Episode 1
My Health Journey & Having a Meaningful Nutrition Philosophy
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Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready? As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle. I'm going to come straight out the gate and be honest with you and tell you that I am a little bit nervous. I didn't think I was going to be nervous, but here I am with some nerves.
I guess nerves are good. They mean we're showing up to do something really bold, which is what I hope to be doing with this podcast. So I'm just going to roll with them. With that being said, it feels very surreal to be sitting down and recording this podcast episode for you. I feel like so much of what has brought this podcast to fruition has been just your love and your encouragement and your requests over the years. I have listened to you and I've kind of had this podcast sitting in the back of my mind, marinating for a while until I could really see a strong vision for it. Over the past couple of years, it seems like everyone and their mom, so many people have come out with health podcasts, and I just had no desire to add to the noise, to become an echo chamber or to contribute to the information overload that's already out there. Because I'm sure you have had the experience, as I have, where you listen to a health podcast, you finish the episode, you come away stunned for a second, maybe have a moment of silence, and then you immediately realize you just drank from a fire hose.
And then you're stressed, you're overwhelmed, and then you start to question your direction. You start to question your own intuition. Sometimes it actually leads you down these rabbit holes that you end up wasting so much time and energy on that you didn't need to go down in the first place. I knew that I didn't want to create any of that. That was one thing I knew, is I don't want to create any of that. So, as I really have thought over this past year, what I wanted this podcast to be, it really was able to be narrowed down to a feeling. And that feeling was really to have you have a place to come connect, to come be refreshed, and to have a breath of fresh air and to really feel hopeful when you come away from it. I think the most important thing I want you to feel is to feel lighter after every episode.
I think all women right now, we need a little bit of lightness in our life. We need to feel lighter. So as I design this podcast and kind of curate what goes into it, I'm always having that at the forefront of my mind. And that leads us to jumping into this first episode. I have so many cool episodes planned, so many cool topics, so many guests I want to introduce you to. But this podcast episode feels really special because it is the kickoff. It's kicking off season one, which is going to be a really incredible season for you all about foundations. It's kind of born out of a little bit of a selfish desire, to be honest.
Every one to two years in my career, I like to remind myself of the priorities, the foundations, and just what's important because I am human and I forget things too. I think it's always important to go back to the beginning and back to the foundations over and over again periodically, to just remind yourself why you believe what you believe and why you're doing what you're doing in the first place. As I thought about this episode, I was really stumped because it feels like, okay, episode one of the foundation season. And then episode one of the whole podcast. Where are we going to start? This is a new beginning. I kept thinking, beginnings, beginnings, beginnings. What do I do with the beginning? Then I thought, oh my gosh, let's go back to the beginning. Let's go back to my beginning.
Back to My Beginning
I don't think I've ever really sat down and talked about the ins and outs of my health journey and gotten really personal and vulnerable about where I come from and what shapes me into who I am and how I've gotten to this place right here. And how along the way, my health journey has really led me to a grander and bigger nutritional philosophy, yes, but also life philosophy. In becoming a student of the body, I've really been able to learn a lot about the world, a lot about people, and a lot about myself. So I thought, what a better way to start the podcast than to start at my beginning, which I've never really shared before. I've only shared snippets of my journey with PCOS and snippets of my journey with autoimmunity, but never really the full picture. I have learned so much and been able to connect so much through you ladies sharing your story with me. Over the years, I've gotten so many stories sent to me via DMs and in emails.
It has taught me that we as women are so powerfully connected, we require strong female relationships to be able to see ourselves clearly. Because when we see ourselves reflected in another woman's eyes, it offers us a lot of clarity so that we can see ourselves more clearly from a completely different perspective. Not only does it help shape us and help us really get down and dirty with who we really are and learn more about ourself, but it also helps us forge new identities and kind of strip away the things that are falsely or not supposed to be a part of our identity. It's a really powerful thing. I have just had the opportunity to receive so much from hearing your stories and see parts of my story woven into yours. My hope is that as I share this today, you'll see parts of your story woven into mine and hopefully it will help you connect some dots or feel not so alone or even maybe have some AHA moments that you didn't really recognize until you see how my story plays out. So let's dive into episode one. I have been a part of the health and wellness world in some way for more than a decade now, probably more like eleven to twelve years.
I started out as a group fitness instructor because I was really into fitness and I loved the community aspect of it. And then I became a personal trainer and as I tended to work with a lot of women who were middle aged, a little older, I started to really see that the old recommendation of calories in, calories out just wasn't really applying to women at all. I was really confused because that's what I had learned and I wanted to understand why. Because it wasn't applying to me, but it wasn't applying to these women that were struggling with their weight, really forcibly undereating, really undernourished. It got my wheels turning and that's what really ended up introducing me to hormones. I really found a lot of interest in hormones but backing up rewind a little bit before I dive into that. I have been in this world in some way for a really long time and so I have seen a lot of trends come and go. I've had the unique opportunity to see how the health and wellness world has kind of played out over the course of a good amount of years and see different fads come and go, different trends come and go.
All About Restriction
I’ve also been able to see how much the health and wellness world has changed with the introduction of social media and then the introduction of these forms of content that are meant for quick learning and quick conceptions such as TikTok videos and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts and things like that. So the way that people are learning has changed throughout these years as well. And when I got started on social media, I think it was like around five years ago now, I had no idea what was in store for me because at the time, that was still when you'd make one static post on Instagram and you'd share your spiel, and that was it. Man, oh man, have things changed even since I got started on social media. I've been on social media now consistently for about four to five years. At the beginning when I really started talking about these nourishment principles and what I teach in Fully Nourished, this was not really something that people were talking about. People weren't talking about food and wellness in the context of nourishment. They were talking about these things in the context of restriction.
It was all about what to restrict. I remember listening to all these doctors, nutritionists, and dietitians speak on how to heal your hormones and heal your body. I remember noticing how many things they would tell you not to eat. And I remember thinking, what the heck do you actually eat? Because if you can't eat all those things and the recommendations are really just vegetables and leafy greens and lean proteins and fish, what the heck do I eat? I really just wanted to create content where it was like, oh, it's okay to eat. It's good to eat. You don't have to just stick to this small kind of paleo-esque diet. You can expand a little bit. Dairy is not always the demon and gluten is not always the problem.
And it really has exploded. I am so happy that this information resonated with so many women, and it spread like a wildfire. I have to say that I’ve got to shout out the JAW community - the Jessica Ash Wellness community and the Fully Nourished community - a little bit here. This information and looking at health and wellness in the context of nourishment really spread like wildfire. Then as TikTok came into the picture and Reels came into the picture, it was like, whoa, there is just an explosion of people sharing information. But then along the way, what you see is, of course, this is going to breed a lot of copycats, especially if you're bringing a lot of newer information to the space.
I'm the first to admit that these were not all concepts that I came up with. These are concepts that were really born of me taking some complex research and trying to break it down into actionable steps. But then what you saw was so many people that had not done the work, had not done the years of research, or had not really taken the time to understand the whys behind the concepts, just started to get their hands on this information.
You start to see how copycats are born. And the reason I bring this up is because the health and wellness world and social media are really intertwined. Sadly, they are very intertwined. With the change in social media has come a very big change in the health and wellness world. Now, I'm the first to admit that health and wellness culture has always been slightly toxic. It has always been very interesting to me to observe after I kind of was able to part ways and pull the wool over my eyes on the cult-like behavior that goes on in some of these communities. But over the course of the past couple of years, I really started to feel how much social media operates, and especially the health and wellness space operates in almost a cult-like way. And I know a lot of you notice that I took a break from social media, which I appreciate you noticing.
Sometimes it's such a weird world where we say things like, oh, I've been gone and now I'm back and people are like, I don't care. I never noticed. But so many of you did notice. I wouldn't be offended if you didn't notice, but so many of you noticed that I took a pretty big step back this past year, probably from mid 2022 to mid 2023. Part of that was that I went through a pretty big life transition. Obviously, you can see behind me that I'm in a recreational vehicle. We moved into an RV. And so going from a home to an RV was just a little bit of a different lifestyle. Not only was it a big change in my environment, but also just it's a little bit of a different lifestyle.
It does require a little bit more movement — moving around and adventure and being in new environments all the time. It was a big life transition. That was part of the reason why I stepped back, but I also needed a little bit of a break. As I started to take a break and take a step back, I really started to just think and contemplate about a whole lot. I had not had time before to really sit and consume content. I hadn't really had time to really sit and kind of observe what was going on around me within the health space. I was always kind of focused on my own thing and focusing on what I was doing.
So it was a unique opportunity for me to really take a step back and start thinking and contemplating and just observing. And I had a little bit of a dark night of the soul, to be honest, because as I started to really sit and observe with how people behave in the health space, but also how people respond to that behavior, I started to almost get — I don't want to say the word triggered, because that's not what it was — I got a revelation that wow, this is a wow. The health and wellness space behaves almost like a religion. It’s interesting because there are a lot of religious people in the health and wellness space. I have noticed that a lot of people who are religious have some type of faith and even the ones that don't, it attracts the kind of people that are of the religion of science. I like to say where they might not believe in a higher power or have any type of faith, but they have faith in science and that is their “god” in a sense. That is their absolute.
Because we as humans are wired to have something be our absolute. And if we deny the existence of a higher power or we don't want to be or we don't want to acknowledge a higher power, then we have to have something because we are designed to worship something. I really started to recognize that, man, the health and wellness space really operates almost in a religious and dogmatic type of way. So if you're not familiar with the definition of dogma, you know what, I'm going to just actually look it up and read the definition because it's one of those things where you understand it but it's hard to explain. So right here it says it's, “a principle or statement of ideas or a group of such principles or statements, especially when considered to be authoritative or accepted uncritically.” And doesn't that just perfectly kind of explain what's going on within different communities in the health space? I know I'm kind of saying the health and wellness space pretty broadly, but I'm kind of talking about the niches within it — the Carnivore niche, the Pro-Metabolic niche, the Vegan niche, the Keto niche. We kind of have these little cult-like sects within the health and wellness space which is the overarching religion. And certain people think certain things are important, certain people think other things are important. But in a way, it really does remind me of the structure of religion.
BREAKING OUT OF AN AUTHORITARIAN STRUCTURE
Getting personal - I grew up in a very evangelical conservative Christian space and I have seen the impact that dogmatic thinking and really this authoritarian type structure, how it impacts other people. And what I mean by authoritarian is even if you haven't been a part of a religion or you haven't experienced it in that way, authoritarian structure really permeates our whole culture. So it's kind of this idea of, “if you don't do this, this is going to be what happens to you.” So if you don't follow the rules, you're going to get a fine. If you don't do this you are going to go to jail. If you don't do this, you're going to go to hell. If you don't eat this way you're going to get diabetes — that's a great example of what an authoritarian structure is.
And so many of us grew up within these structures, especially if your parents parented that way as well, that it can be really hard to break yourself out of that way of thinking. And I think what's going on in the health and wellness world is a perfect expression and a perfect opportunity for us to start changing our way of thinking and how we approach truth or what we think to be true, how we approach our own belief systems and how we develop them and grow them over time. If we have to practice shame and guilt and condescension and evangelize our ideologies by stuffing them down other people's throats, we obviously don't have strong belief systems. Or if we have to protect them or constantly get triggered by somebody thinking differently than us, then obviously you didn't have a strong belief system in the first place. And I start this episode off with this not because I'm trying to bring religion into everything, although that is a big part of my past, so sometimes you'll see it tied into my work. I have my own relationship with my creator. Now, outside of religion, I have a very strong spiritual practice, but I'm not trying to make my work about this.
However, I can't help but bring it in because I think a lot of women will resonate with it. I also think that a lot of women maybe are feeling it in their bodies but haven't recognized it consciously yet. I have to bring it up because I just can't, not because I think it's an important thing to bring light and attention to that. Within these authoritarian-type structures, there's very little room for empathy or compassion or even humanity. There's no room for people's humanness. And it leads to such a soul-sucking vortex of women who feel so not seen and so not heard. It ends up causing us to need to create or identify ourselves within our problems. We don't realize how stuck in that vortex we are because that is our normal.
What I'm trying to do is bring awareness to the fact that this is not normal. Being stuck in your negativity and your victimhood and your disease as your identity is not normal. You don't have to be that way. Yet everyone, even if so many people around you are operating that way. I even think of Caroline Myss and how she talks about the syndrome of woundology and know it is where a person has to rely on the power of illness for manipulation of their world, as opposed to really creating an independent and empowered state of health. And to me, all of these kind of themes of religion and how the health and wellness world operates right now and growing up within these authoritarian structures really lead us to needing to be heard and trying to create any identity that makes us feel heard. So thinking about that idea of woundology, I love that definition and diving into my own health story. I think that the evangelical structure is a really big part of my story because it left me so disassociated from my own body.
I remember growing up and seeing all how many women around me struggled with their health or struggled with something. I remember almost feeling feelings of dread about growing up and becoming a woman because I would look around and hear about all of these health issues and hormone issues and mood issues and the misery that these women were giving off. The energy that they were giving off was not something to look forward to. It was something to dread. And now, of course, I know why. How this type of structure and way of thinking can really suck all that we are out of us. I think of the book by Clarissa Pincola Estes, “Women Who Run with Wolves” and the phrase that she says and she's talking about our psyche, our woman's deepest psyche and women who are in touch with their psyche, the wild woman. She says when we lose touch with the instinctive psyche, we live in a semi destroyed state.
Images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development. When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized and her instincts and natural life cycles are lost — subsumed by the culture or by the intellect or by the ego, one's own or those belonging to others. And then in the next page she dives into what are some of the feeling tone symptoms of a disrupted relationship with the wildish force in the psyche? She goes on to explain that to feel, think or act in any of the following ways is to have partially severed or lost entirely the relationship with the deep instinctual psyche using women's language exclusively.
“These feelings are feeling extraordinarily dry, fatigued, frail, depressed confused, gagged, muzzled, unaroused; feeling frightened or weak without inspiration without animation without soulfulness without meaning shame; being chronically fuming, volatile, stuck, uncreative, compressed, crazed; feeling powerless chronically doubtful, shaky, blocked, unable to follow through. Giving one's creative life over to others life-sapping choices in mates work or friendships. Suffering to live outside of one's own cycles. Overprotective of self, inert, uncertain, faltering, inability to pace oneself or set limits. Not insistent on one's own tempo. To be self conscious. To be away from one's god or gods. To be separated from one's revification, drawn far into domesticity, intellectualism, work or inertia because that is the safest place for one who has lost her instincts. To fear to venture by oneself or to reveal oneself. Fear to seek mentor, mother, father. Fear to set out one's imperfect work before it is an opus. Fear to set out on a journey. Fear of caring for another or others. Fear one will run on, run out, run down cringing before authority, loss of energy before creative projects, wincing, humiliation, angst, numbness, anxiety, afraid to bite back when there is nothing else left to do, afraid to try the new, fear to stand up to, afraid to speak up or speak against, sick stomach. Butterflies sour stomach. Cut in the middle. Strangled, becoming conciliatory or nice too easily revenge. Afraid to stop. Afraid to act repeatedly. Counting to three and not beginning, superiority complex. Ambivalence and yet otherwise fully capable, fully functioning. These severances are a disease not of an era or a century, but become an epidemic anywhere and anytime women are captured, anytime the wildish nature has become entrapped. A healthy woman is much like a wolf — robust, chock full of strong life force, life giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving. Yet separation from the wildish nature causes a woman's personality to become meager, thin, ghosty, spectral. We are not meant to be puny with frail hair and an inability to leap up, inability to chase, to birth to create a life. When women's lives are in stasis it is always time for the wildish woman to emerge. It is time for the creating function of the psyche to flood the delta.”
Those to me are such powerful words and such an accurate representation of where so many women are at and kind of the theme of this podcast and is a perfect explanation to me as to where I was at. I can look back and see throughout my health journey all of the physical aspects that led me to the place I was at. But more importantly, I see the spiritual aspects and the emotional aspects that led me to where I was at being so stuck within that very authoritarian-type structure of religion. But I'm sure most of you can think of how that could apply to an authoritarian structure of parenting.
That could apply to anything, really. So diving into my health story, a lot of it happened slowly and then kind of all at once. I think a lot of people experience that as well or women experience that they didn't know something was wrong until it was very wrong.
Puberty, Period Problems, and Birth Control
But my health journey started very young. I had health problems from the time I went through puberty, and it was specifically period problems. I ended up going on birth control because that was the only option that I was given and I was only 15 years old at the time. For a long time, I blamed birth control for all of my problems. I was on birth control for a little over two years and I know for a fact that that pill almost acted as a suppression of symptoms because the minute I stopped taking it, really, the feces hit the fan, so to speak.
I quickly unraveled into this metabolic mess where I was gaining lots of weight, I was growing facial hair, I had acne, really bad cystic acne that was painful all over my face. My hair was falling out. I had horrible gut issues, and the list went on and on and on. I spent so much time jumping from doctor to doctor to doctor, only to have them say the same thing, which was, there's nothing wrong with you. Everything's fine. Your labs look fine. I remember one doctor looking at me, and I think this was when I was 18. At the time, I mean, I was still very young, trying to figure out what was going on.
And she said to me, well, this is just what they talk about when they say getting old. This is what getting old looks like. I remember looking at her and thinking, this is not right. There's something very not right about the whole situation. So, that's what really spurred me on after that was given to me. I had not really understood that there was a whole nother world out there of alternative healing and alternative approaches to health. I had just been given one snippet of how to approach health, but I knew even in my young soul that something wasn't right there. And then I was introduced to an integrative medicine doctor.
That was really my introduction to alternative styles of healing, that, oh my gosh, you could change your diet, you could eat differently, and it could change your health. Like, wait, what? I pretty quickly went down this rabbit hole of, oh my goodness, I can educate myself now. And to have an integrative health doctor, someone who saw me and said, oh no, not everything is right. It's not all in your head, you know, something is not okay. It was like finally being seen for the first time ever. She was able to give me a diagnosis and at the time I thought, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I got a diagnosis for my problem, and I have PCOS and celiac disease and Hashimoto thyroiditis and lupus, and these are the explanations for all the symptoms that are going on.
That was my first introduction to someone who just runs tests, diagnoses things, and then prescribes a bunch of supplements, a bunch of hormones, a bunch of hormone replacement, a bunch of IVs and B, twelve shots and things like that. And says, okay, once you take these, you're going to be great and you're going to go along your merry way. At the time, I was also starting to really be introduced to the idea that, oh, changing my diet could actually change my health. And so early on, this was when gluten-free was not a thing. You'd say gluten-free, and people would be like, what? Gluten-free was not really a well-known thing. The only gluten-free brand that was available was Udi’s, I don't know if you guys remember, and it was so hella expensive. It was so expensive because it was the only product out there, and it was a really specialty product.
So if you wanted to eat gluten-free bread or gluten-free anything, Udi’s was the brand that you were going to buy. And so I remember going gluten-free and starting to dabble in being dairy-free because I was kind of promoted as the end all, be all. I really did see some improvements between switching from a standard American diet, which I very probably rarely ate enough food and definitely didn't eat enough nutrients, to trying to avoid certain foods, which required me to eat a little bit of a more varied diet. I did see some improvements, for sure. I'm sure some of the things that I was taking were also maybe contributing to a false sense of well-being. But pretty quickly, I started to realize that I didn't want to live my whole life with my identity being that I have PCOS, that I have Lupus, that I have Hashimoto's. I started realizing that some of these things that I'm being given are not making me feel better. In fact, I'm almost feeling a little bit worse.
And so going on, that really started my jumping from thing to thing, jumping from doctor to doctor, functional doctor to functional doctor, jumping from dietitian to dietitian, and really figuring out what worked for me. I kind of talked about how I went down so many different rabbit holes at the beginning because I was just obsessed with healing. I wanted to fix myself so badly. I wanted to almost be perfect. I wanted to achieve perfect health. It can be a terrifying thing to receive a diagnosis and to finally have an explanation for what's been going on with you. It can be a really scary kind of downhill fall. It can feel like a free fall in a way, and you become overwhelmed.
At the time when I got diagnosed with, especially with PCOS — that was my primary symptom — there was not the information there is today. When you looked into autoimmune diseases or when you looked into PCOS, very few people were talking about them. That was really before the explosion of PCOS diagnoses began. A lot of doctors still rejected the idea that PCOS even existed. And when you started to research autoimmune diseases, it was very common those days for people to go paleo - paleo is all the rage. And so the autoimmune Paleo protocol and the Wahls protocol were really popular at the time. So those were kind of the directions that I went pretty quickly. I went from gluten-free to dairy-free to Paleo pretty dang quickly. And although I found some healing, something kept me going.
Entering the Health and Wellness Sphere
At that point, I was really starting to be very interested in nutrition and hormones and the impact that food had on the body. I had started my journey into the health and wellness sphere. And I really took my research very seriously because I was motivated and on a mission. Once I had been introduced to the idea that there is an alternative way of doing things, oh my goodness, the world is my oyster. I remember my local public library had this killer, it was like two big shelves of books, and they had a lot of premed textbooks that had been donated to the library.
I remember that was the place that I had originally started. I started to really research the body and I would look at different medical schools, different health programs, see what their reading list was, and I just started kind of going down the list with the textbooks. And pretty quickly I learned, like, I don't really know how this is going to help heal anybody. In fact, this seems to be very not conducive to healing. It actually seems to be almost like anti-healing. What's going on here? There's a very anti-nutrition bias within these textbooks. What's going on? And so that quickly led me to wanting to learn more, because I was like, well, this isn't it, but I'm hungry to learn more. That’s really where I started to just educate and educate and educate and educate myself regarding nutrition and hormones.
I took so many different courses and certifications and started to really go to school, and it led me to the place that I am now. But if I'm being honest, even as a nutritionist, there was a time where just because you become a nutritionist, and just because you take certain certifications and you get an education, it doesn't lead you to just automatically being able to heal yourself. And although I had made so many strides up until the point for those couple of years from my diagnosis to where I was at, I still felt like there was something missing. And when I discovered the work of Dr. Ray Peat and a lot of the different researchers that he mentioned in his work. That’s really when the pieces started to come together for me.
Finding My Nutrition Philosophy
I had already laid such a strong foundation with hormones. I really understood a lot about hormones at the time. I had learned a lot about different aspects of nutrition. But to be able to connect the dots on how important not only metabolic function is, because that was not new to me, but really the things that impact the metabolism, that was when I was able to make a lot of strides regarding my health. Up until that point, I really had to manage my symptoms. I was still eating gluten free for the most part. I was still eating dairy free for the most part, and I was still really eating to restrict instead of eating to nourish. And when I started to read his research and try to understand his research, which was very new to me, it was counterintuitive, because I had been going from gluten free, dairy free, to paleo, to autoimmune paleo, to kind of similar to autoimmune Paleo, which was the Wahls protocol. Then I started to get more carnivore and keto and more restrictive, because I assumed, since I saw things from a very authoritarian context, like, if you do this, this bad thing will happen. If you do this, this bad thing will happen. And I really was seeing nutrition from the eyes of restriction, because that was really the theme that was being touted and taught at the time, to go from that mindset to realizing, oh no, that restriction is the thing that's actually causing some problems.
We need to go to a more nourishment mindset of what do I need in my diet to thrive? Not what do I need to avoid, to feel okay and manage my symptoms, but what do I actually need to include in my diet so that I can thrive, so my body can do its work and do what it's meant to do, which is self balance, self optimize, and self heal? So how do I get out of my own way? It took me a long time to wrap my head around those concepts and then to be able to finally wrap my head around the concepts of, okay, maybe sugar is not the worst thing in the world. Maybe carbohydrates aren't the demons that they're being touted to be. Maybe there's more to the metabolic story. And really, that is what opened my eyes as I began to nourish myself. I began to see things so clearly, not only just see how my body could heal, but also to be able to see how the environment I grew up in and what my thought processes were around my body, around nutrition, how they really impacted my health, and how it wasn't really about achieving this perfect health like so many influencers seem to know whether that be on Instagram or TikTok. I feel like the influx of health influencers, especially the ones that curate these perfect aesthetic feeds and have perfect dinners on perfect plates and all of that, can really contribute to our idea that health is this thing that we need to achieve.
There's this state of perfection that you will reach, and if you're not there yet, you're behind, or you have somewhere you need to be, because where you're at is not it. And that's why I loved discovering Dr. Peat’s work, because it, more than anything else, gave me permission to perceive, think, act, which was his motto, and it allowed me to start thinking outside of the box about nutrition. And I realized that I already was noticing there's something wrong, there's something going on. The health space is super obsessed with restricting, restricting, restricting. They're kind of looking at food in the context of, what can I restrict from my diet to feel better? And I wanted to change that paradigm. Dr. Peat’s work was the one that really gave me permission to do that, because I started to really understand how dangerous restricting the body really was and how important nourishment was.
Over the years, as I got into a better headspace and of course, as I nourished my body more and more, my symptoms would begin to fade. My autoimmune systems faded pretty early on because I removed myself from the evangelical environment, that authoritarian structure. Isn't it crazy how hating yourself and talking about how horrible you are all the time could possibly make your body attack itself? Is it possible? So once I got out of that really guilt and shame driven environment, that kind of self where you're the center of the universe, really your victimhood, and how sad of a sinner you are is really the center of your life and your obsession with all of your negative qualities and all of the things you've done wrong, it really did impact my health. As I got out of that environment, the autoimmune issues quickly really faded for me. I can look back now and see hindsight's 2020 — that it wasn't probably as much about the food. Yeah, of course I started eating more nutrients and I started eating less of things that were impacting my body and causing inflammation. But in reality, I think a lot of it was that I was removing myself from an environment that caused this constant self-attacking. But as I started nourishing my body and eating for nourishment, instead of eating for my PCOS or eating for my Lupus or eating for my Hashimoto's, I was able to drop those labels as identities and I was able to really step into a new identity as a person.
As I became more and more nourished on a cellular level, my energy changed and therefore my body changed. My mindset changed, my belief system changed, how I approached life changed, and I became less and less obsessed with health and more and more of a student of the body and a student of my surroundings and a student of how my environment impacted my body. And that's really where I found my nutritional philosophy. Over the years it of course has changed. But now my nutritional philosophy is really about not only creating resilience, but having a pursuit of wisdom and being very curious and finding answers within my choices and finding answers within my cravings and really observing how my body interacts with food and the environment in a really curious and observational and playful way. Instead of this militant structured, rigid, constant pursuit of perfection and this constant pursuit of reaching this mysterious place of perfect health. I see people doing it constantly.
The Illusion of Perfect Health
It must be exhausting because perfect health doesn't really exist. We exist in a place of dynamic ebbs and flows where our body kind of stays in this balance. And if you move too far in one direction, your body tells you, and then you move a little bit in the opposite direction and so it's kind of this constant practice, this constant ebb and flow. There's really never going to be a perfect place that we achieve perfect health and anyone that tries to convince you of that is lying or just plain wrong. But as I've gone through the years and years of trying different things and experimenting in different ways and going down different rabbit holes, I'm just more aware than ever that as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, information is really nothing without wisdom or focus. The old phrase there's nothing new under the sun is really very true. There are so many trends and fads that I've seen come into the health and wellness space multiple times. And I think it's kind of funny in a way how people respond the same no matter what time is, no matter how much time has passed, people tend to be really predictable and get caught up in their emotions, caught up in their fear, and again, the mention of the shame and the guilt.
A lot of times there's a lot of manipulation going on in the health and wellness sphere as well. People are really very evangelical about their beliefs and need to evangelize and shove them down people's throat. And it can make people who aren't really aware of what's going on feel incredibly confused and overwhelmed and second guess themselves a lot. I am just fully convinced that information is really nothing without wisdom or without focus. And it's really of utmost importance to learn how to focus our attention on the right thing. For me, for so long, health and perfect health was kind of my ultimate pursuit. I look back now and although I don't regret it, I think it was a great learning experience, I've left it behind me. I can look back now at that time and see how exhausted I was and burned out and overwhelmed, and I realized that I would never be able to fully heal.
The reason I was still experiencing symptoms was not because I wasn't taking the right supplements or eating the perfect diet or eating the right diet. I was constantly ignoring what my body was trying to tell me, that health is not a place, but it's more of a practice and a balance. You’re going to go through certain seasons where the ultimate answer is to just surrender and accept what you're going through. And the best thing you can do for your health sometimes is to just reach a place of acceptance instead of trying to constantly fight for control and try to control every little minute detail of your body, your health, your diet, your supplement regimen, every minute of your day. I'm more convinced today than ever that health is kind of like a dance or it's an art where your body knows how to be healthy and it knows how to heal. It just needs to be given the right environment and the tools to do so. The body actually is very good at letting us know what that is if we are willing to listen. Part of the reason I'm doing this podcast is so that my hope is that you don't make the same mistakes that I did. And if you have, or if you are, that maybe I can remind you to shift your focus or shift your attention a little bit in the right direction.
Defining Our Vision for Health
I'm not here to really tell you what to think. I'm not here to tell you what you need to believe. I'm just here to show you how to think and how to tune into your own system and your own physiology and teach you what I wish I would have known when I was in constant pursuit of just trying to get rid of my PCOS symptoms or trying to get rid of my autoimmune symptoms. It was so much more than that. My body has so much more to teach me. I'm a big believer that the body is there as kind of a teacher to guide our souls in the right direction. If our health was perfect all the time, we wouldn't need to change anything, we wouldn't need to grow, we wouldn't have the lessons that we have learned.
In a big way, sometimes what happens to us, as painful as it may be, as frustrating as it may be, as hopeless as it may seem sometimes, I'm going to pull from one of my favorite Robert Green quotes from his book Mastery. But he says, “Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction, if you pay attention.” And I know for me, as I reflect back on the last twelve years, I can easily say that everything I went through, as painful as it was going through it, it taught me something, taught me something extremely important, It led me in a direction that I needed to go and led me to something that I needed to learn. And that's all I could ask for. So this podcast will not be about pursuing perfect health, but it will be about learning how to focus your attention, which I think is of utmost importance. And I'll leave you one more Robert Green quote that really just spoke to me about focusing our attention. He says, “in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them, those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds, and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.” There's a difference between achieving perfect health and mastering the art of healing and the practice of health.
And that's what I'm passionate about. It's not about this constant pursuit, this constant striving towards this kind of mysterious goal. It's time for us to learn to define what our vision for health truly is and to focus our attention and master the practice of health. So cheers to the first episode of Fully Nourished. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. I hope today's episode and sharing a little bit more of my story really resonated with you and gave you some things to think about. If anything made you feel uncomfortable or triggered you, good. Those are the areas to start focusing on, and that's how we stretch and grow as humans.
So usually in the physical world, it's called trigger pointing, but when we feel an area that is achy or tight, that's usually the first indication that we need to do some work there and focus our attention there. Like I said earlier, season one is all about exploring what I consider to be foundational concepts. So if you're looking to understand the bioenergetic viewpoint a little bit on a deeper level, I'd love for you to join me in the next episode!
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