I haven't done one of these in a little while so I thought I would, since my next interview just isn't ready for your ears yet!

On this episode I will: 
1. celebrate my first ever giveaway, share the reviews that won (incidentally) and what those folks wish to have as their prizes. 
2. give you a little preview of what's to come this fall on the Pod. 
3. tell you about my big news briefly.
4. share about some aha moments I had around some of my health struggles and one resource that has been super helpful in changing the way I feel day to day. 

Ok no biggie, just a casual Thursday over here. 

You can connect with me as well as see my tattoo art on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/micahriot/

my website is www.micahriot.com 
The podcast is hosted on Buzzsprout but truly lives in the heart of Micah's website at:
https://www.micahriot.com/ink-medicine-podcast/

Hello, hello, my darlings. This is Micah Riot with another episode of Ink Medicine podcast. Today we're gonna do something we haven't done in a few months and that is a more of a personal news rambles update. I know you don't like these as much as the interviews. I know I know because I look at the numbers. The interviews get a lot more listens, but you know what. It's my podcast and I do whatever I want. So we're gonna chat about the giveaway, the results of the giveaway. I will read you the winning reviews, even though I did not, of course, judge the reviews based on the reviews themselves. It was a random number generated win, but still I want to share the reviews that won. I will tell you what I am having in store for you, the people that I am chatting with and have chatted with, that I'm about to put up on the podcast. I'm very excited about everybody that I end up talking to. I will tell you about some other developments in my life and my health and how that's affected my work, what's coming up for the fall as we approach our one year anniversary of the podcast, and other such things. Whatever comes up, I will tell you about it. Let's get to it. So, yes, the giveaway. I did my first giveaway ever in my life. As long as I've been a tattoo artist, I've just been coasting on. Whoever follows me follows me. Whoever wants to be tattooed by me, I say yes most of the time. Sometimes I say no, but I've never done a giveaway. People do giveaways in order to get more followers, to attract more attention, get fresh eyes on their stuff, of course, and I have never done that before and it was intimidating. It was like what if I do a giveaway and nobody participates? But that is not what happened, happy to say so. I believe I was at something like around 10 or so reviews before the giveaway and now I'm at close to 30. So we did a good job and because we're close to 30, I did three winners, as I promised to do, a winner per every 10. So here are the winning reviews. This one is called Joyful and Deep. I have several amazing pieces from Micah and this podcast feels like an extension of the deep and meaningful and joyful conversations we have when they are tattooing me Amazing guests and even more amazing conversation. Definitely don't want to miss this podcast. This one is called Intentional, insightful, captivating, I believe, is the last word. I can't fully see the last word. What an intentional, insightful and captivating podcast. Yes, it was captivating. I listened to one just to see what was up and ended up going on a bit of a podcast binge and listened to about five episodes. The podcast is a window into the world of a type of artist. I've always been intrigued by Soothing, thought-provoking, great sound quality and music Everything you could ask for in a podcast. 10 out of 10 would recommend. And the last one the third one, is called so Much Beauty and it is Micah creates gorgeous tattoos in collaboration with their clients. This podcast is like the spirit and soul manifestation of that process. Inc. Slash skin, slash interview, slash podcast airwaves. Thank you, thank you all of you, and thank you the three of you who won. I contacted all of them and two of them want tattoo time, which will just be part of the continuation of the work that we have been doing, and one of them wants a piece of jewelry and I will share the results of that when I have made it. It's been a very, very busy time. I mean, it's summer, right, so there's trips. My partner and I went away to a wedding a couple of weeks ago and then I went to LA to see my family and then when I came back I had a cold for a few days and I haven't even gotten to all my email from August. If you're listening and if you're waiting for an email back, I am planning on when I can do all of that work. So it's coming, but I am wildly excited to make jewelry. I also had an email from somebody recently inquiring about a custom piece. So I don't know if you knew that, but that's also something I do, a little bit of a fun side hustle for me as somebody with a brain that likes to do a lot of different stuff and be creative in a lot of different ways. I don't know if you knew this about me Some of you do and some of you don't but I do some sewing. I make jewelry silver and stone jewelry, solder jewelry not wire wrapped. I do resin art. Sometimes I have a refinished furniture. It's a lot. There's a graveyard of hobbies that were started and stuff that was acquired for said started hobbies and that didn't go very far, but I do intend to come back to basically all of it at some point or another. Anyway, I do love making jewelry. I would say that's probably my like, the thing that makes me the most happy from the other arts that I feel like I have a paw in, so happy to take custom requests. Just hit me up. One of the things I want to speak to is I also love doing guest podcasts and they do take a little bit more effort and time of editing and setting up, like when we can have that chat with our guests Kind of in a different way, because when I'm doing a solo episode, different energies are required. I have to look at my list of topics. I have to figure out what is the most pertinent to now Think about what people have been asking me about, what kind of questions I want to answer, what kind of resources I want to provide for people. But that's faster and I can kind of make it at any time With guests. It's, of course, a little bit more complex, requires a bit more setup, but I have an amazing, amazing, fascinating interview with Jared of Dandrite jewelry that I recorded. Unfortunately, our quality wasn't like our connection quality was not happening, so the call kept dropping and eventually I just started recording with my phone and did save about half of the conversation that we had, but the other half went missing and so, as I edit, I might have to go back and ask him some questions, and so that's taking longer than I wish it was taking, because I really am so excited about the conversation we had I want to put it out there. It's a lot about piercing and the world of piercing, and also the limits of the body and the way that Jared sees the body as something to test as far as sensation and pain goes, which is very relevant to us here in Tattoo Lovers. Another person that I am going to have a chat with and record for our listening pleasure here is a friend of mine who is a queer photographer, tristan Crane, and they suggested we have a conversation about skin issues and how skin issues can affect getting tattooed and also how tattoos can affect skin issues. I think that's going to be relevant to a lot of us. I myself, habagze Mom, have had it since I was in my 20s and there's definitely a relationship between my tattoos and my eczema. So that's coming up in a few weeks. One other guest I would really like to bring on the podcast is a client of mine who is a brilliant gynecologist, who works for Stanford currently, who's teaching gynecology students for Stanford and has also done a lot of work around the world to improve gynecological care. The way it's relevant to tattooing is that she's my client and we've done some really amazing work on her and, of course, I would love to talk to her about the specific work that we did, because she kind of went in and just let me do this big, beautiful abstract piece on her thigh as her. I believe it was her first piece. It was brave and really cool and we had such good chemistry. I would love to bring a conversation with her onto the podcast, so that's also in the making. Other topics I'd like to bring are social media and how that's affected, the type of work that we tattoo artists have to do. That leaves us no choice, and how that's affected sort of the mental health of someone like me who has some challenges with mental health and with feeling confident. And you know, in the end of it all, of course, my priority is my clients and their happiness and their joy and their tattoos and their bodies, and I believe that I provide that. But there's also me as a person behind the scenes, and social media has complicated this work for sure. Another piece of news is that my apprentice is about to move to town and start her apprenticeship, and I'm going to have a conversation with her at the start of her apprenticeship. I want you all to meet her. She's absolutely wonderful and I'm so excited to start this chapter of my life. It's going to change everything. It is going to change everything. I have never had an apprentice before. I wasn't sure that I would ever have one. I've been approached by people throughout the last 15 years of my career and never felt like I had anything to offer them. Until this person came along, I started to see the value of what I could bring to her life and the value of what my small shop could bring to her life and to her learning. And here we are on the precipice of this huge change. The shop is going to be different. I'm going to change the way that it looks inside. We're going to change the furniture. We're going to change the layout. I do hope that it's not going to change the comfort or the coziness that all of you feel when you come in for your appointments. I am absolutely still planning on leaving plenty of time for private space and tattooing. We're going to split days and times and the folks who want to be tattooed in a really private environment will still have access to that, and the folks who don't mind, who enjoy having other energies in room, will be able to have that now Also. She's just, she's a wonderful human and I think you will all enjoy her very much. I had an idea for another topic for the podcast at some point and I wasn't sure if this is going to work as a podcast, but there's a whole bunch of tattoo artists that I've been following in the last few months whose work I find just so gorgeous, and I would love to share their work with you as a curated list of folks that I have found and I would like to share. I am not sure that's going to work in an auditory way, but I think we will try. I'll also put a list together of their Instagram handles so you can actually go and look at the art, but I'll try to describe it and see if that's going to be interesting to my listeners. And here is maybe the more lengthy ramble that you're going to hear today on this episode, and if you want to skip it, feel free. This is about sort of my health, like nothing really terrible, just a process that I've been in and I hope that it helps you with your own health and well-being. And if not, you know, no worries, you can take it or leave it, skip ahead, etc. Stop listening, consent is sexy. So some months ago I well I mean, I've been dealing with this my whole life, you know I get these glucose kind of blood sugar drops where I experience it as feeling sweaty and shaky and like really sick, like not good, you know. And in those moments when I experienced that it's kind of this, like very gross feeling, and at that moment I want to basically eat everything I see inside, especially things that are sweet, like I will eat anything sugary, sweet, you know, I know it's a blood sugar drop, so I will go and eat like a piece of fruit, I'll eat cheese, I'll eat everything. So I'll eat everything I see until that feeling goes away. And that's how experience blood sugar drops. And so I used to have them like once in a while, not very often, I don't know, maybe a few, three times a year, maybe once a month or something. But the last few weeks I got to a point where I was having them almost every day. Definitely a few times a week, but almost every day and I also kind of around the same time have been. I had gone to Costco and I sometimes get snacks from my clients and I had gotten these little bags of gummy bears and I freaking love gummy bears. They're freaking delicious, like they're chewy and they're sweet and the texture is so good and the baggie is like eight gummy bears. So it doesn't seem like much right, but I was having these gummy bears, especially like as I was tattooing, kind of like when we would take a break, as a little like a fun little snack, just a little experience for the mouth, and also, like, you know, if I had stopped tattooing and I was hungry and I wasn't my way home but I wasn't quite there. So basically I was eating sugar on a fasted, essentially a fasted stomach, fasted system and I was having these blood sugar drops, you know, and I was. You know I eat pretty healthy for me. I eat a lot of lean protein, like a lot of chicken. I eat a lot of vegetables. I do eat carbs, but usually it's like gluten free toast in the morning, maybe some rice, maybe some like protein pasta, you know, like garbanzo pasta, stuff like that. So I wasn't. I was kind of like, well, where's the room to improve how I'm eating? You know also fruit too, like, and I know that it's not good to eat sugar on a on an empty stomach. So like I would never get up and like start with candy or start with a pastry or something. So I was like, okay, I'm not eating sugar on an empty stomach, but in reality I was. So I was having all these issues and I have a couple of friends who are both wearing continuous glucose monitors and are learning more about how their body reacts to different foods, how much their blood sugar spikes and drops, and that's a commitment like that's about 200 bucks a month of a commitment. And of course the tracking, which I've done plenty of tracking in my life of like food and how it makes me feel and what I'm eating, and macros and all that. But this is, you know, it's mostly like the monetary commitment and then it would be interesting to see the data. But I wasn't ready to make that jump and I decided instead to read this book about glucose. It's called the glucose revolution. It's written by Jesse Inchio Spe If I'm not pronouncing her name correctly, I apologize, but I will spell it for you. It's I-N-C-H-A-U-S-P and this book is. It's short, it's very readable, it's really written for their regular human. It's not written for anybody who's a scientist, although there's a lot of scientific information in there, but that is to say it's not intimidating at all. I read it in about 24 hours. I know I was visiting my grandmother in LA and Inchio explains how glucose works and its effect on our bodies. And essentially, you know, having read that book, having listened to podcasts, I realized that I was basically in a place where I was like pre-diabetic and every time you have a big glucose spike, every time you have a big glucose sugar, blood sugar drop, you're getting closer to the line of diabetes. And you know who wants to be there. Like nobody, I don't want to be there. But so I wasn't scared, I was just like, okay, I don't want to go down that route, what am I going to do about this? And so in the book she gives you tips of how to stop those kinds of spikes and drops. Basically, the idea is to flatten your glucose spikes and drops to manageable place where your body can kind of coast and not have those peaks and valleys. And if you were to chart your blood sugar jumping and falling. That would be pretty flat. And the way to do that is there's a couple of different things you can do. So first you start every meal with vegetables. Vegetables create kind of a netting, like a mush in your belly, in your stomach, and then you eat your protein and your fat after that and then you eat your carbs last. So instead of having like toast and then eggs and then your greens which is my breakfast usually is greens, eggs and toast would usually have my eggs and my toast together and then I would have my greens last, instead of starting eating my greens first and then my eggs and then my toast last. And it's helped. So essentially I just changed the order of my food. Same with dinner or lunch. You know, instead of eating your salad last, like some people do, eat your salad first, eat a vegetable first, then eat your protein, your fats and then your carbs last. So if you're having pasta for dinner and you're having, like, say, chicken also and a vegetable, you get it Vegetable, chicken, pasta, a pasta for your dessert, and that in itself, I can feel has made a huge difference. The difference has been that I'm having, I'm not getting like hungry. Hungry I'm not getting really intense, like I used to, my client would leave between my two clients. My 10 am would be done at 1pm. They would leave and I would just be like ravenous and I would go and I would like shove all my lunch food into my mouth, eat it really fast and then be like okay, and then I would get really tired. Actually, and this other way that I'm eating, I'm not eating really different things, I'm eating basically the same food in different order and I'm a lot less tired. I used to always have a green tea in the afternoon between my clients. I haven't done that all week, so I've been doing this now for two weeks and that's a huge piece of it is that I'm not ravenous Again. Nobody wants to feel that right, like that's an unpleasant feeling. So I know I'm hungry and I'm like I could eat. I should eat, it's time to eat, but I'm fine, like I can wait. I'm not feeling that like blood sugar drop thing coming on, that really nasty feeling that I was talking about earlier, and I'm not as tired in the afternoon. My energy level seems to be a lot more even. I've noticed myself being able to do more at night, like if I have a full day or I have a client at 10 and a client at two. I'm usually just shot by the end of that day and at like 5pm I can barely get up off the work couch to go home. But you know, I've been feeling more energetic. So I'll even come home, I'll eat my last meal of a day and I'll do stuff around the house which you know mostly I have not been able to do. So that's pretty cool. It's an improvement. The other tip that she gives is apple cider vinegar. There are studies that show that it helps your blood sugar stay flatter, stay more even. So I will put apple cider vinegar. It's not just apple cider vinegar, it's vinegars in general, but they have to have the specific acid that vinegars have. Like, for example, I have a lot of umeboshi vinegar and that one does not have the right acids, so it's not really vinegar. Even though it's called vinegar, it's actually not technically one. So apple cider vinegar is the most obvious. But other vinegars that have the specific acid which you can look up are all great. So I put that on my morning greens. That's really supposed to help your blood sugar stay even. That's about it. What else did she say? She said dress up your carbs, which I do tend to do anyway. So instead of having just toast, you want to put fat in your toast. So avocado or butter or maybe something else, maybe cheese, you know you put that protein, whatever. But that, especially onto your carbs, helps the slow, slow. The absorption of the carbs into your bloodstream really helps with the blood glucose spikes. So it's the way it's improved my life and my work is pretty obvious. As I said, my energy levels are way more even and that's wonderful for me. I'm not as hungry and I do feel like I'm probably in a better mood, although I've already been improving that with magnesium. Did you guys know that a lot of us are short on magnesium? I did not. But once I started researching what could help my hormone imbalances, which I have suffered a lot from, like really bad PMS that would last for weeks, essentially PMDD I started asking people about if they've dealt with it and how they've dealt with it and what's helped them. I heard magnesium from a lot of people, so I started taking it. Vastly improved my moods, like vastly. It's amazing. So those are my health updates. I hope that they help you as well. I think this book is fantastic. I recommend it. I do have to warn you. There's a lot of times that she talks about weight loss, fat loss, and if that's triggering to you, I just want to warn you. It's not focused on weight loss and fat loss, but I'm not focusing on that myself. But it is a part of the book and it's there, so I just wanted to let you know that Again. The title of that book is Glucose Revolution and the author is Jesse Inchauspe. That's pretty much all I've got for you today. One last thing I was thinking a bunch about Burning man and what's happened there this year. It was really muddy, people were stuck out there for a while, but it doesn't seem like anybody minded. People seem to have been happy to be stuck out there for longer, and the kind of space it is reminds me how necessary community is for all of us, and especially in-person community, not Zoom community, and the kind of community where money is not exchanged, where people share resources, people share food, people spend time together without being interrupted by work calls or other responsibilities of living in a capitalistic society. And what if we take that and bring it home? What if we start by just sharing resources, creating spaces If your friend is sick or got into an accident, make them a meal without them asking for it. And if you see somebody outside of your grocery store asking for money you don't have cash on, you, buy them a sandwich. Let's start there, right. Let's share food and resources. Those things are very simple to do. They will take a little bit of time, a little bit of effort, a little bit of money, but they're fairly simple to do. If you have a little bit of extra to share, please do. This is so important, so necessary for us. Living man has become unsustainable for the land that it is on and gatherings are not accessible to all of us for different reasons. But being kind and sharing resources, whatever you have, whatever you can spare, most of us can do that. Thank you, I hope you're having a beautiful week and I'll be back next week with another episode of Ink Medicine podcast.