you're like, oh, my car smells great. Boy, but your brain is like, we're dying. And we just want to move to cleaner products. Non-stick cookware, Teflon. We talked about these in the older ones too. Non-stick, clean green pan, or those type of brands, cookware. You got to be careful with the nonstick. They coat it with things that are volatile and inflammatory to our gut. They trigger inflammation with the hormone disruption, all these things we talked about. The liver gets overloaded, trying to detoxify the blood, and it creates an immune activation where your body may start attacking itself. It's being attacked from so many different places from the air fresheners, the shampoos, the lotions, the foods, the processed foods, the chemicals, the prescription drugs, the things we're consuming. Our liver is on overdrive trying to process all this stuff, and our bloodstream is toxic. And then the immune system's like, I think we just need to attack everything. We're under attack, like just protect. It attacks your liver, it attacks your thyroid, it attacks your glands, it starts to attack you. It's called autoimmune issues, autoimmune diseases. And then we've opened up an entire can of worms on our health. The fixes to this, which I think are very doable right now, is switch to fragrance-free cosmetics. Use glass instead of plastic, especially around the house. Clean ingredients in soaps and your lotions and your cosmetics, and use natural cleaning sprays as well. These are quick little fixes to help reduce the amount of toxic overload that we're under. Trigger number five, hidden blood sugar roller coasters. Even if you don't eat junk food, your blood sugar may be spiking all day. The causes of this are because maybe healthy carb snacks, granola bars, crackers, packaged snacks that we open up and we eat, they're all carb-based. We don't think we're eating sugar. We think we're eating healthy, but we're overloading the simple carbs. Low protein meals. When we don't give our body time to digest protein, it will over-digest carbohydrates and spike our insulin. Coffee on an empty stomach, long gaps between meals, almost like this fasting, but not fasting, because we go from 7 a.m. breakfast, we kind of skip lunch, have it late at like four or five. It counts as our dinner. We went from seven to four, nine, ten hours with no food, not quite long enough for a good fast. But then we ate and we didn't give our body a chance to fast and decrease inflammation. And we ate again. So it's in this middle ground of not really getting enough nutrition and then spacing out too far. This leads to energy crashes during the day, fat storage, because the body's like, listen, we just need to have some backup reserves here because we don't know where this life is going, hormonal chaos, and then the inflammation itself. Some fixes, eat protein first. First thing in the morning, load up on protein. It's a great start to your day. Pair carbs with fiber and fat. So if you're going to eat any type of carbohydrates, um, potatoes, pasta, rice. If you're cooking any of this stuff, make sure we carve, we put it with fiber and fat to digest the carbs better. This is why a baked potatoes taste so much better with some butter on it. Just it works well. Uh, avoid naked carbs, just the simple, straight up carbs. Crack, those are the things I talked about. Eating pasta with nothing on it, like just sauce, pasta sauce, that is a naked carb that just fills you up with carbohydrates. There's little to no protein in it, there's barely any fat, blood sugar disaster right there. And then try walking after meals. It helps you regulate your blood sugar faster and digest better so that you absorb the nutrition better and not just store it as fat. Trigger number six, the sedentary lifestyle. Even active people sit too much. Sitting for long periods slows our circulation. A study from 2014 showed that sitting was like the new smoking. Pretty much the circulatory health of people that sat all day had a sedentary life, and people who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day were equivalent on their circulatory health because we're just not moving. We get stiff fascia, more inflammation in our tissue, muscle weaken, which causes more stress on the joints because the joints have to work harder, and slower lymphatic flow. Just get this bogged down, sluggish mobility of our circulatory system. The fixes, movement snacks, creating times during the day where you get up and move. Just get up and do something. It's amazing how three hours can go by working in front of a computer, like, man, I haven't moved. Get up and move. A quick, brisk walk outside, take the dog out, whatever it is. Walking meetings, having meetings with other people where you walk instead of just talk on the phone. Stretching breaks, and then strength training weekly should be a non-negotiable on your calendar. So here is a 24-hour anti-inflammatory reset that you may want to take part in. In the morning, start off with warm lemon water, like a room temperature water. Squeeze a little bit of lemon in it. You can even put a pinch of uh Celtic salt or Himalayan salt or pink salt in it, just a little pinch, and drink that whole eight ounces or 10 ounces right there. You're starting off your day with an electrolyte, um antioxidant and hydration right off in the morning. It's a great way to start it. High protein breakfast if you eat, get some light exposure as quickly as you can after waking up. Just go look at the sun. Like just go out there and just make sure the sun hits your skin, and then a 10-minute walk. So if you do that, you're getting your light exposure. Midday, use whole food lunches. Don't go out and grab quick stuff. Movement breaks and hydration with electrolytes. You can actually use an electrolyte at this time. And then in the evening, anti-inflammatory dinners. This is where you give yourself a chance to eat a really healthy meal at the end of the day that is anti-inflammatory, green base, a vegetable base, protein, and a healthy fat. You do this every night. There's thousands of combinations of foods you can eat for dinner that are super healthy like this. And you will change inflammation very quickly if that is your 24-hour routine. Have the digital sunset before bedtime, add your magnesium at night, and then use clean personal care products if you do that before bed. And I think you've created a pretty healthy routine that if you do for a month straight, it will create new habits in your life that you're just going to carry on for the rest of your life. Teach your kids this stuff too. It's really important that they carry this stuff on too with the toxic world that we really do live in. So DM me the word inflame, and I'll send you a copy of all this that we said today. Or if you jotted down some notes, you're ready to rock and roll. You can also email us at info at fulllifetampa.com, and we're more than happy to help you with any of this stuff. Stay well, stay healthy, and take care.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host